Showing posts with label Big Brother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Brother. Show all posts

Sunday, September 7, 2008

High-resolution satellite launched in California

This image provided by Vandenberg Air Force Base shows the successful launch of a Delta II, carrying the GeoEye-1 satellite, rocket from Space Launch Complex-2 Saturday Sept. 6, 2008 at Vandenberg Air Force base in Calif. The satellite makers say GeoEye-1 has the highest resolution of any commercial imaging system. It can collect images from orbit with enough detail to show home plate on a baseball diamond. (AP Photo/Air Force Photo/Airman 1st Class Nathaniel Prost)

"The satellite will orbit 423 miles up and circle the Earth more than a dozen times a day. In a single day, it can collect color images of an area the size of New Mexico, or a black-and-white image the size of Texas."

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Britain, US in talks on international criminal database: police

"British security agencies have been in talks with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation over plans for a global database of major criminals and suspected terrorists, a police spokesman told AFP Tuesday."

Big Brother on a global scale.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The American Police State

By Chris Hedges - Oct 29, 2007

A Dallas jury, a week ago, deadlocked in its deliberations and caused a mistrial in the government case against this country’s largest Islamic charity. The action raises a defiant fist on the sinking ship of American democracy.

If we lived in a state where due process and the rule of law could curb the despotism of the Bush administration, this mistrial might be counted a victory. But we do not. The jury may have rejected the federal government’s claim that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development funneled millions of dollars to Middle Eastern terrorists. It may have acquitted Mohammad el-Mezain, the former chairman of the foundation, of virtually all criminal charges related to funding terrorism (the jury deadlocked on one of the 32 charges against el-Mezain), and it may have deadlocked on the charges that had been lodged against four other former leaders of the charity, but don’t be fooled. This mistrial will do nothing to impede the administration’s ongoing contempt for the rule of law. It will do nothing to stop the curtailment of our civil liberties and rights. The grim march toward a police state continues.

Constitutional rights are minor inconveniences, noisome chatter, flies to be batted away on the steady road to despotism. And no one, not the courts, not the press, not the gutless Democratic opposition, not a compliant and passive citizenry hypnotized by tawdry television spectacles and celebrity gossip, seems capable of stopping the process. Those in power know this. We, too, might as well know it.

The Bush administration, which froze the foundation’s finances three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and indicted its officials three years later on charges that they provided funds for the militant group Hamas, has ensured that the foundation and all other Palestinian charities will never reopen in the United States. Any organized support for Palestinians from within the U.S. has been rendered impossible. The goal of the Israeli government and the Bush administration—despite the charade of peace negotiations to be held at Annapolis—is to grind defiant Palestinians into the dirt. Israel, which has plunged the Gaza Strip into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, has now begun to ban fuel supplies and sever electrical service. The severe deprivation, the Israelis hope, will see the overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza and the reinstatement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has become the Marshal Pétain of the Palestinian people.

The Dallas trial—like all of the major terrorism trials conducted by this administration, from the Florida case against the Palestinian activist Dr. Sami al-Arian, which also ended in a mistrial, to the recent decision by a jury in Chicago to acquit two men of charges of financing Hamas—has been a judicial failure. William Neal, a juror in the Dallas trial, told the Associated Press that the case “was strung together with macaroni noodles. There was so little evidence.”

Such trials, however, have been politically expedient. The accusations, true or untrue, serve the aims of the administration. A jury in Tampa, Chicago or Dallas can dismiss the government’s assaults on individual rights, but the draconian restrictions put in place because of the mendacious charges remain firmly implanted within the system. It is the charges, not the facts, which matter.

Dr. al-Arian, who was supposed to have been released and deported in April, is still in a Virginia prison because he will not testify in a separate case before a grand jury. The professor, broken by the long ordeal of his trial and unable to raise another million dollars in legal fees for a retrial, pleaded guilty to a minor charge in the hopes that his persecution would end. It has not. Or take the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who in 2002 was spirited away by Homeland Security from JFK Airport to Syria, where he spent 10 months being tortured in a coffin-like cell. He was, upon his release, exonerated of terrorism. Arar testified before a House panel this month about how he was abducted by the U.S. and interrogated, stripped of his legal rights and tortured. But he couldn’t testify in person. He spoke to the House members on a video link from Canada. He is forbidden by Homeland Security to enter the United States because he allegedly poses a threat to national security.

Those accused of being involved in conspiracies and terrorism plots, as in all police states, become nonpersons. There is no rehabilitation. There is no justice.

"He was never given a hearing nor did the Canadian consulate, his lawyer, or his family know of his fate,” Amnesty International wrote of Arar. “Expulsion in such circumstances, without a fair hearing, and to a country known for regularly torturing their prisoners, violates the U.S. Government’s obligations under international law, specifically the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”

You can almost hear Dick Cheney yawn.

The Bush administration shut down the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development six years ago and froze its assets. There was no hearing or trial. It became a crime for anyone to engage in transactions with the foundation. The administration never produced evidence to support the charges. It did not have any. In the “war on terror,” evidence is unnecessary. An executive order is enough. The foundation sued the government in a federal court in the District of Columbia. Behind closed doors, the government presented secret evidence that the charity had no opportunity to see or rebut. The charity’s case was dismissed.

The government has closed seven Muslim charities in the United States and frozen their assets. Not one of them, or any person associated with them, has been found guilty of financing terrorism. They will remain shut. George W. Bush can tar any organization or individual, here or abroad, as being part of a terrorist conspiracy and by fiat render them powerless. He does not need to make formal charges. He does not need to wait for a trial verdict. Secret evidence, which these court cases have exposed as a sham, is enough. The juries in Tampa, Chicago and Dallas did their duty. They spoke for the rights of citizens. They spoke for the protection of due process and the rule of law. They threw small hurdles in front of the emergent police state. But the abuse rolls on. I fear terrorism. I know it is real. I am sure terrorists will strike again on American soil. But while terrorists can wound and disrupt our democracy, only we can kill it.

Friday, October 19, 2007

German parties blast rash Bush remarks

Press TV News - Oct 19, 2007

German politicians slam the US President's recent remarks on Iran, saying they illustrate the war-mongering policies of the White House.

"Such comments hinder the efforts aimed to find a diplomatic and peaceful solution for Iran's nuclear activities," said Ruprecht polenz, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lower house of Germany's Parliament, in a reference to George W. Bush's recent remarks.

Polenz, who is a member of the ruling Christian Democratic Union, added Thursday that the warmongering comments have been presented in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's trip to Iran.

Germany's Social Democratic Party also issued a statement on Thursday, describing the US president's remarks as 'irresponsible'. A spokesperson for the Party also described US go-to-war rhetoric as detrimental to the measures taken to resolve the issue peacefully.

Another German political party, The Left, said, "By issuing such remarks, Bush seeks to gain more support to pursue his hawkish policies against Iran."

In a press conference held on Wednesday, Bush said Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons would lead to World War III. He didn't provide any evidence for his claims.

"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing the Iranians from gaining the means to make nuclear weapons," he said.

Tehran insists that its nuclear program is solely aimed at peaceful purposes. The IAEA has declared that there is no evidence to prove Iran is developing nuclear weaponry.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

The sinister truth about what they do with our children's fingerprints

by SUE REID - Oct 11, 2007

Fionna Elliot does not look like a firebrand. A hard-working mother, she has never had the time or the interest to dabble in politics.

Yet when the local primary school wrote to her saying they were about to fingerprint her son Alexander, eight, and daughter Jessica, only six, she was furious.

The 29-year-old housewife from Balby in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, saw it as a dangerous step towards a Big Brother society.

She didn't want her children fingerprinted and she marched off to Waverley School, five minutes from the family's home, to protest to the headmistress.

"The school said they were taking the thumb print of every child," Fiona explained at her neat, semi-detached home this week.

"The new electronic mapping system would allow children to borrow books from the library.

"The headmistress said it would be exciting for the pupils and help them develop a love of books and reading."

Each child's fingerprint would replace their library card.

Placing their fingerprint on a scanner would open their computer file with records of the books they had borrowed.

The argument is that this would dramatically simplify record-keeping.

But Fiona Elliott is not prepared to accept it.

"I told the headmistress that the biometric data could easily be stolen by identity thieves or used by the State for some dubious purpose," she says.

"My children are not terrorists or criminals and their fingerprints should not be collected at such a young age."

If some choose to write this off as alarmist, she doesn't care.

For she is one of many parents appalled by what they see as another deeply worrying inroad by the State into our personal liberty.

Britain is already the most snooped-on society in the world.

It has more than a fifth of the world's CCTV cameras.

One day all our NHS records may be on a national computer accessible by thousands of health workers.

Ministers have suggested that every British subject should have their DNA placed on a national database.

And already, the State has the DNA records of nearly a million children, some as young as five.

Now the Government is actively encouraging cash-strapped schools - short of teachers, sports facilities and even books - to spend £20,000 or more on fingerprinting systems.

In the short time since the practice began unannounced in 2001, nearly 6,000 pupils have had their 'dabs' taken throughout the country.

Every week another 20 schools join the list.

So concerned are parents that, backed by academics and experts on privacy, they have launched a campaign against the fingerprinting of children in schools.

The parents say the fingerprinting is 'softening up' children to prepare them for the national introduction of ID cards and to encourage them to hand over precious biometric details without a second thought.

They point out that no other country in Europe routinely fingerprints children and that even communist China has abandoned plans for fingerprinting school pupils because it breaches human rights.

They quote the Minister for Schools and Learning, Jim Knight, who this summer admitted that the police can simply help themselves to the children's fingerprints if they are trying to solve a crime.

How many others, the parents ask, will have access to the fingerprint databases?

But those schools that have introduced the practice say there is nothing to worry about.

The data, unique to every pupil, will never be stolen or spied on, they argue.

This is simply a safe, easy and fun way for the children to take home library books or buy lunch at the school canteen. It does away with pieces of paper and dinner vouchers.

It saves time.

Parents are unconvinced. Some, among them a Suffolk filmmaker called Jonathan Adams, are considering legal action to stop schools in their tracks.

"Litigation may be the only way forward," he says.

"We fear they are in breach of the Human Rights Act, the Data Protection Act and the European Commission laws that safeguard the child.

"We have sought initial advice from lawyers.

"If we won, the individual schools would have to pay a hefty price for ignoring parents' wishes.

"Many have introduced the fingerprinting of pupils without even asking permission from families."

He adds: "The law says the collection of personal biometric data must be proportionate to the issue for which it is being used.

"How can it be proportionate to fingerprint a child so he can borrow a library book or order a hot lunch?

"The other question is what is happening to the fingerprints after the child leaves the school.

"The schools insist the data is wiped from the system.

"But you can't just press the delete button.

"It has to be professionally cleansed and none of the teachers seem to know that."

Mr Adams's concern is similar to many others heard by the Mail during an investigation into the growth of fingerprinting in schools, which was sparked when a reader wrote in with an alarming tale.

She said 11-year- old children were being told to place their thumbs in a biometric mapping machine at a school in Carmarthenshire, Wales.

When parents objected and began to ask questions of the teachers, they were told that children could not use the library if they did not use the mapping system and the permission of parents was not needed anyway.

Furthermore, the teachers insisted that the fingerprint data would be absolutely safe in the school system.

But just how secure is the data from abuse? The schools claim that encrypting technology makes it completely inaccessible to outsiders.

When a child places his thumb or finger on the electronic mapping pad which scans his print, it is transformed into what is called an unintelligible algorithm.

This is a string of numbers, stored on a biometric template, which is held as a code for the child's actual fingerprint.

Crucially, the schools, the education authorities and the Government say it is very difficult to convert this code back to the original thumb or fingerprint.

But not impossible.

So if the right computer geek gets hold of the code for a child's fingerprint, he should be able to create the original fingerprint from it.

So what are the dangers if a child's finger or thumb print is recreated by a hacker?

The simple answer is identity theft. Biometric information such as fingerprints cannot be changed like a PIN number, which is why, in the future, they will be used to authenticate passports or bank accounts.

The print of a seven-year-old boy, for instance, could be pinched from a school computer and then sold to someone who wanted to have the fake identity of a British citizen.

The boy grows up and, at 19, tries to open a bank account.

But he is told he already has one and he is in the red so the answer is no.

At 22, he applies for a mortgage only to be refused because he already has a 20-year loan.

At the register office he asks for a marriage licence, but then finds he already has a wife.

The identity thief has been there first.

Even more perturbing, perhaps, is the potential for mix-ups between innocent people and criminals - for the police, the security services and governments all over the world use such coded algorithms to keep the fingerprints of criminals.

As one IT security consultant in Britain, Brian Drury, said recently: "If a child has never touched a fingerprint scanner, there is zero probability of being incorrectly investigated for a crime.

"Once a child has touched a scanner they will be at the mercy of the algorithm [stored in the school computer] for the rest of their lives."

It is these issues that worry the parents. Jonathan Adams explains how his son started secondary school in Hadley, Suffolk, a year ago.

Within a week he had been fingerprinted.

"It turned out that the school had been using biometric fingerprinting for five years," says Mr Adams.

"They have never considered asking the parents for permission.

"When I objected to what had happened to my son, they sent out a consent form saying it was all fine and dandy and if you want to be awkward you can say no.

"In theory my son's fingerprints have now been removed from the system. But these are ordinary computers.

"They are networked with other schools, they are linked with the local authority, and in turn they are connected with the wider internet.

"I know about IT. Any geek in a backroom with cutting-edge software or hardware can get in to copy the biometric data of any child or all of them."

One of the fiercest campaigners against child fingerprinting is David Clouter.

He has set up a website called Leave Them Kids Alone which is pressing schools to ask permission-from parents before they take the biometric details of pupils.

The businessman acted after his 11-year-old daughter announced one evening that her school, St Matthews in Cambridge, was planning to use fingerprint scans instead of library cards.

David and his wife Katarzyna didn't believe it.

They found the letter confirming the new library system in their daughter Marysia's bag - and discovered they had no say in the matter of whether or not the system was introduced.

"Schools send out consent slips for just about anything, from allowing popcorn during cinema trips to whether we can take pictures of the school play at the end of term," Mr Clouter says, "but they didn't plan to ask the parents about taking their children's fingerprints."

Up to now, the Government has refused to say if the fingerprinting of children is legal and this is what parents may now test in the courts.

Roberta Smart is a housewife and mother of two girls, Kelsey, aged nine, and Harley, six.

They go to a primary school in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, which has introduced a thumb scanner so children can use the library.

She and her partner, Alistair, have written to the school forbidding their daughters' participation.

"I believe that this is part of a Government plan to soften up children for ID cards,' says Roberta, who is reading for a university degree.

"It is grooming the pupils at a very young age to accept that taking their personal biometric details and storing them on computers is normal.

"The school says it is doing nothing wrong and there is nothing to hide. But we are moving closer and closer to a Big Brother State.

"What could a child's fingerprints be used for in ten years' time?"

Her views are shared by Dr Sandra Leaton Gray, director of studies in sociology of education at Homerton College, Cambridge University.

She believes the fingerprinting is dangerous.

"Children are being encouraged to become compliant and passive about giving out their biometric details," she says.

"Essentially, they are being softened up for later life.

"People mix up everyday ID, such as drivers' licences, with this kind of information. It is very different.

"Some of the companies supplying the finger mapping systems in our schools have connections with the American intelligence services and military operating at Guantanamo Bay and should not be allowed access to our pupils."

Professor Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University professor and expert on privacy, agrees.

He told the Mail this week: "Britain is out of line with the rest of Europe, where the fingerprinting of schoolchildren does not happen.

"It is a slippery slope. Certainly, the pupils are being softened up and led to believe that giving their personal biometric data to the authorities is normal behaviour."

Few are more sure of that than Fiona Elliott, the mother of Alexander and Jessica in Doncaster.

She is just relieved that her children have escaped being fingerprinted by a whisker.

"Our primary school's motto is "Living, Learning and Laughing Together",' she said ruefully this week.

"Yet this is the same place that they tried to fingerprint my son and daughter. How can that be right?"

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Overseas US Travelers "Under Watch"


The Bush administration is compiling electronic records on the travel habits of million of Americans travelling overseas.

The Bush administration is compiling electronic records on the travel habits of million of Americans travelling overseas, retaining data on whom they associate or plan to stay with, the personal items they carry and even the books they read, reported the Washington Post on Saturday, September 22, citing documents obtained by civil liberties advocates.

The Post said that the travel records are being collected through border points, airlines and commercial reservation systems.

The records, which are analyzed by the Department of Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System, include information and notes taken during secondary screenings of travelers.

They include "passenger name record" (PNR), which are provided to airlines and other companies when reservations are made.

The PNR includes names, addresses and credit-card information, telephone and e-mail contact details, itineraries, hotel and rental car reservations, and even the type of bed requested in a hotel.

The personal travel records are stored for as long as 15 years, said the American daily.

Former DHS officials told the Post said that the data retention has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002.

Officials claim that the records are part of efforts to help border officials to track down potential terrorists.

Details of the data retention surfaced after civil liberties activists requested copies of official records on their own travel.

The records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of the advocates carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf.

Ever since 9/11, the Bush administration has been spying on Americans and tapping into the country's main communication networks without court warrants.

Surveillance

Civil liberties advocates blasted the Bush administration for intruding into the lives of ordinary people.

"The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society," said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco.

Gilmore said the Bush administration "may be doing it with the best or worst of intentions".

". . . But the job of building a surveillance database and populating it with information about us is happening largely without our awareness and without our consent."

Gilmore's travel records included a note from a Customs and Border Patrol officer that he carried the marijuana-related book during a trip abroad.

"My first reaction was I kind of expected it," he said. "My second reaction was, that's illegal."

Civil liberties activists say that the data retention violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related to Americans' exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate, according to the report.

Invasive

Edward Hasbrouck, a civil liberties activist, said his file contained coding that reflected his plan to fly with another individual.

Though Hasbrouck did not fly with that person, the other passenger's name remained in the record.

"The Automated Targeting System is the largest system of government dossiers of individual Americans' personal activities that the government has ever created," said Hasbrouck, who was a travel agent for more than 15 years.

He said that travel records are among the most potentially invasive of records because they can suggest links.

"If you sat next to someone once, that's a coincidence. If you sat next to them twice, that's a relationship," he said.

Ann Harrison, the communications director for a technology firm in Silicon Valley, was among those that their personal files were obtained by US authorities.

"It was surprising that they were gathering so much information without my knowledge on my travel activities,'' said Harrison, whose record included data on her race and on a European flight that did not begin or end in the US or connect to a US-bound flight.

"It was distressing to me that this information was being gathered in violation of the law."

The records of Harrison's brother, James, included information about another sister's phone number in Tokyo as an emergency contact.

"So my sister's phone number ends up being in a government database," said James, director of the Identity Project.

"This is a lot more than just saying who you are, your date of birth."

Monday, July 30, 2007

HELPLESSLY HOPELESS?

TV Mind Control

by Peter Chamberlin - July 30, 2007

For many years, American society has lived under a state of siege. We have constantly been bombarded, every minute of every day, with psychological conditioning that is meant to lead us into a state of hopelessness. We are addicted to the source of this Pavlovian conditioning - television. This medium serves as an extension of the government propaganda apparatus, pumping-up the fear and anxiety levels, until the people become numb, convinced that we are helpless in a roiling sea of great dangers. We are literally being scared to death, so that we will give-up, roll over, and play dead. They want our surrender to be assured before they take the final steps to murder our democratic-Republic.

The people don't understand that they are the source of all power within this Republic. Our task, as we fight those who seek to force nuclear war against Iran upon us, is to remind the people of their power and their freedom to reject another illegal, immoral war, to be fought on behalf of Israel. We must find ways to overcome the inertia of hopelessness, by replacing it with reasonable hope. It is up to the American people to enforce the common will to avoid this war, by restraining the monsters who push to unleash it. All of the war plans that are being carried out, and those that are yet to be carried out, since the decisive November elections, stand in direct contradiction of that common will. Our Constitutional rights have been violated by the leaders of our government, who have taken oaths to defend that same Constitution. Our only salvation lies in protecting the Constitution from those who seek to destroy it. The path to preserving freedom is spelled-out clearly within its living words. When free people stand together and speak with one voice, then government has no choice, but to listen.

It is illogical, that the majority of American people don't want to be warned about the coming American economic collapse, or the imminent Muslim genocide that will most assuredly usher the whole calamity in. But logic has nothing to do with it. It is all about fear and denial, with denial being understood as a psychological defense mechanism that that people use to isolate themselves from disturbing conditions. People, who are "in denial," disavow knowledge of painful realities, in order to reduce anxiety/fear levels, sometimes to the detriment of their own health.

Our government has developed Psychological Operations (PSYOPs), which are based on manipulating populations who are in full-blown denial. In addition to these ongoing programs of conditioning and disseminating disinformation, Internet reports have revealed that the Department of Defense is developing a simulated "Parallel Earth," http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/ to help them to fine-tune their plan. Sentient World Simulation (SWS) bases its AI "thinking" on the psychological theory of "learned hopelessness."

According to researcher Marlena Plavšić, http://www.see-ran.org/expanded/?id=00069 "learned helplessness" refers to the passive acceptance of unpleasant situations, nullifying the natural reactions, which normally cause attempts to escape or to control the situation. "Learned hopelessness" is a state of deep depression, brought on by prolonged immersion in a reality of learned helplessness.

"A person with learned helplessness easily gives in her/his goals if s/he failed few times in achieving them. Such persons show apathy, no motivation, depression and pessimism. The intensity of learned helplessness depends on what a person holds responsible for the helplessness: she herself/he himself or the outside factors...the victims believe they are helpless. Many concentration camp prisoners die of helplessness. They are told and convinced that the environment, i.e. the guards have absolute power over them. Bruno Bettleheim, psychologist and a survived nazi prisoner from the WW II says that that the concentration camp prisoners became 'walking corpses' in the moment when they gave up trying to influence what was happening to them."

The SWS computer simulation allows military leaders to "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors." Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using it to simulate crises. They try to anticipate how stressed-out populations can be manipulated by increasing the fear and anxiety-induced helplessness, through the introduction of panic-causing events, like earthquakes, tsunamis and terrorist attacks. Sound familiar, to anyone? Sounds like the fear-mongering basis of the whole "war on terror," doesn't it?

So, the Dept. of Defense is using computer modeling to learn how to manipulate people, especially the American people, who have been so debilitated by fear that they have become as sheep, "sheeple." We must assume that the experience amassed by the CIA mind control experiments (that have been revealed in the "Family Jewels") during the Vietnam war have been assimilated into this research, as well as that gained by their manipulations of democratic elections around the world. This is the latest manifestation of Admiral John Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness (TIA)" project, which was supposedly terminated by Congress. Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. and the Army's Information Awareness Center at Fort Belvoir, Va., which was also home to the Army's "Able Danger" program, which identified 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta more than a year before the attacks. The NSA is now at the center of a political firestorm over President Bush's program to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens. Poindexter conceived of TIA in part, because of his frustration over the lack of such powerful tools, when he was national security chief for Reagan.

Here we see another covert op that has been designed by another key player in "Iran/Contra," just as Ollie North drew-up the first "Continuity Of Government" plans when he worked at FEMA and the "Reg 84 program" of civilian concentration camps that he inadvertently revealed under cross-examination by Congress. Does anyone think it coincidence that names from this secretive group of law-breaking renegades keeps coming up in connection with our darkest hours, or whenever a "black ops" is exposed (or a president needs to be dealt with)? You will read their names whenever you examine the darkest hours of modern history, from the "Bay of Pigs," to the JFK assassination, to the secret war in Laos, to "Watergate," to the Iran "hostage rescue" fiasco, to Iran/Contra, to the Monica Lewinski affair (Linda Tripp was Richard Secord's personal secretary and held a GS-16 federal job rating herself), http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/07/connections-to-911-part-three-oceans.html to the secret arms/drugs pipeline that operates from Pakistan to "the Stans." Wherever the "secret government" rears its ugly head, many of these names will be associated with it. If it wasn't for the mistakes made by the secret government operatives during the illegal war on Nicaragua and the ensuing political firestorm, we would probably have no idea today of the depth of their penetration into our legitimate government.

So how do we nullify the ongoing plans of the "secret government" to finalize the destruction of democracy in America, that are characterized by the "national emergency" plans, secretive executive orders and law-nullifying "signing statements"? We must first adopt a "holistic approach" to our ongoing efforts to educate the sleeping American majority, whereby we seek to simplify the story, without omitting too many facets of the secret government PSY-OPS that are being deployed against us. We must work to simply the narrative that we will employ to create an awareness of our dilemma, to awaken the sleeping American body politic. Our second task must be to adapt this common narrative to our own understanding of psychological principles, in order to counter the effects of "learned hopelessness."

The people must be made aware of their own unique power to effect political change, restoring a sense of optimism in our Constitutional government, treating the pandemic of hopelessness with a healthy dose of renewed hope. Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman, the author of "Learned Optimism," http://www.eqtoday.com/optimism/seligman.html claims that "we can choose how we think; about ourselves and our coping strategies, in the first place." His advice for overcoming pessimism is "not to ruminate about what happened (or in our case, what is about to happen), but to do something pleasurable that will distract the thoughts from the troubles." Perhaps the sheer pleasure of standing side-by-side with other like-minded Americans, releasing all the repressed feelings and hopelessness in a great expression of resistance to the evil that looms before us would prove cathartic for us all. Standing up to a relentless bully, with others who have also been bullied, often proves to be a healing experience.

We see in the character of George Bush many of the characteristics of "the serial bully." http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm This has been his "m. o." throughout all of his foreign and domestic policies, as it was throughout his brutal career as governor of Texas. His bullying tactics, combined with Cheney's devious scheming have been merged with the psycho/political science of fear-mongering, that has been perfected by the dark forces of the secret government over many years. The concept of "false flag operations" fits in nicely with the demonic form of politics/government practiced by this government.

The pieces are falling into place, so that we may actually be getting very close to constructing an accurate narrative of the past six years. We know that Al Qaida and the CIA shared a long and sordid history. On 9/11 the terrorist attacks were carried out with the help of, as yet, unnamed military experts, and coordinated into ongoing US war games that were simulating the same attacks, at the exact same time. We do know that American air defenses were not called into action to defend Washington and New York, and that during the attacks many unexplained "coincidences" occurred, among them was a coded warning against Air Force One, over top secret channels. The great unknown at this point is the dividing line between our legitimate government and the shadowy secret government, or at least the "CIA within the CIA" that was mentioned during the Iran/contra hearings. According to revelations of Congressman Charlie Wilson ("Charlie Wilson's War"), one rogue former agent, Ed Wilson, (who is spending the rest of his life in the Pennsylvania State Prison system, for selling explosives to Gaddafi) told Nicaraguan dictator Somoza that he could mobilize a "one-thousand-man army of former CIA operatives...(to) crush the Sandinistas." Was this rogue network involved in 9/11? If so, were they acting on their own, or were there other traitors involved from within the government itself?

We do know for certain that the attacks and the accompanying campaign of fear were used to capitalize on the imperialistic opportunities provided by them. We know for certain that the illegal aggression against Iraq and the coming nuclear aggression against Iran have nothing to do with retaliation for the attacks and everything to do with seizing the oil and gas fields of central Asia. We also know full well that our weakened national and global economies cannot bear the burden of the hyper-inflation of oil prices that the planned assault on Iran will surely bring with it. Cold indifferent Americans, who could care less that a million or more Iranians and other Muslims are about to be incinerated, will not be able to ignore the personal suffering that will come with the impending mega-crisis, if they are made to see the price tag of economic collapse that will come with it.

Our task is to overcome administration attempts to spread fear and anxiety amongst the people, a key factor in their calculating quest to obtain the ultimate dictatorial powers that they continually strive for. If enough people understood the truth about the unintended consequences of this next illegal war and the mountain of evidence which confirms these charges, then no force on earth could restrain them from taking to the streets, to exercise their first amendment rights to peacefully express their "righteous indignation" at the national travesty that is known as the Bush Administration.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

America’s Tomorrow, Burden on Those Yet to Come










by Manuel Valenzuela - July 26, 2007

Throughout human history certain patterns continue repeating themselves over and over again, becoming, if careful attention is paid to study them, a direct harbinger to what tomorrow’s cultures and societies will be like. The inevitability of what a future generation’s destiny will become is oftentimes discernable from the accumulated sins of the fathers that came before as well as those of the grandfathers that no longer exist, over years accruing and building upon each other until the future becomes the unstoppable rollercoaster birthed from the damage that was done in the past.

Tomorrow’s fate follows the path of the slow to evolve human condition and of our raw animalistic emotions and psychologies that have for millennia remained unchanged, following the same direction and trends, the same inability to change, though multiplied by advanced technologies, societal complexity, environmental stresses and increases in populations. It can be read buried inside the forgotten writings of historians and in the investigations of anthropologists, for the patterns endemic to our existence are bountiful, traversing oceans and continents, sparing no corner of human habitation, prevalent to all peoples and all times.

What we will become can be analyzed by studying the research of evolutionary psychologists and that of modern day zoologists. The patterns of our descendants can be deciphered examining the perpetual hierarchy of castes and the habitual social engineering of entire groups demonizing humankind for tens of thousands of years. It can be foretold by the never ending rule of peasants by the Establishment, the exploitation of the masses by the elite and by the willing, seemingly masochistic subservience of the many to the will of the few, as if authoritarian systems of governance are inbred into the human condition, making us mammals thriving on the suffering and heartache ingrained with being governed by tyrants and despots.

Human history, both biological and of civilization, – with its massive amounts of evidence left behind, accumulated and now known – does not lie, telling us the human condition has been a constant throughout time, following the psychologies, behaviors, emotions, culture, needs, wants and instincts that have walked with us since the genesis of humankind. Through the study of the past and of ourselves, therefore, our future can be deciphered and better understood. For what is the future but days yet to come built atop the accumulated ruins of the past, its lessons and errors and triumphs forgotten? What is the future but the heavy burden left behind by past generations whose complicity or failure to act passes on to those young or not yet born? What is the future but the accumulated knowledge of past civilizations imprisoned and silenced by our inability to know who and what we truly are, our denial and ego becoming the demons condemning us to perpetual years of unnecessary turmoil?

The future has yet to arrive, of course, its destiny having not yet been sealed in stone, but what is certain is that there exists a perpetual belief among humankind, in this modern age of greed, selfishness and comfort, that the problems or errors or sins of the present can be ignored and inherited to those yet to take the reigns of society. Every generation, it seems, places upon the next the heavy weight of a society’s ills, those hidden secrets we all know about but would rather not confront, in the misplaced assumption that the future will invariably be better equipped to confront the maladies of the past visiting the innocence of the future.

In this way, the present can relinquish the guilt of what they have endowed to the future, enabling selfish minds to return to their comfortable existence, continuing on the errors of their ways, thereby condemning tomorrow for the short-term satisfaction of today. Built upon the foundations of those now ash and dust, themselves leaving behind heaps of unresolved troubles, and continuing with those now made producers, consumers, serfs and sheeple, the sins, errors, gluttonous stupor and indifference of yesterday and today gather momentum, building a colossal wall, brick of indifference built atop brick of indifference, making blind the present, hindering views of the horizon, even as their behavior degenerates further and even as their actions further indebt America’s tomorrow.

Ultimately, the weight of burdens and ills left behind by the past and present becomes an unbearable responsibility for those yet innocent and unborn who are placed in the indelible position of having to somehow make right what has for years been made wrong. The accumulation of past errors, indifference and acquiescence becomes so heavy, containing so much volume and momentum, that inevitably the dam containing and hiding the indifferences of times past breaks, flooding tomorrow with an unfixed and untreatable destiny. As such, one day in the not too distant future the remnants of times past will arrive to overtake our achievements and triumphs and virtues, swallowing our children with the inherited affliction not of their own making. The vicious cycle will continue, inevitably leading humankind to the precipice of its own destruction.

Facilitator of America’s Tomorrow

If America’s today is any indication of how America’s tomorrow will develop, the past and present must be scrutinized, and understood, for in exploring the sins and errors and tribulations and events of days preceding our own time we can peer directly into, as far as we can go, into America’s tomorrow, trying to understand the course our nation is headed towards. The patterns of history are omnipotent, never invisible or clandestine, waiting eagerly on the periphery for us to wake up and hear the trumpets signaling and warning us to the troubles waiting America’s tomorrow.

America’s tomorrow will arrive like a thunderbolt created during an ominous storm of fear and psychological fragility, striking without warning, its concussion reverberating throughout the land. An attack by the enemy will be declared, its images aired repetitiously by the corporatist media, unleashing wave after wave of human emotion and tragedy for all of us to absorb. The attack will be horrific, a new Pearl Harbor reincarnated, devastating lives and infrastructure, its severity magnified a million-fold by the instruments of propaganda, the tools of power releasing a hypnotizing cocktail of fear, hatred and xenophobia amongst the citizenry.

Tens of millions of people will instantly become, once again, the marching army of drones and automatons for those in power, engendering legions of “good Americans,” their minds under the spell of human wickedness, ready to sacrifice their blood, children, treasure and freedom in the name of security, acting on animal instinct, looking at government for protection, willingly enslaving themselves to the dictates of criminals and murderers. Calls for vengeance abroad and greater security in the fatherland will emanate from our monitors, becoming the calls to prayer listened to by the faithful.

Under the pretext of securing the homeland from the terrorists wanting to destroy us for our cherished freedoms and democracy, the police state will be ushered in during the quiet hours of citizen fear and shock, blindly approved by the people themselves, preferring the modes of totalitarianism to being woken from their gluttony-filled, comfort-laden, fiction-living bubble. In the darkness of America’s chaotic nights the spot lights of draconian measures will be introduced, and the America of yesteryear’s dreams will abruptly vanish into the reality of America’s tomorrow.

It will all be a smoking mirror, of course, stirring the masses through the chimera of terrorism, placing in our own hands the guillotine used to self-decapitate our rights and freedoms, sacrificing liberty for so-called security, the futures of our children for so-called protection. Used to justify total corporatist domination over our lives, and our society, an attack upon an American city will be but the latest stage in our acrimonious and gradual descent into fascism. For the road we have decided to take, so tempting in its comfort and lavishness, yet so corrosive in its birth of ignorance and docility, has inevitably led to the rise of the corporate world, a Leviathan managed by the Establishment, over the years having grown all-powerful, its fangs deeply entrenched in the mechanisms used to create, alter and dominate society and culture.

Our eyes and ears will be unable to understand or see the ramifications of a society allowed to enter the black hole of today’s mutated capitalism. Years in the making, capitalism’s lifespan has reached the point of regression and perversion, where its apex, that greatest bell curve of exploitation, inequality and addiction to power, coincides with the compromising nature upon the human condition, creating that period of decline where its advantages are severely outweighed by its demons. After decades becoming indifferent and unattached to the gradual mutation of capitalism from beacon of hope to unregulated manipulator of human nature, allowing it to reach its most corrosive stage in its cycle, today we find that we are reaping what we have sowed.

The methodical rise of the corporate Leviathan, controlled by the vices of greed and addiction to power, its wealth and power unmatched and unchallenged, concerned only for revenue and sales, stock price and dividend yield, putting profit over people, seeing 300 million Americans only as producers and consumers, not human beings, and thinking of democracy more as a hindrance rather than a blessing, has invariably resulted in the total dominance of governance by an Establishment intent on expanding its control and power over American society.

The last few decades have seen the accumulated wealth of the few at the top grow exponentially, reaching astronomical proportions. At the root of this manifestation has been the exploitation of the middle and working classes along with the pillage of their wages, creating an unbalanced redistribution of resources in favor of the rich. These castes have, over the years, been made to subsist on the crumbs, bones and scraps thrown them by the ruling elite, forced to survive by purchasing the same products they make or sell at work, using up their slave wages for food and survival, forced to pay tribute to their rulers through high taxes.

Behind today’s degenerative and unfettered capitalism – an economic system simply embarking on the next step in its lifecycle – stands the inability of man, no matter what position he stands in, to sever highly animalistic emotions, passions, wants and needs away from the mechanisms of modern economic forms of governance. The rewards spawned by capitalism to the few at the top, as satisfying as any euphoria, yet as addicting as the most compulsive drug, compromise and indeed multiply the primitive, mammalian urges existing inside us, granting sustenance to the demons of human nature and making of man a most dangerous entity.

Inside the minds of the luckiest and wealthiest among us, those we would call the elite, the Establishment, the capitalists and the rich, these demons grow unabatedly with the continued accumulation of capital, creating a circle of degeneration, making addicts to power, wealth and control the same people already possessing them, those with the ability and means to keep pursuing and expanding their wealth at the expense of the easily exploitable masses. For absolute power corrupts absolutely and the human condition has yet to evolve the mechanisms to control itself both in the presence of gluttony or once trapped inside the addictions created by the spoils of capitalism.

In a vicious cycle of capitalistic greed, those having much devote their lives to amassing more, never satisfied with the treasure they already possess, like a wolf gorging on the spoils of the kill, becoming blind to the addiction their lust to the Almighty dollar has created. In their quest for wealth and power, therefore, they will stop at nothing in order to achieve their goals, exploiting and subjugating the masses, manipulating and enslaving us, commandeering the instruments by which to control society, decimating the environment, steering us directly towards the gates of corporatism.

The few at the top, mostly products of inheritance, nepotism and born wealth, over the years inbred and diluted, lost of ability and talent, living off the laurels of ancestors, forever spoon-fed and pampered, far removed from their talented patriarchs and the realm of reality, long since weaned from the ways or lives of the rest of us and insulated by the bubble that wealth inflates, have never experienced the struggle of the masses, nor the reality of life to billions. Instead, isolated and protected do they live, their vast empires designed to enrich them through the slave labor that social engineering manufactures. Paying slave wages, exploiting the lives, energy, blood, sweat and tears of billions, their revenues and profits skyrocket, their lives becoming ever more luxurious, gluttony permeating every moment of their existence. The addiction to what they have cannot be controlled, or extinguished, and so, the exploitation of their workers continues, enabling the ever-widening gap between the rich and the rest of us.

Yet even their wealth and power cannot halt the possession over the human mind that the addiction to greed, love of the Almighty Dollar and the ingrained demons of human nature that are unleashed by capitalism create. Because weather rich or poor, from suburban haven or urban reservation, the fact remains that our brains remain the same, our behaviors perhaps more refined in the former, less educated in the latter, yet still human, all too human, both primate and mammalian, subject to the same forces of evolution, the same animal behaviors, human psychologies and vulnerabilities of consciousness and thus susceptible to the same evils that capitalism helps spawn.

The ruling elite have long since lost any attachment to the masses, or any empathy to the plight of the less fortunate. They live cocooned in their aristocracy, unable to comprehend the life of normalcy, possessing only the drive to further the interests of their own kind. They have become slave drivers, degenerate capitalists, thriving at the expense of others, depending on lower caste systems for their workers, pushing forward the buttons of social engineering to create the next generation of their slaves, slashing education, making more automatons, exacerbating poverty, cutting social services, implementing insurmountable barriers to entry and multiple incentives for failure. They have achieved their successes through the corporation, over the years having become their lifeblood, allowing them greater control over America.

The corporation has become the demon of the modern age, becoming, to 21st century humanity, what totalitarian regimes were to the 20th, a threat allowed to grow and prosper, slowly gaining power and influence, becoming wealthier than entire nations, allowed to control and manipulate the population, swallowing whole the branches of government, becoming overlord of Earth, master of the masses. It is the corporation, allowed to develop through debauched capitalism and the power of the Establishment, through our indifference and failure to act, which has accelerated the dastardly stage of degenerate capitalism we are immersed in today. It is the corporation, and the people that control it, that has become the greatest threat to the continued survival of humankind.

Yet the Leviathan is allowed to continue expanding its wealth, power and control. Out of the top 100 economies in the world, 51 are corporations, their GDP surpassing that of many underdeveloped nations. It is destroying entire societies and cultures, usurping governments into its den of servitude, collapsing the environment and using as its exploitable producers and consumers 6.3 billion human beings. The Leviathan now controls every mechanism of globalization, giving rise to the era of the corporation and the death of the nation state, resurrecting the systems of feudalism and serfdom, carving up the lands of the planet and furthering the utter decay of billions of human lives through the reality of perpetual indentured servitude. The influence they possess is, therefore, immense, able to dictate the direction of the world, and the lives of over six billion humans, through control of the government’s of the world.

The power of the corporation is such that American government, that bastion of ‘We the People,’ has been hijacked, the army of corporatism now infested deep within all levels of governance, conditioned to further the interests of the corporate world. Through the allure of wealth, money and the always addicting Almighty Dollar, which the human brain cannot yet defeat, the Establishment can purchase the services and favors of government employees as well as injecting its own vermin into the halls of power. The revolving door of cronyism, where government officials are hired by corporations and corporate executives get appointed to the highest levels of government, as well as through the legal form of bribery called lobbying of government officials, have resulted in the complete control of America by the corporate world. The military-energy-industrial complex has infiltrated the Oval Office, West Wing and the Congress, spreading its tentacles to all Departments and offices of substance. American government has, for all intents and purposes, become a government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations, a prostitute inseminated by her pimp to give birth to and nurture the mechanisms of complete corporatist control of American civilization.

Every day we see further signs that a government designed to represent the interests of the People has long since stopped doing just that. Yet the citizenry continues to yield more and more power to the corporate world, its indifference and passivity helping seal America’s tomorrow. As the years progress, this reality continues, with government having become a charade, democracy but an instrument of fantasy, our elected representatives having become the whores of corporations, the twice unelected President a corporate puppet, a buffoon whose last name was needed to secure entrance of corporatists to the most powerful position in the world. The debauchery has resulted in laws and regulations and appropriations and rules and tax breaks and incessant welfare furthering the power of the corporation, not those of the people, our interests steamrolled by money, power and greed.

Capitalism has created a system whereby the Almighty Dollar has become the new religion of man, with the demons of greed and exploitation working hand in hand to emasculate the human mind, the pursuit of wealth and the addiction to power condemning billions around the world who have no choice but to live the life of slave to the capitalists. Never before in the history of man has our brain, and our psychology, been confronted with the gluttony or the lavishness or the temptations or the incredible wealth now available to a small minority of humans. It has yet to build defense mechanisms to the evils that capitalism spawns inside the mind; society, and capitalism, has proceeded much faster than our ability to evolve our psychologies. The pursuit of wealth, the addiction to power and the ease with which the elite can build personal empires has become a new phenomenon in our species, relatively speaking. For millennia we were nothing but primitive hunters and gatherers, living off of game and plants, surviving day to day, week to week, considered lucky if we ate once a day, our numbers sparse, the planet virgin.

Never had we seen the gluttony or unsustainable exploitations of today, the overabundance of material goods, the excessiveness of foods, the great accumulation of wealth and the evisceration of the planet to achieve it. The human species has never seen the obesity we see today or the large cardboard cookie cutter homes of today’s suburbs or the stresses of modern living or such technologies as television. Humans had never lived the life of luxury, pursuing material possessions much more than humanity, becoming the greed mongers we are today. The elite had never had the corporation as an option, its tentacles building human wickedness around the globe.

We have evolved technology, but technology has not evolved us. Our society has grown beyond the reach of our slow evolving brains, witnessed by our inability to manage and control the over excessiveness prevalent in the America of today. Our ingrained behaviors and instincts cannot keep up with the rapid pace of society and the alluring temptations of the Almighty Dollar, for evolution works in long epochs, not in decades or years or days.

Our psychology remains susceptible to the demons of capitalism, transforming us not into animals, but into animals now divided by wealth, power and social engineering, with some possessing immense power, control and treasure while others own not one possession. We remain the mammalian primate we have always been, yet capitalism has allowed entrance to the evils inherent in human nature, exploiting and manipulating the easily created pathology of greed, the addiction to power, the urge to exploit, the loss of empathy and the drive toward selfishness, creating behaviors and actions we have yet to fully comprehend. Our fragile, as yet unevolved psychology relative to the mechanisms of the modern world, with its many liabilities, constraints, errors and needs for improvement, has proved that we sped like a runaway freight train directly into forms of economic governance our minds were perhaps not ready to dominate.

We have become, perhaps, a society where the blind lead the blind, into a place nobody knows, for no one has ever entered the parameters of where we presently find ourselves. The temptations, addictions, euphoria, comforts and materialism spawned by capitalism have blinded us to what we have become, to the frailty of our psychologies, to the demons we are releasing. Instead of humankind dominating and controlling capitalism we have allowed capitalism to dominate and control us, much to the detriment of billions.

Today we see the effects of capitalism run amok, beyond the control of humankind, becoming, through its sojourn through its various stages, a runaway freight train whose only stop will be the crash that sends concussions reverberating throughout America’s tomorrow. With few possessing much, many owning little, the great gap between the haves and the have nots nonetheless continues to increase, creating friction and animosity. Left to its own devices, free to evolve as it has since its inception, capitalism, in its modern incarnation, is inevitably leading to increased levels of corporatism, for in authoritarianism, and in control of governance, the elite see the next step in their pursuit of power, wealth and control. In corporatism they see control of a population that will in the next few years increasingly become more and more bitter with the continued decimation of their way of life.

Corporatist addictions to the evils of capitalism, to which their minds are impotent to try and dominate, dictate that the fusion of their corporations with government is the next logical step in the complete control over producers and consumers, 300 million strong. With the increased gap between rich and the rest, with poverty on the rise, with slave labor and slave wages growing, with tens of millions struggling paycheck to paycheck, needing two jobs to sustain themselves, with healthcare lacking for over 40 million people, with laws and regulations no longer enacted to help citizens, with inequality and injustice on the rise, with wealth vastly disproportional, the nation’s resources owned almost exclusively by the elite, and with millions waking to the realization of what is being done to America and its citizens by corporatist interests, the only way to prevent a repeat of the French Revolution will be complete and utter control of the population.

The exploitation by the corporatists of both the people and the nation will continue, for the most deranged step in capitalism’s cycle is upon us. At some point in time, whether in a month or five years, the masses will wake to what is being done to them. Corporatists, already in control of government, dominating society, our culture, thoughts and lives, will try to preempt this inevitability with the introduction of a perpetual police state using as pretext the war on terror and further attacks upon one of our cities.

For corporatism, more commonly termed fascism, has arrived, just in time to hail the arrival of America’s tomorrow.

The Arrival of Tomorrow

Already in control of government, possessing the technologies of private enterprise and the resources of governance, holding all the mechanisms by which to brainwash and manipulate the populace, their wallets thick with the Almighty Dollar, the tentacles of power and control omnipotent and omnipresent, corporatists have all the ingredients deeply entrenched to enact the next step in America’s history.

It is they, the power hungry and corrupted, those addicted to greed and wealth that cannot stand democracy and must, therefore, try to destroy it. For real democracy, and not the illusion meant to convey in the masses a sense of participation, is a threat to those seeking to rule by authority and through absolute control of the nation. To them the will of the citizenry is an obstacle; a government of, by and for the people is a hindrance, because in real democracy the population chooses, decides and controls the path a country will take. In a real democracy the rights of minorities are protected, the freedom of everyone is guaranteed.

Democracy is, therefore, incompatible with authoritarianism, with a system ruled by the few, not the many. Democracy becomes an obstacle to those at the top, because they are few, the masses many, and, in deciding the fate of a nation the elite can never outvote the masses. Given that the interests of the elite are incompatible with those of the people, and that the people will, without manipulation, vote for those espousing their own interests, the elite must use all tools at their disposal to manipulate the vote or the mind of the voters. In order to steer the nation in the direction of their interests, then, the wealthy few must control government and society, using all weapons at their disposal to control the thoughts and opinions of the population. Hence, the importance of the elite to control all aspects of the corporate media is understood, for in the television the thoughts and decisions of the American people are born.

To the corporatists and the elite, the will of the people becomes meaningless, their interests emaciated by the instruments of corporatism. Instead, the illusion is maintained in the minds of the people that their interests are being protected and defended, yet to the careful eye, the interests being pursued are only those of the elite. Slowly but surely, the ambitions of power become a parasite feeding off the interests of the weak, hemorrhaging centuries old rights birthed through revolution. A nation of liberties, freedoms and rights interferes with the wants and visions of those seeking to become overlords of the most powerful and wealthiest nation the world has ever seen. It is, therefore, imperative that the Bill of Rights be torn to shreds, that the Constitution be ripped apart. It is only a “god damn piece of paper,” after all, a document meant for the masses, a barrier to complete control by the elite. To the corporatists now in power, cherished American documents, wonderments in the evolution of human society and thought, are nothing but the toilet paper used to clean themselves of the refuse they call the masses.

A nation of liberty, freedoms and rights is a nation of people able to become threats to governance, their lives protected by law and by the will of the people. Freedom and rights gives birth to a society free to question the actions of government, to seek accountability, a citizenry that owns a government created to serve the interests of the people. A nation of liberties possesses millions of people unwilling to become the sheeple of the powerful, always searching for the truth, seeking it through protest, dissent, debate and intelligence.

A nation free is a nation educated and intelligent, wise to the chicanery of the elite and criminality of its leaders, a people emancipated through the powers of knowledge. An educated people are a liberated people, given the tools to question authority, myth, fables and the auras of false leadership. Indeed, a citizenry that thinks for itself is the greatest threat to corporatists and the elite because free minds question, analyze and are able to see beyond the haze of aerolized bull manure, seeing through the lies and crimes and propaganda, the thoughts of controlled television not given entrance to a mind free to think and reason.

A people free is a threat to the Establishment, for it places barriers to government and corporate chicanery, acting as a firewall to the actions of thieves and murderers, helping, in some way, to try to make right what has been made wrong. Knowing the vital protections endowed to them by the Constitution, the population has the confidence to rise up and be heard, speaking truth to power, marching for justice and liberty.

In this document, a living, breathing, always evolving masterpiece of human understanding, meant to adapt to the present, not cement itself to archaic notions of the past, exists the impediment to corporatism desired by the elite. It is the Constitution that has halted their rise to total prominence, for in their ideology, humanity has always and must always be governed by authority, by a Machiavelli type despot thinking for those that cannot, for only then can civilization thrive and only then can the total domination of the corporatists become reality. In their warped mind, then, America must come under the grip of corporatism, for today, in this stage of civilization’s evolution, the corporate Leviathan is overlord of the planet and those that control it are, therefore, our masters.

Using as pretext an attack on one of our cities by terrorists, America’s new stated enemy, corporatists now entrenched in power will declare martial law, pronouncing that the security of the nation and the protection of our way of life are at stake. Through the exploitation of patriotism, xenophobia and the ignorance of large segments of the American public, the corporatists will introduce new laws designed to further control our lives and eviscerate our rights. The tools of propaganda will bombard us with psychological warfare, molding us to threats existing only in our fears and in our altered state of mind, making of us the soldiers embedded deep inside the trenches of American society, doing the dirty work for the corporatist government.

Exploiting the blindness and silent acquiescence of the masses that fear, anger and hatred engenders, corporatists in government will give rise to the police state, first by deploying the military throughout key cities and regions, creating the environment necessary to begin the conditioning process of the population. Under the rubric of securing the homeland, the military will be placed at the helm of a new security apparatus that will maintain an ever vigilant eye on the population. The citizenry will be told to be vigilant and to report suspicious activity. It will be told to become the eyes and ears of the corporatists, transforming itself into agents of tyranny. In time the populace will become paranoid sheeple robbed of freedom, shadows of their former selves, created by the ceaseless suspicions bred by years of Americans spying on Americans.

The Bill of Rights will be truncated and the Constitution, which is already seen as a piece of toilet paper to the corporatists, will be altered or amended to suit those holding the reigns of absolute power. The government will be further degraded into serving the interests of the corporations, its vast resources, with its tentacles of governance, used to expand the reach and wealth of corporatists. Gone will be our rights to free speech and of assembly and of the press, replaced instead with draconian laws designed to quash dissident voices pronouncing the sounds of wisdom.

A police presence throughout large cities will permeate, designed to intimidate and control. Everywhere one goes will be seen the tools of subservience and obedience, from army fatigues to machine guns to surveillance cameras located in every street corner to police patrols to curfews to heavily armed men stationed at all points of public interest. Warrants will cease to exist, as homes will be invaded without the authority of the law. Courts will become tribunals judging those guilty of breaking the laws of draconian intent.

Dissent will be made quiet, and all forms of protest and debate will not be tolerated for in the America of tomorrow only the voices and visions of the rulers will be allowed to stand. The idea of due process, along with habeas corpus, will become an abstract concept reserved for future historians, for those designated enemies of the state will simply be made to disappear without reason into the national system of gulags, its numbers swelling into the tens of millions, the fates of its prisoners decided by the level of truth they once tried to tell.

Subservience to the state will become a principle to be embedded into the minds of all, particularly the young, whose education will further be implemented to dumb them down, brainwashing them, making them, over years of conditioning, soldiers and automatons loyal to corporatists and the powers of the state. Free thought will become a thing of the past, as books of knowledge will be banned or burned, the opinions of reason made extinct. Television and music will be controlled much more so than today, becoming the loudspeakers of propaganda and the education of enslavement. The pages of past history will be erased or altered; those of the present will be manipulated as reality becomes what the corporatists decide it to be. News, opinion and current events at odds with the goals of power will disappear from society, for the citizenry will only be allowed to hear the propaganda and see only what is beneficial to the state.

Arrests without cause or suspicion will be legalized, wiretaps and eavesdropping will be said to benefit the quest for the homeland’s security. The wonders of the Internet, already a grave and gathering threat to the Establishment, will be destroyed; censorship of websites and their content will become policy and throughout the country, the free opinions of the population will become less than a whisper of a dying society, for in the last breaths of freedom the last palpitations of America’s heart will be heard. Fear and intimidation will permeate throughout the nation, thereby controlling the population, for in the threatening posture of a police state the people are forced into shells of their former selves.

A culture of surveillance will be endemic as the instruments of the security state are used to spy on its own citizens, especially those deemed threats and dissidents. Those fighting for the freedoms and rights now lost will be picked up in the middle of the night, lost like a morning fog, joining a growing group of the disappeared, likely tortured, imprisoned or dropped from a plane at 10,000 feet. Mass graves will be hidden from reality, unmarked and untended, forgotten like the cadavers contained in their bowels. Dissent and protest and debate will be outlawed, and all around, a society made to conform and acquiesce to totalitarianism will be born, its children never experiencing the freedom and the rights once afforded their parents.

In America’s tomorrow, neighbors will be made to spy on neighbors, strangers will inform on strangers, children will be told to report the suspicious activities of parents and all around the nation paranoia will hover over towns and cities and the homes of the population, trust having become one more victim of corporatism, the loyalty amongst friends and relatives compromised with the arrival of self-preservation. False accusations will be made against thousands whose only crime will be thinking for themselves, not being liked by an informer, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and guilty they will stand in a court not of law, but of guilt, where justice is not blind, though it will be unknown and unwanted.

Secrecy and unaccountability will be hallmarks of America’s government; constant surveillance of its citizens will become routine. With the advent of newer technologies the complete whereabouts of citizens will be known at all times. The national ID card will contain all the biometric information about a person, its carrier able to be tracked through GPS surveillance. The introduction of permanent police stops throughout various city streets, state highways and borders will assure authorities of one’s intentions, our vehicles, already equipped with GPS, ransacked without need for reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

The intrusion by the corporatist state will define our existence in our daily lives. Propaganda posters will line the streets and public spaces; surveillance cameras will watch our every move. Project Echelon and its offspring will monitor our phone calls, emails, faxes and conversations; through our fingerprints, DNA and iris scanning the state will be aware of our movements at all times. National psychology examinations for children will be made mandatory, with those deemed ‘troubled’ forced to take certain prescription drugs, made to attend special schools, creating a caste system of undesirables through genetic and social engineering. Through the use of television we will be told what to think and what reality is. Our children will be forced into conscription, trained to become soldiers of fortune in wars against East Asia, Middle Asia and South America. The end of privacy as we know it will arrive with the insertion of cameras into our homes, used to monitor our daily lives and record our most intimate moments.

Birthed from a slippery slope of America’s past and present, fusing the sins of the fathers and ignorance of the sons, our tomorrow will be a mutation of the natural regression that American capitalism has taken over the last two hundred years. We are entering an epoch of cataclysmic momentum, for the evils of 21st century capitalism, having gathered unstoppable momentum during the last 100 years, have generated forces uncompromising and degenerate, gathering power through our inability to visualize the damage inflicted by our economic system’s cycles. The America of yesterday cannot survive in the America of tomorrow; to the corporatists they are mutually exclusive.

We have reached a moment in history where the opening of different doors can be made by our decisions in the next few years. Yet time is precious, for it passes fast and without contemplation, passing us without so much of a realization on our part. Today, corporatism grows and festers in our midst, using the fictional and over-exaggerated war on terror to entrench itself into our culture, methodically conditioning us, preparing us to its eventual and permanent rise. The instruments of its governance are systematically being put into place, clandestinely inserted into our consciousness, one piece of the puzzle at a time, the easier to assimilate us to America’s tomorrow.

Soon we will wake not to find a new dawn but a dreaded twilight, marking not the end of yet another day gone by but the end of America as we knew her, a once brave people succumbing to fear, and once intelligent citizenry cowering to manipulation and a once free society shackled to the dungeons of America’s tomorrow. With each day that passes that we remain passive, silent and indifferent, becoming submissive to further corporatist control over our lives, we are helping to cement the unforgiving future of our progeny and of a once great nation.

Through our inability to act to reality and understand where we are headed we have burdened yet one more generation with the sins and errors of those that came before, in the process imploding the foundations of a nation that once acted as the beacon of freedom, rights and liberty to people throughout the globe. In the end, we have begun assisting in burying the grave of American liberty and freedom, helping to give birth to American corporatism and invariably acting to give rise to the dawn of America’s tomorrow.






July 26, 2007 Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic, commentator, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail~bookid~24111.aspx His articles appear regularly at various alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. He encourages readers to surf the collection of the over 100 essays he has written which can be found visiting his web site http://valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com/ and by searching the Internet. His next book, Beyond the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on America and Humanity, a collection of his essays, will be published in early 2007.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Alarm at US right to highly personal data

Religion and sex life among passenger details to be passed on to officials

Jamie Doward - July 22, 2007
The Observer

Highly sensitive information about the religious beliefs, political opinions and even the sex life of Britons travelling to the United States is to be made available to US authorities when the European Commission agrees to a new system of checking passengers.

The EC is in the final stages of agreeing a new Passenger Name Record system with the US which will allow American officials to access detailed biographical information about passengers entering international airports.

The information sharing system with the US Department of Homeland Security, which updates the previous three-year-old system, is designed to tackle terrorism but civil liberty groups warn it will have serious consequences for European passengers. And it has emerged that both the European parliament and the European data protection supervisor are alarmed at the plan.

In a strongly worded document drawn up in response to the plan that will affect the 4 million-plus Britons who travel to the US every year, the EU parliament said it 'notes with concern that sensitive data (ie personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, and data concerning the health or sex life of individuals) will be made available to the DHS and that these data may be used by the DHS in exceptional cases'.

Under the new agreement, which goes live at the end of this month, the US will be able to hold the records of European passengers for 15 years compared with the current three year limit. The EU parliament said it was concerned the data would lead to 'a significant risk of massive profiling and data mining, which is incompatible with basic European principles and is a practice still under discussion in the US congress.'

Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor, has written to the EC expressing his 'grave concern' at the plan, which he describes as 'without legal precedent' and one that puts 'European data protection rights at risk'.

Hustinx warns: 'Data on EU citizens will be readily accessible to a broad range of US agencies and there is no limitation to what US authorities are allowed to do with the data.'

He expresses concern about 'the absence of a robust legal mechanism that enables EU citizens to challenge misuse of their personal information'.

Hustinx concludes: 'I have serious doubts whether the outcome of these negotiations will be fully compatible with European fundamental rights, which both the Council and the Commission have stated are non negotiable.'

The new agreement will see US authorities gain access to detailed passenger information, from credit card details to home addresses and even what sort of food may have been ordered before a flight. In addition, US authorities will be free to add other information they have obtained about a passenger, leading to concerns about how the information will be shared.

It has emerged that neither Hustinx nor the European parliament were aware of the final draft of the plan.

'If you are going to have this kind of agreement it should involve parliament and the data protection supervisor,' said Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, the civil liberties organisation that campaigns against excessive surveillance.

He warned that under the new system the data will be shared with numerous US agencies. 'The data protection supervisor and the European parliament are angry that they were not consulted,' Bunyan said. 'But they are also angry with a number of elements of the plan such as giving the US the absolute right to pass the data on to third parties.'

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, another group that campaigns against state surveillance, said the new agreement gave huge powers to the US authorities. 'We have no guarantee about how this data will be used,' Davies said.

A spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner's Office in England and Wales said it would be discussing the matter with European counterparts shortly. 'We are working with the European Data Protection Supervisor and our other EU data protection colleagues to come to a joint opinion on the level of data protection set out in the final agreement,' the spokeswoman said.