<![CDATA[Deep Politics Forum - Profits before People]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/ Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:36:23 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[WHITNEY WEBB ON CONVID-19]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16188 Thu, 02 Apr 2020 15:32:05 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16188 ENGINEERING CONTAGION: AMERITHRAX, CORONAVIRUS, AND THE RISE OF HE BIOTECH-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

PART ONE: ALL ROADS LEAD TO DARK WINTER



A DARK WINTER DESCENDS
In late June 2001, the U.S. military was preparing for a “Dark Winter.” At Andrews Air Force Base in Camp Springs, Maryland, several Congressmen, a former CIA director, a former FBI director, government insiders and privileged members of the press met to conduct a biowarfare simulation that would precede both the September 11 attacks and the 2001 Anthrax attacks by a matter of months. It specifically simulated the deliberate introduction of smallpox to the American public by a hostile actor.
The simulation was a collaborative effort led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (part of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security) in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Analytic Services (ANSER) Institute for Homeland Security and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. The concept, design and script of the simulation were created by Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center along with Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of ANSER. The full script of the exercise can be read here.
The name for the exercise derives from a statement made by Robert Kadlec, who participated in the script created for the exercise, when he states that the lack of smallpox vaccines for the U.S. populace means that “it could be a very dark winter for America.” Kadlec, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and a former lobbyist for military intelligence/intelligence contractors, is now leading HHS’ Covid-19 response and led the Trump administration’s 2019 “Crimson Contagion” exercises, which simulated a crippling pandemic influenza outbreak in the U.S. that had first originated in China. Kadlec’s professional history, his decades-old obsession with apocalyptic bioweapon attack scenarios and the Crimson Contagion exercises themselves are the subject of Part III of this series.
 

The Dark Winter exercise began with a briefing on the geopolitical context of the exercise, which included intelligence suggesting that China had intentionally introduced Foot and Mouth disease in Taiwan for economic and political advantage; that Al-Qaeda was seeking to purchase biological pathogens once weaponized by the Soviet Union; and that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had recruited former biowarfare specialists from the Soviet Union and was importing materials to create biological weapons. It further notes that a majority of Americans had opposed a planned deployment of U.S. soldiers to the Middle East, which was also opposed by Iraq, China and Russia. The script also asserts that the soldiers were being deployed to counter and potentially engage the Iraqi military. Later, as the exercise unfolds, many of those Americans once skeptical about this troop deployment soon begin calling for “revenge.”
Amid this backdrop, news suddenly breaks that smallpox, a disease long eradicated in the U.S. and globally, appears to have broken out in the state of Oklahoma. The participants in Dark Winter, representing the National Security Council, quickly deduce that smallpox has been deliberately introduced and that this is the result of a “bioterrorist attack on the United States.” The assumption is made that the attack is “related to decisions we may make to deploy troops to the Mid-East.”
Not unlike what is unfolding currently with the Covid-19 crisis, in Dark Winter, there is no means of rapid diagnosis for smallpox, no treatments available and no surge capacity in the healthcare system. The outbreak quickly spreads to numerous other U.S. states and throughout the world. Hospitals in the U.S. soon face “desperate situations” as “tens of thousands of ill or anxious persons seek care.” This is compounded by “grossly inadequate supplies” and “insufficient isolation rooms,” among other complications.
Since this exercise occurred in June 2001, the heavy hinting that Saddam Hussein-led Iraq and Al Qaeda are the main suspects is notable. Indeed, at one point in one of the fictional news reports used in the exercise, the reporter states that “Iraq might have provided the technology behind the attacks to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.” Such claims that Iraq’s government was linked to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan would re-emerge months later in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and would be heavily promoted by several Dark Winter participants such as former CIA Director James Woolsey, who would later swear under oath that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. It would, of course, later emerge that Iraq’s connections to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks were nonexistent as well as the fact that Iraq did not possess biological weapons or other “weapons of mass destruction.”
Notably, this insertion into one of the Dark Winter news clips was not the only part of the exercise that sought to link Saddam Hussein and Iraq to biological weapons. For instance, during the exercise, satellite imaging showed that a “suspected bioresearch facility” in Iraq appeared to be expanding an “exclusionary zone” in order to limit civilian activity near the facility as well as a “possible quarantine” area in the same area as this facility. Previously in the exercise, Iraq was one of three countries, along with Iran and North Korea, who were “repeatedly rumored” to have illicitly obtained Soviet smallpox cultures from defecting scientists and Iraq was alleged to have offered employment to a leading smallpox scientist who had worked on the Soviet bioweapons program.
Then, at the end of the exercise, a “prominent Iraqi defector” emerges who claims Iraq had arranged the bioweapons attack “through intermediaries,” which is deemed “highly credible” even though “there is no forensic evidence to support this claim.” Iraq officially denies the accusation, but vows to target the U.S. in “highly damaging ways” if the U.S. “takes action against Iraq.” It is thus unsurprising that, as will be shown later in this report, key participants in Dark Winter would heavily promote the narrative that Iraq was to blame for the 2001 Anthrax attacks. Other participants, including Robert Kadlec, would then become involved in the FBI’s “sabotaged” investigation once the Bureau began to focus on a domestic, as opposed to an international source.
In addition, as part of Dark Winter, mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times and others, were sent anonymous letters that threatened renewed attacks on the U.S., including anthrax attacks, if the U.S. did not withdraw its troops from the Middle East. In this simulation, those letters contained “a genetic fingerprint of the smallpox strain matching the fingerprint of the strain causing the current epidemic.” During the Anthrax attacks that would occur just a few months after Dark Winter, Judith Miller – who participated in Dark Winter – and other U.S. reporters would receive threatening letters with a white powder presumed to be Anthrax. In Miller’s case, the powder turned out to be harmless.
Other aspects of Dark Winter appear more notable now than ever, particularly in light of recent pandemic simulations that were conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (Event 201) and the Trump administration (Crimson Contagion) in 2019, as well as the federal government’s current options for responding to Covid-19.
For instance, Dark Winter warns of “dangerous misinformation” spreading online selling “unverified” cures and making similarly “unverified” claims, all of which are deemed as posing a threat to public safety. Such concerns over online misinformation/disinformation and narrative control have recently surfaced in connection with the current Covid-19 crisis. Notable, however, is the fact that the “Event 201” simulation held last October, which simulated a global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus, also greatly emphasized concerns about such misinformation/disinformation and suggested increased social media censorship and “limited internet shutdowns” to combat the issue. That simulation was co-hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which is currently led by Dark Winter co-author Thomas Inglesby.
Dark Winter further discusses the suppression and removal of civil liberties, such as the possibility of the President to invoke “The Insurrection Act”, which would allow the military to act as law enforcement upon request by a State governor, as well as the possibility of “martial rule.” The Dark Winter script also discusses how options for martial rule “include, but are not limited to, prohibition of free assembly, national travel ban, quarantine of certain areas, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus [i.e. arrest without due process], and/or military trials in the event that the court system becomes dysfunctional.”
The exercise later includes “credible allegations” that those deemed “suspicious for smallpox” by authorities were illegally arrested or detained and that these arrests largely targeted low income individuals or ethnic minorities. In terms of current events, it is worth pointing out that U.S. Attorney General William Barr and the Department of Justice he leads have recently requested new “emergency powers” that are allegedly related to the current Covid-19 outbreak. That request specifically references the ability to indefinitely detain Americans without right to a free trial.
WEAVING A NARRATIVE
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After examining Dark Winter, it then becomes important to examine the events the exercise seemingly predicted, namely the 2001 anthrax attacks. This is particularly crucial for two reasons: first, that the source of the anthrax was later traced to a domestic source, allegedly the USAMRIID lab in Fort Detrick; and second, the mode of attack and the initial narrative of those attacks were straight out of the Dark Winter playbook. Furthermore, key players in the government response to the anthrax attacks, including those with apparent foreknowledge of the attacks, as well as those who sought (falsely) to link those attacks to Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were also participants in Dark Winter.
Weeks before the first Anthrax case would be discovered, on the evening of September 11, 2001, then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff was told to start taking injections of the antibiotic Cipro in order to prevent Anthrax infection. In addition, at least one member of the press, journalist Richard Cohen – then at the Washington Post – had also been told to take Cipro soon after September 11 after receiving a tip “in a roundabout way from a high government official.” Who exactly in the Bush administration and in the Beltway began taking Cipro weeks prior to the anthrax attacks and for how long? Unfortunately, the answer to that question remains unanswered. Yet, it has since been revealed that the person who had told these officials to take Cipro was none other than Dark Winter participant Jerome Hauer, who had previously served for nearly 8 years at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC), which oversees the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick.
Hauer, on September 11, 2001, was the managing director of Kroll Inc., a private intelligence and security company informally known as the “CIA of Wall Street,” a company that French intelligence had accused of acting as a front for the actual CIA. Kroll Inc., at the time of the attacks was responsible for security at the World Trade Center complex, yet Hauer was conveniently not present at his World Trade Center office on the day of the attacks, instead appearing on cable news. More on the series of “conveniences” that have followed Hauer throughout his career, especially over the course of 2001, and the massive amounts of money he stands to make off of the current Covid-19 epidemic will be discussed in detail in Part II of this series.
Then, on September 12, Donald Kagan of the neoconservative think tank the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose members populated key posts in the Bush administration, made an odd comment (for the time, anyway) about the September 11 attacks and anthrax. Speaking on Washington DC radio, Kagan – after suggesting that the U.S. should invade Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine in retaliation for September 11 – asks “What would have happened if they had anthrax on that plane?” That same day, James Woolsey, himself a PNAC member and also a Dark Winter participant, claimed that Iraq was to blame for September 11 during a cable news interview.
A week later, another PNAC member and advisor to the Bush White House– Richard Perle – told CNN that the next terror attack is likely to involve “chemical or biological weapons.” Soon after, Jerome Hauer re-emerges, claiming that the government now has a “new sense of urgency” regarding bioterrorist threats and asserts that “Osama Bin Laden wants to acquire these [biological] agents and we know he has links to Saddam and Saddam Hussein has them.” Of course, Saddam Hussein did not actually possess these biological weapons, although he did during the fictional Dark Winter exercise in which Hauer had actively participated. Just days after Hauer made these bold claims, ABC News reported that the alleged 9/11 hijackers may have intended to modify crop dusters to disperse Anthrax.
All of this took place several days before the first anthrax victim, photojournalist Bob Stevens, would even begin to show symptoms and over a week before doctors would even begin to suspect that his condition had been caused by anthrax poisoning.
On October 2, as Stevens’ health began to rapidly deteriorate, a new book co-written by journalist Judith Miller of the New York Times was released. Entitled “Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War,” the book asserted that the U.S. faced an unprecedented bioterrorism threat from terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. It further alleged that such groups may have teamed up with countries such as Iraq and Russia. Miller, who had participated in Dark Winter months prior, had conducted numerous interviews with senior White House officials for the book, particularly Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Libby, although he had not personally attended Dark Winter, was greatly impacted by the exercise when he learned of it, so much so that he had personally arranged for Cheney to watch the video of the entire Dark Winter exercise on September 20, 2001. Cheney took the contents of Dark Winter to the National Security Council the very next day. It would later be reported in New York magazine that, “a few days after 9/11,” the principal authors of Dark Winter – Randall Larsen, Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby – would personally meet with Cheney and members of the administration’s national security staff about the exercise.
Larsen, who worked closely with Robert Kadlec throughout the 1990s, allegedly smuggled a test tube of weaponized Bacillus globigii, “almost genetically identical to anthrax,” into the meeting, according to that report. It is unclear when this meeting took place in relation to when Cheney had watched the video of the Dark Winter exercise.
The same day that Miller’s “Germs” was released, October 2, another odd occurrence took place. A former scientist at the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick, Dr. Ayaad Assaad, received a call from the FBI after someone who intimately knew Assaad’s work history and career in great detail (and who also claimed to have previously worked with Assaad) had anonymously accused him of being a “potential biological terrorist” with a deep-seated hatred of the U.S. government. At the time the letter was received by the FBI, neither the public nor the FBI were aware of any anthrax cases. Assaad, who was then working for the Environmental Protection Agency, told the FBI that he believed he was being framed by former co-workers. The FBI deemed this to be credible and never contacted Assaad in connection with the case again.
It later emerged in the Hartford Courant that Assaad had been the target of extensive harassment by a clique of co-workers at the USAMRIID lab in the early 1990s. One of those co-workers who had harassed Assaad would leave the lab disgruntled as a result of the controversy over Assaad’s harassment allegations. He would later return to the lab to conduct unauthorized, late night research on anthrax and be tied to several missing specimens of anthrax and other pathogens – Lt. Col. Philip Zack.
Zack, in 2001, was working for the U.S. biotechnology company Gilead Sciences. Though he first began working for Gilead in 1999, he was “handpicked” in 2001 to lead the establishment of “a new Project Management Department in conjunction with a complete restructure of R&D [Research and Development].” Donald Rumsfeld, another member of PNAC, became the chairman of Gilead Sciences in 1997 and he served as chairman of that company up until he became George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense in early 2001.
Rumsfeld would later announce on September 10, 2001 that $2.3 trillion had gone “missing” from the Pentagon’s budget. The Pentagon’s accounting office, whose staff was attempting to locate these missing trillions, would be destroyed on September 11, 2001. Though planes being flown into the Pentagon would later be described by government officials as “unimaginable” and “unthinkable” after the attacks, a simulation of planes being flown into the Pentagon had been conducted less than a year prior to September 11.
TERROR REDUX
On October 4, 2001, Bob Stevens’ anthrax poisoning diagnosis was made known to the FBI and CDC and the public was then informed via a press conference. The second anthrax case was declared soon after and was a co-worker of Stevens’, who had worked for the Florida-based newspaper, the Sun.
A day later, White House officials began to immediately pressure then-FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove that the anthrax attacks were linked to Al Qaeda, despite there being no evidence to make such a link. “They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” a then-senior FBI official would later tell the New York Daily News of the meetings.
Over the next few weeks, suspicious letters containing fine, white powder were sent to well-known American journalists, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw and The New York Times’ Judith Miller, though the powder in the letter addressed to Miller was found to be harmless. Notably, Miller and other New York Times journalists wrote a total of 27 articles specifically about anthrax and its potential use as a bioweapon between September 12, 2001 and the day before Stevens was diagnosed with anthrax poisoning.
Letters containing anthrax were also received by Senators Tom Daschle, Russ Feingold and Patrick Leahy, all of whom were – at the time – preventing the US Patriot Act from quickly passing through the Senate and who were resisting administration attempts to ram the legislation through with little to no debate. Several of the letters included the date “9-11-01” and the phrases “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is great” in neatly-printed block letters.
Soon after, a suspicious letter was found in the office of then-Congressman and current Vice President Mike Pence. Media Roots noted the following about Pence’s subsequent press conference in a 2018 podcast that examined the timeline of the 2001 anthrax attacks:
Quote:[i]“…Mike Pence, who once hosted an AM talk show describing himself as ‘Rush Limbaugh on decaf,’ conducts a press conference outside the Capitol proclaiming revenge and biblical style justice to whoever conducted the anthrax attacks. His family–with news cameras in tow–gets tested for anthrax at the hospital after it is allegedly found in his office.
No news outlets questioned his grandstanding or odd performance of going to the hospital with his family, and unlike Senators Daschle and Leahy in their press appearances, Mike Pence alluded to the anthrax letters being connected to the larger ‘war on terror.’”[/i]
As public panic swelled, more letters continued to be found, not just in the United States but around the world, with anthrax and/or hoax letters being found in Japan, Kenya, Israel, China and Australia, among others. Simultaneously, efforts to link the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein and Iraq began to emerge and quickly grew in intensity and number.
The media push to link the attacks to Iraq began first with The Guardian and then was followed by U.S. media outlets like The Wall Street Journal. Those early reports cited unnamed “American investigators” and defense officials and largely centered on the false claim that alleged 9/11 mastermind Mohammad Atta had met with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague in late 2000 as well as similarly false allegations that members of Al Qaeda had recently obtained vials of anthrax in the Czech Republic.
 

A key person in disseminating that false Prague story was Dark Winter participant and PNAC member James Woolsey. It was also revealed in late October 2001 that Woolsey was serving as the personal emissary of Paul Wolfowitz, Iraq War “architect” and then-Deputy Secretary of Defense, in “investigating Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks and anthrax outbreaks.”
Beyond the Pentagon, foreign “experts” soon began to assert that there was a link between the anthrax attacks and Iraq, including former Israeli military intelligence officer Dany Shoham. Shoham recently resurfaced this past January after claiming that Covid-19 was developed by the Chinese government as a bioweapon.
These assertions were soon followed by a report from ABC News’ Brian Ross, who (again falsely) claimed that some of the anthrax used in the attacks had contained bentonite. Ross claimed that bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and that “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.” Ross asserted this information had come from three “well-placed but separate sources,” which later grew to four. Yet, no tests conducted during the Anthrax investigation ever found any bentonite at all, meaning the story was an invention from the very start. ABC and Brian Ross never retracted the story.
Glenn Greenwald, then writing at Salon, would state the following about Ross’ sources in 2008:
Quote:[i]“Ross’ allegedly four separate sources had to have some specific knowledge of the tests conducted and, if they were really “well-placed,” one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted — Ft. Detrick. That means that the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.
It’s extremely possible — one could say highly likely — that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain — as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax — is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims. Feeding claims to ABC News designed to link Saddam to those attacks would, for obvious reasons, promote the goal of the anthrax attacker(s).”[/i]
Soon, media reports began noting the contradictory messaging of the U.S. government with regards to the anthrax attacks, messaging which has striking parallels to the Trump administration’s messaging on Covid-19. In one such report, written by Matthew Engel for The Guardian, states:
Quote:[i]“Those in charge have compounded the problems by sending out confused messages. Was the anthrax weapons-grade or not? Should Americans be alarmed or relaxed? Has President Bush himself been tested? The signals keep changing. Mr. Thompson suggested early on that Bob Stevens, the first anthrax victim, might have drunk from an infected stream.”[/i]
During the 2001 anthrax attacks, there was no shortage of contradictory actions either, such as the government’s failure to mandate that postal workers take Cipro or even take the simplest precautions even though members of the Bush administration had been taking Cipro weeks before the anthrax attacks were known to the FBI and the public. Even worse, the Bush administration waited an extremely long time to close post offices for anthrax testing, waiting until numerous postal workers had already become infected and some had already died. In addition, Ernesto Blanco – a Florida mail room worker who later recovered from Anthrax poisoning – and his family were left confused about the refusal of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to diagnose him with anthrax poisoning while he was in dire condition. Blanco’s family later claimed that his diagnosis had been kept a secret for political reasons.
BASIS FOR SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL
The contradictory response of the Bush administration to the anthrax attacks and the panic that ensued was also paralleled by an equally contradictory sensor system, one which had been installed just a few months before the anthrax attacks in thirty cities throughout the U.S. despite a dubious record of accuracy.
Just as the fictional scenarios proposed in Dark Winter were being written, American scientists were developing a sensor system for the detection of anthrax and botulinum toxin called BASIS (Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information Systems). Months before anthrax would cause extreme panic and target American Senators, scientists from Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were testing the biological sensing device at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, inside the Special Programs Division of what was once the site of the U.S. biological weapons program and where anthrax samples used at Fort Detrick are often produced.
It is worth noting that Dugway, not unlike Fort Detrick, has a longstanding issues with biosafety lapses that have resulted in numerous mishaps, such as their accidental shipment of live anthrax over 70 times to 86 different labs throughout the world from 2005-2015. Independent analyses conducted after the FBI closed its investigation into the attacks have suggested that Dugway may have been the source of the anthrax used in the attacks, as opposed to Fort Detrick.
Returning to BASIS, the results of the tests conducted on this new sensor system in 2001 showed that it was highly prone to generating false positives and was, therefore, worthless beyond the ability to “induce the very panic and social disruption it is intended to thwart“, according to the Livermore Laboratory, which nevertheless marketed BASIS as a tool to “guard the air we breathe.” Vice President Cheney, following his September 2001 briefing on Dark Winter, decided to install the system in the White House.
Days after Senator Tom Daschle’s press conference that revealed he had been targeted by the anthrax attacker, President Bush was in Shanghai attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit when he received a call from Dick Cheney on Airforce Two. Cheney delivered a chilling message — the President and Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, who were with Bush in China, might have been exposed to the ultra-lethal botulinum toxin at the White House.
BASIS had returned two positive results for the deadly neurotoxin and – if the tests held true – three of the U.S.’ highest ranking officials were “toast.” Yet, once again, BASIS had lived up to its reputation as a great panic-inducing mechanism when the supposed botulinum toxin hits were determined to have been false positives. Apparently, this “unintended” feature was a real selling point, as proven by George W. Bush’s subsequent deployment of the system in thirty cities throughout the country under the auspices of the newly-minted Department of Homeland Security as part of a program called Bio-Watch.
Given the events described, it is noteworthy that BASIS relies on the CDC’s Laboratory Response Network (LRN) to identify the biological agents trapped by its sensors. The 150 state and local laboratories that make up the LRN use a polymerase chain reaction (PCR-based) analysis, which is ill-equipped to detect the aforementioned botulinum toxin. In addition, the Bio-Watch program is plagued by bureaucratic and logistical problems, which further undermine any potential public health benefits.
DHS was fully aware of the program’s limitations from the start and issued requests for proposals (RFPs) for the development of autonomous sensor technology that would eliminate the need for manual sample collection. The Bioagent Autonomous Networked Detector (BAND) program was then initiated by HSARPA (Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency) in September of 2003 and, in 2008, awarded a multi-year contract for its development to MicroFluidic Systems, Inc., a company founded by Allen Northrup. Northup is also co-founder of Cepheid, a diagnostic testing company that received FDA approval for a 45-minute Covid-19 test less than two weeks ago.
In tandem with the development of BASIS shortly before 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, DARPA was sponsoring a surveillance program to collect data on U.S. citizens without their knowledge or consent by using their medical records. The ostensible purpose of that program was to develop algorithms that could detect a bioweapons attack based on real-time data input. The Bio-Event Advanced Leading Indicator Recognition Technology, or Bio-ALIRT, is at the heart of what Dark Winter co-author, Dr. Tara O’Toole, calls the “information supply chain.”
“We need to have a disciplined flow of information during epidemics that goes to the people who need to know what they need to know,” O’Toole recently told Ira Pastor in an interview. “That’s different from this cosmic surveillance system, that captures all the possible information all the time and tells us, in advance when an epidemic is coming. We need a supply chain of information to manage the epidemic.” O’Toole, who now works for the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and her longstanding promotion of mass surveillance in the name of “public health” will be discussed in a subsequent installment of this series.
DARPA’s partners in this Orwellian endeavor were, perhaps unsurprisingly, recurring actors in the arena of biological attack simulations, from Johns Hopkins to the University of Pittsburgh – the Biosecurity centers of which were both previously run by O’Toole – and defense industry giants, General Dynamics and IBM.
Hovering over these draconian innovations floats the overarching narrative, which the 2001 anthrax attacks were supposed to activate in popular consciousness. Though the attacks would be pinned on USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins, the highly questionable investigative and prosecutorial methods employed in Ivins’ case, not to mention his timely pre-trial suicide, may instead offer clues regarding a botched false flag operation that had originally been designed to bolster the creation of a new geopolitical chessboard pitting the U.S. against its same perpetual enemies.
COVERING UP THE REAL CONSPIRACY
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From its earliest moments, the FBI’s “Amerithrax” investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks was clearly botched, sabotaged and even farcical. For instance, the letter sent to Dr. Ayaad Assaad would obviously have been a clear starting point for any honest investigation, as whoever wrote it had obvious foreknowledge of the attacks, connections to USAMRIID and was attempting to frame someone else for a crime that – at the time it was sent – had yet to be committed. Yet, The Hartford Courant noted in late 2001 that “the FBI is not tracking the source of the anonymous letter, despite its curious timing, coming a matter of days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known.” Why would the FBI not be interested in who wrote that letter, when it presents a clear lead on someone who, at the very least, knew a bioterrorism attack would soon take place and that the attacker’s profile would fit that of Assaad (i.e. Muslim and a former USAMRIID scientist).
In addition, in the early days of the investigation on October 12, 2001 – just one week after the attacks had claimed their first victim, the FBI called the University of Iowa and demanded that they destroy their entire database on the Ames strain of anthrax, the strain that would later be revealed to have been the very strain used in the attacks.
Both the FBI and the university officially claimed that the database’s destruction was ordered in order to prevent its potential use by terrorists in the future and was thus a “precaution,” despite greatly hampering the capacity of the investigation to determine the origins of the anthrax used in the attacks. Dr. Francis Boyle, an American law professor who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, later asserted that the FBI’s decision to order the destruction of the Ames strain database was an “obstruction of justice, a federal crime,” adding that “…That collection should have been preserved and protected as evidence. That’s the DNA, the fingerprints right there.”
Can the destruction of the Ames strain database and the decision to not pursue any leads related to the anonymous letter framing Dr. Assaad be written off as merely “missteps” made in the earliest and arguably most crucial days of the investigation? The fact that the Bush administration, as previously mentioned, was strongly pressuring then-FBI Director Robert Mueller to find a connection to “someone in the Middle East” at the same time these decision were made instead suggests that the investigation was highly politicized and manipulated by top government officials from the very beginning.
The FBI investigation continued to be marred by similarly obstructive actions. For instance, the anthrax sample that was in the envelope addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy had been found to contain traces of human DNA, a crucial finding that the FBI laboratory deliberately concealed from the agency’s own investigators. The FBI lab then declined to search for a match to this human DNA sample, despite the fact that doing so would – in all probability – lead to the actual attacker.
Due to all the obstruction and deliberate sabotage that took place, the investigation progressed slowly as crucial clues were ignored or outright discarded, apparently in order to keep FBI investigators off of the real trail. After coming under political and media pressure at least name a suspect, the FBI began to focus on former USAMRIID researcher Stephen Hatfill.
Despite lacking any good reason to pursue Hatfill, the FBI – accompanied by TV crews – raided Hatfill’s apartment in biohazard suits and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft later publicly named him a “person of interest” in the case. The FBI pressured Hatfill’s then-employer to fire him and refused to clear his name years after the Bureau knew full well that he had no connection to the crime. Hatfill first sued the government in 2003 and the Department of Justice settled with Hatfill five years later, paying him $4.6 million in damages.
Though it was eventually settled, Hatfill’s lawsuit initially resulted in some odd claims from FBI investigators, with Richard Lambert – the FBI official in charge of the Amerithrax investigation, claiming that the lawsuit “could jeopardize the probe and expose national secrets related to U.S. bioweapons defense measures.” He also claimed it would “make public the vulnerabilities and capabilities of U.S. government installations to bioweapons attacks and expose sensitive intelligence collection sources and methods.” Lambert would later file a federal whistleblower lawsuit where he accused the Bureau’s Washington field office and FBI headquarters of having “greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation.”
The Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, would make a similar argument when Maureen Stevens, the wife of the first anthrax victim Bob Stevens, sued the federal government over the lax security measures in place at the USAMRIID lab where the anthrax used in the attacks was alleged to have originated. Stevens’ lawyer said the lawsuit was also filed due to “the government’s stonewalling tactics,” which included “taking months to turn over an autopsy report, denying them access to DNA tests and even denying them money from the Sept. 11 Victims Compensation Fund.” Citing “national security concerns,” federal attorneys sought to delay Stevens’ lawsuit, arguing that the litigation “would pose a significant risk of disclosing classified or sensitive information relating to the acquisition, development and use of weapons of mass destruction such as anthrax.”
In 2008, soon after Hatfill was cleared and the lawsuit with him settled, the FBI began to focus on another USAMRIID researcher, Dr. Bruce E. Ivins. Ivins, who had previously helped the FBI analyze the anthrax used in the letters sent to politicians, journalists and others, was aggressively targeted by the FBI through aggressive surveillance and what can only be described as extreme harassment.
As Glenn Greenwald noted in Salon in 2008, “the FBI investigation was so heavy-handed that it actually entailed showing gruesome photographs of the anthrax victims to Ivins’ adult children, telling them that their father is the one who did that, while trying to entice them to turn on him with promises of a reward.” It was also revealed that addiction counselor Jean Duley, whose restraining order against Ivins was used by the media as “proof” that he was deranged and a likely “lone wolf” terrorist, had actually been egged on by none other than the FBI to seek that very restraining order.
 

The FBI, as it ramped up its targeting of Ivins, leaked much of its evidence to media outlets, which – for the most part – uncritically reported it. However, it eventually became clear that the case was shoddy and would never hold up in court as it was built on circumstantial evidence and questionable scientific analyses.
It was then announced on July 29, 2008 that Ivins, whose life and career had been left in ruins by the FBI’s aggressive tactics, had committed suicide just as the federal government was set to charge him as the sole culprit behind the Anthrax attacks. Few chose to question the suicide narrative despite there being legitimate reasons to do so, such as the lack of a suicide note at the scene and the fact that no autopsy was ever performed on Ivins’ corpse.
Former FBI agent Richard Lambert’s whistleblower lawsuit would later reveal that the FBI had intentionally withheld a “wealth” of evidence that proved Ivins’ innocence and further charged that the DOJ and FBI had “crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt” that included “press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions.”
After Ivins’ suicide, questions continued to arise regarding the FBI’s case against the deceased scientist, with several journalists and even Senator Patrick Leahy – who had been sent an Anthrax letter – insisting that the FBI’s case against Ivins, particularly the charge that he had acted alone, was implausible. A former co-worker of Ivins and one of the country’s top biowarfare experts, Richard Spertzel, asserted in The Wall Street Journal that Ivins couldn’t have been the culprit because Ivins did not know how to make anthrax of the quality used in the attacks as only 4-5 people in the entire country, Spertzel being one of them, knew how to do so. Spertzel asserted that one of those 4-5 people would have needed at least a year as well as a full lab and a staff dedicate to the task in order to produce the Anthrax used.
In an attempt to mollify mounting criticism, Mueller announced in September 2008 that a panel from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) would independently review the FBI’s “smoking gun” scientific analyses that had led them to accuse Ivins. However, the FBI abruptly closed the case in 2010, well before the panel could conclude its review, and stood by its controversial assertion that Ivins had acted as a “lone wolf” and that anthrax from a flask in Ivins’ lab was “conclusively identified as the parent material to the anthrax powder used in the mailings.”
When the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) did release its review of the FBI’s scientific findings a year later in 2011, it found that the Bureau’s “smoking gun” scientific evidence against Ivins was actually very inconclusive and they also identified several still, unresolved issues with the FBI’s analyses for which the Bureau could not provide an explanation.
However, because Ivins had died before the FBI’s scientific case could go to trial, the FBI’s claims would never be challenged in court. David Relman, vice chairman of the National Academy study committee, later told ProPublica that Ivins’ trial would have been the only way the FBI’s claims “could have been weighed and challenged by experts.”
The NAS study was not the only independent report that challenged the FBI’s case against Ivins after his apparent suicide. In 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its own analysis of the FBI investigation and concluded that the FBI’s approach lacked consistency, adequate standards and precision. The GAO report ultimately supported the NAS’ conclusion that the scientific evidence did not definitely prove Ivins to be the culprit.
The conclusions of both the NAS and GAO reports show that the FBI’s “smoking gun” against Ivins – its scientific analyses – were hardly a smoking gun as they were just as circumstantial as the rest of the Bureau’s evidence against the scientist. This, of course, makes the timing of the FBI’s decision to close the case, a year before any independent analysis of its evidence against Ivins could be completed, significant.
A FAMILIAR CAST OF CHARACTERS
Key players in Dark Winter would also end up playing a role in the FBI Amerithrax investigation and Bush administration efforts to link them to a foreign, rather than a domestic, source. For instance, as increasingly desperate efforts were made to link the anthrax attacks to Al Qaeda in early 2002, an “independent” team from the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies argued that the anthrax attackers were linked to Al Qaeda, citing a diagnosis made by a Florida doctor in June 2001 that alleged 9/11 hijacker Ahmed al-Haznawi had a skin lesion that was “consistent with cutaneous anthrax.”
Yet, this team from Johns Hopkins was – in reality — far from independent, as it was led by Dark Winter co-authors Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby. However, their association with Dark Winter and their September 2001 meeting with Dick Cheney went unmentioned as media outlets ran with O’Toole and Inglesby’s assertion that al-Haznawi’s allegedly anthrax-related lesion “raises the possibility that the hijackers were handling anthrax and were the perpetrators of the anthrax letter attacks.” Other scientists and analysts as well as the FBI challenged and rejected their claims.
Another Dark Winter figure involved in the Amerithrax case was current Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert Kadlec, who became an adviser on biological warfare to the Rumsfeld-led Pentagon in the days after 9/11. Kadlec’s official biography states that he “contributed to the FBI investigation of the anthrax letter attacks,” though it’s unclear exactly what those contributions were, beyond having met at least once with scientists at Fort Detrick in November 2001. Whatever his contributions were, Kadlec has long been an emphatic supporter of the official narrative regarding Bruce Ivins, who he has referred to as a “deranged scientist” and the sole culprit behind the attacks. Kadlec has also used the official narrative about Ivins to assert that bioweapons have been “democratized,” which he argues means that weaponized pathogens can be wielded by essentially anyone with “a few thousand dollars” and enough time on their hands.
Notably, Kadlec isn’t the only key figure in the current U.S. government response to Covid-19 to have ties to the botched FBI investigation as current HHS Secretary Alex Azar was also involved in the FBI investigation. In addition, Azar stated at a White House press briefing in 2018 that he had been “personally involved in much of managing the response [to the anthrax attacks]” as then-General counsel to HHS.
Yet, given that the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks and the government response to them were so disastrous and heavily criticized by independent and mainstream media alike, it is surprising that Azar and Kadlec would so proudly tout their involvement in that fiasco, especially considering that the scientific analyses used in that investigation were fatally flawed and, by all indications, led to the death of an innocent man.
While such credentials in a “normal” world would be grounds for exclusion from public service, they apparently have the opposite effect when it comes to post-2001 HHS policy and U.S. biodefense policy, which – especially following 2001 – has championed the interests and profits of corporate pharmaceutical companies and the apocalyptic vision of bioweapons held by war hawks and perpetual Cold Warriors. This latter category, of course, includes members of the now-defunct PNAC, who infamously referred to racially-targeted bioweapons as a “politically useful tool” in a now infamous 2000 document, and their ideological descendants.
As the next installment of this series will show, Dark Winter participant and 2001 anthrax attack insider Jerome Hauer epitomizes this merging of perpetual hawkishness and corporate pharmaceutical interests, as he has long held (and continues to occupy) key board positions of the very pharmaceutical company that not only sold tens of millions of anthrax vaccine doses to HHS following the 2001 anthrax attacks, but is now a partner in the development of the majority of vaccines, drugs and experimental treatments currently under development in the United States for the treatment of Covid-19.]]> ENGINEERING CONTAGION: AMERITHRAX, CORONAVIRUS, AND THE RISE OF HE BIOTECH-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

PART ONE: ALL ROADS LEAD TO DARK WINTER



A DARK WINTER DESCENDS
In late June 2001, the U.S. military was preparing for a “Dark Winter.” At Andrews Air Force Base in Camp Springs, Maryland, several Congressmen, a former CIA director, a former FBI director, government insiders and privileged members of the press met to conduct a biowarfare simulation that would precede both the September 11 attacks and the 2001 Anthrax attacks by a matter of months. It specifically simulated the deliberate introduction of smallpox to the American public by a hostile actor.
The simulation was a collaborative effort led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (part of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security) in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Analytic Services (ANSER) Institute for Homeland Security and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. The concept, design and script of the simulation were created by Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center along with Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of ANSER. The full script of the exercise can be read here.
The name for the exercise derives from a statement made by Robert Kadlec, who participated in the script created for the exercise, when he states that the lack of smallpox vaccines for the U.S. populace means that “it could be a very dark winter for America.” Kadlec, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and a former lobbyist for military intelligence/intelligence contractors, is now leading HHS’ Covid-19 response and led the Trump administration’s 2019 “Crimson Contagion” exercises, which simulated a crippling pandemic influenza outbreak in the U.S. that had first originated in China. Kadlec’s professional history, his decades-old obsession with apocalyptic bioweapon attack scenarios and the Crimson Contagion exercises themselves are the subject of Part III of this series.
 

The Dark Winter exercise began with a briefing on the geopolitical context of the exercise, which included intelligence suggesting that China had intentionally introduced Foot and Mouth disease in Taiwan for economic and political advantage; that Al-Qaeda was seeking to purchase biological pathogens once weaponized by the Soviet Union; and that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had recruited former biowarfare specialists from the Soviet Union and was importing materials to create biological weapons. It further notes that a majority of Americans had opposed a planned deployment of U.S. soldiers to the Middle East, which was also opposed by Iraq, China and Russia. The script also asserts that the soldiers were being deployed to counter and potentially engage the Iraqi military. Later, as the exercise unfolds, many of those Americans once skeptical about this troop deployment soon begin calling for “revenge.”
Amid this backdrop, news suddenly breaks that smallpox, a disease long eradicated in the U.S. and globally, appears to have broken out in the state of Oklahoma. The participants in Dark Winter, representing the National Security Council, quickly deduce that smallpox has been deliberately introduced and that this is the result of a “bioterrorist attack on the United States.” The assumption is made that the attack is “related to decisions we may make to deploy troops to the Mid-East.”
Not unlike what is unfolding currently with the Covid-19 crisis, in Dark Winter, there is no means of rapid diagnosis for smallpox, no treatments available and no surge capacity in the healthcare system. The outbreak quickly spreads to numerous other U.S. states and throughout the world. Hospitals in the U.S. soon face “desperate situations” as “tens of thousands of ill or anxious persons seek care.” This is compounded by “grossly inadequate supplies” and “insufficient isolation rooms,” among other complications.
Since this exercise occurred in June 2001, the heavy hinting that Saddam Hussein-led Iraq and Al Qaeda are the main suspects is notable. Indeed, at one point in one of the fictional news reports used in the exercise, the reporter states that “Iraq might have provided the technology behind the attacks to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.” Such claims that Iraq’s government was linked to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan would re-emerge months later in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and would be heavily promoted by several Dark Winter participants such as former CIA Director James Woolsey, who would later swear under oath that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. It would, of course, later emerge that Iraq’s connections to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks were nonexistent as well as the fact that Iraq did not possess biological weapons or other “weapons of mass destruction.”
Notably, this insertion into one of the Dark Winter news clips was not the only part of the exercise that sought to link Saddam Hussein and Iraq to biological weapons. For instance, during the exercise, satellite imaging showed that a “suspected bioresearch facility” in Iraq appeared to be expanding an “exclusionary zone” in order to limit civilian activity near the facility as well as a “possible quarantine” area in the same area as this facility. Previously in the exercise, Iraq was one of three countries, along with Iran and North Korea, who were “repeatedly rumored” to have illicitly obtained Soviet smallpox cultures from defecting scientists and Iraq was alleged to have offered employment to a leading smallpox scientist who had worked on the Soviet bioweapons program.
Then, at the end of the exercise, a “prominent Iraqi defector” emerges who claims Iraq had arranged the bioweapons attack “through intermediaries,” which is deemed “highly credible” even though “there is no forensic evidence to support this claim.” Iraq officially denies the accusation, but vows to target the U.S. in “highly damaging ways” if the U.S. “takes action against Iraq.” It is thus unsurprising that, as will be shown later in this report, key participants in Dark Winter would heavily promote the narrative that Iraq was to blame for the 2001 Anthrax attacks. Other participants, including Robert Kadlec, would then become involved in the FBI’s “sabotaged” investigation once the Bureau began to focus on a domestic, as opposed to an international source.
In addition, as part of Dark Winter, mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times and others, were sent anonymous letters that threatened renewed attacks on the U.S., including anthrax attacks, if the U.S. did not withdraw its troops from the Middle East. In this simulation, those letters contained “a genetic fingerprint of the smallpox strain matching the fingerprint of the strain causing the current epidemic.” During the Anthrax attacks that would occur just a few months after Dark Winter, Judith Miller – who participated in Dark Winter – and other U.S. reporters would receive threatening letters with a white powder presumed to be Anthrax. In Miller’s case, the powder turned out to be harmless.
Other aspects of Dark Winter appear more notable now than ever, particularly in light of recent pandemic simulations that were conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (Event 201) and the Trump administration (Crimson Contagion) in 2019, as well as the federal government’s current options for responding to Covid-19.
For instance, Dark Winter warns of “dangerous misinformation” spreading online selling “unverified” cures and making similarly “unverified” claims, all of which are deemed as posing a threat to public safety. Such concerns over online misinformation/disinformation and narrative control have recently surfaced in connection with the current Covid-19 crisis. Notable, however, is the fact that the “Event 201” simulation held last October, which simulated a global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus, also greatly emphasized concerns about such misinformation/disinformation and suggested increased social media censorship and “limited internet shutdowns” to combat the issue. That simulation was co-hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which is currently led by Dark Winter co-author Thomas Inglesby.
Dark Winter further discusses the suppression and removal of civil liberties, such as the possibility of the President to invoke “The Insurrection Act”, which would allow the military to act as law enforcement upon request by a State governor, as well as the possibility of “martial rule.” The Dark Winter script also discusses how options for martial rule “include, but are not limited to, prohibition of free assembly, national travel ban, quarantine of certain areas, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus [i.e. arrest without due process], and/or military trials in the event that the court system becomes dysfunctional.”
The exercise later includes “credible allegations” that those deemed “suspicious for smallpox” by authorities were illegally arrested or detained and that these arrests largely targeted low income individuals or ethnic minorities. In terms of current events, it is worth pointing out that U.S. Attorney General William Barr and the Department of Justice he leads have recently requested new “emergency powers” that are allegedly related to the current Covid-19 outbreak. That request specifically references the ability to indefinitely detain Americans without right to a free trial.
WEAVING A NARRATIVE
[Image: anthrax-letters-630x420-1.jpg?resize=500%2C333&ssl=1]
After examining Dark Winter, it then becomes important to examine the events the exercise seemingly predicted, namely the 2001 anthrax attacks. This is particularly crucial for two reasons: first, that the source of the anthrax was later traced to a domestic source, allegedly the USAMRIID lab in Fort Detrick; and second, the mode of attack and the initial narrative of those attacks were straight out of the Dark Winter playbook. Furthermore, key players in the government response to the anthrax attacks, including those with apparent foreknowledge of the attacks, as well as those who sought (falsely) to link those attacks to Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were also participants in Dark Winter.
Weeks before the first Anthrax case would be discovered, on the evening of September 11, 2001, then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff was told to start taking injections of the antibiotic Cipro in order to prevent Anthrax infection. In addition, at least one member of the press, journalist Richard Cohen – then at the Washington Post – had also been told to take Cipro soon after September 11 after receiving a tip “in a roundabout way from a high government official.” Who exactly in the Bush administration and in the Beltway began taking Cipro weeks prior to the anthrax attacks and for how long? Unfortunately, the answer to that question remains unanswered. Yet, it has since been revealed that the person who had told these officials to take Cipro was none other than Dark Winter participant Jerome Hauer, who had previously served for nearly 8 years at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC), which oversees the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick.
Hauer, on September 11, 2001, was the managing director of Kroll Inc., a private intelligence and security company informally known as the “CIA of Wall Street,” a company that French intelligence had accused of acting as a front for the actual CIA. Kroll Inc., at the time of the attacks was responsible for security at the World Trade Center complex, yet Hauer was conveniently not present at his World Trade Center office on the day of the attacks, instead appearing on cable news. More on the series of “conveniences” that have followed Hauer throughout his career, especially over the course of 2001, and the massive amounts of money he stands to make off of the current Covid-19 epidemic will be discussed in detail in Part II of this series.
Then, on September 12, Donald Kagan of the neoconservative think tank the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose members populated key posts in the Bush administration, made an odd comment (for the time, anyway) about the September 11 attacks and anthrax. Speaking on Washington DC radio, Kagan – after suggesting that the U.S. should invade Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine in retaliation for September 11 – asks “What would have happened if they had anthrax on that plane?” That same day, James Woolsey, himself a PNAC member and also a Dark Winter participant, claimed that Iraq was to blame for September 11 during a cable news interview.
A week later, another PNAC member and advisor to the Bush White House– Richard Perle – told CNN that the next terror attack is likely to involve “chemical or biological weapons.” Soon after, Jerome Hauer re-emerges, claiming that the government now has a “new sense of urgency” regarding bioterrorist threats and asserts that “Osama Bin Laden wants to acquire these [biological] agents and we know he has links to Saddam and Saddam Hussein has them.” Of course, Saddam Hussein did not actually possess these biological weapons, although he did during the fictional Dark Winter exercise in which Hauer had actively participated. Just days after Hauer made these bold claims, ABC News reported that the alleged 9/11 hijackers may have intended to modify crop dusters to disperse Anthrax.
All of this took place several days before the first anthrax victim, photojournalist Bob Stevens, would even begin to show symptoms and over a week before doctors would even begin to suspect that his condition had been caused by anthrax poisoning.
On October 2, as Stevens’ health began to rapidly deteriorate, a new book co-written by journalist Judith Miller of the New York Times was released. Entitled “Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War,” the book asserted that the U.S. faced an unprecedented bioterrorism threat from terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. It further alleged that such groups may have teamed up with countries such as Iraq and Russia. Miller, who had participated in Dark Winter months prior, had conducted numerous interviews with senior White House officials for the book, particularly Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Libby, although he had not personally attended Dark Winter, was greatly impacted by the exercise when he learned of it, so much so that he had personally arranged for Cheney to watch the video of the entire Dark Winter exercise on September 20, 2001. Cheney took the contents of Dark Winter to the National Security Council the very next day. It would later be reported in New York magazine that, “a few days after 9/11,” the principal authors of Dark Winter – Randall Larsen, Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby – would personally meet with Cheney and members of the administration’s national security staff about the exercise.
Larsen, who worked closely with Robert Kadlec throughout the 1990s, allegedly smuggled a test tube of weaponized Bacillus globigii, “almost genetically identical to anthrax,” into the meeting, according to that report. It is unclear when this meeting took place in relation to when Cheney had watched the video of the Dark Winter exercise.
The same day that Miller’s “Germs” was released, October 2, another odd occurrence took place. A former scientist at the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick, Dr. Ayaad Assaad, received a call from the FBI after someone who intimately knew Assaad’s work history and career in great detail (and who also claimed to have previously worked with Assaad) had anonymously accused him of being a “potential biological terrorist” with a deep-seated hatred of the U.S. government. At the time the letter was received by the FBI, neither the public nor the FBI were aware of any anthrax cases. Assaad, who was then working for the Environmental Protection Agency, told the FBI that he believed he was being framed by former co-workers. The FBI deemed this to be credible and never contacted Assaad in connection with the case again.
It later emerged in the Hartford Courant that Assaad had been the target of extensive harassment by a clique of co-workers at the USAMRIID lab in the early 1990s. One of those co-workers who had harassed Assaad would leave the lab disgruntled as a result of the controversy over Assaad’s harassment allegations. He would later return to the lab to conduct unauthorized, late night research on anthrax and be tied to several missing specimens of anthrax and other pathogens – Lt. Col. Philip Zack.
Zack, in 2001, was working for the U.S. biotechnology company Gilead Sciences. Though he first began working for Gilead in 1999, he was “handpicked” in 2001 to lead the establishment of “a new Project Management Department in conjunction with a complete restructure of R&D [Research and Development].” Donald Rumsfeld, another member of PNAC, became the chairman of Gilead Sciences in 1997 and he served as chairman of that company up until he became George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense in early 2001.
Rumsfeld would later announce on September 10, 2001 that $2.3 trillion had gone “missing” from the Pentagon’s budget. The Pentagon’s accounting office, whose staff was attempting to locate these missing trillions, would be destroyed on September 11, 2001. Though planes being flown into the Pentagon would later be described by government officials as “unimaginable” and “unthinkable” after the attacks, a simulation of planes being flown into the Pentagon had been conducted less than a year prior to September 11.
TERROR REDUX
On October 4, 2001, Bob Stevens’ anthrax poisoning diagnosis was made known to the FBI and CDC and the public was then informed via a press conference. The second anthrax case was declared soon after and was a co-worker of Stevens’, who had worked for the Florida-based newspaper, the Sun.
A day later, White House officials began to immediately pressure then-FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove that the anthrax attacks were linked to Al Qaeda, despite there being no evidence to make such a link. “They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” a then-senior FBI official would later tell the New York Daily News of the meetings.
Over the next few weeks, suspicious letters containing fine, white powder were sent to well-known American journalists, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw and The New York Times’ Judith Miller, though the powder in the letter addressed to Miller was found to be harmless. Notably, Miller and other New York Times journalists wrote a total of 27 articles specifically about anthrax and its potential use as a bioweapon between September 12, 2001 and the day before Stevens was diagnosed with anthrax poisoning.
Letters containing anthrax were also received by Senators Tom Daschle, Russ Feingold and Patrick Leahy, all of whom were – at the time – preventing the US Patriot Act from quickly passing through the Senate and who were resisting administration attempts to ram the legislation through with little to no debate. Several of the letters included the date “9-11-01” and the phrases “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is great” in neatly-printed block letters.
Soon after, a suspicious letter was found in the office of then-Congressman and current Vice President Mike Pence. Media Roots noted the following about Pence’s subsequent press conference in a 2018 podcast that examined the timeline of the 2001 anthrax attacks:
Quote:[i]“…Mike Pence, who once hosted an AM talk show describing himself as ‘Rush Limbaugh on decaf,’ conducts a press conference outside the Capitol proclaiming revenge and biblical style justice to whoever conducted the anthrax attacks. His family–with news cameras in tow–gets tested for anthrax at the hospital after it is allegedly found in his office.
No news outlets questioned his grandstanding or odd performance of going to the hospital with his family, and unlike Senators Daschle and Leahy in their press appearances, Mike Pence alluded to the anthrax letters being connected to the larger ‘war on terror.’”[/i]
As public panic swelled, more letters continued to be found, not just in the United States but around the world, with anthrax and/or hoax letters being found in Japan, Kenya, Israel, China and Australia, among others. Simultaneously, efforts to link the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein and Iraq began to emerge and quickly grew in intensity and number.
The media push to link the attacks to Iraq began first with The Guardian and then was followed by U.S. media outlets like The Wall Street Journal. Those early reports cited unnamed “American investigators” and defense officials and largely centered on the false claim that alleged 9/11 mastermind Mohammad Atta had met with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague in late 2000 as well as similarly false allegations that members of Al Qaeda had recently obtained vials of anthrax in the Czech Republic.
 

A key person in disseminating that false Prague story was Dark Winter participant and PNAC member James Woolsey. It was also revealed in late October 2001 that Woolsey was serving as the personal emissary of Paul Wolfowitz, Iraq War “architect” and then-Deputy Secretary of Defense, in “investigating Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks and anthrax outbreaks.”
Beyond the Pentagon, foreign “experts” soon began to assert that there was a link between the anthrax attacks and Iraq, including former Israeli military intelligence officer Dany Shoham. Shoham recently resurfaced this past January after claiming that Covid-19 was developed by the Chinese government as a bioweapon.
These assertions were soon followed by a report from ABC News’ Brian Ross, who (again falsely) claimed that some of the anthrax used in the attacks had contained bentonite. Ross claimed that bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and that “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.” Ross asserted this information had come from three “well-placed but separate sources,” which later grew to four. Yet, no tests conducted during the Anthrax investigation ever found any bentonite at all, meaning the story was an invention from the very start. ABC and Brian Ross never retracted the story.
Glenn Greenwald, then writing at Salon, would state the following about Ross’ sources in 2008:
Quote:[i]“Ross’ allegedly four separate sources had to have some specific knowledge of the tests conducted and, if they were really “well-placed,” one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted — Ft. Detrick. That means that the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.
It’s extremely possible — one could say highly likely — that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain — as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax — is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims. Feeding claims to ABC News designed to link Saddam to those attacks would, for obvious reasons, promote the goal of the anthrax attacker(s).”[/i]
Soon, media reports began noting the contradictory messaging of the U.S. government with regards to the anthrax attacks, messaging which has striking parallels to the Trump administration’s messaging on Covid-19. In one such report, written by Matthew Engel for The Guardian, states:
Quote:[i]“Those in charge have compounded the problems by sending out confused messages. Was the anthrax weapons-grade or not? Should Americans be alarmed or relaxed? Has President Bush himself been tested? The signals keep changing. Mr. Thompson suggested early on that Bob Stevens, the first anthrax victim, might have drunk from an infected stream.”[/i]
During the 2001 anthrax attacks, there was no shortage of contradictory actions either, such as the government’s failure to mandate that postal workers take Cipro or even take the simplest precautions even though members of the Bush administration had been taking Cipro weeks before the anthrax attacks were known to the FBI and the public. Even worse, the Bush administration waited an extremely long time to close post offices for anthrax testing, waiting until numerous postal workers had already become infected and some had already died. In addition, Ernesto Blanco – a Florida mail room worker who later recovered from Anthrax poisoning – and his family were left confused about the refusal of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to diagnose him with anthrax poisoning while he was in dire condition. Blanco’s family later claimed that his diagnosis had been kept a secret for political reasons.
BASIS FOR SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL
The contradictory response of the Bush administration to the anthrax attacks and the panic that ensued was also paralleled by an equally contradictory sensor system, one which had been installed just a few months before the anthrax attacks in thirty cities throughout the U.S. despite a dubious record of accuracy.
Just as the fictional scenarios proposed in Dark Winter were being written, American scientists were developing a sensor system for the detection of anthrax and botulinum toxin called BASIS (Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information Systems). Months before anthrax would cause extreme panic and target American Senators, scientists from Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were testing the biological sensing device at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, inside the Special Programs Division of what was once the site of the U.S. biological weapons program and where anthrax samples used at Fort Detrick are often produced.
It is worth noting that Dugway, not unlike Fort Detrick, has a longstanding issues with biosafety lapses that have resulted in numerous mishaps, such as their accidental shipment of live anthrax over 70 times to 86 different labs throughout the world from 2005-2015. Independent analyses conducted after the FBI closed its investigation into the attacks have suggested that Dugway may have been the source of the anthrax used in the attacks, as opposed to Fort Detrick.
Returning to BASIS, the results of the tests conducted on this new sensor system in 2001 showed that it was highly prone to generating false positives and was, therefore, worthless beyond the ability to “induce the very panic and social disruption it is intended to thwart“, according to the Livermore Laboratory, which nevertheless marketed BASIS as a tool to “guard the air we breathe.” Vice President Cheney, following his September 2001 briefing on Dark Winter, decided to install the system in the White House.
Days after Senator Tom Daschle’s press conference that revealed he had been targeted by the anthrax attacker, President Bush was in Shanghai attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit when he received a call from Dick Cheney on Airforce Two. Cheney delivered a chilling message — the President and Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, who were with Bush in China, might have been exposed to the ultra-lethal botulinum toxin at the White House.
BASIS had returned two positive results for the deadly neurotoxin and – if the tests held true – three of the U.S.’ highest ranking officials were “toast.” Yet, once again, BASIS had lived up to its reputation as a great panic-inducing mechanism when the supposed botulinum toxin hits were determined to have been false positives. Apparently, this “unintended” feature was a real selling point, as proven by George W. Bush’s subsequent deployment of the system in thirty cities throughout the country under the auspices of the newly-minted Department of Homeland Security as part of a program called Bio-Watch.
Given the events described, it is noteworthy that BASIS relies on the CDC’s Laboratory Response Network (LRN) to identify the biological agents trapped by its sensors. The 150 state and local laboratories that make up the LRN use a polymerase chain reaction (PCR-based) analysis, which is ill-equipped to detect the aforementioned botulinum toxin. In addition, the Bio-Watch program is plagued by bureaucratic and logistical problems, which further undermine any potential public health benefits.
DHS was fully aware of the program’s limitations from the start and issued requests for proposals (RFPs) for the development of autonomous sensor technology that would eliminate the need for manual sample collection. The Bioagent Autonomous Networked Detector (BAND) program was then initiated by HSARPA (Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency) in September of 2003 and, in 2008, awarded a multi-year contract for its development to MicroFluidic Systems, Inc., a company founded by Allen Northrup. Northup is also co-founder of Cepheid, a diagnostic testing company that received FDA approval for a 45-minute Covid-19 test less than two weeks ago.
In tandem with the development of BASIS shortly before 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, DARPA was sponsoring a surveillance program to collect data on U.S. citizens without their knowledge or consent by using their medical records. The ostensible purpose of that program was to develop algorithms that could detect a bioweapons attack based on real-time data input. The Bio-Event Advanced Leading Indicator Recognition Technology, or Bio-ALIRT, is at the heart of what Dark Winter co-author, Dr. Tara O’Toole, calls the “information supply chain.”
“We need to have a disciplined flow of information during epidemics that goes to the people who need to know what they need to know,” O’Toole recently told Ira Pastor in an interview. “That’s different from this cosmic surveillance system, that captures all the possible information all the time and tells us, in advance when an epidemic is coming. We need a supply chain of information to manage the epidemic.” O’Toole, who now works for the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and her longstanding promotion of mass surveillance in the name of “public health” will be discussed in a subsequent installment of this series.
DARPA’s partners in this Orwellian endeavor were, perhaps unsurprisingly, recurring actors in the arena of biological attack simulations, from Johns Hopkins to the University of Pittsburgh – the Biosecurity centers of which were both previously run by O’Toole – and defense industry giants, General Dynamics and IBM.
Hovering over these draconian innovations floats the overarching narrative, which the 2001 anthrax attacks were supposed to activate in popular consciousness. Though the attacks would be pinned on USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins, the highly questionable investigative and prosecutorial methods employed in Ivins’ case, not to mention his timely pre-trial suicide, may instead offer clues regarding a botched false flag operation that had originally been designed to bolster the creation of a new geopolitical chessboard pitting the U.S. against its same perpetual enemies.
COVERING UP THE REAL CONSPIRACY
[Image: amerithraxdoj500.jpg?resize=500%2C331&ssl=1]
From its earliest moments, the FBI’s “Amerithrax” investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks was clearly botched, sabotaged and even farcical. For instance, the letter sent to Dr. Ayaad Assaad would obviously have been a clear starting point for any honest investigation, as whoever wrote it had obvious foreknowledge of the attacks, connections to USAMRIID and was attempting to frame someone else for a crime that – at the time it was sent – had yet to be committed. Yet, The Hartford Courant noted in late 2001 that “the FBI is not tracking the source of the anonymous letter, despite its curious timing, coming a matter of days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known.” Why would the FBI not be interested in who wrote that letter, when it presents a clear lead on someone who, at the very least, knew a bioterrorism attack would soon take place and that the attacker’s profile would fit that of Assaad (i.e. Muslim and a former USAMRIID scientist).
In addition, in the early days of the investigation on October 12, 2001 – just one week after the attacks had claimed their first victim, the FBI called the University of Iowa and demanded that they destroy their entire database on the Ames strain of anthrax, the strain that would later be revealed to have been the very strain used in the attacks.
Both the FBI and the university officially claimed that the database’s destruction was ordered in order to prevent its potential use by terrorists in the future and was thus a “precaution,” despite greatly hampering the capacity of the investigation to determine the origins of the anthrax used in the attacks. Dr. Francis Boyle, an American law professor who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, later asserted that the FBI’s decision to order the destruction of the Ames strain database was an “obstruction of justice, a federal crime,” adding that “…That collection should have been preserved and protected as evidence. That’s the DNA, the fingerprints right there.”
Can the destruction of the Ames strain database and the decision to not pursue any leads related to the anonymous letter framing Dr. Assaad be written off as merely “missteps” made in the earliest and arguably most crucial days of the investigation? The fact that the Bush administration, as previously mentioned, was strongly pressuring then-FBI Director Robert Mueller to find a connection to “someone in the Middle East” at the same time these decision were made instead suggests that the investigation was highly politicized and manipulated by top government officials from the very beginning.
The FBI investigation continued to be marred by similarly obstructive actions. For instance, the anthrax sample that was in the envelope addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy had been found to contain traces of human DNA, a crucial finding that the FBI laboratory deliberately concealed from the agency’s own investigators. The FBI lab then declined to search for a match to this human DNA sample, despite the fact that doing so would – in all probability – lead to the actual attacker.
Due to all the obstruction and deliberate sabotage that took place, the investigation progressed slowly as crucial clues were ignored or outright discarded, apparently in order to keep FBI investigators off of the real trail. After coming under political and media pressure at least name a suspect, the FBI began to focus on former USAMRIID researcher Stephen Hatfill.
Despite lacking any good reason to pursue Hatfill, the FBI – accompanied by TV crews – raided Hatfill’s apartment in biohazard suits and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft later publicly named him a “person of interest” in the case. The FBI pressured Hatfill’s then-employer to fire him and refused to clear his name years after the Bureau knew full well that he had no connection to the crime. Hatfill first sued the government in 2003 and the Department of Justice settled with Hatfill five years later, paying him $4.6 million in damages.
Though it was eventually settled, Hatfill’s lawsuit initially resulted in some odd claims from FBI investigators, with Richard Lambert – the FBI official in charge of the Amerithrax investigation, claiming that the lawsuit “could jeopardize the probe and expose national secrets related to U.S. bioweapons defense measures.” He also claimed it would “make public the vulnerabilities and capabilities of U.S. government installations to bioweapons attacks and expose sensitive intelligence collection sources and methods.” Lambert would later file a federal whistleblower lawsuit where he accused the Bureau’s Washington field office and FBI headquarters of having “greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation.”
The Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, would make a similar argument when Maureen Stevens, the wife of the first anthrax victim Bob Stevens, sued the federal government over the lax security measures in place at the USAMRIID lab where the anthrax used in the attacks was alleged to have originated. Stevens’ lawyer said the lawsuit was also filed due to “the government’s stonewalling tactics,” which included “taking months to turn over an autopsy report, denying them access to DNA tests and even denying them money from the Sept. 11 Victims Compensation Fund.” Citing “national security concerns,” federal attorneys sought to delay Stevens’ lawsuit, arguing that the litigation “would pose a significant risk of disclosing classified or sensitive information relating to the acquisition, development and use of weapons of mass destruction such as anthrax.”
In 2008, soon after Hatfill was cleared and the lawsuit with him settled, the FBI began to focus on another USAMRIID researcher, Dr. Bruce E. Ivins. Ivins, who had previously helped the FBI analyze the anthrax used in the letters sent to politicians, journalists and others, was aggressively targeted by the FBI through aggressive surveillance and what can only be described as extreme harassment.
As Glenn Greenwald noted in Salon in 2008, “the FBI investigation was so heavy-handed that it actually entailed showing gruesome photographs of the anthrax victims to Ivins’ adult children, telling them that their father is the one who did that, while trying to entice them to turn on him with promises of a reward.” It was also revealed that addiction counselor Jean Duley, whose restraining order against Ivins was used by the media as “proof” that he was deranged and a likely “lone wolf” terrorist, had actually been egged on by none other than the FBI to seek that very restraining order.
 

The FBI, as it ramped up its targeting of Ivins, leaked much of its evidence to media outlets, which – for the most part – uncritically reported it. However, it eventually became clear that the case was shoddy and would never hold up in court as it was built on circumstantial evidence and questionable scientific analyses.
It was then announced on July 29, 2008 that Ivins, whose life and career had been left in ruins by the FBI’s aggressive tactics, had committed suicide just as the federal government was set to charge him as the sole culprit behind the Anthrax attacks. Few chose to question the suicide narrative despite there being legitimate reasons to do so, such as the lack of a suicide note at the scene and the fact that no autopsy was ever performed on Ivins’ corpse.
Former FBI agent Richard Lambert’s whistleblower lawsuit would later reveal that the FBI had intentionally withheld a “wealth” of evidence that proved Ivins’ innocence and further charged that the DOJ and FBI had “crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt” that included “press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions.”
After Ivins’ suicide, questions continued to arise regarding the FBI’s case against the deceased scientist, with several journalists and even Senator Patrick Leahy – who had been sent an Anthrax letter – insisting that the FBI’s case against Ivins, particularly the charge that he had acted alone, was implausible. A former co-worker of Ivins and one of the country’s top biowarfare experts, Richard Spertzel, asserted in The Wall Street Journal that Ivins couldn’t have been the culprit because Ivins did not know how to make anthrax of the quality used in the attacks as only 4-5 people in the entire country, Spertzel being one of them, knew how to do so. Spertzel asserted that one of those 4-5 people would have needed at least a year as well as a full lab and a staff dedicate to the task in order to produce the Anthrax used.
In an attempt to mollify mounting criticism, Mueller announced in September 2008 that a panel from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) would independently review the FBI’s “smoking gun” scientific analyses that had led them to accuse Ivins. However, the FBI abruptly closed the case in 2010, well before the panel could conclude its review, and stood by its controversial assertion that Ivins had acted as a “lone wolf” and that anthrax from a flask in Ivins’ lab was “conclusively identified as the parent material to the anthrax powder used in the mailings.”
When the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) did release its review of the FBI’s scientific findings a year later in 2011, it found that the Bureau’s “smoking gun” scientific evidence against Ivins was actually very inconclusive and they also identified several still, unresolved issues with the FBI’s analyses for which the Bureau could not provide an explanation.
However, because Ivins had died before the FBI’s scientific case could go to trial, the FBI’s claims would never be challenged in court. David Relman, vice chairman of the National Academy study committee, later told ProPublica that Ivins’ trial would have been the only way the FBI’s claims “could have been weighed and challenged by experts.”
The NAS study was not the only independent report that challenged the FBI’s case against Ivins after his apparent suicide. In 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its own analysis of the FBI investigation and concluded that the FBI’s approach lacked consistency, adequate standards and precision. The GAO report ultimately supported the NAS’ conclusion that the scientific evidence did not definitely prove Ivins to be the culprit.
The conclusions of both the NAS and GAO reports show that the FBI’s “smoking gun” against Ivins – its scientific analyses – were hardly a smoking gun as they were just as circumstantial as the rest of the Bureau’s evidence against the scientist. This, of course, makes the timing of the FBI’s decision to close the case, a year before any independent analysis of its evidence against Ivins could be completed, significant.
A FAMILIAR CAST OF CHARACTERS
Key players in Dark Winter would also end up playing a role in the FBI Amerithrax investigation and Bush administration efforts to link them to a foreign, rather than a domestic, source. For instance, as increasingly desperate efforts were made to link the anthrax attacks to Al Qaeda in early 2002, an “independent” team from the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies argued that the anthrax attackers were linked to Al Qaeda, citing a diagnosis made by a Florida doctor in June 2001 that alleged 9/11 hijacker Ahmed al-Haznawi had a skin lesion that was “consistent with cutaneous anthrax.”
Yet, this team from Johns Hopkins was – in reality — far from independent, as it was led by Dark Winter co-authors Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby. However, their association with Dark Winter and their September 2001 meeting with Dick Cheney went unmentioned as media outlets ran with O’Toole and Inglesby’s assertion that al-Haznawi’s allegedly anthrax-related lesion “raises the possibility that the hijackers were handling anthrax and were the perpetrators of the anthrax letter attacks.” Other scientists and analysts as well as the FBI challenged and rejected their claims.
Another Dark Winter figure involved in the Amerithrax case was current Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert Kadlec, who became an adviser on biological warfare to the Rumsfeld-led Pentagon in the days after 9/11. Kadlec’s official biography states that he “contributed to the FBI investigation of the anthrax letter attacks,” though it’s unclear exactly what those contributions were, beyond having met at least once with scientists at Fort Detrick in November 2001. Whatever his contributions were, Kadlec has long been an emphatic supporter of the official narrative regarding Bruce Ivins, who he has referred to as a “deranged scientist” and the sole culprit behind the attacks. Kadlec has also used the official narrative about Ivins to assert that bioweapons have been “democratized,” which he argues means that weaponized pathogens can be wielded by essentially anyone with “a few thousand dollars” and enough time on their hands.
Notably, Kadlec isn’t the only key figure in the current U.S. government response to Covid-19 to have ties to the botched FBI investigation as current HHS Secretary Alex Azar was also involved in the FBI investigation. In addition, Azar stated at a White House press briefing in 2018 that he had been “personally involved in much of managing the response [to the anthrax attacks]” as then-General counsel to HHS.
Yet, given that the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks and the government response to them were so disastrous and heavily criticized by independent and mainstream media alike, it is surprising that Azar and Kadlec would so proudly tout their involvement in that fiasco, especially considering that the scientific analyses used in that investigation were fatally flawed and, by all indications, led to the death of an innocent man.
While such credentials in a “normal” world would be grounds for exclusion from public service, they apparently have the opposite effect when it comes to post-2001 HHS policy and U.S. biodefense policy, which – especially following 2001 – has championed the interests and profits of corporate pharmaceutical companies and the apocalyptic vision of bioweapons held by war hawks and perpetual Cold Warriors. This latter category, of course, includes members of the now-defunct PNAC, who infamously referred to racially-targeted bioweapons as a “politically useful tool” in a now infamous 2000 document, and their ideological descendants.
As the next installment of this series will show, Dark Winter participant and 2001 anthrax attack insider Jerome Hauer epitomizes this merging of perpetual hawkishness and corporate pharmaceutical interests, as he has long held (and continues to occupy) key board positions of the very pharmaceutical company that not only sold tens of millions of anthrax vaccine doses to HHS following the 2001 anthrax attacks, but is now a partner in the development of the majority of vaccines, drugs and experimental treatments currently under development in the United States for the treatment of Covid-19.]]> <![CDATA[Me, Whistblower...]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16171 Thu, 06 Feb 2020 15:03:25 +0000 David Guyatt]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16171
The original full article (more than this) can be found at: 

https://meawhistleblower.blogspot.com/20...g-spy.html


Quote:Structures do not walk the streets" - Jacques Lacan

From autarky to autarchy.
[Fragmented] cartels, monopolies, duopolies, opaque layered mature markets, gamed regulation or self-regulation or no regulation, dark pool poker tables of corruption, sinister darknet operations, Deep States bifurcating between the kleptocratic and the plutocratic, disaster capitalism templates helicoptered in to scenes of desperation, state and self-imposed mainstream media censorship, corporate lobbyists controlling the democratic process and filtering knowledge via their control of press output, the imprisoning of whistleblowers, the omnipresence of shadow banking and dark money matrices, certain investment houses operating as states within states directly influencing world governance via a confiscation of power, global warming our way to a new planetary equilibrium state with irreversible feedback loops, akin to the early phases in the development of the acidic atmosphere of Venus, all of this blended together with the hard right politics of divide and rule and class war.
That’s late capitalism!
Take The Atlantic Bridge (TAB). Established two decades ago as a part of the UK’s dark money network with the aim to transform what was allegedly a transatlantic special relationship into an even more special relationship between political and corporate power, TAB is a blueprint for hard right corporate totalitarianism in the interests of all the usual sociopathic sectors – tobacco, big pharma, munitions, oil – together with the far right lunacies of UKIP, the Tea Party and other Mad Hatters of the personality disordered far right.
TAB merged into the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation - the anchor on the US side of the Atlantic.
As research by George Monbiot has revealed, the political agendas so created were myopic and psychopathic – funding climate change denial bodies, targeting whistleblowers and hackers, the erosion of employment rights, lowering minimum wage structures, granting corporations and certain states immunity from prosecution and, deeper down thirty years away from any possible public scrutiny, spying on one’s own citizens and neighbouring governments, firewalling the state, undermining democratic processes for proprietary gain while, not content with the impending suicide driven death of their system and our planet, choosing to kill our beautiful game by turning football into poker in a final act of spite.
Where is the separation between the Deep State and the government? When spectacular moneyed elites act out their farces for their own entertainment, all the forces of the Deep State – law, enforcement, military intelligence – ensure that chaos reigns when the curtains come down. Chaos is a good thing.
Non-cybernetic virtual private networks of tax evasion in offshore financial centres under the various evolutions of the imperial Anglo-Saxon flags of yore encapsulate the revolving door culture between treasuries, tax collection agencies and the big four accounting firms - a mafia-structured monopoly if ever there was one.
The 1% know how to look after their own interests as power serves only power in their elite system of socialism for the rich and cowboy capitalism for the poor. When their grotesque social experiment went belly up in 2007/8, true colours of governments and even truer depths of states were revealed. The primary architects of the crisis together with hard right think tanks scrambled to create new paradigms of irrational distortion to spin out their game for another role of the dice. Mervyn King’s one good act in his life is the chess playing anecdote above. His book “The End of Alchemy” is a literary monetarist power grab which attempts to reveal new truths but suitably ignores the roles of systemic corruption, irrational psychology, the fractal misbehaviour of markets analysed by Benoit Mandelbrot, the whole issue of the validity of efficient markets in twisted infrastructures while, tongue firmly in cheek, claiming that it would be a fine thing to give more power to the central banks and the IMF (empower the bankers, economists and politicians at the service of the Goldman Sachs oligarchy). “We might have fucked up last time but give us power to have another chance at our totalitarianism”.
Looking through the microscope of monetarism and lecturing...
Why should we be expected to give any attention to a man whose failings were an input to the Great Recessionary Depression? The rigging of the Libor by the Bank of England for the benefit of UK institutional bodies has equivalence with the fixing of football matches for British market participants.
Illegitimate claims of capitalism producing growth when, as Piketty intimated, the only growth is due to an expansion in the global populace – late capitalism is the conclusion of a Ponzi scheme orchestrated in the late Middle Ages but doomed to a disastrous death from day one, as with all pyramid schemes. “Growth is not democracy. Profusion is a function of discrimination”.
It is the worst of times, it is the worst of times, it is the age of foolishness.
Capitalism, despite the support of Deep States, is a Ponzi scheme collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity.
But All-Under-Heaven suggests that the situation should be observed a level deeper…
… the level of the mafia state.
The Italian mafia state targets Sicilian magistrate Nino di Matteo for exposing the state as mafia, the Heritage/TAB mafia states imprison (directly or otherwise) Snowden, Assange, Hammond, Manning, Love to various loci of solitary confinement for exposing state mafiosi behaviours, while a fragmentally cartelised web of geographically scattered mafia states orchestrate the systemic corruption and matchfixing that has destroyed global football. It is suitably ironic in a postmodern way that a game that is played on turf should have become a mafia battle over turf.
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"Do it. Call things what they are. People will be so mad" - Heather Marsh

Thomas Piketty: “… wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future. The consequences for the long-term dynamics of wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.”
While virtually all advocacy, transparency and tax justice entities (with their bevies of characterless fuckwit hipsters and private income interns) focus on offshore financial centres, money laundering and current abuses of the template of capital, the real wealth inequalities exist on the basis of old money and all those forgotten crimes.
Josiah Wedgwood: “Political democracies that don’t democratise their economic systems are inherently unstable.”
The Ponzi scheme in its late capitalism phase is hurtling towards its precipitous conclusion – the collapse of All-Under-Heaven. “If we are going to do Armageddon we might as well do it with some panache”.
To decelerate if not prevent the self-harming disorders of this neo-con death cult there is only one solution in this first phase of the deconstruction of a pseudo-system – a markedly progressive tax on the largest fortunes worldwide (targeting both capital and income) to prevent inheritance trumping meritocracy and to enforce an efficient use of capital for global rather than proprietary benefit hence ending the austerity-based matrices of social injustice.
With a burdensome progressive tax in place, the psychopathic incentive to amass huge fortunes in the first place would be undermined.
Piketty: “Such a tax would also have another virtue: it would expose wealth to democratic scrutiny, which is a necessary condition for effective regulation of the banking system and international capital flows… The primary purpose of the capital tax is not to finance the social state but to regulate capitalism.”
National wealth has become markedly privatised in the last four decades. Currently, in the US, incomes are as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere anytime – the top 1% earn 35% of income while the bottom 50% of population earn just 25%. There are only three tools for getting rid of the current levels of debt in the developed nations – taxes on capital, inflation or austerity. Austerity isn’t a prerequisite, it is an option. As one vice-president of a leading bank stated: “It’s corporate fraud on an industrial scale, sanctioned by the government”.
Baudrillard: “Misfortune, misery – all these things are traded very easily these days. There is a stock exchange of negative values, so to speak.”
Piketty: “… capitalists do indeed dig their own grave: either they tear each other apart in a desperate attempt to combat the falling rate of profit… or they force labour to accept a smaller and smaller share of national income, which ultimately leads to a proletarian revolution and general expropriation. In any event capital is undermined by its internal contradictions.”
Late capitalism yields a plethora of Ponzi bubbles - these are not Kondratieff waves but rather expressions of robust Malthusian ecological limits blended with the conclusion of this viral pyramid scheme. One of our lawyers views our universe as the three-dimensional surface of a four-sphere equivalent to an expanding Ponzi scheme which creates bubbles at the current three-dimensional surface which quantum in and out of existence.
Yanis Varoufakis: “Just as one person’s debt is another’s asset, one nation’s deficit is another’s surplus. In an asymmetrical world the money that surplus economies amass from selling more stuff to deficit economies than they buy from them accumulates in their banks, but these banks are then tempted to lend much of it back to the deficit countries or regions, where interest rates are always higher because money is so much scarcer. In this way, banks help maintain some semblance of balance during the good times… Bankers, in this sense, are fair-weather surplus recyclers… As long as the fair financial weather continues, fair-weather surplus recycling endures. But it cannot endure forever. With the certainty and abruptness that a pile of sand will collapse once the critical grain is added on top of it, vendor-financed trade will always go into sudden, violent spasm. No one can predict when but only fools doubt that it must… Panic reaches a deafening climax and Keynes’s inimitable words resonate once more: ‘As soon as a storm rises,’ bankers behave like a ‘fair-weather sailor’ who ‘abandons the boat which might carry him to safety by his haste to push his neighbour off and himself in’. It is the destiny of fair-weather surplus recycling to prompt a crash and occasion a complete halt to all recycling. This is what happened in 1929. It is also what has been happening since 2008 in Europe.”
A death spiral.
A system of cascading death spirals.
And it is also the skewed incentives of diabolical wealth accumulation together with short-termist inversion capitalist structures with the supportive networks of tax havens and regulatory capture that have allowed the deconstruction of football as a sport over the last quarter century.
As soon as there is an imbalance in favour of market depth over sporting kudos, corruption is a given.
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"What the fuck do we know?"

Hayek was bad enough but free markets have been replaced by bureaucratic state monopoly control – markets are a terror of value without equivalence.
Take the efficiency of markets (financial or football).
Eugene Fama was one of three winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2013.
His hypothesis regarding the efficiency of markets is elegant but also entirely wrong (give the man a gong for being wrong). Not particularly impressed with his Fama-French Three-Factor Model either (but more on that later).
If there were no Deep State interferences, no psychopathies, no mass behavioural irrationalities, no corruptions, no insider trading and if markets didn’t always evolve towards a cartelised maturity, he would be right. But there are and they do so he’s wrong.
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is divided into three levels – strong-form, semi-strong-form and weak-form efficiency. Strong-form suggests that market prices reflect all information, public and private, and it is not possible for anyone to earn excess returns. In semi-strong-form, prices adjust to new information rapidly and rationally. While in weak-form structures, prices simply follow a random walk.
Before we go any further we need to look at the architecture of markets. The public markets are just the tip of an iceberg of submerged dark pool markets – there are hundreds of non-regulated dark pools where deep insiders trade against deep insiders in markets that the public only sees when an excess of over-enthusiasm occurs. It is in these markets where the significant corruption occurs.
All assessments of Fama’s hypothesis require a dichotomous approach then – the public markets and the dark pools.
Markets are rarely efficient, efficiency being a fluke rather than an achievement. Work from the sixties onwards by Daniel Kahnemann, Amos Tversky, Paul Slovic and Richard Thaler had already introduced psychology into the market and, in 1979, Kahnemann and Tversky developed Prospect Theory which represented the final nail in the coffin of Efficient Markets. Investors do not behave in a rational manner for a whole continuum of different reasons that exist both within themselves and in interaction between themselves in complex ways to produce the behaviours we collectively project. Market prices represent human psychology far more than they do unproven economic fundamentals.
"The problem is today, when you have chaos or disorder, people lose their cognitive mapping” -Slavoj Zizek.
So, by 1979, Fama’s hypothesis should have been put to bed…
… unfortunately, it took the blinkered Chicago School until 2007 to acknowledge the impact of behaviouralism (individual and mass) in the markets, attempting to convince us in the meantime that an efficient pricing infrastructure underpinned the alleged validity of Friedmanian late capitalism.
Fama also fails because all of the information is not in the market compromising all three levels of Fama’s efficiency hierarchy. Public markets are reactive to deeper forces and are unable to respond instantaneously to the flow of real information. The public markets offer a distilled filtered form of this driving dark pool bazaar. Private dark pool trading strategies convert into proprietary holistic public market strategies as dark pool power and liabilities are exploited or hedged in the public sphere. The information flow in dark pools is, by its very nature, opaque. Proxy trading, algorithmic distortions, hidden players away from the table, quantised consortia, disinformational trading and the sociopathy of cornered markets etc. At any given time, the market tends to inefficiency and as mature markets are able to evolve into anything the primary operators desire, the prices can be anything too - supply and demand don't set prices, billionaires do.
Mature markets are largely under the semi-absolute internal control of a small grouping of operators. These cartelised structures include entities with hidden and private agendas co-operating on shared agendas to mutual benefit. Even when such infrastructure is held in place with extra robustness due to governmental Deep State scaffolding around the marketplace, the dominant player(s) is/are still able to gravitate the price to loci more favourable to their returns. In effect, a near monopolistic corruption distorts any semblance of efficiency in the market.
Disaster capitalism thrives on chaos. When a disaster strikes or, as in the case of Chile or Brexit, is created, the Hayekians move in with their shock tactics to further destabilise an already destabilised people. As US security entities enter the vacuum, the markets are utterly chaotic. Although some efficiency improvements are exported via these security entities, the holistic performance of the markets drive efficiencies off the bottom of Fama’s scale.
Private information is introduced to the public market in a variety of strategies that, by their very nature, imply market inefficiencies being created for dark pool gain. Deep insiders possess powerful market information that must be released to the market strategically. Just think of the variety of ways in which, say, Ben Bernanke could have utilised his absolute knowledge of the variables related to quantitative easing. A flawed man, with strategies evolving in real time, could profit without the full reality ever hitting the market by placing trades laterally and peripherally across the time continuum. Only the greedy fully reveal their hands.

This is how █████, the owner of █████, fucks over the sport via the █████ syndicate (and associated network) while putting on a charitable public face.
The most evident ways that financial markets are inefficient is by their refusal to accept the cost of negative externalities in the price of an asset. How on earth can a price be efficient in the holistic sense if externalities are not included in the equation? The timing of the eagerly anticipated systemic implosion is an unknowable variable. It is an unknown known. Temporally.
Disaster myopia in a disaster capitalism complex!
Although dark pools are elevated up the efficiency hierarchy due to a reduction in time-lag from information to market and the quality of the knowledge, such improvement is marginal.
Fama’s only other claim to fame is the Fama-French Three-Factor Model. This attempts to replace the old and inadequate Capital Asset Pricing Model. By ignoring psychology and the impacts of corruption, this model also fails. Entertainingly, Foye, Mramor and Pahor (2013) have shown an improvement in the performance of the Fama-French model if one of the terms is replaced by a term which acts as a proxy for accounting manipulation!
Mandelbrot: “Financial economics, as a discipline, is where chemistry was in the 16th century: a messy compendium of proven know-how, misty folk wisdom, and unexamined assumptions and grandiose speculation.” As a former pupil of Mandelbrot, Fama should know better.
Economics claims the status of a science but it is only scientific at Foucault’s threshold – “If one recognises in science only the linear accumulation of truths or the orthogenesis of reason, and fails to recognise in it the discursive practice that has its own levels, its own thresholds, its own various ruptures, one can describe only a single historical division, which one adopts as a model to be applied at all times for all forms of knowledge.”
Through the provision of a psychopathic regulation-lite template where individuals are rewarded for antisocial public displays of their disorders, elevating themselves up the power hierarchy, it is hardly surprising that the system itself has become psychopathic. Short-termism engenders systemic risk. Refusing to recognise externalities produces super-systemic risk.
Neo-classical economics is pre-Galilean in its simplicity. Multi-disciplinary, it is not! There came the chartists and the technical analysts, believing in their candlesticks and their head-and-shoulder formations, all blinded from the whole to the specific, plotting the same lines on the same charts. Then came the idiot physicists – the econophysicists – to spread disaster far and wide. Holistically challenged, this new breed of trader possessed all of the professional inadequacies of their predecessors but with an extra twist – black boxes. Algorithmic trading has grown exponentially in the last two decades in coincidence with the Permanent Depression which also took root around 1997. Micro-focused high frequency trading incrementally shaving creative arbitrages to improve micro-efficiencies within the macro-chaos counts as strategy as archaic theory and unsustainable edifices provide one another with bravos and encores while we approach super-systemic catastrophe scenarios.
On October 19th 1987, Wall Street fell by 29.2% in the biggest daily decline in a century. The probability of Wall Street falling this amount is 10 to the power of 50. Mandelbrot: “You could scan the powers of 10 from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the breadth of the measurable universe – and still never meet such a number.” Only in an immeasurable multiverse do we surpass such numbers – in the Infinite Patch Multiverse, your nearest doppelganger is 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 29 metres away.
Big shout going out…!
Free market capitalism underprices risk. In fact, it frequently excludes risk from the equation entirely. Every single quantum reality impacts on the future market price as butterflies flutter across fractal space.
While all of the free market ideologues and their apologists are shuffling the papers, printing the money, pretending that there is another boom-and-bust possibility in this game yet and extending their pretences to the territory of carbon markets and cap and trade schemes, each fundamentally flawed in their Ponzi capitalism, there are super-systemic fractals that might just be worthy of closer inspection. And not just by climate change scientists either.
Mandelbrot: “The two poles of human experience – deterministic systems of order and planning and the stochastic or random systems of irregularity and unpredictability.” The latter of these two poles dominates the markets today.
Andrew Haldane describes the inability to judge risk as “disaster myopia” – a lack of awareness of the network externalities in combination with misaligned incentives. But this is merely the first level of disaster myopia. The feedback loops, the fractals, the super-systemic risk, the threshold entanglement of different equilibrium states would combine in a second layer – more “catastrophe myopia” really.
There is no such entity as a sustainable Ponzi scheme. Every free market structure is pure Ponzi, a consequence of which is that we now reside in what Sun Tzu called the Worst Variety of Ground. The fractals yet to be unleashed, the toxicity still to surface, the mass delusions and engendered mass psychologies yet to spiral out of perceived rationality, will all come to fruition against the backdrop of a super-systemic lack of stable equilibrium. So, a system that returns negative growth if externalities are included produces this lack of utility on an unstable foundation which spontaneously combusts repeatedly and fractally.
Dark pools and many other forms of ‘shadow market’, utilised for the trading of huge blocks of institutional knowledge, are entirely non-regulated. Investors are able to trade inside information anonymously on the deepest market platforms – the dominant strata in any market. Stock markets and global football betting markets are getting darker.
The whole dark pool edifice exists in a protective bubble. The broker-dealers and exchanges offering dark pool access are in a very privileged position – primary level cloned trading in a mature market sector is a portfolio to die for. Securing crucial temporal edges for a ‘financial elite’ these highly regressive structures are the future of financial markets. Non-regulated private markets offer a Pandora’s box of market abuse away from the prying eyes of oversight. Co-ordinated market strategies may be orchestrated to corner a particular market to the benefit and demise of suitable entities – fake markets with induced short-term momenta. By taking advantage of private markets to trade their information insiders are severely hampering price transparency.
In chaotic windows and in truncated markets, the temporal edge is most important. Markets are volatile in stormy waters and volatility is easy money. In the most serious state of market paralysis, this temporal edge offers massive advantage – just like the ticker-tape did in the Great Depression.
This is an illusory game of exchange, a giant poker table where our realities are determined.
Speculators are always blamed for the cyclical crises of capitalism but this is too simple a view. Speculators are merely finessing the non-regulated dark pool market inefficiencies riding the surf rather than generating the wave in the first place. So blame NYFix and Turquoise and Baikal and blame the state-based economic systems that allow this chicanery to take place.
Economists always look to the past for solutions yet no economic hyperreality is replicable and the fractal nature of the crisis inputs renders economic research as quite pointless – systemic and super-systemic risk are the new market yardsticks.
Not only is it a necessity for all market activity be non-regulated but also it must be self-rating. Ratings Agencies that are relied upon by investors yet are paid by those they rate – a systemic enigma built into the fake infrastructure.
Baudrillard: “The illusion of the economic sphere lies in its having aspired to ground the principle of reality and rationality on the forgetting of this ultimate reality of impossible exchange.”
Sigmund Freud: “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”
Michel Foucault: “There is a battle ‘for truth’… It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power’. ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘regime’ of truth… The problem is not changing people’s consciousnesses – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.”
Nomi Prins (from her book ‘Crony Capitalism and Corruption – An Entirely Rigged Political-Financial System,): “Too big to fail is a seven-year phenomenon created by the most powerful central banks to bolster the largest, most politically connected US and European banks. Synthetic bank and market subsidisation disguised as ‘monetary policy’ has spawned artificial assets and debt bubbles everywhere. Complex products, risky practices, leverage and co-dependent transactions have contagion ramifications. The notion of free markets in which each participant has access to the same information is a fallacy. Democracy is predicated on the idea that every vote counts equally, and in the utopian perspective, the government adopts policies that benefit or adhere to the majority of those votes. In fact, it is a minority of elite families and private individuals that exercise the most control. What we have is a plutocracy of government and markets.”
Benjamin Franklin: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”
Taking on a death cult in the end times can only lead to a date with Dignitas…
… or the deep dark net.
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"If we are going to end up being exotics of our own lives (as we all are), we may as well cultivate radical exoticism" - Jean Baudrillard

Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
The 4 Phases of the Image, Lacan’s Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, the surreal hyperreal (the neohyperreal) versus the public spectacle. A triptych of fact, fiction, fusion.
Max Hastings: “The 2013-15 revelations of Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee who has seen fit to disclose the scale of western eavesdropping... has done important damage to American and British security. He inhabits a new universe, in which old definitions of conflict, and also of patriotism, are no longer universally acknowledged. The balance of tactics and methodology in struggles between nations has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. Secret war, as it was practised by the nations that fought the conflict of 1939-45, may well prove to be the future war.”
Imprisoned hacktivist Jeremy Hammond: “I had an obligation to use my skills to expose… injustice – and to bring the truth to light.”
Enter the Wu Shu Hackers, infamous before we started - legendary Chinese monkeys whose aim is to defeat the greedy warlords and give football back to the people.

Futurescanning.
Always futurescanning.
Ojo del Toro, a 0-Day Guru.
Row Phisherman Row.

[b]We open markets.[/b]
Gabriella Coleman: “In the 1950s a small group of MIT-based computer enthusiasts… adopted the term ‘hacker’ to differentiate their freewheeling attitude from those of their peers… hackers courted contingency, disregarding norms or rules they thought likely to stifle creative invention… hackers repurposed tools in the service of beauty and utility.”
Whackers do the same but to an underlying single issue agenda, in our case – to save football from the mafia and, after tracing information, we expose and share via 5th Estate channels. Sometimes the only goal is copyrighting the content into the hyperreality, at other times we share with the hive mind, but always we are mocking the perpetrators.
Only 29% of organisations have a cybersecurity expert in their IT departments and lowest common denominator security structures are open to exploration - they should have expected us.
Multiple servers, parallel realities in coincident time, robust cellular networks ripping apart markets while, on the square, the hacking Deep State spies through the maze of espionage, allowing them to think that it is Ojo del Toro who has been lost in a maze while traps are set when, in reality, the reverse is true. Sousveillance and hacktivism are the two brigades that bind chaos. IWSH are an underground Sun Tzu force for the social media age, chapeau blanc hackers who disturbed the equilibrium too much for their hacks to be made public. Evolving beyond the emerging threat of the likes of DEADPOOL, the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Unit at GCHQ with their dirty tricks and attempted infiltrations to destroy, deny, degrade and disrupt ‘enemies’ by discrediting them. Low level prankster DDoS attacks and more guesstimate hacking is not going to solve the system's problem with hackers.
The Deep State, demanding of evidence which is then provided, sets up the sting to arrest the Raj - a matchfixing mafia man who intended to buy the outcome of a match in the UK - in a wired hotel room before the call was sent to operatives from on high to withdraw at the final moment as machinations many leagues under the surface determine realities upon it.
Always ask why the state sponsors corruption.
Coleman: “Hackers and their projects have become routine, authoritative, and public participants in our daily geo-political goings on. There are no obvious, much less given, explanations as to why a socially and economically privileged group of actors, once primarily defined by obscure tinkering and technical explorations is now so willing to engage in popular media advocacy, traditional policy, law-making, political tool building, and especially forms of direct action and civil disobedience so risky that scores of hackers are currently in jail or exile for their willingness to expose wrongdoing".

Direct action is the only action.

Gottfried Frank: “… a festival of hatred towards all that can be called human joy. With gigantic strength the perilous hoard emerges, tearing hearts asunder and darkening the divine spark of gods with noisy, monstrous mocking.”
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"If any Wikileaks' journalist is under coercion they will recuse themselves and staff in another jurisdiction will ensure full publication" - Wikileaks tweet from April 5th 2017

Football has found a new equilibrium state as an augmented reality where manipulators create an illusion to create an event. Each paradigm develops its own Gestalt but any whole is temporary as, in effect, there is no paradigm, only corruption versus critical consciousness. There are no permanent facts, only interpretations. There are no absolutes. There is no solid ground.
Enter the hacker, the whistleblower, the spectator of the spectacle. Hannah Arendt: “Nothing and nobody exists in this world who’s very being does not presuppose a spectator”. The spectator is a key node in this charade.
But we are not in the arena of rogue individuals and solo bad apples here, we are dealing with a systemic and global stealing of the people’s game. The Deep State plus an ever-expanding circle of non-governmental advisers from banking, industry, commerce and sport who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of the real state have resolved to monetise the game to derivative levels of opacity. Zizek: "Of course, the market is a domain of egotistic cheating and lying: however, as Lacan taught us, in order for a lie to function, it has to present itself and be taken as truth”. By analysing corruption, one “removes the veil” and reveals truth. Others, in Calinescu’s view, blind themselves to nature and become “slaves of a lifeless dogma.”
There is a battle for truth with the vast majority of the 4th Estate being stationed on the incorrect side of the border. Fake news. Fake football. Glenn Greenwald: “[Snowden’s leak] changed the way people around the world viewed the reliability of any statements by US officials and transformed relations between countries. It radically altered views about the proper role of journalism in relation to government power.”
One should hack and steal information only where one cannot plunder – we give you theoretical violence and 5th Estate terrorism as you look down your gun.

Jacques Derrida: “Think like the miners who explode the beams that support their shafts.”
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"... when the authorities find it useful to tell the truth, it's because they can't find any better lies. Immediately this truth, coming from an official mouth, becomes a lie corroborated by facts" - Ian Birchall

Although ostensibly about corruption taking over football, this book will not be comfortable reading for the fundamentalist football fan. A primary reason that the game has been lost is the schizophrenic nature of the fan – corruption against Arsenal has been virtually ever-present in the Premier League over the last decade and against Glasgow Celtic since time immemorial until the club formerly known as Rangers ceased to be in 2011. Rightly so, the fans of these two clubs express outrage at the refereeing decisions of bias and corruption but most clubs will bend the rules and if one mentioned to Arsenal fans the refereeing performances of █████ or to Glasgow Celtic fans the close links of the club to bookmaking entities, the tsunami of abuse cascades from the moment of media disclosure. Corruption in the holistic continues due to this self-imposed divide and rule. If fans of all clubs were to unite against the corruption and demand change, there might be a hope of fixing football but would Boca bond with River Plate, El Betis with Sevilla, Galatasaray with Fenerbache, Inter with Juve, Arsenal with Spurs?

Modelling the holistic is easier than modelling the specific – mass psychology is a plug in for financial market analysts but individual behavioural traits are a science of specificity. Similarly, modelling systemic corruption across a sport is facile in comparison with the minutiae of myriads of corrupt actions within it. It is the cumulative hologram of total corruption that reverses Baudrillard’s phases of the image.
Football died with its biggest fairy tale – the rise of █████ to being Premier League champions - the remarkable story of sovereign wealth fund-backed billionaires backing local lads, bribing referees, doping local lads, buying superstars, doping superstars, buying off opponents, doping the markets, massively successful on the pitch and in the markets via institutional control and corruption. As we show in the book, the goodwill lost out of the █████ Affair is colossal – you can fool some of the fans some of the time, you can fool all of the fans some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the fans all of the time. It was a poor strategy allowing criminals to own the █████. But at least now we know that with doping, referee control and state mafia/sovereign wealth fund backing, anybody can win the Premier League.
More money, more greed, more envy - psychopathy of the individual and of the system. It is the systemic nature of the market-led corruption that underpins both neo-liberalism in financial markets and football. The fight to save football, although futile, has been a tragedy of intrigue, mystery and corruption but also of freedom, a passion for justice and struggle against impossible odds.
Nino di Matteo: “We live in a mafia state – a state that, in order to preserve the status quo, has to remove whistleblowers who want justice. We want to know the reason for the silence of mainstream media – why are they frightened to the degree they become accomplices in (and beneficiaries of) the corruption. We must rebel against this system and this mafia method.
“… Since receiving death threats, I have felt fear. My freedom is restricted. It is unlikely I will ever live a normal life again.”
There is nowhere for whistleblowers to turn. We live underground and invisibly most of our lives, OPSEC is second nature, automatic – number plate-face, the discarding of burners, the abuse of pagers, programming to intercept drones, different routes-different times, establishing secret office spaces, creating networks of proprietary VPNs, the daily changing of codes utilising proprietary random number generators, linked in a cellular manner to colleagues who one can rarely meet while at all times of crisis having to act solo in strategy and reactive in defence when communication routes are necessarily convoluted.
And, in the holistic, constructing doubled and trebled games of strategy to enmesh the enemy in our cosmic web of sousveillance.
When Deep States and Sovereign Wealth Funds combine with mafia and financial markets, whatever entity is leeched onto by the resulting monstrosity is fucked. Well and truly fucked. █████is not a fairy tale it is grimmer than that. It is a nightmare. As Brian Tuohy has shown with his books on US sport (particularly ‘The Fix Is In’ and ‘Larceny Games’), the same structures exist in the major American sports. It is the global collaboration of corrupt entities that separates football from these effectively insular US sports.
The Wikileaks Theory of Change (2006): “Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes, we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite, not merely for preferment or favour within the regime, but as the primary planning methodology behind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power. Authoritarian regimes create forces which oppose them by pushing against a people’s will to truth, love and self-realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce further resistance. Hence such schemes are concealed by successful authoritarian powers until resistance is futile or outweighed by the efficiencies of naked power. This collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population, is enough to define their behaviour as conspiratorial.”
Daniel Berrigan: “Every nation-state tends towards the imperial – that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top...”
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"There is great disorder under Heaven, the situation is excellent" - Mao Zedong

Gabriella Coleman tweet on Feb 12th 2017: “The fact that citizens must break the law 2 protest the Trump’s egregious disrespect of the law shows that the law holds no universal status".

"...[F]ar from being opposed to crime, law is the universalized crime, crime elevated to the level of an unconditional principle” - Zizek.
It begets a kind of secular study of the Talmud – the inflating expansion of the law and the enhanced avoiding of it.
Whistleblowing is a risk business. The targeting of other people’s inappropriate powers engenders psychopathic response. Aside from Wikileaks and the Courage Foundation, there is no support matrix for whistleblowers. The law has to be broken.
Ojo del Toro tweet on Sep 29th 2016: “Blaming entrapment, whistleblowers and hackers for revealing truth about corruption is crazy. Failure lies with institutions and government.”
Metamorphosis is the aim but mutually assured destruction the outcome – the death of football, the death of Ojo del Toro and other members of our network, the death of capitalism, the death of the social, the death of the planet.
The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers are a dynamic, moving target. We are opaque and elastic and geographically spread. The nodes are secure. We have moved the agenda along ahead of the curve for nearly a quarter of a century. The mainstream media doesn’t function. We by-pass this media to become the media. We are anarchists. We have spent our adult lives demolishing capitalism and the liberal state via direct action, sousveillance, hacking, whistleblowing, spying on the spies, setting hoax traps, constantly reconfiguring our security and our advantages. We are latter day Edelweiss Pirates. We give you our art and our graffiti. We offer you dietrologia – the science of what is behind something and we give you ‘pataphysics – the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, examining the laws governing exceptions and universes parallel to this one. The science of imaginary solutions.
Which brings us to the realms of conspiracy. What is a conspiracy? How do you prove an ever-evolving organism other than in real-time? We can explain your corruption yesterday and today but can only monitor to understand your corruptions of tomorrow (despite all the predictive software). But we can tell you the outcomes of corrupted football matches before they are played. If you have any doubt about whether what follows is based on truth or the delusions of conspiracy theory, keep that in mind. We know the results before kick off.
Coleman: “Craftiness depends on a vigilant criticality, a willingness to scrutinize, always with a mind on identifying inconsistencies or upending convention … a dogged anti-authoritarianism.”
The Mentor from ‘Conscience of a Hacker’ (1986), written shortly after his arrest: “Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something you will never forgive me for.”
Eugene Francois Vidocq was a former criminal who set up the first French state security in 1811 – La Brigade de la Surete. Like Vidocq, we expanded our cell from the fringes – an anarcho-syndicalist network of sousvellance against surveillance. Bridges. Build. Burn. Creative destruction against the surface tension on inflating systemic corruption bubbles. It is a tragedy. We are all Hamlet. Death is liberation and we have no choice but to carry on. We have to maintain the tension, keep surfing that zeitgeist of corruption - the vacuum between reality and the public perception of reality. Destroying laws but voluntarily enacting new self-restraints to avoid abusing the powers that hacking provides. If we give up, we die. If we push our luck, we die. If we do not remain vigilant, we die. A normal distribution of potential strategic outcomes is brutalised by analyses of the Black Swan outliers. In the darkest times I wonder how long all of this can go on. The accident waiting to happen. The articulated lorry, the bicycle, the ditch. All-under-Heaven. Death. Multiverse. Life. A death culture turns the living into commodities, football for rent, leeching your entity onto the rotting corpse of the game and bleeding every last drop of essence and beauty from the tragic farce. Living in the end times.
Being entirely dominated by our future security led to the decision to make this book a hybrid of coded fiction based on fact. We have been made to understand our boundaries by the deepest of state operators (although we were aware pre-enforcement). This book will not blame the player but it does hate what the game has become. It is a prelude to the football of the future and a coda to the football of the past and present.
Recent inquiries and disclosures eg the McLaren report and Fancy Bears' Hacking Team show that this is sport’s last chance to save itself from oblivion – the triumvirate of matchfixing, doping and mafia is short-termist and, ultimately, suicidal. The game is up. Final whistle.
As Baudrillard showed, fighting corruption merely energises it, helping it to evolve into more complex forms, the whistleblower acts as an externalised security consultant to the corrupt edifice pointing out weaknesses, disclosing patterns, defining events – a virtual devil’s advocate, a destabiliser away from the table.

But.

We whackers guide our enemies via enticements to the loci of our primary strategies, persuading them of future potential corrupt options whilst we lie in wait on the shady side of the valley in narrowing passes.
Zizek: "Our struggle is not against actual corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustain it” and the strategy is later defined “… there is no way – but also no need – to fully subtract ourselves from the “corrupted” order of the State: what we have to do is introduce a supplementary torsion into it, to inscribe into it our fidelity to an Event. In this way we remain within the State, but we make the State function in a neo-statal way (in a similar way to how poetry, say, takes place within language, but twists and turns against itself, thus making it tell the truth). There is no need, then, to play the Gnostic ascetic and withdraw from fallen reality into the isolated space of Truth: while heterogeneous to reality, Truth can appear anywhere within it.”
And that is the game that hackers play. We are dealing with an arbitrary construct, it doesn’t mean anything, it is fake, it is make-it-up-as-you-go-along, “and therefore can be circumvented, in all likelihood”. As Lacan proclaimed in the introduction to 'Television': "I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there is no way to say it all. Saying it all is materially impossible: words fail".
The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers monkeying around. Shu, our tactic, our art. Shu. Strategy. Shu. No one can fathom our motivations - the 'saving' of football was always our secondary (and eventually our tertiary) aim.
We reveal much in the book but some content is redacted and many individuals are coded. Names, characters, businesses, states, places, events and incidents may be either the product of a diseased imagination or used in a fictitious manner only linked to the truth via multiversal wormholes. Apparently, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or anywhere in between, or actual events is purely coincidental, a fluke, a freak entanglement.

The assertion of strong truths entails symbolic violence - "From a radical emancipatory perspective, violence is always legitimate since our strategy is the result of violence that we are exposed to but whenever necessary it will always be a matter of strategy whether to use violence against the enemy" - Zizek.
The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers have the biggest sports story of all time. Read on.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Existentially, life is about death.

Adieu, adieu. Remember me.

W.B. Yeats: "All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born".
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The original full article (more than this) can be found at: 

https://meawhistleblower.blogspot.com/20...g-spy.html


Quote:Structures do not walk the streets" - Jacques Lacan

From autarky to autarchy.
[Fragmented] cartels, monopolies, duopolies, opaque layered mature markets, gamed regulation or self-regulation or no regulation, dark pool poker tables of corruption, sinister darknet operations, Deep States bifurcating between the kleptocratic and the plutocratic, disaster capitalism templates helicoptered in to scenes of desperation, state and self-imposed mainstream media censorship, corporate lobbyists controlling the democratic process and filtering knowledge via their control of press output, the imprisoning of whistleblowers, the omnipresence of shadow banking and dark money matrices, certain investment houses operating as states within states directly influencing world governance via a confiscation of power, global warming our way to a new planetary equilibrium state with irreversible feedback loops, akin to the early phases in the development of the acidic atmosphere of Venus, all of this blended together with the hard right politics of divide and rule and class war.
That’s late capitalism!
Take The Atlantic Bridge (TAB). Established two decades ago as a part of the UK’s dark money network with the aim to transform what was allegedly a transatlantic special relationship into an even more special relationship between political and corporate power, TAB is a blueprint for hard right corporate totalitarianism in the interests of all the usual sociopathic sectors – tobacco, big pharma, munitions, oil – together with the far right lunacies of UKIP, the Tea Party and other Mad Hatters of the personality disordered far right.
TAB merged into the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation - the anchor on the US side of the Atlantic.
As research by George Monbiot has revealed, the political agendas so created were myopic and psychopathic – funding climate change denial bodies, targeting whistleblowers and hackers, the erosion of employment rights, lowering minimum wage structures, granting corporations and certain states immunity from prosecution and, deeper down thirty years away from any possible public scrutiny, spying on one’s own citizens and neighbouring governments, firewalling the state, undermining democratic processes for proprietary gain while, not content with the impending suicide driven death of their system and our planet, choosing to kill our beautiful game by turning football into poker in a final act of spite.
Where is the separation between the Deep State and the government? When spectacular moneyed elites act out their farces for their own entertainment, all the forces of the Deep State – law, enforcement, military intelligence – ensure that chaos reigns when the curtains come down. Chaos is a good thing.
Non-cybernetic virtual private networks of tax evasion in offshore financial centres under the various evolutions of the imperial Anglo-Saxon flags of yore encapsulate the revolving door culture between treasuries, tax collection agencies and the big four accounting firms - a mafia-structured monopoly if ever there was one.
The 1% know how to look after their own interests as power serves only power in their elite system of socialism for the rich and cowboy capitalism for the poor. When their grotesque social experiment went belly up in 2007/8, true colours of governments and even truer depths of states were revealed. The primary architects of the crisis together with hard right think tanks scrambled to create new paradigms of irrational distortion to spin out their game for another role of the dice. Mervyn King’s one good act in his life is the chess playing anecdote above. His book “The End of Alchemy” is a literary monetarist power grab which attempts to reveal new truths but suitably ignores the roles of systemic corruption, irrational psychology, the fractal misbehaviour of markets analysed by Benoit Mandelbrot, the whole issue of the validity of efficient markets in twisted infrastructures while, tongue firmly in cheek, claiming that it would be a fine thing to give more power to the central banks and the IMF (empower the bankers, economists and politicians at the service of the Goldman Sachs oligarchy). “We might have fucked up last time but give us power to have another chance at our totalitarianism”.
Looking through the microscope of monetarism and lecturing...
Why should we be expected to give any attention to a man whose failings were an input to the Great Recessionary Depression? The rigging of the Libor by the Bank of England for the benefit of UK institutional bodies has equivalence with the fixing of football matches for British market participants.
Illegitimate claims of capitalism producing growth when, as Piketty intimated, the only growth is due to an expansion in the global populace – late capitalism is the conclusion of a Ponzi scheme orchestrated in the late Middle Ages but doomed to a disastrous death from day one, as with all pyramid schemes. “Growth is not democracy. Profusion is a function of discrimination”.
It is the worst of times, it is the worst of times, it is the age of foolishness.
Capitalism, despite the support of Deep States, is a Ponzi scheme collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity.
But All-Under-Heaven suggests that the situation should be observed a level deeper…
… the level of the mafia state.
The Italian mafia state targets Sicilian magistrate Nino di Matteo for exposing the state as mafia, the Heritage/TAB mafia states imprison (directly or otherwise) Snowden, Assange, Hammond, Manning, Love to various loci of solitary confinement for exposing state mafiosi behaviours, while a fragmentally cartelised web of geographically scattered mafia states orchestrate the systemic corruption and matchfixing that has destroyed global football. It is suitably ironic in a postmodern way that a game that is played on turf should have become a mafia battle over turf.
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"Do it. Call things what they are. People will be so mad" - Heather Marsh

Thomas Piketty: “… wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future. The consequences for the long-term dynamics of wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.”
While virtually all advocacy, transparency and tax justice entities (with their bevies of characterless fuckwit hipsters and private income interns) focus on offshore financial centres, money laundering and current abuses of the template of capital, the real wealth inequalities exist on the basis of old money and all those forgotten crimes.
Josiah Wedgwood: “Political democracies that don’t democratise their economic systems are inherently unstable.”
The Ponzi scheme in its late capitalism phase is hurtling towards its precipitous conclusion – the collapse of All-Under-Heaven. “If we are going to do Armageddon we might as well do it with some panache”.
To decelerate if not prevent the self-harming disorders of this neo-con death cult there is only one solution in this first phase of the deconstruction of a pseudo-system – a markedly progressive tax on the largest fortunes worldwide (targeting both capital and income) to prevent inheritance trumping meritocracy and to enforce an efficient use of capital for global rather than proprietary benefit hence ending the austerity-based matrices of social injustice.
With a burdensome progressive tax in place, the psychopathic incentive to amass huge fortunes in the first place would be undermined.
Piketty: “Such a tax would also have another virtue: it would expose wealth to democratic scrutiny, which is a necessary condition for effective regulation of the banking system and international capital flows… The primary purpose of the capital tax is not to finance the social state but to regulate capitalism.”
National wealth has become markedly privatised in the last four decades. Currently, in the US, incomes are as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere anytime – the top 1% earn 35% of income while the bottom 50% of population earn just 25%. There are only three tools for getting rid of the current levels of debt in the developed nations – taxes on capital, inflation or austerity. Austerity isn’t a prerequisite, it is an option. As one vice-president of a leading bank stated: “It’s corporate fraud on an industrial scale, sanctioned by the government”.
Baudrillard: “Misfortune, misery – all these things are traded very easily these days. There is a stock exchange of negative values, so to speak.”
Piketty: “… capitalists do indeed dig their own grave: either they tear each other apart in a desperate attempt to combat the falling rate of profit… or they force labour to accept a smaller and smaller share of national income, which ultimately leads to a proletarian revolution and general expropriation. In any event capital is undermined by its internal contradictions.”
Late capitalism yields a plethora of Ponzi bubbles - these are not Kondratieff waves but rather expressions of robust Malthusian ecological limits blended with the conclusion of this viral pyramid scheme. One of our lawyers views our universe as the three-dimensional surface of a four-sphere equivalent to an expanding Ponzi scheme which creates bubbles at the current three-dimensional surface which quantum in and out of existence.
Yanis Varoufakis: “Just as one person’s debt is another’s asset, one nation’s deficit is another’s surplus. In an asymmetrical world the money that surplus economies amass from selling more stuff to deficit economies than they buy from them accumulates in their banks, but these banks are then tempted to lend much of it back to the deficit countries or regions, where interest rates are always higher because money is so much scarcer. In this way, banks help maintain some semblance of balance during the good times… Bankers, in this sense, are fair-weather surplus recyclers… As long as the fair financial weather continues, fair-weather surplus recycling endures. But it cannot endure forever. With the certainty and abruptness that a pile of sand will collapse once the critical grain is added on top of it, vendor-financed trade will always go into sudden, violent spasm. No one can predict when but only fools doubt that it must… Panic reaches a deafening climax and Keynes’s inimitable words resonate once more: ‘As soon as a storm rises,’ bankers behave like a ‘fair-weather sailor’ who ‘abandons the boat which might carry him to safety by his haste to push his neighbour off and himself in’. It is the destiny of fair-weather surplus recycling to prompt a crash and occasion a complete halt to all recycling. This is what happened in 1929. It is also what has been happening since 2008 in Europe.”
A death spiral.
A system of cascading death spirals.
And it is also the skewed incentives of diabolical wealth accumulation together with short-termist inversion capitalist structures with the supportive networks of tax havens and regulatory capture that have allowed the deconstruction of football as a sport over the last quarter century.
As soon as there is an imbalance in favour of market depth over sporting kudos, corruption is a given.
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"What the fuck do we know?"

Hayek was bad enough but free markets have been replaced by bureaucratic state monopoly control – markets are a terror of value without equivalence.
Take the efficiency of markets (financial or football).
Eugene Fama was one of three winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2013.
His hypothesis regarding the efficiency of markets is elegant but also entirely wrong (give the man a gong for being wrong). Not particularly impressed with his Fama-French Three-Factor Model either (but more on that later).
If there were no Deep State interferences, no psychopathies, no mass behavioural irrationalities, no corruptions, no insider trading and if markets didn’t always evolve towards a cartelised maturity, he would be right. But there are and they do so he’s wrong.
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is divided into three levels – strong-form, semi-strong-form and weak-form efficiency. Strong-form suggests that market prices reflect all information, public and private, and it is not possible for anyone to earn excess returns. In semi-strong-form, prices adjust to new information rapidly and rationally. While in weak-form structures, prices simply follow a random walk.
Before we go any further we need to look at the architecture of markets. The public markets are just the tip of an iceberg of submerged dark pool markets – there are hundreds of non-regulated dark pools where deep insiders trade against deep insiders in markets that the public only sees when an excess of over-enthusiasm occurs. It is in these markets where the significant corruption occurs.
All assessments of Fama’s hypothesis require a dichotomous approach then – the public markets and the dark pools.
Markets are rarely efficient, efficiency being a fluke rather than an achievement. Work from the sixties onwards by Daniel Kahnemann, Amos Tversky, Paul Slovic and Richard Thaler had already introduced psychology into the market and, in 1979, Kahnemann and Tversky developed Prospect Theory which represented the final nail in the coffin of Efficient Markets. Investors do not behave in a rational manner for a whole continuum of different reasons that exist both within themselves and in interaction between themselves in complex ways to produce the behaviours we collectively project. Market prices represent human psychology far more than they do unproven economic fundamentals.
"The problem is today, when you have chaos or disorder, people lose their cognitive mapping” -Slavoj Zizek.
So, by 1979, Fama’s hypothesis should have been put to bed…
… unfortunately, it took the blinkered Chicago School until 2007 to acknowledge the impact of behaviouralism (individual and mass) in the markets, attempting to convince us in the meantime that an efficient pricing infrastructure underpinned the alleged validity of Friedmanian late capitalism.
Fama also fails because all of the information is not in the market compromising all three levels of Fama’s efficiency hierarchy. Public markets are reactive to deeper forces and are unable to respond instantaneously to the flow of real information. The public markets offer a distilled filtered form of this driving dark pool bazaar. Private dark pool trading strategies convert into proprietary holistic public market strategies as dark pool power and liabilities are exploited or hedged in the public sphere. The information flow in dark pools is, by its very nature, opaque. Proxy trading, algorithmic distortions, hidden players away from the table, quantised consortia, disinformational trading and the sociopathy of cornered markets etc. At any given time, the market tends to inefficiency and as mature markets are able to evolve into anything the primary operators desire, the prices can be anything too - supply and demand don't set prices, billionaires do.
Mature markets are largely under the semi-absolute internal control of a small grouping of operators. These cartelised structures include entities with hidden and private agendas co-operating on shared agendas to mutual benefit. Even when such infrastructure is held in place with extra robustness due to governmental Deep State scaffolding around the marketplace, the dominant player(s) is/are still able to gravitate the price to loci more favourable to their returns. In effect, a near monopolistic corruption distorts any semblance of efficiency in the market.
Disaster capitalism thrives on chaos. When a disaster strikes or, as in the case of Chile or Brexit, is created, the Hayekians move in with their shock tactics to further destabilise an already destabilised people. As US security entities enter the vacuum, the markets are utterly chaotic. Although some efficiency improvements are exported via these security entities, the holistic performance of the markets drive efficiencies off the bottom of Fama’s scale.
Private information is introduced to the public market in a variety of strategies that, by their very nature, imply market inefficiencies being created for dark pool gain. Deep insiders possess powerful market information that must be released to the market strategically. Just think of the variety of ways in which, say, Ben Bernanke could have utilised his absolute knowledge of the variables related to quantitative easing. A flawed man, with strategies evolving in real time, could profit without the full reality ever hitting the market by placing trades laterally and peripherally across the time continuum. Only the greedy fully reveal their hands.

This is how █████, the owner of █████, fucks over the sport via the █████ syndicate (and associated network) while putting on a charitable public face.
The most evident ways that financial markets are inefficient is by their refusal to accept the cost of negative externalities in the price of an asset. How on earth can a price be efficient in the holistic sense if externalities are not included in the equation? The timing of the eagerly anticipated systemic implosion is an unknowable variable. It is an unknown known. Temporally.
Disaster myopia in a disaster capitalism complex!
Although dark pools are elevated up the efficiency hierarchy due to a reduction in time-lag from information to market and the quality of the knowledge, such improvement is marginal.
Fama’s only other claim to fame is the Fama-French Three-Factor Model. This attempts to replace the old and inadequate Capital Asset Pricing Model. By ignoring psychology and the impacts of corruption, this model also fails. Entertainingly, Foye, Mramor and Pahor (2013) have shown an improvement in the performance of the Fama-French model if one of the terms is replaced by a term which acts as a proxy for accounting manipulation!
Mandelbrot: “Financial economics, as a discipline, is where chemistry was in the 16th century: a messy compendium of proven know-how, misty folk wisdom, and unexamined assumptions and grandiose speculation.” As a former pupil of Mandelbrot, Fama should know better.
Economics claims the status of a science but it is only scientific at Foucault’s threshold – “If one recognises in science only the linear accumulation of truths or the orthogenesis of reason, and fails to recognise in it the discursive practice that has its own levels, its own thresholds, its own various ruptures, one can describe only a single historical division, which one adopts as a model to be applied at all times for all forms of knowledge.”
Through the provision of a psychopathic regulation-lite template where individuals are rewarded for antisocial public displays of their disorders, elevating themselves up the power hierarchy, it is hardly surprising that the system itself has become psychopathic. Short-termism engenders systemic risk. Refusing to recognise externalities produces super-systemic risk.
Neo-classical economics is pre-Galilean in its simplicity. Multi-disciplinary, it is not! There came the chartists and the technical analysts, believing in their candlesticks and their head-and-shoulder formations, all blinded from the whole to the specific, plotting the same lines on the same charts. Then came the idiot physicists – the econophysicists – to spread disaster far and wide. Holistically challenged, this new breed of trader possessed all of the professional inadequacies of their predecessors but with an extra twist – black boxes. Algorithmic trading has grown exponentially in the last two decades in coincidence with the Permanent Depression which also took root around 1997. Micro-focused high frequency trading incrementally shaving creative arbitrages to improve micro-efficiencies within the macro-chaos counts as strategy as archaic theory and unsustainable edifices provide one another with bravos and encores while we approach super-systemic catastrophe scenarios.
On October 19th 1987, Wall Street fell by 29.2% in the biggest daily decline in a century. The probability of Wall Street falling this amount is 10 to the power of 50. Mandelbrot: “You could scan the powers of 10 from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the breadth of the measurable universe – and still never meet such a number.” Only in an immeasurable multiverse do we surpass such numbers – in the Infinite Patch Multiverse, your nearest doppelganger is 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 29 metres away.
Big shout going out…!
Free market capitalism underprices risk. In fact, it frequently excludes risk from the equation entirely. Every single quantum reality impacts on the future market price as butterflies flutter across fractal space.
While all of the free market ideologues and their apologists are shuffling the papers, printing the money, pretending that there is another boom-and-bust possibility in this game yet and extending their pretences to the territory of carbon markets and cap and trade schemes, each fundamentally flawed in their Ponzi capitalism, there are super-systemic fractals that might just be worthy of closer inspection. And not just by climate change scientists either.
Mandelbrot: “The two poles of human experience – deterministic systems of order and planning and the stochastic or random systems of irregularity and unpredictability.” The latter of these two poles dominates the markets today.
Andrew Haldane describes the inability to judge risk as “disaster myopia” – a lack of awareness of the network externalities in combination with misaligned incentives. But this is merely the first level of disaster myopia. The feedback loops, the fractals, the super-systemic risk, the threshold entanglement of different equilibrium states would combine in a second layer – more “catastrophe myopia” really.
There is no such entity as a sustainable Ponzi scheme. Every free market structure is pure Ponzi, a consequence of which is that we now reside in what Sun Tzu called the Worst Variety of Ground. The fractals yet to be unleashed, the toxicity still to surface, the mass delusions and engendered mass psychologies yet to spiral out of perceived rationality, will all come to fruition against the backdrop of a super-systemic lack of stable equilibrium. So, a system that returns negative growth if externalities are included produces this lack of utility on an unstable foundation which spontaneously combusts repeatedly and fractally.
Dark pools and many other forms of ‘shadow market’, utilised for the trading of huge blocks of institutional knowledge, are entirely non-regulated. Investors are able to trade inside information anonymously on the deepest market platforms – the dominant strata in any market. Stock markets and global football betting markets are getting darker.
The whole dark pool edifice exists in a protective bubble. The broker-dealers and exchanges offering dark pool access are in a very privileged position – primary level cloned trading in a mature market sector is a portfolio to die for. Securing crucial temporal edges for a ‘financial elite’ these highly regressive structures are the future of financial markets. Non-regulated private markets offer a Pandora’s box of market abuse away from the prying eyes of oversight. Co-ordinated market strategies may be orchestrated to corner a particular market to the benefit and demise of suitable entities – fake markets with induced short-term momenta. By taking advantage of private markets to trade their information insiders are severely hampering price transparency.
In chaotic windows and in truncated markets, the temporal edge is most important. Markets are volatile in stormy waters and volatility is easy money. In the most serious state of market paralysis, this temporal edge offers massive advantage – just like the ticker-tape did in the Great Depression.
This is an illusory game of exchange, a giant poker table where our realities are determined.
Speculators are always blamed for the cyclical crises of capitalism but this is too simple a view. Speculators are merely finessing the non-regulated dark pool market inefficiencies riding the surf rather than generating the wave in the first place. So blame NYFix and Turquoise and Baikal and blame the state-based economic systems that allow this chicanery to take place.
Economists always look to the past for solutions yet no economic hyperreality is replicable and the fractal nature of the crisis inputs renders economic research as quite pointless – systemic and super-systemic risk are the new market yardsticks.
Not only is it a necessity for all market activity be non-regulated but also it must be self-rating. Ratings Agencies that are relied upon by investors yet are paid by those they rate – a systemic enigma built into the fake infrastructure.
Baudrillard: “The illusion of the economic sphere lies in its having aspired to ground the principle of reality and rationality on the forgetting of this ultimate reality of impossible exchange.”
Sigmund Freud: “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”
Michel Foucault: “There is a battle ‘for truth’… It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power’. ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘regime’ of truth… The problem is not changing people’s consciousnesses – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.”
Nomi Prins (from her book ‘Crony Capitalism and Corruption – An Entirely Rigged Political-Financial System,): “Too big to fail is a seven-year phenomenon created by the most powerful central banks to bolster the largest, most politically connected US and European banks. Synthetic bank and market subsidisation disguised as ‘monetary policy’ has spawned artificial assets and debt bubbles everywhere. Complex products, risky practices, leverage and co-dependent transactions have contagion ramifications. The notion of free markets in which each participant has access to the same information is a fallacy. Democracy is predicated on the idea that every vote counts equally, and in the utopian perspective, the government adopts policies that benefit or adhere to the majority of those votes. In fact, it is a minority of elite families and private individuals that exercise the most control. What we have is a plutocracy of government and markets.”
Benjamin Franklin: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”
Taking on a death cult in the end times can only lead to a date with Dignitas…
… or the deep dark net.
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"If we are going to end up being exotics of our own lives (as we all are), we may as well cultivate radical exoticism" - Jean Baudrillard

Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
The 4 Phases of the Image, Lacan’s Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, the surreal hyperreal (the neohyperreal) versus the public spectacle. A triptych of fact, fiction, fusion.
Max Hastings: “The 2013-15 revelations of Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee who has seen fit to disclose the scale of western eavesdropping... has done important damage to American and British security. He inhabits a new universe, in which old definitions of conflict, and also of patriotism, are no longer universally acknowledged. The balance of tactics and methodology in struggles between nations has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. Secret war, as it was practised by the nations that fought the conflict of 1939-45, may well prove to be the future war.”
Imprisoned hacktivist Jeremy Hammond: “I had an obligation to use my skills to expose… injustice – and to bring the truth to light.”
Enter the Wu Shu Hackers, infamous before we started - legendary Chinese monkeys whose aim is to defeat the greedy warlords and give football back to the people.

Futurescanning.
Always futurescanning.
Ojo del Toro, a 0-Day Guru.
Row Phisherman Row.

[b]We open markets.[/b]
Gabriella Coleman: “In the 1950s a small group of MIT-based computer enthusiasts… adopted the term ‘hacker’ to differentiate their freewheeling attitude from those of their peers… hackers courted contingency, disregarding norms or rules they thought likely to stifle creative invention… hackers repurposed tools in the service of beauty and utility.”
Whackers do the same but to an underlying single issue agenda, in our case – to save football from the mafia and, after tracing information, we expose and share via 5th Estate channels. Sometimes the only goal is copyrighting the content into the hyperreality, at other times we share with the hive mind, but always we are mocking the perpetrators.
Only 29% of organisations have a cybersecurity expert in their IT departments and lowest common denominator security structures are open to exploration - they should have expected us.
Multiple servers, parallel realities in coincident time, robust cellular networks ripping apart markets while, on the square, the hacking Deep State spies through the maze of espionage, allowing them to think that it is Ojo del Toro who has been lost in a maze while traps are set when, in reality, the reverse is true. Sousveillance and hacktivism are the two brigades that bind chaos. IWSH are an underground Sun Tzu force for the social media age, chapeau blanc hackers who disturbed the equilibrium too much for their hacks to be made public. Evolving beyond the emerging threat of the likes of DEADPOOL, the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Unit at GCHQ with their dirty tricks and attempted infiltrations to destroy, deny, degrade and disrupt ‘enemies’ by discrediting them. Low level prankster DDoS attacks and more guesstimate hacking is not going to solve the system's problem with hackers.
The Deep State, demanding of evidence which is then provided, sets up the sting to arrest the Raj - a matchfixing mafia man who intended to buy the outcome of a match in the UK - in a wired hotel room before the call was sent to operatives from on high to withdraw at the final moment as machinations many leagues under the surface determine realities upon it.
Always ask why the state sponsors corruption.
Coleman: “Hackers and their projects have become routine, authoritative, and public participants in our daily geo-political goings on. There are no obvious, much less given, explanations as to why a socially and economically privileged group of actors, once primarily defined by obscure tinkering and technical explorations is now so willing to engage in popular media advocacy, traditional policy, law-making, political tool building, and especially forms of direct action and civil disobedience so risky that scores of hackers are currently in jail or exile for their willingness to expose wrongdoing".

Direct action is the only action.

Gottfried Frank: “… a festival of hatred towards all that can be called human joy. With gigantic strength the perilous hoard emerges, tearing hearts asunder and darkening the divine spark of gods with noisy, monstrous mocking.”
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"If any Wikileaks' journalist is under coercion they will recuse themselves and staff in another jurisdiction will ensure full publication" - Wikileaks tweet from April 5th 2017

Football has found a new equilibrium state as an augmented reality where manipulators create an illusion to create an event. Each paradigm develops its own Gestalt but any whole is temporary as, in effect, there is no paradigm, only corruption versus critical consciousness. There are no permanent facts, only interpretations. There are no absolutes. There is no solid ground.
Enter the hacker, the whistleblower, the spectator of the spectacle. Hannah Arendt: “Nothing and nobody exists in this world who’s very being does not presuppose a spectator”. The spectator is a key node in this charade.
But we are not in the arena of rogue individuals and solo bad apples here, we are dealing with a systemic and global stealing of the people’s game. The Deep State plus an ever-expanding circle of non-governmental advisers from banking, industry, commerce and sport who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of the real state have resolved to monetise the game to derivative levels of opacity. Zizek: "Of course, the market is a domain of egotistic cheating and lying: however, as Lacan taught us, in order for a lie to function, it has to present itself and be taken as truth”. By analysing corruption, one “removes the veil” and reveals truth. Others, in Calinescu’s view, blind themselves to nature and become “slaves of a lifeless dogma.”
There is a battle for truth with the vast majority of the 4th Estate being stationed on the incorrect side of the border. Fake news. Fake football. Glenn Greenwald: “[Snowden’s leak] changed the way people around the world viewed the reliability of any statements by US officials and transformed relations between countries. It radically altered views about the proper role of journalism in relation to government power.”
One should hack and steal information only where one cannot plunder – we give you theoretical violence and 5th Estate terrorism as you look down your gun.

Jacques Derrida: “Think like the miners who explode the beams that support their shafts.”
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"... when the authorities find it useful to tell the truth, it's because they can't find any better lies. Immediately this truth, coming from an official mouth, becomes a lie corroborated by facts" - Ian Birchall

Although ostensibly about corruption taking over football, this book will not be comfortable reading for the fundamentalist football fan. A primary reason that the game has been lost is the schizophrenic nature of the fan – corruption against Arsenal has been virtually ever-present in the Premier League over the last decade and against Glasgow Celtic since time immemorial until the club formerly known as Rangers ceased to be in 2011. Rightly so, the fans of these two clubs express outrage at the refereeing decisions of bias and corruption but most clubs will bend the rules and if one mentioned to Arsenal fans the refereeing performances of █████ or to Glasgow Celtic fans the close links of the club to bookmaking entities, the tsunami of abuse cascades from the moment of media disclosure. Corruption in the holistic continues due to this self-imposed divide and rule. If fans of all clubs were to unite against the corruption and demand change, there might be a hope of fixing football but would Boca bond with River Plate, El Betis with Sevilla, Galatasaray with Fenerbache, Inter with Juve, Arsenal with Spurs?

Modelling the holistic is easier than modelling the specific – mass psychology is a plug in for financial market analysts but individual behavioural traits are a science of specificity. Similarly, modelling systemic corruption across a sport is facile in comparison with the minutiae of myriads of corrupt actions within it. It is the cumulative hologram of total corruption that reverses Baudrillard’s phases of the image.
Football died with its biggest fairy tale – the rise of █████ to being Premier League champions - the remarkable story of sovereign wealth fund-backed billionaires backing local lads, bribing referees, doping local lads, buying superstars, doping superstars, buying off opponents, doping the markets, massively successful on the pitch and in the markets via institutional control and corruption. As we show in the book, the goodwill lost out of the █████ Affair is colossal – you can fool some of the fans some of the time, you can fool all of the fans some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the fans all of the time. It was a poor strategy allowing criminals to own the █████. But at least now we know that with doping, referee control and state mafia/sovereign wealth fund backing, anybody can win the Premier League.
More money, more greed, more envy - psychopathy of the individual and of the system. It is the systemic nature of the market-led corruption that underpins both neo-liberalism in financial markets and football. The fight to save football, although futile, has been a tragedy of intrigue, mystery and corruption but also of freedom, a passion for justice and struggle against impossible odds.
Nino di Matteo: “We live in a mafia state – a state that, in order to preserve the status quo, has to remove whistleblowers who want justice. We want to know the reason for the silence of mainstream media – why are they frightened to the degree they become accomplices in (and beneficiaries of) the corruption. We must rebel against this system and this mafia method.
“… Since receiving death threats, I have felt fear. My freedom is restricted. It is unlikely I will ever live a normal life again.”
There is nowhere for whistleblowers to turn. We live underground and invisibly most of our lives, OPSEC is second nature, automatic – number plate-face, the discarding of burners, the abuse of pagers, programming to intercept drones, different routes-different times, establishing secret office spaces, creating networks of proprietary VPNs, the daily changing of codes utilising proprietary random number generators, linked in a cellular manner to colleagues who one can rarely meet while at all times of crisis having to act solo in strategy and reactive in defence when communication routes are necessarily convoluted.
And, in the holistic, constructing doubled and trebled games of strategy to enmesh the enemy in our cosmic web of sousveillance.
When Deep States and Sovereign Wealth Funds combine with mafia and financial markets, whatever entity is leeched onto by the resulting monstrosity is fucked. Well and truly fucked. █████is not a fairy tale it is grimmer than that. It is a nightmare. As Brian Tuohy has shown with his books on US sport (particularly ‘The Fix Is In’ and ‘Larceny Games’), the same structures exist in the major American sports. It is the global collaboration of corrupt entities that separates football from these effectively insular US sports.
The Wikileaks Theory of Change (2006): “Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes, we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite, not merely for preferment or favour within the regime, but as the primary planning methodology behind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power. Authoritarian regimes create forces which oppose them by pushing against a people’s will to truth, love and self-realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce further resistance. Hence such schemes are concealed by successful authoritarian powers until resistance is futile or outweighed by the efficiencies of naked power. This collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population, is enough to define their behaviour as conspiratorial.”
Daniel Berrigan: “Every nation-state tends towards the imperial – that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top...”
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"There is great disorder under Heaven, the situation is excellent" - Mao Zedong

Gabriella Coleman tweet on Feb 12th 2017: “The fact that citizens must break the law 2 protest the Trump’s egregious disrespect of the law shows that the law holds no universal status".

"...[F]ar from being opposed to crime, law is the universalized crime, crime elevated to the level of an unconditional principle” - Zizek.
It begets a kind of secular study of the Talmud – the inflating expansion of the law and the enhanced avoiding of it.
Whistleblowing is a risk business. The targeting of other people’s inappropriate powers engenders psychopathic response. Aside from Wikileaks and the Courage Foundation, there is no support matrix for whistleblowers. The law has to be broken.
Ojo del Toro tweet on Sep 29th 2016: “Blaming entrapment, whistleblowers and hackers for revealing truth about corruption is crazy. Failure lies with institutions and government.”
Metamorphosis is the aim but mutually assured destruction the outcome – the death of football, the death of Ojo del Toro and other members of our network, the death of capitalism, the death of the social, the death of the planet.
The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers are a dynamic, moving target. We are opaque and elastic and geographically spread. The nodes are secure. We have moved the agenda along ahead of the curve for nearly a quarter of a century. The mainstream media doesn’t function. We by-pass this media to become the media. We are anarchists. We have spent our adult lives demolishing capitalism and the liberal state via direct action, sousveillance, hacking, whistleblowing, spying on the spies, setting hoax traps, constantly reconfiguring our security and our advantages. We are latter day Edelweiss Pirates. We give you our art and our graffiti. We offer you dietrologia – the science of what is behind something and we give you ‘pataphysics – the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, examining the laws governing exceptions and universes parallel to this one. The science of imaginary solutions.
Which brings us to the realms of conspiracy. What is a conspiracy? How do you prove an ever-evolving organism other than in real-time? We can explain your corruption yesterday and today but can only monitor to understand your corruptions of tomorrow (despite all the predictive software). But we can tell you the outcomes of corrupted football matches before they are played. If you have any doubt about whether what follows is based on truth or the delusions of conspiracy theory, keep that in mind. We know the results before kick off.
Coleman: “Craftiness depends on a vigilant criticality, a willingness to scrutinize, always with a mind on identifying inconsistencies or upending convention … a dogged anti-authoritarianism.”
The Mentor from ‘Conscience of a Hacker’ (1986), written shortly after his arrest: “Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something you will never forgive me for.”
Eugene Francois Vidocq was a former criminal who set up the first French state security in 1811 – La Brigade de la Surete. Like Vidocq, we expanded our cell from the fringes – an anarcho-syndicalist network of sousvellance against surveillance. Bridges. Build. Burn. Creative destruction against the surface tension on inflating systemic corruption bubbles. It is a tragedy. We are all Hamlet. Death is liberation and we have no choice but to carry on. We have to maintain the tension, keep surfing that zeitgeist of corruption - the vacuum between reality and the public perception of reality. Destroying laws but voluntarily enacting new self-restraints to avoid abusing the powers that hacking provides. If we give up, we die. If we push our luck, we die. If we do not remain vigilant, we die. A normal distribution of potential strategic outcomes is brutalised by analyses of the Black Swan outliers. In the darkest times I wonder how long all of this can go on. The accident waiting to happen. The articulated lorry, the bicycle, the ditch. All-under-Heaven. Death. Multiverse. Life. A death culture turns the living into commodities, football for rent, leeching your entity onto the rotting corpse of the game and bleeding every last drop of essence and beauty from the tragic farce. Living in the end times.
Being entirely dominated by our future security led to the decision to make this book a hybrid of coded fiction based on fact. We have been made to understand our boundaries by the deepest of state operators (although we were aware pre-enforcement). This book will not blame the player but it does hate what the game has become. It is a prelude to the football of the future and a coda to the football of the past and present.
Recent inquiries and disclosures eg the McLaren report and Fancy Bears' Hacking Team show that this is sport’s last chance to save itself from oblivion – the triumvirate of matchfixing, doping and mafia is short-termist and, ultimately, suicidal. The game is up. Final whistle.
As Baudrillard showed, fighting corruption merely energises it, helping it to evolve into more complex forms, the whistleblower acts as an externalised security consultant to the corrupt edifice pointing out weaknesses, disclosing patterns, defining events – a virtual devil’s advocate, a destabiliser away from the table.

But.

We whackers guide our enemies via enticements to the loci of our primary strategies, persuading them of future potential corrupt options whilst we lie in wait on the shady side of the valley in narrowing passes.
Zizek: "Our struggle is not against actual corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustain it” and the strategy is later defined “… there is no way – but also no need – to fully subtract ourselves from the “corrupted” order of the State: what we have to do is introduce a supplementary torsion into it, to inscribe into it our fidelity to an Event. In this way we remain within the State, but we make the State function in a neo-statal way (in a similar way to how poetry, say, takes place within language, but twists and turns against itself, thus making it tell the truth). There is no need, then, to play the Gnostic ascetic and withdraw from fallen reality into the isolated space of Truth: while heterogeneous to reality, Truth can appear anywhere within it.”
And that is the game that hackers play. We are dealing with an arbitrary construct, it doesn’t mean anything, it is fake, it is make-it-up-as-you-go-along, “and therefore can be circumvented, in all likelihood”. As Lacan proclaimed in the introduction to 'Television': "I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there is no way to say it all. Saying it all is materially impossible: words fail".
The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers monkeying around. Shu, our tactic, our art. Shu. Strategy. Shu. No one can fathom our motivations - the 'saving' of football was always our secondary (and eventually our tertiary) aim.
We reveal much in the book but some content is redacted and many individuals are coded. Names, characters, businesses, states, places, events and incidents may be either the product of a diseased imagination or used in a fictitious manner only linked to the truth via multiversal wormholes. Apparently, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or anywhere in between, or actual events is purely coincidental, a fluke, a freak entanglement.

The assertion of strong truths entails symbolic violence - "From a radical emancipatory perspective, violence is always legitimate since our strategy is the result of violence that we are exposed to but whenever necessary it will always be a matter of strategy whether to use violence against the enemy" - Zizek.
The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers have the biggest sports story of all time. Read on.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Existentially, life is about death.

Adieu, adieu. Remember me.

W.B. Yeats: "All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born".
]]> <![CDATA[Fascism then. Fascism now?]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15965 Tue, 06 Nov 2018 13:02:08 +0000 Bill Fite]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15965 Fascism then. Fascism now?

by Paul Bigioni

Toronto Star, November 27, 2005 (www.thestar.com)

[Image: redblueline.gif]

Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.

Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.

These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."

By exploring the disturbing parallels between our own time and the era of overt fascism, we can avoid the same hideous mistakes. At present, we live in a constitutional democracy. The tools necessary to protect us from fascism remain in the hands of the citizen. All the same, North America is on a fascist trajectory. We must recognize this threat for what it is, and we must change course.

the rest of this interesting article at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascis...n_Now.html]]> Fascism then. Fascism now?

by Paul Bigioni

Toronto Star, November 27, 2005 (www.thestar.com)

[Image: redblueline.gif]

Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.

Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.

These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."

By exploring the disturbing parallels between our own time and the era of overt fascism, we can avoid the same hideous mistakes. At present, we live in a constitutional democracy. The tools necessary to protect us from fascism remain in the hands of the citizen. All the same, North America is on a fascist trajectory. We must recognize this threat for what it is, and we must change course.

the rest of this interesting article at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascis...n_Now.html]]> <![CDATA[George Monbiot Explains Neoliberalism, Climate, Immigration, Globalization!]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15389 Fri, 17 Mar 2017 05:55:02 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15389

Brilliant! He mentions Trump and Brexit, among other things. His book on this general subject is also very good.]]>

Brilliant! He mentions Trump and Brexit, among other things. His book on this general subject is also very good.]]> <![CDATA[Neroliberalism: The Deep Story Behind Trump's Triumph]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15340 Tue, 21 Feb 2017 08:59:26 +0000 David Guyatt]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15340
Quote:Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump's triumph

George Monbiot


How a ruthless network of super-rich ideologues killed choice and destroyed people's faith in politics


Monday 14 November 2016 06.30 GMT Last modified on Monday 23 January 2017 10.14 GMT
The events that led to Donald Trump's election started in England in 1975. At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it on the table. "This is what we believe," she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.


The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.


This, at any rate, is how it was originally conceived. But by the time Hayek came to write The Constitution of Liberty, the network of lobbyists and thinkers he had founded was being lavishly funded by multimillionaires who saw the doctrine as a means of defending themselves against democracy. Not every aspect of the neoliberal programme advanced their interests. Hayek, it seems, set out to close the gap.


He begins the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions as political freedom, universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands.


Democracy, by contrast, "is not an ultimate or absolute value". In fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising choice over the direction that politics and society might take.


He justifies this position by creating a heroic narrative of extreme wealth. He conflates the economic elite, spending their money in new ways, with philosophical and scientific pioneers. Just as the political philosopher should be free to think the unthinkable, so the very rich should be free to do the undoable, without constraint by public interest or public opinion.


The ultra rich are "scouts", "experimenting with new styles of living", who blaze the trails that the rest of society will follow. The progress of society depends on the liberty of these "independents" to gain as much money as they want and spend it how they wish. All that is good and useful, therefore, arises from inequality. There should be no connection between merit and reward, no distinction made between earned and unearned income, and no limit to the rents they can charge.


Inherited wealth is more socially useful than earned wealth: "the idle rich", who don't have to work for their money, can devote themselves to influencing "fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs". Even when they seem to be spending money on nothing but "aimless display", they are in fact acting as society's vanguard.


Hayek softened his opposition to monopolies and hardened his opposition to trade unions. He lambasted progressive taxation and attempts by the state to raise the general welfare of citizens. He insisted that there is "an overwhelming case against a free health service for all" and dismissed the conservation of natural resources. It should come as no surprise to those who follow such matters that he was awarded the Nobel prize for economics.


By the time Thatcher slammed his book on the table, a lively network of thinktanks, lobbyists and academics promoting Hayek's doctrines had been established on both sides of the Atlantic, abundantly financed by some of the world's richest people and businesses, including DuPont, General Electric, the Coors brewing company, Charles Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, Lawrence Fertig, the William Volker Fund and the Earhart Foundation. Using psychology and linguistics to brilliant effect, the thinkers these people sponsored found the words and arguments required to turn Hayek's anthem to the elite into a plausible political programme.


The ideologies Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan espoused were just two facets of neoliberalism.


The ideologies Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan espoused were just two facets of neoliberalism. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Thatcherism and Reaganism were not ideologies in their own right: they were just two faces of neoliberalism. Their massive tax cuts for the rich, crushing of trade unions, reduction in public housing, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services were all proposed by Hayek and his disciples. But the real triumph of this network was not its capture of the right, but its colonisation of parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested.


Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did not possess a narrative of their own. Rather than develop a new political story, they thought it was sufficient to triangulate. In other words, they extracted a few elements of what their parties had once believed, mixed them with elements of what their opponents believed, and developed from this unlikely combination a "third way".


It was inevitable that the blazing, insurrectionary confidence of neoliberalism would exert a stronger gravitational pull than the dying star of social democracy. Hayek's triumph could be witnessed everywhere from Blair's expansion of the private finance initiative to Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, which had regulated the financial sector. For all his grace and touch, Barack Obama, who didn't possess a narrative either (except "hope"), was slowly reeled in by those who owned the means of persuasion.


What will be the first actions Trump takes as president?


As I warned in April, the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people's lives; debate is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation. The man who sank Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency was not Donald Trump. It was her husband.


The paradoxical result is that the backlash against neoliberalism's crushing of political choice has elevated just the kind of man that Hayek worshipped. Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation of Hayek's "independent"; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained by common morality, whose gross predilections strike a new path that others may follow. The neoliberal thinktankers are now swarming round this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled by those who know what they want. The likely result is the demolition of our remaining decencies, beginning with the agreement to limit global warming.


Those who tell the stories run the world. Politics has failed through a lack of competing narratives. The key task now is to tell a new story of what it is to be a human in the 21st century. It must be as appealing to some who have voted for Trump and Ukip as it is to the supporters of Clinton, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn.


A few of us have been working on this, and can discern what may be the beginning of a story. It's too early to say much yet, but at its core is the recognition that as modern psychology and neuroscience make abundantly clear human beings, by comparison with any other animals, are both remarkably social and remarkably unselfish. The atomisation and self-interested behaviour neoliberalism promotes run counter to much of what comprises human nature.


Hayek told us who we are, and he was wrong. Our first step is to reclaim our humanity.
Source]]>
Quote:Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump's triumph

George Monbiot


How a ruthless network of super-rich ideologues killed choice and destroyed people's faith in politics


Monday 14 November 2016 06.30 GMT Last modified on Monday 23 January 2017 10.14 GMT
The events that led to Donald Trump's election started in England in 1975. At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it on the table. "This is what we believe," she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.


The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.


This, at any rate, is how it was originally conceived. But by the time Hayek came to write The Constitution of Liberty, the network of lobbyists and thinkers he had founded was being lavishly funded by multimillionaires who saw the doctrine as a means of defending themselves against democracy. Not every aspect of the neoliberal programme advanced their interests. Hayek, it seems, set out to close the gap.


He begins the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions as political freedom, universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands.


Democracy, by contrast, "is not an ultimate or absolute value". In fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising choice over the direction that politics and society might take.


He justifies this position by creating a heroic narrative of extreme wealth. He conflates the economic elite, spending their money in new ways, with philosophical and scientific pioneers. Just as the political philosopher should be free to think the unthinkable, so the very rich should be free to do the undoable, without constraint by public interest or public opinion.


The ultra rich are "scouts", "experimenting with new styles of living", who blaze the trails that the rest of society will follow. The progress of society depends on the liberty of these "independents" to gain as much money as they want and spend it how they wish. All that is good and useful, therefore, arises from inequality. There should be no connection between merit and reward, no distinction made between earned and unearned income, and no limit to the rents they can charge.


Inherited wealth is more socially useful than earned wealth: "the idle rich", who don't have to work for their money, can devote themselves to influencing "fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs". Even when they seem to be spending money on nothing but "aimless display", they are in fact acting as society's vanguard.


Hayek softened his opposition to monopolies and hardened his opposition to trade unions. He lambasted progressive taxation and attempts by the state to raise the general welfare of citizens. He insisted that there is "an overwhelming case against a free health service for all" and dismissed the conservation of natural resources. It should come as no surprise to those who follow such matters that he was awarded the Nobel prize for economics.


By the time Thatcher slammed his book on the table, a lively network of thinktanks, lobbyists and academics promoting Hayek's doctrines had been established on both sides of the Atlantic, abundantly financed by some of the world's richest people and businesses, including DuPont, General Electric, the Coors brewing company, Charles Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, Lawrence Fertig, the William Volker Fund and the Earhart Foundation. Using psychology and linguistics to brilliant effect, the thinkers these people sponsored found the words and arguments required to turn Hayek's anthem to the elite into a plausible political programme.


The ideologies Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan espoused were just two facets of neoliberalism.


The ideologies Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan espoused were just two facets of neoliberalism. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Thatcherism and Reaganism were not ideologies in their own right: they were just two faces of neoliberalism. Their massive tax cuts for the rich, crushing of trade unions, reduction in public housing, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services were all proposed by Hayek and his disciples. But the real triumph of this network was not its capture of the right, but its colonisation of parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested.


Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did not possess a narrative of their own. Rather than develop a new political story, they thought it was sufficient to triangulate. In other words, they extracted a few elements of what their parties had once believed, mixed them with elements of what their opponents believed, and developed from this unlikely combination a "third way".


It was inevitable that the blazing, insurrectionary confidence of neoliberalism would exert a stronger gravitational pull than the dying star of social democracy. Hayek's triumph could be witnessed everywhere from Blair's expansion of the private finance initiative to Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, which had regulated the financial sector. For all his grace and touch, Barack Obama, who didn't possess a narrative either (except "hope"), was slowly reeled in by those who owned the means of persuasion.


What will be the first actions Trump takes as president?


As I warned in April, the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people's lives; debate is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation. The man who sank Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency was not Donald Trump. It was her husband.


The paradoxical result is that the backlash against neoliberalism's crushing of political choice has elevated just the kind of man that Hayek worshipped. Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation of Hayek's "independent"; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained by common morality, whose gross predilections strike a new path that others may follow. The neoliberal thinktankers are now swarming round this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled by those who know what they want. The likely result is the demolition of our remaining decencies, beginning with the agreement to limit global warming.


Those who tell the stories run the world. Politics has failed through a lack of competing narratives. The key task now is to tell a new story of what it is to be a human in the 21st century. It must be as appealing to some who have voted for Trump and Ukip as it is to the supporters of Clinton, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn.


A few of us have been working on this, and can discern what may be the beginning of a story. It's too early to say much yet, but at its core is the recognition that as modern psychology and neuroscience make abundantly clear human beings, by comparison with any other animals, are both remarkably social and remarkably unselfish. The atomisation and self-interested behaviour neoliberalism promotes run counter to much of what comprises human nature.


Hayek told us who we are, and he was wrong. Our first step is to reclaim our humanity.
Source]]> <![CDATA[Trump's Economic Plans for Jobs, Taxes, Trade, etc.]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15262 Sat, 07 Jan 2017 20:13:45 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15262
]]>
]]> <![CDATA[A Measure of Order We Can Control]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15254 Wed, 04 Jan 2017 10:00:19 +0000 David Guyatt]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15254
But first a far shorter clip from the 2016 film Sicario. The interesting (and partially true) rationale for the operation that involved the use of an assassin to kill a Mexican drug lord begin at 0.49 seconds.



I say partially true because the film avoids discussing what happens to the money derived from the narcotics business. One could argue this is implied, as indeed it is implied in the Allan Francovich film below.



But of course if governments consider it is their role to ensure that control and order are applied, then we can easily see that this does not refer only to the drugs trade, but across all vices...]]>
But first a far shorter clip from the 2016 film Sicario. The interesting (and partially true) rationale for the operation that involved the use of an assassin to kill a Mexican drug lord begin at 0.49 seconds.



I say partially true because the film avoids discussing what happens to the money derived from the narcotics business. One could argue this is implied, as indeed it is implied in the Allan Francovich film below.



But of course if governments consider it is their role to ensure that control and order are applied, then we can easily see that this does not refer only to the drugs trade, but across all vices...]]> <![CDATA[The Standing Rock Battle for the Environment, Clean Water, Native Rights, Civil Rights, A Future]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15093 Tue, 08 Nov 2016 17:58:16 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15093
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At Standing Rock, A Native American Woman Elder Says "This is What I Have Been Waiting for My Entire Life!"

By Ann Wright
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(image by Ann Wright) License DMCA
This time I have been at Standing Rock, North Dakota at the Oceti Shakowin camp to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) for four days during a whirlwind of national and international attention following two terrible displays of police brutality toward the water protectors.
On October 27, over 100 local and state police and National Guard dressed in riot gear with helmets, face masks, batons and other protective clothing, carrying assault rifles stormed the Front Line North camp. They had other military equipment such as Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Personnel carriers (MRAP) and Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) and a full assortment of tasers, bean bag bullets and clubs/batons. They arrested 141 persons, destroyed the Frontline camp and threw the personal possessions of those arrested in garbage dumpsters. The Morton county sheriff reportedly is investigating the purposeful destruction of personal property.
In another overreaction to the unarmed civilian water protectors, on November 2, police shot tear gas and beanbag bullets at water protectors who were standing in a small tributary to the Missouri River. They were standing in the frigid water to protect a handmade bridge across the river to sacred burial sites that was being destroyed by the police. Police snipers stood on the ridge of the burial hill with their feet on sacred burial sites.
On October 3, in solidarity with water protectors, almost 500 religious leaders from all over the United States arrived to join water protectors in a day of prayer for stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline. Retired Episcopal Priest John Flogerty had put out a national call for clergy to come to Standing Rock. He said he was stunned that in less than 10 days, 474 leaders answered the call to stand for protection of Mother Earth. During the two-hour interfaith witness, discussion and prayer near the current digging of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), one could hear the digging machines destroying the ridge line to the south of Highway 1806.
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(image by Ann Wright) License DMCA




After the gathering, about 50 of the group drove to Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, to call on the Governor of the State to stop the pipeline. Fourteen clergy sat down in the rotunda of the capitol in prayer, refused to end their prayers and leave the capitol building when ordered by the police, and were arrested.
Another five people were arrested 30 minutes later when storm troopers were deployed to intimidate the remainder of the group when they walked across the street toward the sidewalk in front of the Governor's ranch style house to kneel in prayer. The women arrestees were transported four hours to a county jail in Fargo, North Dakota when a women's cell was available in Bismarck. Two of the men arrested were shocked when they were told that the women arrestees had been taken to Fargo as they had been placed by themselves in a cell that would accommodate 10 that was filled with feminine hygiene products.
The men arrestees also said that their cash was taken and the jail issued a check for the cash, resulting in their having NO cash upon release making getting a cab or buying food virtually impossible as taxis and grocery stores generally don't cash checks. Instead, those emerging from jail are told to go to a bank to cash the checks which are located far from the jail and probably closed when arrestees are released.
On Saturday, November 5, tribal council leaders arranged for a ceremony for horses as the plains Indians are "descendants from a powerful horse nation." Tribal leader John Eagle reminded the approximately 1,000 persons in a large circle at the new Tribal Council Sacred Fire, that in August 1876, 4,000 horses were taken by U.S. military from the Lakota in what is known as the Battle of Greasy Grass, and known to the U.S. military as the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Eagle also mentioned for the non-Sioux that the Sioux word for horse means "my son, my daughter." He said that the return of horses to the sacred fire would be a healing for the horses for their genetic memory of the treatment of their ancestors in the past century as well as a healing for the native American population for the genetic trauma for their historical treatment of their ancestors. Healing for many at Standing Rock from their recent violent treatment by police and North Dakota National Guard, was an important aspect of the ceremony.
Chief John Eagle pointed out that many Native Americans have joined the military and that as combat veterans, they have double post traumatic stress (PTS), first from their treatment as Native Americans and second as combat veterans. John emphasized that for native combat veterans in particular, it is important to use the word "water protectors," as the terms "demonstrators and protesters" may trigger a PTSD response from their days in the U.S. military. He said that he could see PTSD in the eyes of many who went through each of the recent encounters with the police.
As John Eagle explained the purpose of the ceremony, in the distance galloping down the road of flags into the Oceti Sankowin camp came 30 horses and riders. With "peace cries" not war cries, the large 1,000-person circle opened to welcome the horses and riders. They circled the sacred fire many times to the every increasing "peace cries" and the beating of a large drum. He called on each "water protector" to have courage in their hearts to overcome anger and fear and to turn to prayer, as the police and government don't know how to deal with nonviolence and prayer. Leaders asked that no one take photos of the sacred ceremony once the horses entered the circle.
Another leader said that Native Americans must begin forgiving rather than waiting for an apology for their treatment by the U.S. government. He predicted that the U.S. government will never give an apology and that unless Native Americans forgive the pain the live in, they will live in anger. "Lives are better if one can forgive," he said. "We must change and we must change our treatment of Mother Earth."
The son of American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means told of being in the Front line camp and being clubbed by police as he protected an elder woman. He said that he felt that he had seen violence unfold before, that the treatment by police in 2016 was "familiar in our blood." Means also reminded everyone to help the young water protectors who are having difficulty in coping with their experiences with the police in the past two weeks.
As the ceremony was ending approximately thirty Navajo Hopi youth and adult supporters arrived into the circle after running from Arizona. Greeted by great cries from the 1,000 persons in the circle, a 15 year-old Hopi youth in sobs said, "150 years ago we were forced to run away from our homes but today we have run to help keep your and our homes, in a prayerful spirit, but to show the government that it cannot make us run away again."

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As I walked from the circle, an older Sioux woman told me that she had been at the Front Line camp the day it was destroyed. She had been sitting in prayer when the police stormed in, roughed people up, broke up the camp and arrested her. She said that she has been in the camp for three months and will stay until the camp ends.
In tears, she said, "I am now living as my ancestors lived...in nature all day, everyday, in community living, working and praying together. I have been waiting for this gathering all my life."]]>
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At Standing Rock, A Native American Woman Elder Says "This is What I Have Been Waiting for My Entire Life!"

By Ann Wright
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This time I have been at Standing Rock, North Dakota at the Oceti Shakowin camp to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) for four days during a whirlwind of national and international attention following two terrible displays of police brutality toward the water protectors.
On October 27, over 100 local and state police and National Guard dressed in riot gear with helmets, face masks, batons and other protective clothing, carrying assault rifles stormed the Front Line North camp. They had other military equipment such as Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Personnel carriers (MRAP) and Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) and a full assortment of tasers, bean bag bullets and clubs/batons. They arrested 141 persons, destroyed the Frontline camp and threw the personal possessions of those arrested in garbage dumpsters. The Morton county sheriff reportedly is investigating the purposeful destruction of personal property.
In another overreaction to the unarmed civilian water protectors, on November 2, police shot tear gas and beanbag bullets at water protectors who were standing in a small tributary to the Missouri River. They were standing in the frigid water to protect a handmade bridge across the river to sacred burial sites that was being destroyed by the police. Police snipers stood on the ridge of the burial hill with their feet on sacred burial sites.
On October 3, in solidarity with water protectors, almost 500 religious leaders from all over the United States arrived to join water protectors in a day of prayer for stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline. Retired Episcopal Priest John Flogerty had put out a national call for clergy to come to Standing Rock. He said he was stunned that in less than 10 days, 474 leaders answered the call to stand for protection of Mother Earth. During the two-hour interfaith witness, discussion and prayer near the current digging of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), one could hear the digging machines destroying the ridge line to the south of Highway 1806.
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(image by Ann Wright) License DMCA




After the gathering, about 50 of the group drove to Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, to call on the Governor of the State to stop the pipeline. Fourteen clergy sat down in the rotunda of the capitol in prayer, refused to end their prayers and leave the capitol building when ordered by the police, and were arrested.
Another five people were arrested 30 minutes later when storm troopers were deployed to intimidate the remainder of the group when they walked across the street toward the sidewalk in front of the Governor's ranch style house to kneel in prayer. The women arrestees were transported four hours to a county jail in Fargo, North Dakota when a women's cell was available in Bismarck. Two of the men arrested were shocked when they were told that the women arrestees had been taken to Fargo as they had been placed by themselves in a cell that would accommodate 10 that was filled with feminine hygiene products.
The men arrestees also said that their cash was taken and the jail issued a check for the cash, resulting in their having NO cash upon release making getting a cab or buying food virtually impossible as taxis and grocery stores generally don't cash checks. Instead, those emerging from jail are told to go to a bank to cash the checks which are located far from the jail and probably closed when arrestees are released.
On Saturday, November 5, tribal council leaders arranged for a ceremony for horses as the plains Indians are "descendants from a powerful horse nation." Tribal leader John Eagle reminded the approximately 1,000 persons in a large circle at the new Tribal Council Sacred Fire, that in August 1876, 4,000 horses were taken by U.S. military from the Lakota in what is known as the Battle of Greasy Grass, and known to the U.S. military as the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Eagle also mentioned for the non-Sioux that the Sioux word for horse means "my son, my daughter." He said that the return of horses to the sacred fire would be a healing for the horses for their genetic memory of the treatment of their ancestors in the past century as well as a healing for the native American population for the genetic trauma for their historical treatment of their ancestors. Healing for many at Standing Rock from their recent violent treatment by police and North Dakota National Guard, was an important aspect of the ceremony.
Chief John Eagle pointed out that many Native Americans have joined the military and that as combat veterans, they have double post traumatic stress (PTS), first from their treatment as Native Americans and second as combat veterans. John emphasized that for native combat veterans in particular, it is important to use the word "water protectors," as the terms "demonstrators and protesters" may trigger a PTSD response from their days in the U.S. military. He said that he could see PTSD in the eyes of many who went through each of the recent encounters with the police.
As John Eagle explained the purpose of the ceremony, in the distance galloping down the road of flags into the Oceti Sankowin camp came 30 horses and riders. With "peace cries" not war cries, the large 1,000-person circle opened to welcome the horses and riders. They circled the sacred fire many times to the every increasing "peace cries" and the beating of a large drum. He called on each "water protector" to have courage in their hearts to overcome anger and fear and to turn to prayer, as the police and government don't know how to deal with nonviolence and prayer. Leaders asked that no one take photos of the sacred ceremony once the horses entered the circle.
Another leader said that Native Americans must begin forgiving rather than waiting for an apology for their treatment by the U.S. government. He predicted that the U.S. government will never give an apology and that unless Native Americans forgive the pain the live in, they will live in anger. "Lives are better if one can forgive," he said. "We must change and we must change our treatment of Mother Earth."
The son of American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means told of being in the Front line camp and being clubbed by police as he protected an elder woman. He said that he felt that he had seen violence unfold before, that the treatment by police in 2016 was "familiar in our blood." Means also reminded everyone to help the young water protectors who are having difficulty in coping with their experiences with the police in the past two weeks.
As the ceremony was ending approximately thirty Navajo Hopi youth and adult supporters arrived into the circle after running from Arizona. Greeted by great cries from the 1,000 persons in the circle, a 15 year-old Hopi youth in sobs said, "150 years ago we were forced to run away from our homes but today we have run to help keep your and our homes, in a prayerful spirit, but to show the government that it cannot make us run away again."

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As I walked from the circle, an older Sioux woman told me that she had been at the Front Line camp the day it was destroyed. She had been sitting in prayer when the police stormed in, roughed people up, broke up the camp and arrested her. She said that she has been in the camp for three months and will stay until the camp ends.
In tears, she said, "I am now living as my ancestors lived...in nature all day, everyday, in community living, working and praying together. I have been waiting for this gathering all my life."]]> <![CDATA[New Documents Reveal Oil And Tobacco Industries’ Dirty History Of Working Together]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14868 Wed, 20 Jul 2016 12:12:04 +0000 Drew Phipps]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14868
And how they collaborated to con us all.

Chris D'Angelo 07/20/2016 12:30 am

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oil-...ef=science

Quote: Things keep looking worse and worse for the oil industry. After documents dating back as far as the 1940s revealed companies coordinated to cover up the industry's role in climate change, several corporations, including ExxonMobil, now face a fraud probe and mounting public outrage. Many have said the climate change cover-up rivals that of big tobacco's decades-long scheme to mislead the public about the health risks of smoking ― assertions the oil industry continues to shrug off.


But a new trove of documents compiled and released Wednesday by the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL, provides further evidence that the comparison to big tobacco is valid and that the two industries have even worked collaboratively for over a half-century. The documents, according to Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL, show oil and tobacco giants have long shared marketing and advertising strategies, research institutes, PR firms and even scientists. And contrary to popular belief, Muffett told The Huffington Post, "tobacco companies got their playbook from the oil industry," not the other way around.


In April, CIEL released documents showing that the oil industry has known about the potential role of fossil fuels in CO2 emissions since at least 1957. They began "shaping science to shape public opinion," as Muffett put it, even earlier, in the 1940s. A second round of documents released in May revealed that the industry had the technology to cut CO2 emissions in the 1970s, but instead chose to "invest in research to explain away the climate risks." The latest batch, which includes dozens of documents pulled from an archive of some 14 million tobacco industry documents maintained by the University of California at San Francisco, shows that big oil's strategies "were effective enough that another industry ― the global poster child for consumer fraud ― took these strategies to carry out its own deception campaign," according to Muffett.


The cross-pollination was easy to come by. In June 1957, representatives of tobacco powerhouse Philip Morris visited Shell Oil and Humble Oil (now Exxon Mobil) facilities in Texas to learn more about mass spectrometry, a technology the petroleum industry was using to test for hazardous air pollutants. "The oil companies, because of their smog research, had developed unique expertise in detecting minute toxins in air quality," Muffett said. Of "particular interest" to Philip Morris, the company noted in a subsequent report about its visit, was Shell's ongoing use of the technology to analyze cigarette tars. Ironically, Shell's testing was conducted as part of New York University research funded by the tobacco industry.


Muffett said it is just one of many examples of the oil industry testing tobacco products. By the 1960s, the documents show, oil companies, including Shell and Esso, were developing and patenting their own cigarette filters ― a discovery Muffett said initially left him "utterly drop-jawed." By the late-1970s, according to CIEL, British American Tobacco alone shared board members with three separate petroleum companies.


Beyond the research component, big oil and big tobacco shared a common market as well. Among the more telling documents is a 1967 report in which the American Tobacco Company proposes a "tie-in" between its own Colony cigarettes and the petroleum industry. "Success," the tobacco company wrote, "will depend heavily on the appeal we make to the smoker-driver. And except to say the the appeal is not gasoline, we don't intend to get into the creative requirements here. It is obvious that smoking pleasure and the freedom and leisure of auto travel must be linked successfully if we are to get this program moving."


The report goes on to explore possible approaches, including establishing a relationship with the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for America's oil and natural gas industry, which the tobacco company described as "not an ordinary association" and "highly political." Muffett said this particular document highlights both the industries' mutual interests (including the fact that gas stations have long been key retail outlets for tobacco products) and that big tobacco was constantly looking to oil companies, and API, for guidance. API and Philip Morris did not respond to HuffPost's requests for comment Tuesday.


Big tobacco's fascination with big oil "bordered on paranoia," Muffett said. And the relationship was, as he put it, not all "lovey dovey." Reports and internal documents, CIEL says on a website about the research, "demonstrate that each industry saw in the other a convenient culprit for environmental cancers. Ironically, this mutual finger-pointing not only gave each industry a convenient opportunity to watch and learn from the other's strategies, it also increased the overall public uncertainty about the causes of cancer and the necessary solutions to the benefit of both industries."


Muffett told HuffPost the documents compiled by his nonprofit effectively become a precursor to the story in hants
of Doubt, a book that details how "a loose-knit group of high-level scientists, with extensive political connections, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public" about the dangers of tobacco smoke and global warming. Muffett's hope is that others will investigate the documents for themselves. "A core part of the lesson here is that this information is out there, the truth is out there," he told HuffPost. "And far less of it is under industry control than I think they may have long believed."


May Boeve, co-founder and executive director of environmental group 350.org, pointed out that the "last 14 consecutive months have been the hottest on record." "We will make sure that Exxon and their industry peers are held accountable for robbing us of a generation's worth of action on climate," she added. Other key findings, as highlighted on CIEL's website and in a press release, include:

  • After learning that Shell was using the Stanford Research Institute for animal experimentation, a Phillip Morris executive wrote that the company should consider hiring SRI for its own research, arguing, "Obviously [Shell] would not employ them if they did not think SRI was reliable." SRI was later hired by tobacco companies to conduct carbon monoxide testing and "develop discrete, portable cigarette testing kits that could be used without attracting attention."
  • Theodore Sterling, who in 1968 "prepared a report that would prove central to the tobacco industry's attacks on the emerging scientific consensus around cancer and tobacco," also had a long history of conducting research for oil companies.
  • Many of the scientists who worked for the tobacco industry's Scientific Advisory Board were recommended by a former Standard Oil executive.
  • Oil and tobacco companies teamed up to cosponsor America's favorite past time: baseball.

In a statement Wednesday, Muffett said the new documents represent half the story ― at best. "The rest of this story ― including vital truths about the history of climate deception ― remains hidden in the oil industry's files," he said. "Six decades of denial and deception is six too many. We owe it to ourselves, and to future generations, to bring that truth to light."

The book in the article is "Merchants of Doubt." https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-H...1608193942]]>
And how they collaborated to con us all.

Chris D'Angelo 07/20/2016 12:30 am

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oil-...ef=science

Quote: Things keep looking worse and worse for the oil industry. After documents dating back as far as the 1940s revealed companies coordinated to cover up the industry's role in climate change, several corporations, including ExxonMobil, now face a fraud probe and mounting public outrage. Many have said the climate change cover-up rivals that of big tobacco's decades-long scheme to mislead the public about the health risks of smoking ― assertions the oil industry continues to shrug off.


But a new trove of documents compiled and released Wednesday by the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL, provides further evidence that the comparison to big tobacco is valid and that the two industries have even worked collaboratively for over a half-century. The documents, according to Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL, show oil and tobacco giants have long shared marketing and advertising strategies, research institutes, PR firms and even scientists. And contrary to popular belief, Muffett told The Huffington Post, "tobacco companies got their playbook from the oil industry," not the other way around.


In April, CIEL released documents showing that the oil industry has known about the potential role of fossil fuels in CO2 emissions since at least 1957. They began "shaping science to shape public opinion," as Muffett put it, even earlier, in the 1940s. A second round of documents released in May revealed that the industry had the technology to cut CO2 emissions in the 1970s, but instead chose to "invest in research to explain away the climate risks." The latest batch, which includes dozens of documents pulled from an archive of some 14 million tobacco industry documents maintained by the University of California at San Francisco, shows that big oil's strategies "were effective enough that another industry ― the global poster child for consumer fraud ― took these strategies to carry out its own deception campaign," according to Muffett.


The cross-pollination was easy to come by. In June 1957, representatives of tobacco powerhouse Philip Morris visited Shell Oil and Humble Oil (now Exxon Mobil) facilities in Texas to learn more about mass spectrometry, a technology the petroleum industry was using to test for hazardous air pollutants. "The oil companies, because of their smog research, had developed unique expertise in detecting minute toxins in air quality," Muffett said. Of "particular interest" to Philip Morris, the company noted in a subsequent report about its visit, was Shell's ongoing use of the technology to analyze cigarette tars. Ironically, Shell's testing was conducted as part of New York University research funded by the tobacco industry.


Muffett said it is just one of many examples of the oil industry testing tobacco products. By the 1960s, the documents show, oil companies, including Shell and Esso, were developing and patenting their own cigarette filters ― a discovery Muffett said initially left him "utterly drop-jawed." By the late-1970s, according to CIEL, British American Tobacco alone shared board members with three separate petroleum companies.


Beyond the research component, big oil and big tobacco shared a common market as well. Among the more telling documents is a 1967 report in which the American Tobacco Company proposes a "tie-in" between its own Colony cigarettes and the petroleum industry. "Success," the tobacco company wrote, "will depend heavily on the appeal we make to the smoker-driver. And except to say the the appeal is not gasoline, we don't intend to get into the creative requirements here. It is obvious that smoking pleasure and the freedom and leisure of auto travel must be linked successfully if we are to get this program moving."


The report goes on to explore possible approaches, including establishing a relationship with the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for America's oil and natural gas industry, which the tobacco company described as "not an ordinary association" and "highly political." Muffett said this particular document highlights both the industries' mutual interests (including the fact that gas stations have long been key retail outlets for tobacco products) and that big tobacco was constantly looking to oil companies, and API, for guidance. API and Philip Morris did not respond to HuffPost's requests for comment Tuesday.


Big tobacco's fascination with big oil "bordered on paranoia," Muffett said. And the relationship was, as he put it, not all "lovey dovey." Reports and internal documents, CIEL says on a website about the research, "demonstrate that each industry saw in the other a convenient culprit for environmental cancers. Ironically, this mutual finger-pointing not only gave each industry a convenient opportunity to watch and learn from the other's strategies, it also increased the overall public uncertainty about the causes of cancer and the necessary solutions to the benefit of both industries."


Muffett told HuffPost the documents compiled by his nonprofit effectively become a precursor to the story in hants
of Doubt, a book that details how "a loose-knit group of high-level scientists, with extensive political connections, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public" about the dangers of tobacco smoke and global warming. Muffett's hope is that others will investigate the documents for themselves. "A core part of the lesson here is that this information is out there, the truth is out there," he told HuffPost. "And far less of it is under industry control than I think they may have long believed."


May Boeve, co-founder and executive director of environmental group 350.org, pointed out that the "last 14 consecutive months have been the hottest on record." "We will make sure that Exxon and their industry peers are held accountable for robbing us of a generation's worth of action on climate," she added. Other key findings, as highlighted on CIEL's website and in a press release, include:

  • After learning that Shell was using the Stanford Research Institute for animal experimentation, a Phillip Morris executive wrote that the company should consider hiring SRI for its own research, arguing, "Obviously [Shell] would not employ them if they did not think SRI was reliable." SRI was later hired by tobacco companies to conduct carbon monoxide testing and "develop discrete, portable cigarette testing kits that could be used without attracting attention."
  • Theodore Sterling, who in 1968 "prepared a report that would prove central to the tobacco industry's attacks on the emerging scientific consensus around cancer and tobacco," also had a long history of conducting research for oil companies.
  • Many of the scientists who worked for the tobacco industry's Scientific Advisory Board were recommended by a former Standard Oil executive.
  • Oil and tobacco companies teamed up to cosponsor America's favorite past time: baseball.

In a statement Wednesday, Muffett said the new documents represent half the story ― at best. "The rest of this story ― including vital truths about the history of climate deception ― remains hidden in the oil industry's files," he said. "Six decades of denial and deception is six too many. We owe it to ourselves, and to future generations, to bring that truth to light."

The book in the article is "Merchants of Doubt." https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-H...1608193942]]> <![CDATA[Republican Attorneys General Defend Big Oil Over Climate Fraud Probe by Citing the Constitution]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14823 Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:31:18 +0000 Drew Phipps]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14823 GOP legal advisors say the investigation "threatens free speech."

Chris D'Angelo 06/17/2016 04:52 am ET


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/repu...ef=science


A group of Republican state attorneys general is standing up for oil giants over an investigation into whether companies like Exxon Mobil misled the public about the risks of climate change. Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange and 12 others argue in a letter penned this week that efforts by a growing coalition of Attorneys General from states including New York, California and Massachusetts to "police the global warming debate through the power of the subpoena is a grave mistake." "Using law enforcement authority to resolve a public policy debate undermines the trust invested in our offices and threatens free speech," the Republicans wrote.


The coalition, called "AGs United for Clean Power," was formed in late March following reports by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times that found Exxon executives were aware of the climate risks associated with carbon dioxide emissions, but funded research to cover up those risks and block solutions. In a more recent investigation, the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law uncovered documents that show the oil industry, including Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil), was on notice about the potential role of fossil fuels in CO2 emissions no later than 1957 and "shaping science to shape public opinion" even earlier, in the 1940s.


New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman who subpoenaed Exxon in January over the allegations that it lied to the public and its investors said in a March speech announcing the coalition that the science on climate change is clear. "We know what's happening to the planet," Schneiderman said. "There is no dispute, but there is confusion, and confusion sowed by those with an interest in profiting from the confusion and creating misperceptions in the eyes of the American public that need to be cleared up." GOP Attorneys General say in their Jun. 15 letter that the Democratic-led investigation of the oil industry "raises substantial First Amendment concerns."


They disregard studies that suggest the consensus among scientists is as high as 97 percent. Instead, the authors write that "a vigorous debate exists in this country regarding the risks of climate change and the appropriate response to those risks." Actions indicating one side of the debate should fear prosecution "chills speech," they said. The First Amendment defense has been a go-to for the industry in its fight to keep internal climate documents buried. Suzanne McCarron, ExxonMobil's vice president for public and government affairs, said in March the coalition's effort was "politically motivated" and the allegations against her company were "an attempt to limit free speech."


But Schneiderman pointed out that the First Amendment "does not give you the right to commit fraud." "We are pursuing this as we would any other fraud matter," he said in March. "You have to tell the truth. You can't make misrepresentations of the kinds we've seen here." In many ways, the oil companies' cover-up of climate risks rivals that of the tobacco industry misleading the public about the health risks associated with smoking. Not only did both stretch back decades, they each raised questions about a company's constitutional right to free speech. In the case of big oil, former Vice President Al Gore said time is of the essence. "We do not have 40 years to continue suffering the consequences of the fraud allegedly being committed by the fossil fuel companies where climate change is concerned," he said at the March event.


In addition to echoing industry claims about free speech, Strange and his co-authors warn their Democratic counterparts that the issue is a two-way street that "any fraud theory requiring more disclosure of Exxon would surely require more disclosure by clean energy' companies." "If it is possible to minimize the risks of climate change, then the same goes for exaggeration," the letter reads. "If minimization is fraud, exaggeration is fraud."


May Boeve, executive director of environmental group 350.org, was among those who slammed the Republican Attorney Generals' letter. She said Exxon refuses to "turn from its destructive deception on climate change," even in the face of record-breaking temperatures. "Whether it's trying to block Attorney General [Maura] Healey's investigation in Massachusetts or orchestrating coordinated attacks from Republican attorneys general across the country," Boeve said in a statement, "it's clear that Exxon's only interest is in maintaining the status quo of its business model planet and people be damned."


*******
That is certainly welcome news for terrorist groups and drug cartels. Now they can say, and presumably Republicans AG's will agree, that they have the right to gather together (Freedom of Assembly), to arm themselves against police (Second Amendment), plot to commit crimes (Freedom of Speech), and to spread radical jihadism (Freedom of Religion). While it is refreshing to see such concern for the supreme law of the land from these top dogs, I doubt that any such respect will suddenly manifest itself in the policies or daily workings of their respective law enforcement agencies.


*********
Here is the list of these sudden converts to constitutional principles:

Strange: Alabama
Richards: Alaska
Brnovich: Arizona
Rutledge: Arkansas
Landry: Louisiana
Schuette: Michigan
Peterson: Nebraska
Pruitt: Oklahoma
Wilson: South Carolina
Paxton: Texas
Reyes: Utah
Schimel: Wyoming

Texas, Alaska, and Oklahoma are the three of the five top oil producing states in the US in 2013. Exxon is heavily invested in the Permian Basin (Texas), the Woodford/Caney Shale (Oklahoma), the Conesauga Shale (Alabama), the Favetteville Shale (Arkansas), the Haynesville Shale (Louisiana). Exxon is the largest holder of discovered reserves in Alaska's North Slope. Exxon and its subsidiaries paid $8.8 million in 2014 taxes to the State of Utah. I am confident that more such self-serving financial connections could be uncovered.]]> GOP legal advisors say the investigation "threatens free speech."

Chris D'Angelo 06/17/2016 04:52 am ET


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/repu...ef=science


A group of Republican state attorneys general is standing up for oil giants over an investigation into whether companies like Exxon Mobil misled the public about the risks of climate change. Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange and 12 others argue in a letter penned this week that efforts by a growing coalition of Attorneys General from states including New York, California and Massachusetts to "police the global warming debate through the power of the subpoena is a grave mistake." "Using law enforcement authority to resolve a public policy debate undermines the trust invested in our offices and threatens free speech," the Republicans wrote.


The coalition, called "AGs United for Clean Power," was formed in late March following reports by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times that found Exxon executives were aware of the climate risks associated with carbon dioxide emissions, but funded research to cover up those risks and block solutions. In a more recent investigation, the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law uncovered documents that show the oil industry, including Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil), was on notice about the potential role of fossil fuels in CO2 emissions no later than 1957 and "shaping science to shape public opinion" even earlier, in the 1940s.


New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman who subpoenaed Exxon in January over the allegations that it lied to the public and its investors said in a March speech announcing the coalition that the science on climate change is clear. "We know what's happening to the planet," Schneiderman said. "There is no dispute, but there is confusion, and confusion sowed by those with an interest in profiting from the confusion and creating misperceptions in the eyes of the American public that need to be cleared up." GOP Attorneys General say in their Jun. 15 letter that the Democratic-led investigation of the oil industry "raises substantial First Amendment concerns."


They disregard studies that suggest the consensus among scientists is as high as 97 percent. Instead, the authors write that "a vigorous debate exists in this country regarding the risks of climate change and the appropriate response to those risks." Actions indicating one side of the debate should fear prosecution "chills speech," they said. The First Amendment defense has been a go-to for the industry in its fight to keep internal climate documents buried. Suzanne McCarron, ExxonMobil's vice president for public and government affairs, said in March the coalition's effort was "politically motivated" and the allegations against her company were "an attempt to limit free speech."


But Schneiderman pointed out that the First Amendment "does not give you the right to commit fraud." "We are pursuing this as we would any other fraud matter," he said in March. "You have to tell the truth. You can't make misrepresentations of the kinds we've seen here." In many ways, the oil companies' cover-up of climate risks rivals that of the tobacco industry misleading the public about the health risks associated with smoking. Not only did both stretch back decades, they each raised questions about a company's constitutional right to free speech. In the case of big oil, former Vice President Al Gore said time is of the essence. "We do not have 40 years to continue suffering the consequences of the fraud allegedly being committed by the fossil fuel companies where climate change is concerned," he said at the March event.


In addition to echoing industry claims about free speech, Strange and his co-authors warn their Democratic counterparts that the issue is a two-way street that "any fraud theory requiring more disclosure of Exxon would surely require more disclosure by clean energy' companies." "If it is possible to minimize the risks of climate change, then the same goes for exaggeration," the letter reads. "If minimization is fraud, exaggeration is fraud."


May Boeve, executive director of environmental group 350.org, was among those who slammed the Republican Attorney Generals' letter. She said Exxon refuses to "turn from its destructive deception on climate change," even in the face of record-breaking temperatures. "Whether it's trying to block Attorney General [Maura] Healey's investigation in Massachusetts or orchestrating coordinated attacks from Republican attorneys general across the country," Boeve said in a statement, "it's clear that Exxon's only interest is in maintaining the status quo of its business model planet and people be damned."


*******
That is certainly welcome news for terrorist groups and drug cartels. Now they can say, and presumably Republicans AG's will agree, that they have the right to gather together (Freedom of Assembly), to arm themselves against police (Second Amendment), plot to commit crimes (Freedom of Speech), and to spread radical jihadism (Freedom of Religion). While it is refreshing to see such concern for the supreme law of the land from these top dogs, I doubt that any such respect will suddenly manifest itself in the policies or daily workings of their respective law enforcement agencies.


*********
Here is the list of these sudden converts to constitutional principles:

Strange: Alabama
Richards: Alaska
Brnovich: Arizona
Rutledge: Arkansas
Landry: Louisiana
Schuette: Michigan
Peterson: Nebraska
Pruitt: Oklahoma
Wilson: South Carolina
Paxton: Texas
Reyes: Utah
Schimel: Wyoming

Texas, Alaska, and Oklahoma are the three of the five top oil producing states in the US in 2013. Exxon is heavily invested in the Permian Basin (Texas), the Woodford/Caney Shale (Oklahoma), the Conesauga Shale (Alabama), the Favetteville Shale (Arkansas), the Haynesville Shale (Louisiana). Exxon is the largest holder of discovered reserves in Alaska's North Slope. Exxon and its subsidiaries paid $8.8 million in 2014 taxes to the State of Utah. I am confident that more such self-serving financial connections could be uncovered.]]> <![CDATA[Big Oil Could Have Cut CO2 Emissions In 1970s — But Did Nothing]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14758 Mon, 23 May 2016 12:07:01 +0000 Drew Phipps]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14758 New documents show the industry chose to prioritize costs over the planet.
05/19/2016 07:52 pm ET

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/big-...ef=science

In 1963, Esso (now Exxon Mobil) patented a design for a "novel and highly efficient electrode" for use in fuel cells a possible means of decreasing carbon emissions and producing cleaner-burning vehicles. Research into this innovative technology, the company said at the time, "has been greatly accelerated." But, as Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, likes to say, "Did you start driving a Prius in 1968?"


Muffett's point, which he supports with dozens more documents his group released Thursday, is that American oil companies were well aware of the risks their industry posed to the environment by the 1960s. And they could have taken actions to significantly reduce carbon emissions. The new documents, Muffett said, show that oil companies "clearly preferred to invest in research to explain away the climate risks," instead of on technologies to reduce emissions. The Center for International Environmental Law last month published documents showing the oil industry was aware of the potential role of fossil fuels in carbon dioxide emissions and the associated climate risks as early as 1957 decades earlier than had previously been documented and covered them up.


This second trove of documents, Muffett said, doesn't contain a "smoking gun" like the first set, but does highlight how the U.S. oil industry studied, understood and chose not to act on climate change. "Here's still more evidence that this industry both understood climate issues [and] had the capacity to cut pollution," Muffett said. "What really emerges from our research is which side of the coin the oil companies decided to pursue."


For example, a 1980 Exxon corporate document released last month by the DeSmog Blog Project refers to existing technology that could remove carbon dioxide from power plant emissions. "It is assumed that the major contributors of CO2 are the burning of fossil fuels," the document reads. "There is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases of forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Technology exists to remove CO2 from stack gases but removal of only 50% of the CO2 would double the cost of power generation." "They could have deployed it very rapidly," Muffett said of the technologies, "But they decided it was too expensive." The American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment after business hours.


The new documents also show that during the same period, oil companies funded research into other pollutants that may offset climate warming; carbon sinks that would reduce the need to control emissions; and alternative theories on the cause of climate change, some of which are still being tossed around by climate change deniers today. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the industry also financed studies into how petroleum products could be used to control the climate. The research included burning oil to clear areas of fog and smog, and constructing massive "artificial heat mountains" out of asphalt to increase rainfall. As early as the 1980s, oil companies were beginning to invest in taller oil rigs that could withstand rising sea levels. Bigger drilling rigs, Muffett said, are "an example of the profound distinction of how these companies were protecting their own interests" and not the public's.


This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that April 2016 was the 12th consecutive month to set a global temperature record. Tom Sanzillo, finance director at the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Vice there is a clear potential, perhaps even likelihood, that these documents will result in litigation against oil companies. "This looks like it's pretty serious, and it just seems to get worse," Sanzillo said. The Center for International Environmental Law plans to release additional documents in the near future. For now, the group's new searchable database allows users to identify connections between companies, research institutes and individuals.]]> New documents show the industry chose to prioritize costs over the planet.
05/19/2016 07:52 pm ET

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/big-...ef=science

In 1963, Esso (now Exxon Mobil) patented a design for a "novel and highly efficient electrode" for use in fuel cells a possible means of decreasing carbon emissions and producing cleaner-burning vehicles. Research into this innovative technology, the company said at the time, "has been greatly accelerated." But, as Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, likes to say, "Did you start driving a Prius in 1968?"


Muffett's point, which he supports with dozens more documents his group released Thursday, is that American oil companies were well aware of the risks their industry posed to the environment by the 1960s. And they could have taken actions to significantly reduce carbon emissions. The new documents, Muffett said, show that oil companies "clearly preferred to invest in research to explain away the climate risks," instead of on technologies to reduce emissions. The Center for International Environmental Law last month published documents showing the oil industry was aware of the potential role of fossil fuels in carbon dioxide emissions and the associated climate risks as early as 1957 decades earlier than had previously been documented and covered them up.


This second trove of documents, Muffett said, doesn't contain a "smoking gun" like the first set, but does highlight how the U.S. oil industry studied, understood and chose not to act on climate change. "Here's still more evidence that this industry both understood climate issues [and] had the capacity to cut pollution," Muffett said. "What really emerges from our research is which side of the coin the oil companies decided to pursue."


For example, a 1980 Exxon corporate document released last month by the DeSmog Blog Project refers to existing technology that could remove carbon dioxide from power plant emissions. "It is assumed that the major contributors of CO2 are the burning of fossil fuels," the document reads. "There is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases of forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Technology exists to remove CO2 from stack gases but removal of only 50% of the CO2 would double the cost of power generation." "They could have deployed it very rapidly," Muffett said of the technologies, "But they decided it was too expensive." The American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment after business hours.


The new documents also show that during the same period, oil companies funded research into other pollutants that may offset climate warming; carbon sinks that would reduce the need to control emissions; and alternative theories on the cause of climate change, some of which are still being tossed around by climate change deniers today. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the industry also financed studies into how petroleum products could be used to control the climate. The research included burning oil to clear areas of fog and smog, and constructing massive "artificial heat mountains" out of asphalt to increase rainfall. As early as the 1980s, oil companies were beginning to invest in taller oil rigs that could withstand rising sea levels. Bigger drilling rigs, Muffett said, are "an example of the profound distinction of how these companies were protecting their own interests" and not the public's.


This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that April 2016 was the 12th consecutive month to set a global temperature record. Tom Sanzillo, finance director at the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Vice there is a clear potential, perhaps even likelihood, that these documents will result in litigation against oil companies. "This looks like it's pretty serious, and it just seems to get worse," Sanzillo said. The Center for International Environmental Law plans to release additional documents in the near future. For now, the group's new searchable database allows users to identify connections between companies, research institutes and individuals.]]> <![CDATA[The New & Old Blend of US Foreign Policy]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14716 Mon, 09 May 2016 11:02:42 +0000 David Guyatt]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14716 Thierry Meyssan ranks him as one of the few commentators around today who can (and does) speak with some authority on US foreign policy.

Quote:

US foreign policy

by Thierry Meyssan
These days, US foreign policy is often contradictory, as we can see in Syria, where troops trained by the Pentagon are fighting troops trained by the CIA. And yet it remains perfectly coherent on two points to divide Europe between the European Union on one side and Russia on the other and to divide the Far East between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on one side and China on the other. Why? And can this be predicted?


VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 9 MAY 2016 [Image: ligne-rouge.gif]DEUTSCH ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ ESPAÑOL فارسى FRANÇAIS ITALIANO PORTUGUÊS TÜRKÇE
[Image: zoom-32.png]
[Image: 1_-_1-324-28149.jpg]For more than a century, in an attempt to explain and therefore anticipate US foreign policy, we have been visualising a struggle between the isolationists and the interventionists. The former adopted the line of the «Pilgrim Fathers», who fled old Europe to build a new world based on their religious beliefs, and therefore distant from European cynicism. The latter, in the tradition of certain of the «Founding Fathers», intended not only to seize their independence, but also to pursue the project of the British Empire for their own benefit.Today, this distinction has lost almost all validity, since it has become impossible to live in autarchy, even for a country as vast as the United States. Although it has become commonplace to accuse one's political adversaries of isolationism, no US politician with the exception of Ron Paul now defends such an idea.The debate has shifted to a confrontation between the partisans of perpetual war and the adepts of a more measured use of force. If we are to believe the work of professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, the present policy of the United States is decided by a collection of interest groups, independent of the desires of its citizens [1]. In this debate, therefore, it is legitimate to note the influence, on the one hand, of the military-industrial complex, which dominates the US economy and whose interest is to pursue a state of «endless war» - and, on the other, the toll companies (software, high-tech, entertainment) who, although their production is more virtual than real, make their money wherever the world is at peace.This analysis of the debate leaves aside the question of the access to raw materials and energy sources, which was dominant in the 19th and 20th centuries, but has lost its urgency, without having completely disappeared.Since the «Carter Doctrine», which treats the access to hydrocarbons from the «Greater Middle East» as a question of «national security» [2], we have seen Washington create CentCom, move more than 500,000 men to the Gulf, and seek to impose control over the whole region. We remember that Dick Cheney, persuaded of the imminence of «peak oil», decided to prepare the «Arab Springs», and war against all the states in the region which it did not yet control. But this policy lost its meaning even while it was in appplication, because the United States, apart from their production of gas and shale oil, took control of the hydrocarbons in the Gulf of Mexico. Consequently, in the years to come, the United States will not only have abandoned the «Greater Middle East», but may engage in a major war against Venezuela, the only middle-range power which could compete with and threaten their exploitation in the Gulf of Mexico.In a series of interviews with The Atlantic, President Obama tried to explain his doctrine [3]. In order to do so, he replied lengthily and repetitively to those who accuse him of contradictions or weakness, particularly after the affair of the «red line» in Syria. He had indeed declared that the use of chemical weapons was a red line which should not be crossed, but when his administration alleged that the Syrian Arab Republic had used them against its own population, he refused to wage a new war. Leaving aside the question of whether the accusation was true or not, the President stressed that the United States had no interest in risking the lives of its soldiers in this conflict, and that he had chosen to economise their forces in order to face genuine threats against US national interests. This declaration of reserve is known as the «Obama Doctrine».So what are these «genuine threats» ? The President didn't say. At best we can look at the work of the US National Intelligence Council and the preceding remarks on the power of the interest groups. It appears that the United States has abandoned the post-9/11 «G.W. Bush Doctrine» of global domination to return to that of his father commercial excellence. Once the Cold War ended for want of combatants, the era was dedicated only to economic competition within the deregulated capitalist system.As a matter of fact, it was specifically to reassure himself that the era of ideological conflicts was really over that President Obama reached out to Cuba and Iran. It was indispensable to calm the opposition of these two revolutionary states, the only ones to contest not only US supremacy, but also international rules. The bad faith displayed by the United States in their application of the 5+1 agreement only goes to show that they do not care about Iranian nuclear technology, but are seeking only to restrain the Khomeinist revolution.It's in this context that we witness the return of the «Wolfowitz Doctrine», according to which everything must be done to prevent the emergence of a new competitor, and this begins with the bridling of the European Union [4]. However, this strategy seems to have been modified, insofar as Washington considers the awakening of China with even greater apprehension. So there is talk of the «Far East Pivot» strategy, consisting of withdrawing troops present in Greater Middle East, and repositioning them in order to control this new region and contain China. While the Pentagon has abandoned the neo-conservative lunacy concerning the destruction of China, it nonetheless intends to restrict Beijing to an entirely economic role, and prevent it from applying any political influence outside its frontiers.And yet what we are now seeing is the contrary of the «Far East Pivot». The United States have certainly increased their presence in the Pacific slightly, but have above all set up a strong military presence in Central Europe. While war is still raging in Palestine and Yemen, in Syria and Iraq, and threatens to inflame Libya, a new conflict has begun in Ukraine. There are, however, two ways of interpreting this evolution.On one hand, we may consider that the military deployment at the Russian border, and Moscow's intended military reponse, are absolutely no threat to peace. Indeed, it seems both very dangerous and absolutely unnecessary to engage in such a conflict. The war in Ukraine will not be directed against Russia, but will constitute the artificial fabrication of a Russian pseudo-threat to Europe, with its sanctions and counter-sanctions, which will allow the United States to «protect» their credulous allies.On the other hand, we may consider that the economic future of the United States is founded on their control of international exchange, and thus on the maintenance of maritime transport [5]. On the contrary, the development of Russia and China supposes their freedom from US trusteeship, and therefore the construction of continental commercial routes. This is President Xi's project, with the construction of two «Silk Roads», one building on the antique traces of the route through Central Asia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean, the other through Russia to Germany. Two routes which today are interdicted by Daesh in the Levant, and by Ukraine in Europe.The question of maritime transport was the central point of US strategy at the beginning of the 21st century, with the support of pirates from the Horn of Africa [6] - a strategy that ended when Moscow and Beijing sent their warships into the area. However, even though China had the Suez Canal doubled in size by Egypt, the access via the Bal el-Mandeb Straits remains officially under the control of Djibouti, and unofficially under the control of Al-Qaïda via the Islamic Emirate of Mukalla.To the control of the commercial routes must be added the control of financial exchanges. This is the reason why the US Justice Department has promulgated rules which it is attempting to impose progressively on all the banks in the world. But here too, Russia has set up its own SWIFT system, while China has refused the convertibility of its money into dollars in order to avoid being shackled by US rules.If this analysis is correct, the wars in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine will not end until Russia and China have secured another commercial route to Western Europe. On this subject, we can observe the current efforts by the United States to topple Belarus into their camp after having opposed it for so long a way of consolidating the Ukrainian firewall and ensuring hermetic compartmentalisation between Western and Eastern Europe.From this perspective, the commercial negotiations that the United States have undertaken with the European Union (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP), and with the ASEAN (Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP) are not aimed at reinforcing their exchanges, but on the contrary, at excluding Russia and China from the market. Stupidly, the Europeans and Asians are concentrating on the choice of production standards instead of demanding the entry of Russia and China into the negotiations.A final fact to be learned from Obama's interviews with The Atlantic is that the United States intend to update their alliances and adapt them to their new strategic doctrine. So the support for the Saudi régime, which guaranteed a supply of Middle East oil, is no longer of any interest, and even becomes a burden. Or, the «special relation» with the United Kingdom which once had its importance in terms of control of the oceans (the Atlantic Charter), and the attempt to fashion a unipolar world (the Iraq war), no longer offers any particular interest and must be re-thought - without mentioning the costly support for Israël, which no longer serves a purpose in the Middle East, and which will not continue unless Tel-Aviv proves itself useful in other parts of the world.The preceding remarks do not reflect the current Presidential campaign in the United States, which opposes the military-industrial complex and WASP ideology, represented by Hillary Clinton, and the toll industry and social pact of the «American dream», represented by Donald Trump [7]. The violence of this campaign attests to the necessity of re-balancing these forces after a period of the exclusive supremacy of war-mongering since 1995.When the camp represented today by Trump finally wins, we should see the settlement of wars, but the outbreak of an oppressive coercion for the payment of patents and authors' royalties. In the case that a win by this group should tarry, the United States will have to deal with the uprising of an angry population and riots. It will then become especially difficult to predict US foreign policy.


]]> Thierry Meyssan ranks him as one of the few commentators around today who can (and does) speak with some authority on US foreign policy.

Quote:

US foreign policy

by Thierry Meyssan
These days, US foreign policy is often contradictory, as we can see in Syria, where troops trained by the Pentagon are fighting troops trained by the CIA. And yet it remains perfectly coherent on two points to divide Europe between the European Union on one side and Russia on the other and to divide the Far East between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on one side and China on the other. Why? And can this be predicted?


VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 9 MAY 2016 [Image: ligne-rouge.gif]DEUTSCH ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ ESPAÑOL فارسى FRANÇAIS ITALIANO PORTUGUÊS TÜRKÇE
[Image: zoom-32.png]
[Image: 1_-_1-324-28149.jpg]For more than a century, in an attempt to explain and therefore anticipate US foreign policy, we have been visualising a struggle between the isolationists and the interventionists. The former adopted the line of the «Pilgrim Fathers», who fled old Europe to build a new world based on their religious beliefs, and therefore distant from European cynicism. The latter, in the tradition of certain of the «Founding Fathers», intended not only to seize their independence, but also to pursue the project of the British Empire for their own benefit.Today, this distinction has lost almost all validity, since it has become impossible to live in autarchy, even for a country as vast as the United States. Although it has become commonplace to accuse one's political adversaries of isolationism, no US politician with the exception of Ron Paul now defends such an idea.The debate has shifted to a confrontation between the partisans of perpetual war and the adepts of a more measured use of force. If we are to believe the work of professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, the present policy of the United States is decided by a collection of interest groups, independent of the desires of its citizens [1]. In this debate, therefore, it is legitimate to note the influence, on the one hand, of the military-industrial complex, which dominates the US economy and whose interest is to pursue a state of «endless war» - and, on the other, the toll companies (software, high-tech, entertainment) who, although their production is more virtual than real, make their money wherever the world is at peace.This analysis of the debate leaves aside the question of the access to raw materials and energy sources, which was dominant in the 19th and 20th centuries, but has lost its urgency, without having completely disappeared.Since the «Carter Doctrine», which treats the access to hydrocarbons from the «Greater Middle East» as a question of «national security» [2], we have seen Washington create CentCom, move more than 500,000 men to the Gulf, and seek to impose control over the whole region. We remember that Dick Cheney, persuaded of the imminence of «peak oil», decided to prepare the «Arab Springs», and war against all the states in the region which it did not yet control. But this policy lost its meaning even while it was in appplication, because the United States, apart from their production of gas and shale oil, took control of the hydrocarbons in the Gulf of Mexico. Consequently, in the years to come, the United States will not only have abandoned the «Greater Middle East», but may engage in a major war against Venezuela, the only middle-range power which could compete with and threaten their exploitation in the Gulf of Mexico.In a series of interviews with The Atlantic, President Obama tried to explain his doctrine [3]. In order to do so, he replied lengthily and repetitively to those who accuse him of contradictions or weakness, particularly after the affair of the «red line» in Syria. He had indeed declared that the use of chemical weapons was a red line which should not be crossed, but when his administration alleged that the Syrian Arab Republic had used them against its own population, he refused to wage a new war. Leaving aside the question of whether the accusation was true or not, the President stressed that the United States had no interest in risking the lives of its soldiers in this conflict, and that he had chosen to economise their forces in order to face genuine threats against US national interests. This declaration of reserve is known as the «Obama Doctrine».So what are these «genuine threats» ? The President didn't say. At best we can look at the work of the US National Intelligence Council and the preceding remarks on the power of the interest groups. It appears that the United States has abandoned the post-9/11 «G.W. Bush Doctrine» of global domination to return to that of his father commercial excellence. Once the Cold War ended for want of combatants, the era was dedicated only to economic competition within the deregulated capitalist system.As a matter of fact, it was specifically to reassure himself that the era of ideological conflicts was really over that President Obama reached out to Cuba and Iran. It was indispensable to calm the opposition of these two revolutionary states, the only ones to contest not only US supremacy, but also international rules. The bad faith displayed by the United States in their application of the 5+1 agreement only goes to show that they do not care about Iranian nuclear technology, but are seeking only to restrain the Khomeinist revolution.It's in this context that we witness the return of the «Wolfowitz Doctrine», according to which everything must be done to prevent the emergence of a new competitor, and this begins with the bridling of the European Union [4]. However, this strategy seems to have been modified, insofar as Washington considers the awakening of China with even greater apprehension. So there is talk of the «Far East Pivot» strategy, consisting of withdrawing troops present in Greater Middle East, and repositioning them in order to control this new region and contain China. While the Pentagon has abandoned the neo-conservative lunacy concerning the destruction of China, it nonetheless intends to restrict Beijing to an entirely economic role, and prevent it from applying any political influence outside its frontiers.And yet what we are now seeing is the contrary of the «Far East Pivot». The United States have certainly increased their presence in the Pacific slightly, but have above all set up a strong military presence in Central Europe. While war is still raging in Palestine and Yemen, in Syria and Iraq, and threatens to inflame Libya, a new conflict has begun in Ukraine. There are, however, two ways of interpreting this evolution.On one hand, we may consider that the military deployment at the Russian border, and Moscow's intended military reponse, are absolutely no threat to peace. Indeed, it seems both very dangerous and absolutely unnecessary to engage in such a conflict. The war in Ukraine will not be directed against Russia, but will constitute the artificial fabrication of a Russian pseudo-threat to Europe, with its sanctions and counter-sanctions, which will allow the United States to «protect» their credulous allies.On the other hand, we may consider that the economic future of the United States is founded on their control of international exchange, and thus on the maintenance of maritime transport [5]. On the contrary, the development of Russia and China supposes their freedom from US trusteeship, and therefore the construction of continental commercial routes. This is President Xi's project, with the construction of two «Silk Roads», one building on the antique traces of the route through Central Asia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean, the other through Russia to Germany. Two routes which today are interdicted by Daesh in the Levant, and by Ukraine in Europe.The question of maritime transport was the central point of US strategy at the beginning of the 21st century, with the support of pirates from the Horn of Africa [6] - a strategy that ended when Moscow and Beijing sent their warships into the area. However, even though China had the Suez Canal doubled in size by Egypt, the access via the Bal el-Mandeb Straits remains officially under the control of Djibouti, and unofficially under the control of Al-Qaïda via the Islamic Emirate of Mukalla.To the control of the commercial routes must be added the control of financial exchanges. This is the reason why the US Justice Department has promulgated rules which it is attempting to impose progressively on all the banks in the world. But here too, Russia has set up its own SWIFT system, while China has refused the convertibility of its money into dollars in order to avoid being shackled by US rules.If this analysis is correct, the wars in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine will not end until Russia and China have secured another commercial route to Western Europe. On this subject, we can observe the current efforts by the United States to topple Belarus into their camp after having opposed it for so long a way of consolidating the Ukrainian firewall and ensuring hermetic compartmentalisation between Western and Eastern Europe.From this perspective, the commercial negotiations that the United States have undertaken with the European Union (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP), and with the ASEAN (Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP) are not aimed at reinforcing their exchanges, but on the contrary, at excluding Russia and China from the market. Stupidly, the Europeans and Asians are concentrating on the choice of production standards instead of demanding the entry of Russia and China into the negotiations.A final fact to be learned from Obama's interviews with The Atlantic is that the United States intend to update their alliances and adapt them to their new strategic doctrine. So the support for the Saudi régime, which guaranteed a supply of Middle East oil, is no longer of any interest, and even becomes a burden. Or, the «special relation» with the United Kingdom which once had its importance in terms of control of the oceans (the Atlantic Charter), and the attempt to fashion a unipolar world (the Iraq war), no longer offers any particular interest and must be re-thought - without mentioning the costly support for Israël, which no longer serves a purpose in the Middle East, and which will not continue unless Tel-Aviv proves itself useful in other parts of the world.The preceding remarks do not reflect the current Presidential campaign in the United States, which opposes the military-industrial complex and WASP ideology, represented by Hillary Clinton, and the toll industry and social pact of the «American dream», represented by Donald Trump [7]. The violence of this campaign attests to the necessity of re-balancing these forces after a period of the exclusive supremacy of war-mongering since 1995.When the camp represented today by Trump finally wins, we should see the settlement of wars, but the outbreak of an oppressive coercion for the payment of patents and authors' royalties. In the case that a win by this group should tarry, the United States will have to deal with the uprising of an angry population and riots. It will then become especially difficult to predict US foreign policy.


]]> <![CDATA[Woman Leading Flint Water Lead Poisoning Law Suit Found Shot in Own Home]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14671 Sun, 24 Apr 2016 03:31:40 +0000 Magda Hassan]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14671 Woman Leading Flint Lead Poisoning Lawsuit Found Shot Dead in Her Home April 22, 2016
[URL="http://latest.com/2016/04/woman-leading-flint-lead-poisoning-lawsuit-found-shot-dead-in-her-home/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=ta&utm_campaign=iwvo12#disqus_thread"]28 comments

[/URL]
[Image: 1176162_630x354.jpg]
6 ABC screengrab
Sasha Avonna Bell, a woman leading the drive to sue the Michigan government over the Flint lead poisoning water crisis, has been found shot and killed in her home, M Live reports. She had claimed that her child was poisoned by the water after it was switched from the Detroit water system to the Flint river, (which officials hadn't applied corrosion inhibitors to).

Another woman, Sacorya Renee Reed, was also found shot and killed in the home. Their bodies were discovered on April 19th.
"Sasha was a lovely young woman who cared deeply for her family, and especially for her young child," said her attorney Corey M. Stern. "Her tragic and senseless death has created a void in the lives of so many people that loved her. Hopefully, her child will be lifted up by the love and support from everyone who cared deeply for Sasha."
A 1-year-old was found unharmed in the home. Police haven't confirmed if it was Bell's child.

Those supporting Bell's landmark suit have vowed that it will continue. No charges have been filed in the shooting.
http://latest.com/2016/04/woman-leading-...ign=iwvo12]]> Woman Leading Flint Lead Poisoning Lawsuit Found Shot Dead in Her Home April 22, 2016
[URL="http://latest.com/2016/04/woman-leading-flint-lead-poisoning-lawsuit-found-shot-dead-in-her-home/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=ta&utm_campaign=iwvo12#disqus_thread"]28 comments

[/URL]
[Image: 1176162_630x354.jpg]
6 ABC screengrab
Sasha Avonna Bell, a woman leading the drive to sue the Michigan government over the Flint lead poisoning water crisis, has been found shot and killed in her home, M Live reports. She had claimed that her child was poisoned by the water after it was switched from the Detroit water system to the Flint river, (which officials hadn't applied corrosion inhibitors to).

Another woman, Sacorya Renee Reed, was also found shot and killed in the home. Their bodies were discovered on April 19th.
"Sasha was a lovely young woman who cared deeply for her family, and especially for her young child," said her attorney Corey M. Stern. "Her tragic and senseless death has created a void in the lives of so many people that loved her. Hopefully, her child will be lifted up by the love and support from everyone who cared deeply for Sasha."
A 1-year-old was found unharmed in the home. Police haven't confirmed if it was Bell's child.

Those supporting Bell's landmark suit have vowed that it will continue. No charges have been filed in the shooting.
http://latest.com/2016/04/woman-leading-...ign=iwvo12]]> <![CDATA[Koch bros convinced people that VA was broken, so they could loot it]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14594 Thu, 17 Mar 2016 19:36:18 +0000 Tracy Riddle]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14594 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazin...p?page=all

In past presidential primaries, when candidates wanted to win the votes of veterans they would trek to American Legion halls and Veterans of Foreign Wars conventions in far corners of Iowa and New Hampshire. While there's been a little of that in the current primary contest, a new pattern has emerged, at least on the Republican side.
Over the last year, every major GOP candidate with the exception of Donald Trump has made a pilgrimage to gatherings put on by Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), a group that had barely formed during the 2012 primary cycle. Whereas candidates back in the day were under pressure from the old-line veterans' groups to promise undying support for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and its nationwide network of hospitals and clinics, the opposite has been true this season. Candidates at CVA rallies have been competing with each other to badmouth the VA and its allegedly shabby treatment of veterans. And all have pledged fealty to the CVA's goal of moving as many vets as possible out of the VA into private care. Even Trump is calling for more "choice."
This may not at first hearing seem too surprising. Nearly the whole of the Republican Party has become more radically antigovernment in recent years. And since the spring of 2014, when headlines started appearing about long wait times and cover-ups at some VA hospitals, a strong narrative has built up, including in the mainstream media, that the system is fundamentally broken. A recent front-page headline in the New York Times proclaimed, as if it were a matter of fact, that Bernie Sanders's support for the VA during the controversy over wait times proved his poor judgment: "Faith in Agency Clouded Bernie Sanders's V.A. Response."
Yet beneath the surface of events, a far different, deeper, and more consequential story is unfolding. The CVA, it turns out, is the creation of David and Charles Koch's network. The Koch family has famously poured hundreds of millions of dollars into think tanks, candidates, and advocacy groups to advance their libertarian views about the virtues of free markets and the evils of governments and unions. Seldom, however, has one of their investments paid off so spectacularly well as it has on the issue of veterans' health care. Working through the CVA, and in partnership with key Republicans and corporate medical interests, the Koch brothers' web of affiliates has succeeded in manufacturing or vastly exaggerating "scandals" at the VA as part of a larger campaign to delegitimize publicly provided health care.
The Koch-inspired attacks, in turn, have provided the pretext for GOP candidates to rally behind the causeonly recently seen as fringeof imposing free market "reforms" on the federal government's second largest agency. The attacks have also damaged the reputation of the VA among the broader news-consuming public, and, not coincidently, undermined morale within the agency itself. And they succeeded in stampeding bipartisan majorities in Congress into passing legislation in 2014 that under the guise of offering veterans "choice" has instead created a deeply flawed and unworkable process of outsourcing VA care while also setting in motion a commission that seems intent on dismantling VA-provided health care altogether.
All this has been happening, ironically, even as most vets who use the system and all the major veterans' service organizations (VSOs) applaud the quality of VA health care. Adding to the perverse twists of the story is a mountain of independent evidence, including studies mandated by the 2014 law itself, showing that while the VA has an assortment of serious problems, it continues to outperform the rest of the U.S. health sector on nearly every metric of qualitya fact that ought to raise fundamental questions about the wisdom of outsourcing VA care to private providers.
The long arc of the VA's place in American life shows that the agency has always struggled against ideological enemies and against commercial health care providers who would stand to gain business from its being privatized. The only hope is that Americans will wake up in time to save the VA from those who are trying to kill it.

(read the rest at the link)]]> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazin...p?page=all

In past presidential primaries, when candidates wanted to win the votes of veterans they would trek to American Legion halls and Veterans of Foreign Wars conventions in far corners of Iowa and New Hampshire. While there's been a little of that in the current primary contest, a new pattern has emerged, at least on the Republican side.
Over the last year, every major GOP candidate with the exception of Donald Trump has made a pilgrimage to gatherings put on by Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), a group that had barely formed during the 2012 primary cycle. Whereas candidates back in the day were under pressure from the old-line veterans' groups to promise undying support for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and its nationwide network of hospitals and clinics, the opposite has been true this season. Candidates at CVA rallies have been competing with each other to badmouth the VA and its allegedly shabby treatment of veterans. And all have pledged fealty to the CVA's goal of moving as many vets as possible out of the VA into private care. Even Trump is calling for more "choice."
This may not at first hearing seem too surprising. Nearly the whole of the Republican Party has become more radically antigovernment in recent years. And since the spring of 2014, when headlines started appearing about long wait times and cover-ups at some VA hospitals, a strong narrative has built up, including in the mainstream media, that the system is fundamentally broken. A recent front-page headline in the New York Times proclaimed, as if it were a matter of fact, that Bernie Sanders's support for the VA during the controversy over wait times proved his poor judgment: "Faith in Agency Clouded Bernie Sanders's V.A. Response."
Yet beneath the surface of events, a far different, deeper, and more consequential story is unfolding. The CVA, it turns out, is the creation of David and Charles Koch's network. The Koch family has famously poured hundreds of millions of dollars into think tanks, candidates, and advocacy groups to advance their libertarian views about the virtues of free markets and the evils of governments and unions. Seldom, however, has one of their investments paid off so spectacularly well as it has on the issue of veterans' health care. Working through the CVA, and in partnership with key Republicans and corporate medical interests, the Koch brothers' web of affiliates has succeeded in manufacturing or vastly exaggerating "scandals" at the VA as part of a larger campaign to delegitimize publicly provided health care.
The Koch-inspired attacks, in turn, have provided the pretext for GOP candidates to rally behind the causeonly recently seen as fringeof imposing free market "reforms" on the federal government's second largest agency. The attacks have also damaged the reputation of the VA among the broader news-consuming public, and, not coincidently, undermined morale within the agency itself. And they succeeded in stampeding bipartisan majorities in Congress into passing legislation in 2014 that under the guise of offering veterans "choice" has instead created a deeply flawed and unworkable process of outsourcing VA care while also setting in motion a commission that seems intent on dismantling VA-provided health care altogether.
All this has been happening, ironically, even as most vets who use the system and all the major veterans' service organizations (VSOs) applaud the quality of VA health care. Adding to the perverse twists of the story is a mountain of independent evidence, including studies mandated by the 2014 law itself, showing that while the VA has an assortment of serious problems, it continues to outperform the rest of the U.S. health sector on nearly every metric of qualitya fact that ought to raise fundamental questions about the wisdom of outsourcing VA care to private providers.
The long arc of the VA's place in American life shows that the agency has always struggled against ideological enemies and against commercial health care providers who would stand to gain business from its being privatized. The only hope is that Americans will wake up in time to save the VA from those who are trying to kill it.

(read the rest at the link)]]> <![CDATA[Flint’s Crisis Is About More Than Water - Hedges]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14494 Tue, 09 Feb 2016 04:54:57 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=14494 Flint's Crisis Is About More Than Water
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/flin..._20160207/


Posted on Feb 7, 2016

By Chris Hedges
[Image: flintfence_590.jpg]
The Flint Water Plant tower in Michigan. (ehrlif / Shutterstock)


What is in the mind of someone who knowingly poisons children and impairs their lives? Why did the politicians, regulators and bureaucrats who knew the water in Flint, Mich., was toxic lie about the danger for months? What does it say about a society that is ruled by, and refuses to punish, those who willfully destroy the lives of children?
The crisis in Flint is far more ominous than lead-contaminated water. It is symptomatic of the collapse of our democracy. Corporate power is not held accountable for its crimes. Everything is up for sale, including children. Our regulatory agenciesincluding the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Michigan's Department of Environmental Qualityhave been defunded, emasculated and handed over to corporate-friendly stooges. Our corrupt courts are part of a mirage of justice. The role of these government agencies and courts, and of the legislatures, is to sanction abuse rather than halt it.
The primacy of profit throughout the society takes precedence over life itself, including the life of the most vulnerable. This corporate system of power knows no limits. It has no internal restraints. It will sacrifice all of us, including our children, on the altar of corporate greed. In a functioning judicial system, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Flint's former emergency manager, Darnell Earley, along with all the regulatory officials who lied as a city was being sickened, would be in jail facing trial.
Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Gitta Sereny in "Into That Darkness," Omer Bartov in "Murder in Our Midst," Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archipelago," Primo Levi in "The Drowned and the Saved" and Ella Lingens-Reiner in "Prisoners of Fear" argue that the modern instrument of evil is the technocrat, the man or woman whose sole concern is technological and financial efficiency, whose primary measurement of success is self-advancement, even if it means piling up corpses or destroying the lives of children.
"Monsters exist," Levi noted, "but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men." These technocrats have no real ideology, other than the ideology that is in vogue. They want to get ahead, to rise in the structures of power. They know how to make the collective, or the bureaucracy, work on behalf of power. Nothing else is of importance. "The new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful devout disciples," Vasily Grossman, in his book "Forever Flowing, wrote of Stalin's Soviet Union. "The new state did not even require servantsjust clerks."
We churn out millions of these technocrats or clerks in elite universities and business schools. They are trained to serve the system. They do not question its assumptions and structures any more than Nazi bureaucrats questioned the assumptions and structures of the "Final Solution." They manage the huge financial houses and banks such as Goldman Sachs. They profit from endless war. They orchestrate the fraud on Wall Street. They destroy the ecosystem on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. They are elected to office. They are empty shells of human beings who stripped of their power and wealth are banal and pathetic. They are not sadists. They do not delight in cruelty. They are cogs in the machinery of corporate power.
These technocrats are numb to the most basic of human emotions and devoid of empathy beyond their own tiny inner circle. Michigan state officials, for example, provided bottled water to their employees in Flint for nearly a year while city residents drank the contaminated water, and authorities spent $440,000 to pipe clean water to the local GM plant after factory officials complained that the Flint water was corroding their car parts. That mediocre human beings make such systems function is what makes them dangerous.
The long refusal to make public the poisoning of the children of Flint, who face the prospect of stunted growth, neurological, speech and hearing impairment, reproductive problems and kidney damage, mirrors the slow-motion poisoning and exploitation of the planet by other corporate technocrats. These are not people we want to entrust with our future.
Theodor Adorno warned in his essay "Education After Auschwitz" that if we did not create an educational system that taught us to think morally and trained us how to make moral choices, another Auschwitz would appear on the horizon. Schools must teach more than vocational skills; they must teach values. They must, as Adorno wrote, teach citizens about "the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms." And they must do this "without fear of offending any authorities."
We live in an age that has eradicated social and cultural consciousness and left us in a rootless, ahistorical, emotionally driven void. Whole populations in our poorest communities are poisoned or, in countries such as Iraq, murdered en masse. But we have no context for measuring human actions and human evil. We find our collective identity in childish nationalist cant and patriotic propaganda that bombards the airwaves, not in the cold reality of our callousness and ruthlessness. We do not know who we are.
"People who blindly slot themselves into the collective already make themselves into something like inert material, extinguish themselves as self-determined beings,"Adorno writes about the technocrat. "With this comes the willingness to treat others as an amorphous mass."
"The manipulative characteras anyone can confirm in the sources available about those Nazi leadersis distinguished by a rage for organization, by the inability to have any immediate human experiences at all, by a certain lack of emotion, by an overvalued realism," Adorno goes on to say in his 1966 essay. "At any cost he wants to conduct supposed, even if delusional, Realpolitik. He does not for one second think or wish that the world were any different than it is, he is obsessed by the desire of doing things [Dinge zut un], indifferent to the content of such action. He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person. If my observations do not deceive me and if several sociological investigations permit generalization, then this type has become much more prevalent today than one would think."
Humanity as an idea, as the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has pointed out, is itself mortal. It can be extinguished along with millions of human beings. "Barbarism is not the inheritance of our prehistory," Finkielkraut reminds us. "It is the companion that dogs our every step."
"Indeed, one of the most frightening consequences of the Holocaust may well be that rather than serving as a warning to preserve humanity at all cost, it has provided a license to privilege physical survival over moral existence," writes Omer Bartov in "Mirrors of Destruction." "This may be one reason, along with the realization that mass murder has continued unabated since 1945, that such men as [Tadeusz] Borowski, [Jean] Améry, Paul Celan, and [Primo] Levi finally decided to put an end to their own lives."
We have turned our universities into temples dedicated to corporate vocational training. Most graduates of Princeton or Harvard have no more ability to question the operating systems of the corporate state than an inner-city boy or girl who is taught basic functional literacy only so he or she can stock shelves or sell fast food. We all have our place in the great machine of corporate self-immolation. We all are drones. The technical skills vary from intricate and complex to rudimentary. But the commonality is that we lack the capacity to measure our actions against the ideas, outrages and injustices of the past. We have ceased to be moral beings. The devil in Goethe's "Faust" grasps that the element most essential to the perpetration of evil is the obliteration of memory.
Now it is over. What meaning can one see?
It is as if it had not come to be.
And yet it circulates as if it were.
I should preferEternal Emptiness.
We do not possess the intellectual skillsand this is by designthat permit us to question power, to see ourselves as part of a long human continuum. We have forgotten, or never been taught, that each individual must be seen as an ultimate end if we are to retain any human decency and hope. Once we depersonalize others, once we forget who we are and where we came from, we make evil possible. "Act so that humanity, both in your own person and that of others, be used as an end in itself, and never as a mere means," Immanuel Kant wrote. If we cannot think morally, if we live devoid of empathy, if our advancement comes at the expense of the other, if we lose touch with the wisdom of the past, we cannot rebel. And if we do not rebel we will sustain a system that will ultimately slay us.
]]> Flint's Crisis Is About More Than Water
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/flin..._20160207/


Posted on Feb 7, 2016

By Chris Hedges
[Image: flintfence_590.jpg]
The Flint Water Plant tower in Michigan. (ehrlif / Shutterstock)


What is in the mind of someone who knowingly poisons children and impairs their lives? Why did the politicians, regulators and bureaucrats who knew the water in Flint, Mich., was toxic lie about the danger for months? What does it say about a society that is ruled by, and refuses to punish, those who willfully destroy the lives of children?
The crisis in Flint is far more ominous than lead-contaminated water. It is symptomatic of the collapse of our democracy. Corporate power is not held accountable for its crimes. Everything is up for sale, including children. Our regulatory agenciesincluding the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Michigan's Department of Environmental Qualityhave been defunded, emasculated and handed over to corporate-friendly stooges. Our corrupt courts are part of a mirage of justice. The role of these government agencies and courts, and of the legislatures, is to sanction abuse rather than halt it.
The primacy of profit throughout the society takes precedence over life itself, including the life of the most vulnerable. This corporate system of power knows no limits. It has no internal restraints. It will sacrifice all of us, including our children, on the altar of corporate greed. In a functioning judicial system, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Flint's former emergency manager, Darnell Earley, along with all the regulatory officials who lied as a city was being sickened, would be in jail facing trial.
Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Gitta Sereny in "Into That Darkness," Omer Bartov in "Murder in Our Midst," Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archipelago," Primo Levi in "The Drowned and the Saved" and Ella Lingens-Reiner in "Prisoners of Fear" argue that the modern instrument of evil is the technocrat, the man or woman whose sole concern is technological and financial efficiency, whose primary measurement of success is self-advancement, even if it means piling up corpses or destroying the lives of children.
"Monsters exist," Levi noted, "but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men." These technocrats have no real ideology, other than the ideology that is in vogue. They want to get ahead, to rise in the structures of power. They know how to make the collective, or the bureaucracy, work on behalf of power. Nothing else is of importance. "The new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful devout disciples," Vasily Grossman, in his book "Forever Flowing, wrote of Stalin's Soviet Union. "The new state did not even require servantsjust clerks."
We churn out millions of these technocrats or clerks in elite universities and business schools. They are trained to serve the system. They do not question its assumptions and structures any more than Nazi bureaucrats questioned the assumptions and structures of the "Final Solution." They manage the huge financial houses and banks such as Goldman Sachs. They profit from endless war. They orchestrate the fraud on Wall Street. They destroy the ecosystem on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. They are elected to office. They are empty shells of human beings who stripped of their power and wealth are banal and pathetic. They are not sadists. They do not delight in cruelty. They are cogs in the machinery of corporate power.
These technocrats are numb to the most basic of human emotions and devoid of empathy beyond their own tiny inner circle. Michigan state officials, for example, provided bottled water to their employees in Flint for nearly a year while city residents drank the contaminated water, and authorities spent $440,000 to pipe clean water to the local GM plant after factory officials complained that the Flint water was corroding their car parts. That mediocre human beings make such systems function is what makes them dangerous.
The long refusal to make public the poisoning of the children of Flint, who face the prospect of stunted growth, neurological, speech and hearing impairment, reproductive problems and kidney damage, mirrors the slow-motion poisoning and exploitation of the planet by other corporate technocrats. These are not people we want to entrust with our future.
Theodor Adorno warned in his essay "Education After Auschwitz" that if we did not create an educational system that taught us to think morally and trained us how to make moral choices, another Auschwitz would appear on the horizon. Schools must teach more than vocational skills; they must teach values. They must, as Adorno wrote, teach citizens about "the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms." And they must do this "without fear of offending any authorities."
We live in an age that has eradicated social and cultural consciousness and left us in a rootless, ahistorical, emotionally driven void. Whole populations in our poorest communities are poisoned or, in countries such as Iraq, murdered en masse. But we have no context for measuring human actions and human evil. We find our collective identity in childish nationalist cant and patriotic propaganda that bombards the airwaves, not in the cold reality of our callousness and ruthlessness. We do not know who we are.
"People who blindly slot themselves into the collective already make themselves into something like inert material, extinguish themselves as self-determined beings,"Adorno writes about the technocrat. "With this comes the willingness to treat others as an amorphous mass."
"The manipulative characteras anyone can confirm in the sources available about those Nazi leadersis distinguished by a rage for organization, by the inability to have any immediate human experiences at all, by a certain lack of emotion, by an overvalued realism," Adorno goes on to say in his 1966 essay. "At any cost he wants to conduct supposed, even if delusional, Realpolitik. He does not for one second think or wish that the world were any different than it is, he is obsessed by the desire of doing things [Dinge zut un], indifferent to the content of such action. He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person. If my observations do not deceive me and if several sociological investigations permit generalization, then this type has become much more prevalent today than one would think."
Humanity as an idea, as the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has pointed out, is itself mortal. It can be extinguished along with millions of human beings. "Barbarism is not the inheritance of our prehistory," Finkielkraut reminds us. "It is the companion that dogs our every step."
"Indeed, one of the most frightening consequences of the Holocaust may well be that rather than serving as a warning to preserve humanity at all cost, it has provided a license to privilege physical survival over moral existence," writes Omer Bartov in "Mirrors of Destruction." "This may be one reason, along with the realization that mass murder has continued unabated since 1945, that such men as [Tadeusz] Borowski, [Jean] Améry, Paul Celan, and [Primo] Levi finally decided to put an end to their own lives."
We have turned our universities into temples dedicated to corporate vocational training. Most graduates of Princeton or Harvard have no more ability to question the operating systems of the corporate state than an inner-city boy or girl who is taught basic functional literacy only so he or she can stock shelves or sell fast food. We all have our place in the great machine of corporate self-immolation. We all are drones. The technical skills vary from intricate and complex to rudimentary. But the commonality is that we lack the capacity to measure our actions against the ideas, outrages and injustices of the past. We have ceased to be moral beings. The devil in Goethe's "Faust" grasps that the element most essential to the perpetration of evil is the obliteration of memory.
Now it is over. What meaning can one see?
It is as if it had not come to be.
And yet it circulates as if it were.
I should preferEternal Emptiness.
We do not possess the intellectual skillsand this is by designthat permit us to question power, to see ourselves as part of a long human continuum. We have forgotten, or never been taught, that each individual must be seen as an ultimate end if we are to retain any human decency and hope. Once we depersonalize others, once we forget who we are and where we came from, we make evil possible. "Act so that humanity, both in your own person and that of others, be used as an end in itself, and never as a mere means," Immanuel Kant wrote. If we cannot think morally, if we live devoid of empathy, if our advancement comes at the expense of the other, if we lose touch with the wisdom of the past, we cannot rebel. And if we do not rebel we will sustain a system that will ultimately slay us.
]]>