I Pledge Allegiance...

Guest Post by  Mike Krieger's Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Remember those weird kids who didn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance in school? They either sat down or just stood up silently. I sure do. Most likely for religious reasons, but I remember thinking to myself as a kid that it was wrong not to say the pledge aloud with the rest of us. As I got older in my teenage years, I even felt that those kids were not being respectful.

Some adults may even give them the old, “well, if you don’t like it then you can leave” routine that is mentioned every time a minority opts out of the majority’s way of doing things.
Homeschooling my children will really make this a non-issue; however, my nieces were reciting the American Pledge of Allegiance the other day while playing with my children. In fact, here in Texas the kids recite both the American and Texas Pledge of Allegiance before class.

After hearing them recite it, and of course remembering the 2,500 or so times I said it in my lifetime, I started to think about the purpose and real meaning of this pledge that millions of school-aged children recite every morning Monday through Friday.

A pledge, of course, is a vow, an oath, or a commitment. Allegiance is defined as loyalty, devotion, and obedience. In fact, the antonyms for allegiance are treachery and disloyalty.

Crazy when you think about it, right? Do we really want our kids pledging obedience and loyalty to the U.S. federal government? Especially when the pledge itself is masked with a lie. I mean, it ends with, “with liberty and justice for all.” Now that’s a crock of shit right there. Not one arrest in the financial sector for the 2008 crisis, not one investigation into the 2003 Iraq invasion where no WMDs were found, and a complete cover-up of the events on 9/11, i.e., Building 7. Liberty and justice for all… how about we ask Edward Snowden about that? His patriotic actions were described as treachery and disloyalty.

Nationalism and blind patriotism is crucial in keeping a population dumbed-down and ignorant, which is why if you think about it, pledging allegiance to the government we have today is truly a backwards thing to do. Teaching it to a small child is particularly degrading.

As a dad who is proud of my own liberty, this makes life tough sometimes. Do I teach my kids the truth or go with the flow?

On the surface it seems black and white, but it’s not. Teaching your children about certain truths that make them the odd kid out is not exactly what a parent wants for their child. My wife and I are constantly turning to each other and asking ourselves, should we make a stand on this? Because if we do, it might make it hard for the kids.

A great example comes from a friend of mine with an 11-year-old son who stood up on 9/11 at school and countered the teacher’s lesson for the anniversary and told her about the Loose Change version. It was awkward to say the least. To simply question the events of 9/11 go against the state’s religion of nationalism, so for an 11-year-old boy to bring it up in a classroom…you can imagine the trouble it caused.

Teaching my children about the oligarchs and the current state of our leaders in government is not something that I take lightly. I realize that some of our core values, like the belief in liberty, respect for all life, and individual sovereignty will make them the odd kid out sometimes.

Being surrounded by people who have been taught, just as I was, to pledge allegiance to the state, is the unfortunate reality we are all confronted with. something that is so deeply engrained that the best I can do is teach my children to think for themselves and decide on their own. Figuring out how to best teach my children the danger of such blind allegiance is without a doubt the most difficult task I face as a father.

It is interesting to note how Americans have short memories or a lack of historical education regarding their nation even less than one hundred years ago. The Bellamy salute was for many years the predecesor of the current salute during the pledge and that the Pledge of Allegiance itself was authored by a Christian Socialist in order to indoctrinate the youth of America into statist compliance to the state. For many this mental manipulation of the masses away from the soverign individualistic roots that America was founded on seems to have worked.

Wake up America. 

Nothing in life is easy or free except the cheese in the mouse trap.

 

The Power of Fantasy: Bioterrorism, ISIS and Ebola Mania

 

By Binoy Kampmark

Does demagoguery have an inventive side?  Only if you assume semi-literacy is virtuous, and that imagination lies in the name of the manipulative.  The combination of both Ebola and terrorism are the evil twins of the same security dilemma. It is manufactured. It is a confection. And it is, at the end, worthless in what it actually suggests.  The effects of it are, however, dangerous. They suggest that politicians can be skimpy with the evidence yet credible in the vote.

Historically, disease and culture share the same bed of significance.  Notions of purity prevail in these considerations.  Bioterrorism has become, rather appropriately, another mutation in the debate on how foreign fighters arriving in a country might behave.  Individuals such as Jim Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, continue insisting on the need for presidential administrations to form a “national bioterrorism watch system”.

“While [Ebola] is a dangerous disease that Washington needs to take seriously,” writes David Inserra of The Daily Signal, “America could face an even greater medical threat in the future: the threat of bioterrorism.”[1]  While the language here seems to draw distinctions – that those suffering Ebola pose one set of problems, while the use of a bioterrorist agent is another – the ease of placing the two side by side is virtually irresistible.

In the wake of the Ebola outbreak, that old horse of potential bioterrorism has emerged with a convenient vengeance.  This is not surprising, given the spectre of WMD fantasies that captivated the Bush administration in 2003.  It is not sufficient that there are terrorists with a low probability of waging actual attacks on home soil, be they returning citizens, or simply foreign fighters wishing to stir up a good deal of fuss. Throwing in the disease component is hard to resist.

Rep. Mike Jelly of Pennsylvania decided to direct the bioterror genie the way of Islamic State fighters, suggesting that returning jihadists might cause Washington a good deal of headaches, not merely by their radicalisation, but by carrying the virus as a strategic weapon of infliction.  “Think about the job they could do, the harm they could inflict on the American people by bringing this deadly disease into our cities, into schools, into our towns, and into our homes.  Horrible, horrible.”[2]

This exotic lunacy was also appealing to Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who even suggested that Hamas fighters might be daft enough to infect themselves with Ebola and make a journey to freedom land in order to engage in acts of infectious mayhem.  Their venue of safe passage would be from the South, where the evils of an open border with Mexico risk allowing a dangerous pathogen into the country.  Now that, dear readers, is exactly what such figures think about Mexico.

The moral calculus operating with Wilson is that of irrational, dangerous death – those who “value death more than you value life”. Those with such a creed are bound to get up to any old and lethal mischief. “It would promote their creed.  And all of this could be avoided by sealing the border, thoroughly. C’mon, this is the 21^st century.”[3]

As to whether the idea of using such an agent would be feasible is quite something else.  Weaponising such a pathogen has proven to be a formidable challenge.  Such groups as the Aum Shinrikyo cult attempted to collect the virus while ostensibly on a medical mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was a failure of some magnitude.  As Dina Fine Maron argues, the “financial and logistical challenges of transforming Ebola into a tool of bioterror makes the concern seem overblown – at least as far as widespread devastation is concerned.”[4]  Even the FBI’s James Corney suggests that evidence of Islamic State’s involvement in an Ebola program is highly dubious.

This tends to get away from that old problem that the biggest of trouble makers in the business of death remain states rather than non-state ideologues.  States have done more than their fair share of dabbling in the business of rearing microbes of death in the armoury.  Be it small pox, botulism, and tularaemia, these have found their way into inventories and laboratories with disturbing normality.

Much of this has also been allowed to get away because of the Obama administration’s open confusion on the subject of how to handle the Ebola problem.  The excitement has become feverish (dare one say pathological?) in the US, suggesting the double bind that the Obama administration finds itself. The President did not do himself any favours by on the one hand denying there was a grave threat, and then proceeding to appoint an “Ebola Czar” by the name of Ron Klain.  This was classic bureaucracy in action – we create positions of unimportance to supposedly fight the unimportant, while admitting their gravity in creating such positions.

Certainly, the President found himself railroaded by events with the unilateral decisions of Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to implement mandatory 21-day quarantines for those returning from Ebola “hot zones”.  This has always been the federal, and one might even say federalist headache: what is done in the White House and Washington often stays there. The response by states can often have a foreign sense to them.  The US Centres for Disease and Control and Prevention has regarded such quarantine measures as unnecessary, but the CDC’s attempt to defuse the situation has not worked.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest had to face the music of disease on Monday, with a reporter suggesting that, if Klain was actually an “Ebola response coordinator”, it seemed “that you have a need for some coordinating here.”[5]

William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, a long time student of infectious diseases, sees this as a matter of information, in so far as the more one gets, the less anxious one is bound to feel.  “I would like not to call it irrational. When people are just learning about something, something that they regard as a threat, and they haven’t integrated all of this information still into their thought process, their sense of anxiety obviously increases.”[6]

Schaffner is unduly wedded to the rather unfashionable belief that knowledge somehow enlightens. But it is not knowledge that is driving this debate, but supposition.  Facts are the enemy, and they continue to play the roles of silent, some might even say murdered witnesses.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Notes
[1] http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/24/bioterrorism-bigger-concern-ebola/
[2]http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/gop-congressman-says-american-jihadis-might-return-to-us-wit#1gj4wzx
[3] http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/gop-congressman-hamas-might-infected-themselves-with-ebola-a#1akf4m2
[4] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weaponized-ebola-is-it-really-a-bioterror-threat/
[5] http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/222012-ebola-czar-faces-first-big-test
[6]http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/resisting-an-ebola-travel-ban-spreads-antihysteria-hysteria/story-fnay3ubk-1227102858157

The Ebola covert op: 30 answers to “who benefits?”

Guest Post By Jon Rappoport


"In any major covert op, there are always multiple objectives and levels of opportunity, and they are not wasted. The interesting thing is, 99.99% of the players who benefit don’t even realize the whole thing is a planned op." (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

This is not a complete list of benefits from the Ebola op. However, it does cover a significant amount of territory.

In no particular order:

Distraction: the continuing US war in the Middle East moves to the back pages.

Vaccine and drug sales for pharmaceutical companies expand.

The public is further conditioned to accept all vaccines, follow all medical orders, buy phony epidemics as real, fear germs, fear “unpredictable outbreaks.”

Fear = easier to control.

The public is conditioned to living, cradle-to-grave, under the power of the medical cartel and doctors’ orders.

Mega-corporations and financiers gain more control over the rich resources of West Africa.

The US government establishes a military outpost in West Africa, the purpose of which is to enhance and expand its operations on the African continent. Its main economic competitor in Africa is China.

The CDC and the World Health Organization enhance their influence, justify their budgets, try to appear as the protectors of humanity.

Ebola researchers grab new grant monies, seek promotions, enhanced status, awards.

The diagnostic-testing industry cashes in.

The use of irrelevant, useless, and unreliable diagnostic tests for Ebola sets the stage for future situations in which thousands or even millions of false positive tests invent, out of thin air, so-called epidemics in which viruses actually play no role at all. Just like now.

Irrelevant or non-existent viruses function as cover stories to conceal actual and inconvenient causes of illness, such as industrial pollution, ag pesticides, GMO food, fracking chemicals, radiation, etc.

The medical cartel and its government allies move a step closer to being able to mandate all vaccines for the population, with no exemptions permitted.

The overall toxifying and weakening of populations, through vaccines and drugs, thus moves forward. Weakened = easier to control.

Selective quarantines further establishes unconstitutional government control over the people. A phony epidemic can trigger the wide declaration of martial law.

Under the aegis of “tracking carriers of the virus,” the Surveillance State expands.

Combining the epidemic op with open borders, the government and medical authorities can assert there are now vast numbers of unvaccinated people in the US (immigrants)—and they must be protected, through “herd immunity,” by vaccinating everyone in the US with every conceivable vaccine.

Under the cover of “a global pandemic,” toxic modern medicine can expand its reach into every corner of the globe as a “necessary platform for treating ‘infected populations’.”

The DOD and DHS expand their operations, because “every pandemic is a threat to national security.”

The Globalist view of one world under one controlling management system is enhanced — “every epidemic threatens all of us, we’re all in this together, we need, among other innovations, one coordinated medical system for the whole planet.”

Travel to and from any point in the world can be cut off arbitrarily — more top-down control.

Through declaring “infected zones,” economic attacks can be leveled by isolating and quarantining those zones. Loss of business, loss of money—the IMF and World Bank step in and make draconian deals for loans, in exchange for surrender to mega-corporate control of those territories.

In the wake of “fear of the epidemic,” all national health insurance programs on the planet, including Obamacare, can assert more power over the people—“we’re here to protect you from illness and death, so accept all diagnoses and treatments; no opting out, no resistance…”

Further attacks can be launched at traditional and natural solutions to illness—“how dare people try to treat Ebola with anything except (unproven and toxic) drugs and vaccines.”

Further propaganda covertly characterizes “deepest darkest Africa” as the place where terrible things come from.

“The killer virus” functions as a cover story, concealing the centuries-long campaign to weaken and decimate the populations of Africa through starvation, wars, contaminated water supplies, overcrowding, theft of fertile farm land and other natural resources, toxic vaccine campaigns.

Multiple government agencies (DHS, DOD, CDC, SEC, NIH, CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.) coordinate plans and exercises to “combat a pandemic situation.” These joint plans further collect overall power to control the movements and actions of the population.

Of course, at any given moment, vaccines (which are already a toxic soup of chemicals and germs) can be covertly seeded with other toxic elements, including those which cause sterility and infertility.

Up the road, we will see increased efforts to deliver vaccines and drugs embedded in food products, and sprayed from the air.

The “distraction effect” of Ebola can, of course, divert attention away from many events, stories, and other operations, including: NSA spying, Benghazi, Fast&Furious, the US government alliance with the Sinaloa drug cartel, ISIS, etc.

The “war against the epidemic” is quite similar to the “war against terrorism,” and involves the same loss of privacy and freedom.

And, naturally, the media benefit, because they have a big scary story to cover—their hits and sales improve, their advertisers are happy.

What I call the Reality Manufacturing Company is deeply satisfied; they just invented, out of whole cloth, a new front of fake reality, and untold numbers of people bought it, rather than imagining and inventing their own reality. The day when THAT most profound of all revolutions occurs is shoved further into the future.

This “who benefits” list explains, in part, why I’ve been writing extensively about the phony epidemic called Ebola.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com.

America - Have We Become What We Most Hate?

Guest Post by Justin Raimondo

Is Washington a revisionist power?

 The idea that the United States must exercise "global leadership" is rationalized by our interventionists as a necessary prerequisite for maintaining some type of "world order." Who will guard the sea lanes? Who will deter "aggression"? Who will defend the "rules" against those "rogue states" just waiting for an opportunity to wreak havoc, if not the United States of America?

No "mainstream" politician dares challenge this mythology, and those academics and popular writers who do so risk being marginalized. Challenging the motives of our wise rulers isn’t good for your career: that is, not if you want to have any influence in Washington. And while it’s okay to question whether this episode of meddling or that murderous invasion is really in our interest, the benevolence and historical legitimacy of the American empire is not to be questioned. Because, after all, the theoreticians of imperialism say, without the stability enforced by America’s military supremacy "liberalism" could not exist.

This is how the world is seen inside the Washington Beltway, where the monuments of Empire loom large and more than half the population owes its livelihood to the Imperium. Outside that bubble of hubris and skyrocketing real estate values, however, the world looks to be quite a different place – as does America’s role in it.

To an Iraqi citizen, who has watched his nation be torn to pieces by the American eagle, stability is the last thing he associates with the Americans. To a Libyan who had hopes his country might evolve into something more than Gaddafi’s playground, "order" fled the moment the Americans intervened. To a resident of eastern Ukraine who voted in an internationally-recognized election for Victor Yanukovych – and who awoke one morning to discover his government had been overthrown by force – America is anything but the champion of liberal democracy.

But of course none of these peoples – Iraqis, Libyans, Ukrainians – count for much in the Imperial City. Their wishes, hopes, dreams, and opinions are irrelevant to the making of American foreign policy: they are outside the pale, forever exiled to that netherworld separating the West from the rest. And there is no race or nation farther outside that pale than the Russians, who lost the cold war and therefore – in Washington’s view – have ceded any power or influence they once had over the calculations of US policymakers.
Russia and the Russians are routinely demonized in Washington: they are the one people it is perfectly okay to hate – unless, that is, you are a member of "Pussy Riot," or a has-been chess champion who’s taken up Russophobia as a second career. That is, unless you’re a traitor to your own country and allow yourself to be used as an instrument in Washington’s hands.

Naturally the number one hate object is Vladimir Putin, who is regularly characterized as either the reincarnation of Stalin, the second coming of Hitler, or, preferably, both. That’s because he doesn’t recognize the implications of Russia’s defeat in the cold war and still seems to think his opinions amount to something in the brave new unipolar world Washington is building.

No wonder the response to his recent speech at the "Valdai International Discussion Club" – an annual event in Russia – has been nothing short of hysterical. Yet even then, I was amazed to get this tweet from Jackson Diehl, the editorial chieftain of the Washington Post, announcing their editorial:
"We pore over his performance in Valdai, a poisonous mix of lies, conspiracy theories and anti-US vitriol."
What does the editorial board of the Washington Post find so appalling? They are shocked – shocked! – that Mr. Putin wants Washington to "stay out of our affairs and to stop pretending they rule the world." How dare he! Who does he think he is, anyway – a world leader of consequence, whose country is armed with nuclear weapons?

It wasn’t just the reliably neoconnish WaPo. As James Carden noted in The National Interest, "The New York Times alerted readers ‘Putin Lashes Out at U.S. for Backing ‘Neo-Fascists’ and ‘Islamic Radicals’; the Financial Times proclaimed "Putin Unleashes Fury at US ‘follies’; and Fox News reported that ‘Putin Blasts US in Speech, Blaming West for Conflict in Ukraine.’" The Washington Post only added a few more decibels to the cold war chorus, noting approvingly that, in a recent speech, President Obama likened the Russians to a bad case of Ebola.

The WaPo’s sense of nostalgia is evoked when Putin mentions (twice) Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on a desk in the UN – it’s the 1960s all over again! Except it isn’t: and that, from Putin’s point of view – and much of the world’s – is precisely the problem.

Because back then the US had a real adversary in the Soviet Union, and Washington was properly constrained. No more: ever since the fall of the Soviet empire, the Americans have been on a rampage. Instead of ensuring stability – and defending national sovereignty against aggressors – they have become the worst aggressors on the planet, agents of instability who seek to overthrow the established order and, as George W. Bush proclaimed in his crazed second inaugural address, "light a fire in the mind" on a global scale.

In his Valdai speech, Putin points to the brokenness of the institutions and understandings that used to balance out the power relationships in the international arena, regulating them so that upheaval and conflict were minimized. Without this framework, says Putin, all that’s left is "the rule of brute force." Western whiners will bristle at such hypocrisy: this is said by the invader of Crimea! Yet Crimea has been Russian since Catherine the Great: the Russians will respond to our arguments that this is "aggression" the moment we give back the American southwest to Mexico. And anyone capable of the least amount of objectivity will have to concede they have a point.

With the end of the cold war, Putin continues,

"What we needed to do was to carry out a rational reconstruction and adapt it to the new realities in the system of international relations.

"But the United States, having declared itself the winner of the Cold War, saw no need for this. Instead of establishing a new balance of power, essential for maintaining order and stability, they took steps that threw the system into sharp and deep imbalance."

NATO expansion to the very gates of Moscow, Clinton’s Balkan wars, and a regime-change operation that overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and replaced it with "pro-Western" elements with dubious democratic credentials. Even more shameless was the political and diplomatic support given by Washington to crazed Islamic radicals, such as the Chechen "freedom fighters," i.e. the ideological blood brothers of the Tsarnaev brothers.

"The Cold War ended," avers the Russian leader who picked up the pieces,

"But it did not end with the signing of a peace treaty with clear and transparent agreements on respecting existing rules or creating new rules and standards. This created the impression that the so-called ‘victors’ in the Cold War had decided to pressure events and reshape the world to suit their own needs and interests. If the existing system of international relations, international law and the checks and balances in place got in the way of these aims, this system was declared worthless, outdated and in need of immediate demolition.

"Pardon the analogy, but this is the way nouveaux riches behave when they suddenly end up with a great fortune, in this case, in the shape of world leadership and domination. Instead of managing their wealth wisely, for their own benefit too of course, I think they have committed many follies."

The editorialists and the neocon pundits are up in arms over the Valdai speech precisely because Putin is absolutely right about what he calls the "legal nihilism" of the US and its satellites. And of course they weren’t exactly pleased to hear the Russian leader’s denunciation of America’s "total control of the global mass media" which "has made it possible when desired to portray white as black and black as white."

Our Western "democrats" are bound to choke at this point, yelping about the alleged near-total control of the Russian media by Putin & Co. Yet this only underscores Putin’s point: the source of their anger is that anyone, anywhere on earth, deviates from the party line as dictated by Washington and its captive media, which speak with one voice when it comes to foreign affairs.

If we look at the international competition between nations in terms of ecology, it’s clear what is the problem. Like a population of rats that has suddenly been allowed to reproduce beyond its natural boundaries due to a lack of predators – say, bears – to balance them out, the Americans have gone swarming across the globe, undermining the natural ecological balance and taking out everything and everyone in their path. This is where our "victory" in the cold war has led us – into a position very much like that of the old Soviet Union before Stalin reduced Soviet ideology to a strictly defensive posture of "socialism in one country." We have switched roles with the Russians, who are now the status quo power, in opposition to our own role as a revisionist revolutionary power seeking to destroy what little stability the world has left.

Ah, irony – thy name is history.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.

The Ebola Story Doesn’t Smell Right

Guest Post Paul Craig Roberts

The federal government has announced that thousands of additional US soldiers are being sent to Liberia. General Gary Volesky said the troops would “stamp out” ebola. The official story is that combat troops are being sent to build treatment structures for those infected with ebola.

Why combat troops? Why not send a construction outfit such as an engineer battalion if it has to be military? Why not do what the government usually does and contract with a construction company to build the treatment units? “Additional thousands of troops” results in a very large inexperienced construction crew for 17 treatment units. It doesn’t make sense.

Stories that don’t make sense and that are not explained naturally arouse suspicions, such as: Are US soldiers being used to test ebola vaccines and cures, or more darkly are they being used to bring more ebola back to the US?

I understand why people ask these questions. The fact that they will receive no investigative answer will deepen suspicions.

Uninformed and gullible Americans will respond: “The US government would never use its own soldiers and its own citizens as guinea pigs.” Before making a fool of yourself, take a moment to recall the many experiments the US government has conducted on American soldiers and citizens. For example, search online for “unethical human experimentation in the United States” or “human radiation experiments,” and you will find that federal agencies such as the Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission have: exposed US soldiers and prisoners to high levels of radiation; irradiated the testicles of males and tested for birth defects (high rate resulted); irradiated the heads of children; fed radioactive material to mentally disabled children.

The Obama regime’s opposition to quarantine for those arriving from West Africa is also a mystery. The US Army has announced that the Army intends to quarantine every US soldier returning from deployment in Liberia. The Army sensibly says that an abundance of caution is required in order to minimize the risk of transferring the ebola outbreak to the US. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/army-quarantines-general-soldiers-fighting-ebola/story?id=26486775 However, the White House has not endorsed the Army’s decision, and the White House has expressed opposition to the quarantines ordered by the governors of New York and New Jersey. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10/27/joint-chiefs-call-for-quarantine-troops-returning-from-ebola-zone/ 

Apparently pressure from the White House and threats of law suits from those subject to quarantine have caused the two states to loosen their quarantines. A nurse returning from treating ebola patients in West Africa has been cleared by New Jersey for discharge after being symptom-free for 24 hours instead of the 21-days it takes for the disease to produce symptoms. The nurse threatened a lawsuit, and the false issue of “discrimination against health care workers” has arisen. How is it discrimination to quarantine those with the greatest exposure to ebola?

Once symptoms appear, an infected person is dangerous to others until the person is quarantined. As the CDC now has been forced to admit, after stupidly denying the obvious fact, the current ebola strain can spread by air. All it takes is a sneeze or a cough or a contaminated surface. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/10/cdc-finally-gets-right-ebola-spreads-aerosols-3-feet.html 

In other words, it can spread like flu. Previous denials of this fact helped to create the suspicion that the new ebola strain is a weaponized biowarfare strain created by US government labs in West Africa. As University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle has revealed, Washington placed its biowarfare laboratories in African countries that did not sign the convention banning such experimentation. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/10/20/us-government-master-criminal-time/ 

Washington’s deviousness in evading the convention that the US government signed has produced another suspicion: Did the new ebola strain escape, perhaps via some lab mishap that infected lab workers, or was the strain deliberately released in order to test if it works? See: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/10/26/evidence-us-development-testing-airborne-ebola-robert-wenzel/ and http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/10/20/us-army-withheld-promise-germany-ebola-virus-wouldnt-weaponized/ 

The only intelligent and responsible policy is to stop all commercial flights to and from ebola areas. Health worker volunteers should be transported by military aircraft and should be required to undergo the necessary quarantine before being transported back to the US.

Why does the White House oppose the only responsible and intelligent policy? Why is Congress silent on the issue?

The resistance to a sane policy fosters the suspicions that the government or some conspiracy group intends to use ebola to declare martial law and herd the population or undesirable parts of it, into the FEMA camps that Halliburton was paid to construct (without the public ever being told the reason for the camps).
It is certainly strange that a government involved in long-term wars in the Middle East, the purpose of which is unclear to the public, and in fomenting conflict with both Russia and China, two countries armed with nuclear weapons, would so recklessly create more suspicions among the public of its motives, intentions, and competence.

Democracy requires that the public trust the government. Yet Washington does everything possible to destroy this trust and to present a picture of dysfunctional government with hidden and undeclared agendas.

 Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a former Reagan administration cabinet official who has been an outspoken voice of truth and reason for decades. Dr. Roberts is highly respected and regarded internationally as a source of accurate perspectives and information. So what is Roberts saying about the whole Ebola situation? The article below makes some very important observations that should be considered. Whatever the global powers are up to in regard to the Ebola outbreak, all indications are that our government and others are highly involved with the manipulation of this situation. More and more information is piling up to indicate that the Ebola virus was likely engineered. The power structure is being pushed further into a corner with each passing day, this makes them more dangerous than ever. Even if steps were taken on the ground to curb the spread of the deadly Ebola pathogen, the aerosol spraying programs (geoengineering, SRM, SAG, SAI) could be utilized to distribute engineered pathogens anytime those in power wish. The collective health of the human race has already been horrifically compromised from what we conclusively know they are spraying above our heads (countless lab tests prove this), what might they be spraying that we don’t yet know about? If they are not yet spraying pathogens, what is to stop them from doing this at any point of their choosing? The spraying must be exposed and halted, it’s up to all of us to engage in this battle to expose the truth.

Zombies Are Us: The Walking Dead in the American Police State

Guest Post By John W. Whitehead

Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it’s indistinguishable from the purest paranoia.— Terrence Rafferty, New York Times

Fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

Nowhere is this epidemic of fear and paranoia more aptly mirrored than in the culture’s fascination with zombies, exacerbated by the hit television series The Walking Dead, in which a small group of Americans attempt to survive in a zombie-ridden, post-apocalyptic world where they’re not only fighting off flesh-eating ghouls but cannibalistic humans.

Zombies have experienced such a surge in popularity in recent years that you don’t have to look very far anymore to find them lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc in movie blockbusters such as World War Z, running for their lives in 5K charity races, battling corsets in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even putting government agents through their paces in mock military drills arranged by the Dept. of Defense (DOD) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

We’ve been so hounded in recent years with dire warnings about terrorist attacks, Ebola pandemics, economic collapse, environmental disasters, and militarized police, it’s no wonder millions of Americans have turned to zombie fiction as a means of escapism and a way to “envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports.” As Time magazine reporter James Poniewozik phrases it, the “apocalyptic drama lets us face the end of the world once a week and live.”
Writing for the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty notes:

In the case of zombie fiction, you have to wonder whether our 21st-century fascination with these hungry hordes has something to do with a general anxiety, particularly in the West, about the planet’s dwindling resources: a sense that there are too many people out there, with too many urgent needs, and that eventually these encroaching masses, dimly understood but somehow ominous in their collective appetites, will simply consume us. At this awful, pinched moment of history we look into the future and see a tsunami of want bearing down on us, darkening the sky. The zombie is clearly the right monster for this glum mood, but it’s a little disturbing to think that these nonhuman creatures, with their slack, gaping maws, might be serving as metaphors for actual people—undocumented immigrants, say, or the entire populations of developing nations—whose only offense, in most cases, is that their mouths and bellies demand to be filled.

Here’s the curious thing: while zombies may be the personification of our darkest fears, they embody the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent. Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?
For years now, the government has been carrying out military training drills with zombies as the enemy. In 2011, the DOD created a 31-page instruction manual for how to protect America from a terrorist attack carried out by zombie forces. In 2012, the CDC released a guide for surviving a zombie plague. That was followed by training drills for members of the military, police officers and first responders. As journalist Andrea Peyser reports:

Coinciding with Halloween 2012, a five-day national conference was put on by the HALO Corp. in San Diego for more than 1,000 first responders, military personnel and law enforcement types. It included workshops produced by a Hollywood-affiliated firm in…overcoming a zombie invasion. Actors were made up to look like flesh-chomping monsters. The Department of Homeland Security even paid the $1,000 entry fees for an unknown number of participants…

“Zombie disaster” drills were held in October 2012 and ’13 at California’s Sutter Roseville Medical Center. The exercises allowed medical center staff “to test response to a deadly infectious disease, a mass-casualty event, terrorism event and security procedures”…

[In October 2014], REI outdoor-gear stores in Soho and around the country are to hold free classes in zombie preparedness, which the stores have been providing for about three years.

The zombie exercises appear to be kitschy and fun—government agents running around trying to put down a zombie rebellion—but what if the zombies in the exercises are us, the citizenry, viewed by those in power as mindless, voracious, zombie hordes?
Consider this: the government started playing around with the idea of using zombies as stand-ins for enemy combatants in its training drills right around the time the Army War College issued its 2008 report, warning that an economic crisis in the U.S. could lead to massive civil unrest that would require the military to intervene and restore order.

That same year, it was revealed that the government had amassed more than 8 million names of Americans considered a threat to national security, to be used “by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.” The program’s name, Main Core, refers to the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”

Also in 2008, the Pentagon launched the Minerva Initiative, a $75 million military-driven research project focused on studying social behavior in order to determine how best to cope with mass civil disobedience or uprisings. The Minerva Initiative has funded projects such as “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?” which “conflates peaceful activists with ‘supporters of political violence’ who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on ‘armed militancy’ themselves.”

In 2009, the Dept. of Homeland Security issued its reports on Rightwing and Leftwing Extremism, in which the terms “extremist” and “terrorist” were used interchangeably to describe citizens who were disgruntled or anti-government. Meanwhile, a government campaign was underway to spy on Americans’ mail, email and cell phone communications. Recent reports indicate that the U.S. Postal Service has handled more than 150,000 requests by federal and state law enforcement agencies to monitor Americans’ mail, in addition to photographing every piece of mail sent through the postal system.

Noticing a pattern yet? “We the people” or, more appropriately, “we the zombies” are the enemy.
So when presented with the Defense Department’s battle plan for defeating an army of the walking dead, you might find yourself giggling over the fact that a taxpayer-funded government bureaucrat actually took the time to research and write about vegetarian zombies, evil magic zombies, chicken zombies, space zombies, bio-engineered weaponized zombies, radiation zombies, symbiant-induced zombies, and pathogenic zombies.

However, I would suggest that you take at face value the DOD’s strategy, outlined in “CONOP 8888,” recognizing that in an age of extreme government paranoia, what you’re really perusing is a training manual for the government in how to put down a citizen uprising or at least an uprising of individuals “infected” with dangerous ideas about freedom. Military strategists seized upon the zombie ruse as a way to avoid upsetting the public should the “fictional training scenario” be mistaken for a real plan. Of course, the tactics and difficulties involved are all too real, beginning with martial law.

As the DOD training manual states: “zombies [read: “activists”] are horribly dangerous to all human life and zombie infections have the potential to seriously undermine national security and economic activities that sustain our way of life. Therefore having a population that is not composed of zombies or at risk from their malign influence is vital to U.S. and Allied national interests.”

So how does the military plan to put down a zombie (a.k.a. disgruntled citizen) uprising?
The strategy manual outlines five phases necessary for a counter-offensive: shape, deter, seize initiative, dominate, stabilize and restore civil authority. Here are a few details:

Phase 0 (Shape): Conduct general zombie awareness training. Monitor increased threats (i.e., surveillance). Carry out military drills. Synchronize contingency plans between federal and state agencies. Anticipate and prepare for a breakdown in law and order.

Phase 1 (Deter): Recognize that zombies cannot be deterred or reasoned with. Carry out training drills to discourage other countries from developing or deploying attack zombies and publicly reinforce the government’s ability to combat a zombie threat. Initiate intelligence sharing between federal and state agencies. Assist the Dept. of Homeland Security in identifying or discouraging immigrants from areas where zombie-related diseases originate.

Phase 2 (Seize initiative): Recall all military personal to their duty stations. Fortify all military outposts. Deploy air and ground forces for at least 35 days. Carry out confidence-building measures with nuclear-armed peers such as Russia and China to ensure they do not misinterpret the government’s zombie countermeasures as preparations for war. Establish quarantine zones. Distribute explosion-resistant protective equipment. Place the military on red alert. Begin limited scale military operations to combat zombie threats. Carry out combat operations against zombie populations within the United States that were “previously” U.S. citizens.
Phase 3 (Dominate): Lock down all military bases for 30 days. Shelter all essential government personnel for at least 40 days. Equip all government agents with military protective gear. Issue orders for military to kill all non-human life on sight. Initiate bomber and missile strikes against targeted sources of zombie infection, including the infrastructure. Burn all zombie corpses. Deploy military to lock down the beaches and waterways.

Phase 4 (Stabilize): Send out recon teams to check for remaining threats and survey the status of basic services (water, power, sewage infrastructure, air, and lines of communication). Execute a counter-zombie ISR plan to ID holdout pockets of zombie resistance. Use all military resources to target any remaining regions of zombie holdouts and influence. Continue all actions from the Dominate phase.
Phase 5 (Restore civil authority): Deploy military personnel to assist any surviving civil authorities in disaster zones. Reconstitute combat capabilities at various military bases. Prepare to redeploy military forces to attack surviving zombie holdouts. Restore basic services in disaster areas.
Notice the similarities? Surveillance. Military drills. Awareness training. Militarized police forces. Martial law. What’s amazing is that the government is not being covert about any of this. As I point out in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, it’s all out in the open, for all to see, read and learn from.

If there is any lesson to be learned, it is simply this: whether the threat to national security comes in the form of actual terrorists, imaginary zombies or disgruntled American citizens infected with dangerous ideas about freedom, the government’s response to such threats remains the same: detect, deter and annihilate.
It’s time to wake up, America, before you end up with a bullet to the head—the only proven means of killing a zombie.

Ebola: Question All Basic Assumptions

Guest Post by Jon Rappoport


To understand what the sellers are selling, you have to go back to the beginning of their story.

You have to restrain yourself from buying the beginning, because if you do buy it, uncritically, you’re now on their river, you’re now traveling in their boat.

And even if you jump off later and claim, “They’re lying!”, you’re still holding the suitcase with their first assumptions in it.

At the beginning they say there has been an outbreak in three separate areas of West Africa.

The first part of “outbreak” means: accelerated dying is occurring.

How do you know that’s true? Where are the numbers to confirm that? Where is evidence that shows present deaths are jumping beyond recent past deaths?

The second part of “outbreak” means: the new accelerated deaths in all three geo-areas are linked by the same cause.

Where is the evidence for that?

The diagnostic tests? The antibody and PCR tests, both of which are useless, misleading, irrelevant, and rampant with false-positive results?

Is the evidence the symptoms these victims are showing? General symptoms like fever, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, bleeding, all of which can and do stem from a variety of causes? Of course not.

The third part of “outbreak” means: researchers have found what the link is among all the new deaths—the Ebola virus.

On what basis do they know this? Those useless diagnostic tests? Divining rods? The solemn assurance of the CDC? Quick eyeball diagnosis of every patient with a fever wandering into a clinic in West Africa?

On all counts, the beginning of the story is unproven—and the burden of proof is not on you, it’s on the “experts” making the claims.

Three cops are called to the scene of a death. In the apartment, a man is lying on the floor. He is, in fact, dead.

Upon examination, the cops and a medical examiner find no holes in his body. They find no shell casings, no weapons, no gunshot residue.

They confer. Their conclusion? He was killed at close range by two rounds from a revolver.

The papers and the local news broadcasts carry the story: “A man was shot to death in his apartment by an unknown assailant last night…”

The next day, the cops arrest a schoolteacher who has a revolver locked in the trunk of his car.

A few days later, you’re sitting in a bar watching the news on television. You see video of the schoolteacher’s arraignment on a charge of first-degree murder.

You say, “How do they know he did it?”

The people sitting near you break out into a chorus: “Who else could it be?”

Sixteen years later, while the schoolteacher is sitting on death row awaiting his execution, a lawyer manages to have the victim’s body exhumed.

On re-examination, the coroner finds no evidence of a gunshot wound…but the remains of the body are decayed beyond the point where a definitive judgment can be made.

Oh well, those are the breaks.

Here is what I’m encountering in many quarters. People are saying, or assuming: the CDC and the World Health Organization lie about everything under the sun EXCEPT…when they launch stories about outbreaks. Then they must be telling the truth. The basic beginning of their tale must be true.

In those crucial moments, they never lie.

Really, now. Think about that.

And then think about this: the 2009 “outbreak” called Swine Flu. In that situation, the CDC stopped counting cases in the US, because the overwhelming number of lab tests on diagnosed and likely Swine Flu patients were coming back…with no sign of Swine Flu or any other kind of flu.

So…as a “big lie” strategy, with roughly ten thousand bogus cases of Swine Flu cases on their hands, the CDC suddenly claimed there were 22 MILLION cases of Swine Flu in the US.

That was their “outbreak” story.

And now, when they tell a story about an “outbreak” of a virus called Ebola…well, they must be telling the truth, right?

Egregiously lying THEN means they must be telling the truth NOW, right?

Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Freedom Demands Better People!

Guest Post by Adam Kokesh

Many people, despite our evolved state and position as the dominant species on our little spaceship Earth, live their lives like animals.

We have given a myriad of opportunities made available by the "evolutionary brain explosion" and still, many people CHOOSE (due in part to social conditioning) to use only a fraction of the 10% of our brains we supposedly use.

While it would be arrogant to say that libertarians have ALL the answers, we do have something valuable to share that seems to go in line with the general intellectual approach shared by most of us.
Freedom is simply one conclusion of a rational analysis of the human condition, but it has many implications. It is not simply a political conclusion—that without the force and coercion of government, we will all be better off—it is also a moral code and a higher calling.

The message of freedom is simple: You as a free, beautiful, independent human being, own yourself, and therefor it is wrong to forcibly violate the rights of others.

It would seem we could present this not just as a nice idea that will just so happen to completely upend the social order when embraced, but as a scientific principle: human relationships are better overall for everyone involved by any metric when they are free of violence and coercion.

Hearing people debate this must sound like the flat earth vs round earth arguments. It's funny that despite our intelligence and unique capacity for rational analysis, we still routinely reject science on behalf of our insecurities and fears.

The Opposite of Freedom

The opposite of freedom is slavery—supposedly complete control by others.

Under modern governments, we live a state of semi-slavery.

Governments certainly act like they own their citizens like tax cows. The reason they get away with it is that most people deny or avoid this. Those who simply chafe against control and avoid it often do so with a certain cognitive dissonance because of feelings of guilt imposed by their fellow tax cows demanding that everyone "pay their fair share."

Regardless of how much people avoid taxation, most of us give up or have stolen from us large chunks of our productivity to support governments, but far more is being stolen.

We can all be placed on a scale from zero to autonomous for how we choose to live.

When a child is born, he or she is in a state of zero autonomy, completely dependent and incapable of making decisions far beyond his or her own bodily functions. Most people only partially grow out of this state and maintain a degree of subversion to the authorities of their lives. In a sense, we all do this to some degree to the extent that we allow the emotional manipulations and bullying of others to compromise our respect for our own individual will.

Those of us who embrace the moral message of freedom tend to treat ourselves with more respect.
When you understand the value of your own decision-making capacity, you tend to respect it more. You don't put up with abusive relationships with individuals or groups—a partner who takes advantage of you or a government.

You don't live by the expectations of others, but rather your energies are free to pursue a fully actualized life.
You feel no guilt or shame in seeing your world as it is and molding it to your desires.
You meet your fellows with the same love and respect that you have for yourself.

Those string pullers at the top of the current system would tell you that except for the few elites, humans are incapable of true autonomy, not independence, but spiritual, emotional, and psychological autonomy.
They would tell you that most people were born followers. Sheep. Mindless pack animals. And from looking around us today, they might be right. But you don't have to be one of the elites to decide that you are going to be the alpha of your own life! Your circumstances are irrelevant to the attitude by which you CHOOSE to live your life!

Most of us today live relatively sad, pathetic lives that are planned out for us—in which the relevance of our intent and preferences is insignificant compared to the people who tell us what to eat, what to wear, what to think, how to live, and who to work for.

Alphas emerge to exploit the rest of us, but by and large, the human animal is one that submits to fear and intimidation, and cowers in the face of tyranny.

Your Destiny

While it is tempting to be pessimistic, and today it is all too easy to lose hope—IT IS NOT OUR DESTINY TO LIVE LIKE CATTLE!

The gift of the human consciousness is too much to be squandered. We all have the capacity to be the alphas of our own lives. To say that you should be free, as libertarians would make the case, is to say that you deserve better.

You are a free, beautiful independent human being and you should never let anyone tell you otherwise. To wake up to the message of freedom, to see the light of logic, to understand what it means to BE FREE—is not just a call for a handful of political positions, is not just a set of beliefs, is not a mere box to be checked, IT IS A CALLING TO BE A BETTER PERSON!

As long as we remain as pack animals, we will be restrained by those who would exploit us. As long as we willingly accept the subversion of our own potential, we will remain in such a childlike state of immaturity, uncertainty, and subservience. This is about how you think, how you act, how you treat other people, what you eat, what you buy, who you associate with, and how you appreciate the unique gift that is your own will. The message of freedom demands better people.

Step up.

Adam Kokesh

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The Myth Of The Free Press

Guest Post by Chris Hedges, originally posted at TruthDig blog,

There is more truth about American journalism in the film “Kill the Messenger,” which chronicles the mainstream media’s discrediting of the work of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, than there is in the movie “All the President’s Men,” which celebrates the exploits of the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal.

The mass media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism. They laud and promote the myth of American democracy - even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism. They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia. The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot official propaganda to the masses. The corporations, which own the press, hire journalists willing to be courtiers to the elites, and they promote them as celebrities. These journalistic courtiers, who can earn millions of dollars, are invited into the inner circles of power. They are, as John Ralston Saul writes, hedonists of power.

When Webb, writing in a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News, exposed the Central Intelligence Agency’s complicity in smuggling tons of cocaine for sale into the United States to fund the CIA-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the press turned him into a journalistic leper. And over the generations there is a long list of journalistic lepers, from Ida B. Wells to I.F. Stone to Julian Assange.

The attacks against Webb have been renewed in publications such as The Washington Post since the release of the film earlier this month. These attacks are an act of self-justification. They are an attempt by the mass media to mask the collaboration between themselves and the power elite. The mass media, like the rest of the liberal establishment, seek to wrap themselves in the moral veneer of the fearless pursuit of truth and justice. But to maintain this myth they have to destroy the credibility of journalists such as Webb and Assange who shine a light on the sinister and murderous inner workings of empire, who care more about truth than news.

The country’s major news outlets—including my old employer The New York Times, which wrote that there was “scant proof” of Webb’s contention—functioned as guard dogs for the CIA. Soon after the 1996 exposé appeared, The Washington Post devoted nearly two full pages to attacking Webb’s assertions. The Los Angeles Times ran three separate articles that slammed Webb and his story. It was a seedy, disgusting and shameful chapter in American journalism. But it was hardly unique. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, in the 2004 article “How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb’s Career,” detailed the dynamics of the nationwide smear campaign.

Webb’s newspaper, after printing a mea culpa about the series, cast him out. He was unable to work again as an investigative journalist and, fearful of losing his house, he committed suicide in 2004. We know, in part because of a Senate investigation led by then-Sen. John Kerry, that Webb was right. But truth was never the issue for those who opposed the journalist. Webb exposed the CIA as a bunch of gunrunning, drug-smuggling thugs. He exposed the mass media, which depend on official sources for most of their news and are therefore hostage to those sources, as craven handmaidens of power. He had crossed the line. And he paid for it.

If the CIA was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs into inner-city neighborhoods to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, what did that say about the legitimacy of the vast covert organization? What did it tell us about the so-called war on drugs? What did it tell us about the government’s callousness and indifference to the poor, especially poor people of color at the height of the crack epidemic? What did it say about rogue military operations carried out beyond public scrutiny?
These were questions the power elites, and their courtiers in the press, were determined to silence.

The mass media are plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism and careerism as the academy, labor unions, the arts, the Democratic Party and religious institutions. They cling to the self-serving mantra of impartiality and objectivity to justify their subservience to power. The press writes and speaks—unlike academics that chatter among themselves in arcane jargon like medieval theologians—to be heard and understood by the public. And for this reason the press is more powerful and more closely controlled by the state. It plays an essential role in the dissemination of official propaganda. But to effectively disseminate state propaganda the press must maintain the fiction of independence and integrity. It must hide its true intentions.

The mass media, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for conformity. They impart to readers and viewers their sense of themselves. They tell them who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a variety of techniques, advice and schemes that promise personal and professional success. The mass media, as Wright wrote, exist primarily to help citizens feel they are successful and that they have met their aspirations even if they have not. They use language and images to manipulate and form opinions, not to foster genuine democratic debate and conversation or to open up public space for free political action and public deliberation. We are transformed into passive spectators of power by the mass media, which decide for us what is true and what is untrue, what is legitimate and what is not. Truth is not something we discover. It is decreed by the organs of mass communication.

“The divorce of truth from discourse and action—the instrumentalization of communication—has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda; it has disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed,” James W. Carey wrote in “Communication as Culture.”

Bridging the vast gap between the idealized identities—ones that in a commodity culture revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and power, or at least the illusion of it—and actual identities is the primary function of the mass media. And catering to these idealized identities, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, can be very profitable. We are given not what we need but what we want. The mass media allow us to escape into the enticing world of entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but it is not the primary concern of the mass media. No more than 15 percent of the space in any newspaper is devoted to news; the rest is devoted to a futile quest for self-actualization. The ratio is even more lopsided on the airwaves.

“This,” Mills wrote, “is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.”

At the core of this pseudo-world is the myth that our national institutions, including those of government, the military and finance, are efficient and virtuous, that we can trust them and that their intentions are good. These institutions can be criticized for excesses and abuses, but they cannot be assailed as being hostile to democracy and the common good. They cannot be exposed as criminal enterprises, at least if one hopes to retain a voice in the mass media.

Those who work in the mass media, as I did for two decades, are acutely aware of the collaboration with power and the cynical manipulation of the public by the power elites. It does not mean there is never good journalism and that the subservience to corporate power within the academy always precludes good scholarship, but the internal pressures, hidden from public view, make great journalism and great scholarship very, very difficult. Such work, especially if it is sustained, is usually a career killer. Scholars like Norman Finkelstein and journalists like Webb and Assange who step outside the acceptable parameters of debate and challenge the mythic narrative of power, who question the motives and virtues of established institutions and who name the crimes of empire are always cast out.

The press will attack groups within the power elite only when one faction within the circle of power goes to war with another. When Richard Nixon, who had used illegal and clandestine methods to harass and shut down the underground press as well as persecute anti-war activists and radical black dissidents, went after the Democratic Party he became fair game for the press. His sin was not the abuse of power. He had abused power for a long time against people and groups that did not matter in the eyes of the Establishment. Nixon’s sin was to abuse power against a faction within the power elite itself.
The Watergate scandal, mythologized as evidence of a fearless and independent press, is illustrative of how circumscribed the mass media is when it comes to investigating centers of power.

“History has been kind enough to contrive for us a ‘controlled experiment’ to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened,” Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote in “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.” “By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.”

The righteous thunder of the abolitionists and civil rights preachers, the investigative journalists who enraged Standard Oil and the owners of the Chicago stockyards, the radical theater productions, such as “The Cradle Will Rock,” that imploded the myths peddled by the ruling class and gave a voice to ordinary people, the labor unions that permitted African-Americans, immigrants and working men and women to find dignity and hope, the great public universities that offered the children of immigrants a chance for a first-class education, the New Deal Democrats who understood that a democracy is not safe if it does not give its citizens an acceptable standard of living and protect the state from being hijacked by private power, are no longer part of the American landscape. It was Webb’s misfortune to work in an era when the freedom of the press was as empty a cliché as democracy itself.

“The Cradle Will Rock,” like much of the popular work that came out of the Federal Theatre Project, addressed the concerns of the working class rather than the power elite. And it excoriated the folly of war, greed, corruption and the complicity of liberal institutions, especially the press, in protecting the power elite and ignoring the abuses of capitalism. Mister Mister in the play runs the town like a private corporation.
“I believe newspapers are great mental shapers,” Mister Mister says. “My steel industry is dependent on them really.”

“Just you call the News,” Editor Daily responds. “And we’ll print all the news. From coast to coast, and from border to border.”

Editor Daily and Mister Mister sing:

O the press, the press, the freedom of the press.
They’ll never take away the freedom of the press.
We must be free to say whatever’s on our chest—
with a hey-diddle-dee and ho-nanny-no
for whichever side will pay the best.

“I should like a series on young Larry Foreman,” Mister Mister tells Editor Daily. “Who goes around stormin’ and organizin’ unions.”

“Yes, we’ve heard of him,” Editor Daily tells Mister Mister. “In fact, good word of him. He seems quite popular with workingmen.”

“Find out who he drinks with and talks with and sleeps with. And look up his past till at last you’ve got it on him.”

“But the man is so full of fight, he’s simply dynamite, why it would take an army to tame him,” Editor Daily says.
“Then it shouldn’t be too hard to tame him,” Mister Mister says.

“O the press, the press, the freedom of the press,” the two sing. “You’ve only got to hint whatever’s fit to print; if something’s wrong with it, why then we’ll print to fit. With a he-diddly-dee and aho-nonny-no. For whichever side will pay the best.”

The State Has No Right To Do Anything

  
Guest Post David S. D'Amato

I often hear people make casual remarks like, “Well, the State has a right to collect taxes,” “the State has a right to punish criminals,” or “the State has a right to controls its borders.” Inside, I am always somewhat horrified at how very easily these kinds of assumptions are made, at how obvious the truth of such claims seems to others. Such assumptions are simply a given for most people, not even on the table for debate, no one really speculating about where the State acquired all of these special rights over everyone and seemingly everything.

The only “right” the State could possibly have is the right of conquest, the barbaric notion that might makes right. It could never own what is possesses in any legitimate sense, either acquiring a chattel through peaceful and consensual trade, or land through actual occupancy and use, standards recognized in theory by all libertarians. Defenders of the State give us a glaring example of question begging when they take for granted that their favored institution originated out of contract or agreement as a way to institute law and preserve order. In so assuming, they take as their central premise a hugely controversial factual claim that, when confronted with the historical record, cannot withstand scrutiny. Ostensible utilitarian justifications for the State are no less specious. Statists often claim, for example, that in the absence of government, society would collapse into a brutal, chaotic war of all against all — a condition which we are apparently meant to compare to the sublime order and peace offered us by governments. As Albert Jay Nock once noted,

It seems to be a fond notion with the legalists and authoritarians that the vast majority of mankind would at once begin to thieve and murder and generally misconduct itself if the restraints of law and authority were removed. The anarchist, whose opportunities to view mankind in its natural state are perhaps as good as the legalist’s, regards this belief as devoid of foundation.

Presented with statism’s ridiculous and backward narrative, we must wonder who the starry-eyed utopians really are. After all, the violence and chaos that putatively accompany anarchist societies are purely speculative and hypothetical, whereas the vicious, bloody chaos of the State is well documented in countless volumes of world history for thousands of years. Even if we do not doubt the sincerity of the State’s faithful, we must certainly doubt the faith itself, the credulous trust in the idea that force and compulsion are the best ways to organize human beings.

Statists, moreover, seem always to forget that ultimately governments too are quite necessarily market actors; in forcing us into their coercive, authoritarian schemes, they do not thereby magically suspend the laws of supply and demand, which are as real and immutable as the laws of physics. And since all statists disagree with one another as to which goods and services we ought to regard as being “outside of the market,” best overseen and provided by the bureaucratic, centralized State, we are left to wonder how any statist sets about drawing the line. Today’s authoritarians speak with one voice in their earnest denunciations of the 20th centuries authoritarian regimes, all while never quite enlightening us as to just how much government is too much; divine revelation notwithstanding, we must puzzle over what it is that furnishes them the secrets of how much coercive power a special elite ought to wield over otherwise peaceful, productive society. Whether it’s telling us how many ounces of a soft drink we’re allowed to consume or forbidding us from whitening people’s teeth without special permission, all statists have their pet tyrannies. For the rest of us, it’s largely rather impossible to tell the difference between the sincere but misguided do-gooder authoritarian and the opportunistic, rent-seeking, pressure group authoritarian, for whom public policy is a way to private gain. The intentions behind coercive, rights-violating laws therefore end up being relatively unimportant, especially when compared to the results of such laws. Statists bank on the completely far-fetched and historically untenable belief that when we give a small elite power to make rules for everyone, they will use that power for the welfare of the whole public. Suddenly, human beings are not the violent, selfish brutes they were when we were talking about anarchist societies; no, human beings under the rule of the State are instead almost perfectly righteous and altruistic, free from all the assumptions we ordinarily make about the antisocial flaws of human nature.

Once we begin to see the State as it is — a predatory criminal organization, violently and arbitrarily arrogating to itself the power to make laws for everyone within a given geographical space — we begin also to see the strictly practical problems with such a system. Without any check or restraint on the monopoly power that defines the State, any other social institution competing with that power, the threat of mayhem and bellicosity among human beings is at its most menacing. As a result, contrary to the hollow assertion that we need government to protect us from each other, government itself turns out to be the foremost danger to the prospect of peace and goodwill among men. We anarchists do not comprehend or expect any fundamental change in human nature. We do, however, believe that we can continue to change our social institutions, shaping them to be more closely aligned with the principles of individual dignity, autonomy, and agency. We do not accept that, presented with the historical facts of war, conquest, and destitution, we must simply throw up our hands and concede that these ought to be the dominant, governing forces of all social life. We have modified both our theories and our institutions in the past and have concluded that some are indeed better than others. No longer do we regard women as unequal to men, or human enslavement as a natural and legitimate detail of economic relations (well, most of us anyway). Likewise, anarchists look forward to and work to create changes in the social environment which will bring us closer to the ideal of individual sovereignty and total freedom — even while acknowledging that the absolute, perfect realization of that ideal is not possible.

The fact that we cannot construct a perfect skyscraper, completely without any infinitesimal imperfection or engineering mistake, has never made us think that we ought to halt all progress in the direction of a better skyscraper; the perfect skyscraper, though hypothetical and nonexistent, remains our template. Scientific principles apply no less to questions of politics, society and civilization. The difference seems to repose on the fact that poorly engineered, inferior skyscrapers do not enjoy the self-serving propaganda of courtiers and free riders with something to gain from the status quo. Furthermore, controversies in the engineering sciences do not seem to animate in human beings the same passion as do questions of a political kind. Politics is rather bound up with our feelings about community, right and wrong, war and peace; the truths of these do not seem to be as definite or well-settled as those in the “hard sciences.” But even if political and social truths do not lend themselves as readily to our discovery, this is no reason to think that they don’t in fact exist. We find in nature truths more general and more specific, more conspicuous and more hidden, different types and orders of phenomena, all reflecting truth in their own ways. All the more reason to allow the pluralism and experimentation inherent in anarchism, which free us to discover the truest and the best in social relations organically and without artificial constraints, through a decentralized process of trial and error. Under the concentrated, hierarchical schemes produced by the State, errors are costly and far-reaching, predisposed to creating systemic crises that threaten huge groups of people. Errors under anarchism are not so easily foisted on millions because they do not rely on compelled hierarchical relationships, cannot command lockstep obedience with arbitrary orders. Anarchism is evolutionary more than it is revolutionary, expanding like frozen water in the crack of a rock until that rock, the crumbling old system, finally cracks. As a practice and as a theory, anarchism questions easy assumptions about what it means to be human and how we are supposed to live together as coequal free agents. The State doesn’t have a right to tell you what you can and can’t do — no one does, and no one could. Only individuals have rights, and none of us has the right to rule anyone else.