Introducing Social Bonds Or How National Is Privatising Health Care June 3 2015 | From: AotearoaAWiderPerspective
This week, only a week after they closed relationship Aotearoa, the government announced that they were introducing social bonds to private investors. They are doing so to allow private investors the chance to invest in mental healthcare.
The idea is that people invest in these bonds and only if the results are measurably positive will the investors get their money back!
Mental healthcare patients are among the most vulnerable of patients and here in “man up” New Zealand are also the ones most likely to avoid seeking treatment and if they do often end up between wall and ship because it is so hard to diagnose and treat. It is not for nothing this sector was chosen as the pilot for this new government initiative. Nobody likes a whinger and nobody ever expects to end up needing help for psychological problems.
Make no mistake however. This is a pilot. What that means is, they are testing the water. Expect bonds to be issued for other healthcare “products”. And if you borrow you have to pay it back. The argument that we only have to pay it back if the results are positive is a misleading one because no investor is going to invest in bonds unless there result is a return.
One of the ways in which the private organisations have to prove themselves is by earning money. The only way to earn money is by declaring people fit for work or no longer needing assistance. “Independent” but equally privately owned Assessment organisations do the assessment of people receiving treatment or funding for treatment.
These organisations depend on for their work on the results they deliver too. What that means for sick people is that not their health but their ability to go back to work at the most early convenience judged by privately owned company who wants to make money is the most important decision factor.
In England one such private assessors is Atos. Atos has been known to judge people lying on their deathbeds fit for work and cutting them off from much needed disability income. Atos forces people undergoing Cancer treatment to go back to work. They have also been known to cut off people with disabilities such as paralysed legs because they were able to push their wheel chairs with their hands.
As someone watching my husband, who had to go back to work way to soon after a serious operation because we didn’t have the funds for him to recover properly, suffer and who is now on ACC (He is one of the lucky ones) because he hit a psychological wall as well as having to deal with the physical consequences of what happened to him, I can assure you that this is not option for long term solutions in healthcare.
It will not help people get back to a normal healthy life. It will only make more and more damaged people trying to get on and deteriorating to a point were there are no solutions left. Expect higher rates of suicide, domestic violence, violent deaths and less social cohesion and community.
According to the Ministry of health web page these bonds are currently used or starting to be used in: The United Kingdom, United States, South America, Holland, South Africa, Belgium and Australia, and are being actively explored in Canada, Ireland and Israel.
The purpose for the pilot is:
Test the conceptwithin the New Zealand context to see whether this is an effective and efficient way for government to reduce social problems
Develop the conditions to use social bonds more widely in the future: including growing the social-investor market and building capabilities of service providers, government agencies and Intermediaries
Learn lessons that could be applied to other forms of payments-for-results and/or outcomes-based contracting
Enable Government to make more informed decisions on whether to use payments-for-results and outcomes based contracting more widely.
BRICS Finalising EEU & The Silk Road Economic Belt Integration June 3 2015 | From: Geopolitics
As opposed to the regressive banksters’ EU and now TTP economic integrations, the BRICS led economic integration is based on mutual respect and mutual progress. This is the character that attracts progressive governments across Asia and Europe into the Eurasian Economic Union and the Silk Road Economic Belt.
Spearheaded by superpowers not engaged in wars overseas, and the availability of generous funds without the associated strings attached, there’s no denying that any country in the world, with sensible leaders at the helm, would surely find such opportunity very hard to refuse.
Silk Road Extends to Minsk as China and Russia Agree EEU Cooperation
The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister said in Beijing on Friday that Russia and China are seeking to develop their respective economic unions to form a new intercontinental partnership.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov said on Friday that Russia and China are strengthening their ties on a number of fronts, and expressed hope that their respective economic unions, the Eurasian Economic Union and the Silk Road Economic Belt, will work together productively.
The two countries are looking at ways to expand their partnership with the help of various international organizations, explained Morgulov, including the BRICS association of emerging economies and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO], which “can play a key role in the formation of this kind of continental partnership.”
The agreement between the six members of the SCO was signed in 2001, with the aim of ensuring regional security and cooperation in various areas, including the military and economic spheres, and the battle against terrorism and extremism.
In addition to economic cooperation, said Morgulov, China and Russia are strengthening their partnership in the military sphere, with their “armed forces constantly undertaking military and sea exercises.”
Speaking at a summit on Russia-China relations, Margulov expressed hope that “important decisions will be taken [at the summit], aimed at strengthening and developing our organizations,” paying particular attention to the partnership between the EEU and the Silk Road initiative.
“I think the economic connection between the Silk Road and the Eurasian integration projects is an extremely important and promising direction for our mutual work in the future,” said Margulov.
“The first step was the May 8 decision to begin negotiations between the EEU and China on the conclusion of an agreement on trade and economic cooperation. At its core, the agreement represents the formation of a kind of continental partnership,” explained Margulov.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xin Jinping on May 8 in Moscow earlier this month signed a range of trade agreements, including one setting out the framework for cooperation between the EEU and Silk Road organizations.
“This is a new type of relations which can be recommended to all the countries in the world,” said Morgulov on Friday.
“Moscow would be happy if a similar model existed in its ties with the West.
Kennedy Drops Bombshell: 70% News Ad Revenue From Pharma June 2 2015 | From: NaturalBlaze
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is at it again. After speaking in Sacramento, California against SB-277, pummeling the Centers for Disease Control during public testimony in Vermontand appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO show to do the same, he has now broke major news during a recent interview.
Speaking with former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura regarding the vaccine industry and big pharma, Kennedy confirmed what many have assumed by stating:
“I ate breakfast last week with the president of a network news division and he told me that during non-election years, 70% of the advertising revenues for his news division come from pharmaceutical ads.
And if you go on TV any night and watch the network news, you’ll see they become just a vehicle for selling pharmaceuticals. He also told me that he would fire a host who brought onto his station a guest who lost him a pharmaceutical account.”
These powerful admissions by Kennedy are made with the supporting backdrop of five-time Emmy Award winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson recently stated:
“If people were simply covering in terms of news value, facts, and fairness we’d be giving way more coverage to vaccine side effects, autism, ADD, and all the immune disorders that have emerged in the past and been made untouchable by this environment that I’ve discussed with you (referring to astroturfing.)"
Indeed it appears that we are seeing a major push by highly unethical, fraudulent pharmaceutical companies attempting to legally corral the entire American public into unwilling consumers of their vaccine products. This current move has revealed major conflicts-of-interest among many senators, news organizations and regulatory agencies.
In addition, there appears to be a near mutiny among good senators and congressmen who are rapidly introducing bills to counter the drug company-sponsored vaccine exemption removal push being witnessed in state houses across the U.S.
United States, New Zealand, Canadian, United Kingdom & Australian Governments Hacked Smartphones, Planted Spyware In Google Phone Apps June 2 2015 | From: TruthInMedia
A new document from whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals that the United States, Canada, and other so-called “Five Eyes” nations hacked weaknesses in one of the world’s most popular mobile browsers to access smartphone traffic. The hacking involved using apps in the Google and Samsung app stores.
Consistent with much of the Snowden revelations, the “mainstream” media has largely ignored the story.
According to the “Top Secret” document, the spying agnecies of Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand started targeting the UC Browser in 2011 after it was discovered that a leak released details of millions of users. UC Browser is the most popular app in China and India.
The agencies stated goal was to exploit the weakness to collect data on suspected terrorists or intelligence targets. Some cases apparently involved implanting spyware on targeted smartphones.
The Five Eyes nations were looking to exploit similar leaks in other mobile apps. CBC reports that the document shows the surveillance agencies did not alert the companies or the public about weaknesses.
The latest document release from Snowden was reported by The intercept and Canada’s CBC.
Canada’s Communications Security Establishment surveillance agency refused to comment on the CBC report, while the British GCHQ stated that all surveillance programs are “carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework.”
The U.S. National Security Agency and New Zealand surveillance agency did not respond to CBC News. Australia’s signals intelligence agency refused to comment.
Not everyone believes the government’s claims of accountability and promises that the program was only used in search of terrorists. Michael Geist, a professor at University of Ottawa and an expert on internet law, told the CBC:
“All of this is being done in the name of providing safety and yet … Canadians or people around the world are put at risk.”
The documents also reveal that the Five Eyes agreed not to spy on each others’ citizens and instead focused their attention on apps stores in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Cuba, Morocco, the Bahamas and Russia.
Bankers Plan Secret London Meeting To ‘End Cash’ June 1 2015 | From: TheEventChronicle
Economist Martin Armstrong claims there is a “secret meeting to end cash” set to take place in London before the end of the month involving representatives from the ECB and the Federal Reserve.
Armstrong, who is known for successfully predicting the 1987 Black Monday crash as well as the 1998 Russian financial collapse, expressed his shock that no news outlet has reported on this upcoming conference.
“I find it extremely perplexing that I have been the only one to report of the secret meeting in London. Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, and Willem Buiter, the Chief Economist at Citigroup, will address the central banks to advocate the elimination of all cash to bring to fruition the day when you cannot buy or sell anything without government approval,” writes Armstrong.
“When I googled the issue to see who else has picked it up, to my surprise, Armstrong Economics comes up first. Others are quoting me, and I even find it spreading as far as the Central Bank of Nigeria, but I have yet to find any reports on the meeting taking place in London, when my sources are direct.”
Armstrong first brought attention to the alleged meeting earlier this month when he revealed that representatives from the Federal Reserve, the ECB as well as participants from the Swiss and Danish central banks would all be attending a “major conference in London” at which Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, and Willem Buiter, the Chief Economist at Citigroup, would give presentations.
Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
“We better keep one eye open at night for this birth of a cashless society that is coming in much faster than expected. Why the secret meeting? Something does not smell right here,” concludes Armstrong.
Discussions and moves towards banning cash have repeatedly cropped up in recent weeks.
Willem Buiter, who Armstrong claims is speaking at the secret meeting, recently advocated abolishing cash altogether in order to “solve the world’s central banks’ problem with negative interest rates.”
Last year, Kenneth Rogoff also called for “abolishing physical currency” in order to stop “tax evasion and illegal activity” as well as preventing people from withdrawing money when interest rates are close to zero.
Striking a similar tone, former Bank of England economist Jim Leaviss penned an article for the London Telegraph earlier this month in which he said a cashless society would only be achieved by:
“forcing everyone to spend only by electronic means from an account held at a government-run bank,” which would be, “monitored, or even directly controlled by the government.”
Big banks in both the United Kingdom and the U.S. are already treating the withdrawal or depositing of moderately large amounts of cash as a suspicious activity.
Reports emerged in March of how the Justice Department is ordering bank employees to consider calling the cops on customers who withdraw $5,000 dollars or more.
Willem Buiter, the Chief Economist at Citigroup.
Meanwhile in France, new measures are set to come into force in September which will restrict French citizens from making cash payments over €1,000 euros. Armstrong suggests that “financial police” could enforce this new law by, “searching people on trains just passing through France to see if they are transporting cash, which they will now seize.”
As Armstrong notes, banning cash in order to eviscerate what little economic freedoms people have left to avoid disastrous Keynesian central bank policy is nothing short of economic totalitarianism.
“In the mind of an economic tyrant, banning cash represents the holy grail,”writes Michael Krieger.
“Forcing the plebs onto a system of digital fiat currency transactions offers total control via a seamless tracking of all transactions in the economy, and the ability to block payments if an uppity citizen dares get out of line.”
Recharging With Alastair Thompson, Publisher Of Scoop Media June 1 2015 | From: Scoop by KatherineAustinFitts
I arrived in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, on Monday. Kiwi’s – as New Zealander’s call themselves – are one of the most literate populations in the world. With four million people on a series of large and small beautiful islands, Kiwi’s are hard-working and intensely interested in their political, economic and cultural life.
Alastair Thompson of Scoop with Kim Hill of Radio New Zealand
I came to Wellington to see Alastair Thompson. For sixteen-years, Alastair has led the remarkable independent news media site Scoop Media and its global networks of independent writers, researchers and journalists.
Scoop Media covers the news – all the news – in New Zealand. Scoop’s day-to-day flow grew out of its coverage of the New Zealand legislature along with the national government and central bank.
Scoop’s initial value proposition was that it would publish everyone’s news. You have a press release? Scoop would publish it. Then web software ranked articles by web hits so that readers could easily see which news stories others considered important. Lots of media publications provide such rankings now.
However, Scoop was the first I experienced with this feature. Of course, readers could also choose to read the Editors’ Top Picks or focus on the many categories which make up a good daily paper – health, culture, geopolitics.
In short, Scoop has always been well-grounded in the daily news of a busy and prosperous country.
Alastair, as both reporter and publisher, is grounded in journalism’s traditional commitments to objectivity and integrity. And he has the advantage of having covered all aspects of politics, economics and daily life.
Scoop began in a period in which globalization was creating a growing divergence between “reality” and “official reality” and between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”
This divergence coincided with corporate media shifting out of investigative journalism and into the engineering and promotion of “official reality.”
The corporate media’s shift created an opportunity for a small team of serious journalists “down under” to step onto the global stage and to make a critical difference. For me, it started with the Enron story.
In January 2002, I sent out an e-mail rant to my network regarding Enron. It consisted of 20 questions designed to show that the official story on the Enron fraud was not possible.
I got an e-mail from Alastair in New Zealand asking me if he could publish it. Surprised, but intrigued that anyone in New Zealand would recognize the importance of what was happening with Enron and the implications for the US government and financial system, I said yes. Two days later, Alastair sent me the Scoop rankings. My 20 questions had ranked quite high. That was the beginning of writing many pieces published by Scoop on Enron over the next year and developing a column called The Real Deal.
Part of the beauty of the Scoop model was that anyone interested in following a particular writer could sign up to receive articles as they were posted. So I (and all the other writers at Scoop) could build an audience and find a voice.
Alastair was always hovering, checking, and making suggestions. He had a publisher’s nose for a story, a feel for the audience and the training to keep things in line.
During this period, investigative reporter Jason Leopold also found his way to Scoop and was able to publish the documents and reporting that nailed a portion of the Enron “book-cooking story”
Given that a former Enron executive had been Secretary of the Army at the US Department of Defense – the #1 book-cooking organization in America (more here) – it was quite a coup.
As the Enron story went viral around the globe, none other than Salon.com and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman were shown as having come down on the wrong side of the story. A network of writers, researchers and journalists suddenly realized that the corporate media could no longer control a story.
There was an audience for the truth. And the truth mattered, particularly when it was backed up with hard documents and tech-savvy publishers willing to take the time to get the hard evidence on line to support a reporter who had the story.
This was in the months following 9-11 when it steadily became obvious that the corporate media and the US government were not going to provide answers on what had really happened. As that became apparent, unanswered questions about 9-11 began to appear through Scoop’s site.
It started with “UnAnswered Questions” by an investigator writing under the pseudonym MalContent X. Malcontent X kept going with a series and Alastair did a brilliant job of circulating and promoting it.
The questions meme caught on. Several 9-11 activists in the US hooked up with Alastair’s brother to create a new website, UnAnswered Questions.org, which was designed to collect, organize and frame global unanswered questions about 9-11. Scoop created the UQ Wire.
The UnAnswered Questions group held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington which was enormously successful.
Questions and articles poured in and the UQ Wire began publishing an enormous flow of citizen concerns that circulated broadly. The speed was remarkable. The US team would work through the day and ship it off to the New Zealand team who was just starting their day fresh – everything flowed 24/7.
To cope with the flow of information, Paul Thompson (not a relative of Alastair) decided to build a chronology that grew into a mammoth on line “Terror Timeline.”
For some period, Paul moved to New Zealand where, with Alastair’s and Scoop’s support, he helped me build an audience through the publication of his book.
By asking questions and holding the US government responsible to answer the questions, rather than trying to answer them, the combined effort was able to document and – in the court of popular opinion – to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the government’s explanations of what had happened was not possible given the known facts.
UnAnswered Questions and Scoop’s UQ Wire made sure that the “official” story was not widely accepted. This was long enough for the architects, scientists and other groups with serious expertise to enter the fray. If not for Alastair and Scoop, that door would have closed.
The exercise in grassroots transparency was so extraordinary in impact that the equivalent of the German PBS made a documentary about it.
The 9-11 story had profound implications – including implications regarding the integrity of the financial system. Thanks to Scoop Media, global investors got plenty of warnings about the ongoing financial coup long before the housing bubble crashed and the bailouts began:
US mortgage fraud as Alastair published articles by Chris Sanders in London as well as my work (Where is the Collateral?)
I remember reading that Australian investors had a high loss rate on US mortgage-backed securities and thinking, “Too bad they ignored Scoop’s warnings.”
The person who summed it up best was a retired CIA operative who called me in the midst of a round of Scoop stories going viral. He said in an ominous tone, “I want you to know that the Agency does not like Scoop.”
Really?
Alastair always made sure that Scoop published a lot more than just global shenanigans. He offered a platform to authors such as Suzan Mazur who has written extensively for years on science and human evolution on Scoop.
And the flow of daily news in New Zealand continued providing a healthy baseline for what might sometimes seem like a world which had lost its way.
I decided early this year that it was time for me to travel to New Zealand again to see Alastair in person. Scoop has for many years been a touchstone. With the global financial crisis cutting deeply into advertising budgets, Scoop has been searching for a new business model.
Their search is of great importance. How do we create and build a profitable business model to support serious news and journalism? Without it, we are lost. All solutions, all pathways require transparency. However, we need transparency that functions with professionalism and integrity and which can do so with full market support.
Their creation and evolution of their economic model has the potential to be one of their most important contributions to independent journalism if it succeeds. (Read Why Scoop.co.nz Can No Longer Be Free)
So, I have been sitting with Alastair this week – over lunch at Te Papa Tongarewa talking about the issues of the day, the opportunities before us, and how we recharge and invigorate independent media.
Writers and reporters whom the corporate media would suppress or smear found a platform in New Zealand that gave them a new voice and a pathway forward and which made a difference in the lives of millions of global readers.
As Alastair and I sit and talk, I am reminded of the shoulders upon which I stand. Kia Ora, Scoop Media.
The tide is turning against the globalization of GMO-based agriculture and forced feeding with consumers leading the charge from the bottom up demanding informed consent (e.g. labeling, independent science) and organic alternatives.
The decision of the Chipotle restaurant chain to make its product lines GMO-free is not most people's idea of a world-historic event. Especially since Chipotle, by US standards, is not a huge operation. A clear sign that the move is significant, however, is that Chipotle's decision was met with a tidal-wave of establishment media abuse.
Chipotle has been called irresponsible, anti-science, irrational, and much more by the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and many others. A business deciding to give consumers what they want was surely never so contentious.
The media lynching of Chipotle has an explanation that is important to the future of GMOs. The cause of it is that there has long been an incipient crack in the solid public front that the food industry has presented on the GMO issue. The crack originates from the fact that while agribusiness sees GMOs as central to their business future, the brand-oriented and customer-sensitive ends of the food supply chain do not.
The brands who sell to the public, such as Nestle, Coca-Cola, Kraft, etc., are therefore much less committed to GMOs. They have gone along with their use, probably because they wish to maintain good relations with agribusiness, who are their allies and their suppliers. Possibly also they see a potential for novel products in a GMO future.
However, over the last five years, as the reputation of GMOs has come under increasing pressure in the US, the cost to food brands of ignoring the growing consumer demand for GMO-free products has increased. They might not say so in public, but the sellers of top brands have little incentive to take the flack for selling GMOs.
From this perspective, the significance of the Chipotle move becomes clear. If Chipotle can gain market share and prestige, or charge higher prices, from selling non-GMO products and give (especially young) consumers what they want, it puts traditional vendors of fast and processed food products in an invidious position.
Kraft and McDonald's, and their traditional rivals can hardly be left on the sidelines selling outmoded products to a shrinking market. They will not last long.
MacDonald's already appears to be in trouble, and it too sees the solution as moving to more up-market and healthier products. For these much bigger players, a race to match Chipotle and get GMOs out of their product lines, is a strong possibility. That may not be so easy, in the short term, but for agribusiness titans who have backed GMOs, like Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta; a race to be GMO-free is the ultimate nightmare scenario.
Until Chipotle's announcement, such considerations were all behind the scenes. But all of a sudden this split has spilled out into the food media. On May 8th, Hain Celestial told The Food Navigator that:
"We sell organic products...gluten-free products and...natural products. [But] where the big, big demand is, is GMO-free."
According to the article, unlike Heinz, Kraft, and many others, Hain Celestial is actively seeking to meet this demand. Within the food industry, important decisions, for and against GMOs, are taking place.
Why the pressure to remove GMOs will grow
The other factor in all this turmoil is that the GMO technology wheel has not stopped turning. New GMO products are coming on stream that will likely make crop biotechnology even less popular than it is now. This will further ramp up the pressure on brands and stores to go GMO-free. There are several contributory factors.
The first issue follows from the recent US approvals of GMO crops resistant to the herbicides 2,4-D and Dicamba. These traits are billed as replacements for Roundup-resistant traits whose effectiveness has declined due to the spread of weeds resistant to Roundup (Glyphosate).
The causes of the problem, however, lie in the technology itself. The introduction of Roundup-resistant traits in corn and soybeans led to increasing Roundup use by farmers (Benbrook 2012). Increasing Roundup use led to weed resistance, which led to further Roundup use, as farmers increased applications and dosages. This translated into escalated ecological damage and increasing residue levels in food. Roundup is now found in GMO soybeans intended for food use at levels that even Monsanto used to call "extreme" (Bøhn et al. 2014).
The two new herbicide-resistance traits are set to recapitulate this same story of increasing agrochemical use. But they will also amplify it significantly.
The specifics are worth considering. First, the spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba on the newer herbicide-resistant crops will not eliminate the need for Roundup, whose use will not decline (see Figure). That is because, unlike Roundup, neither 2,4-D nor Dicamba are broad-spectrum herbicides. They will have to be sprayed together with Roundup, or with each other (or all of them together) to kill all weeds. This vital fact has not been widely appreciated.
Confirmation comes from the companies themselves. Monsanto is stacking (i.e. combining) Dicamba resistance with Roundup resistance in its Xtend crops and Dow is stacking 2,4-D resistance with Roundup resistance in its Enlist range. (Notably, resistance to other herbicides, such as glufosinate, are being stacked in all these GMO crops too.)
The second issue is that the combined spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba and Roundup, will only temporarily ease the weed resistance issues faced by farmers. In the medium and longer terms, they will compound the problems. That is because new herbicide-resistant weeds will surely evolve.
In fact, Dicamba-resistant and 2,4-D-resistant weeds already exist. Their spread, and the evolution of new ones, can be guaranteed (Mortensen et al 2012). This will bring greater profits for herbicide manufacturers, but it will also bring greater PR problems for GMOs and the food industry. GMO soybeans and corn will likely soon have "extreme levels" of at least three different herbicides, all of them with dubious safety records (Schinasi and Leon 2014).
The first time round, Monsanto and Syngenta's PR snow-jobs successfully obscured this, not just from the general public, but even within agronomy. But it is unlikely they will be able to do so a second time. 2,4-D and Dicamba-resistant GMOs are thus a PR disaster waiting to happen.
The most revolutionary and innovative part of that pipeline is a technology and not a trait. Many products in the GMO pipeline are made using RNA interference technologies that rely on double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs). dsRNA is a technology with two problems. One is that products made with it (such as the "Arctic" Apple, the "Innate" Potato, and Monsanto's "Vistive Gold" Soybeans) are unproven in the field. Like its vanguard, a Brazilian virus-resistant bean, they may never work under actual farming conditions.
But if they do work, there is a clear problem with their safety which is explained in detail here (pdf).
In outline, the problem is this: the long dsRNA molecules needed for RNA interference were rejected long ago as being too hazardous for routine medical use (Anonymous, 1969). The scientific literature even calls them "toxins", as in this paper title from 1969: Absher M., and Stinebring W. (1969) Toxic properties of a synthetic double-stranded RNA. Nature223: 715-717. (not online)
As further evidence of this, long dsRNAs are now used in medicine to cause autoimmune disorders in mice, in order to study these disorders (Okada et al 2005).
The Absher and Stinebring paper comes from a body of research built up many years ago, but its essential findings have been confirmed and extended by more modern research. We now know why dsRNAs cause harm. They trigger destructive anti-viral defence pathways in mammals and other vertebrates and there is a field of specialist research devoted to showing precisely how this damages individual cells, whole tissues, and results in auto-immune disease in mice (Karpala et al. 2005).
The conclusion therefore, is that dsRNAs that are apparently indistinguishable from those produced in, for example, the Arctic apple and Monsanto's Vistive Gold Soybean, have strong negative effects on vertebrate animals (but not plants).
These vertebrate effects are found even at low doses.
Consumers are vertebrate animals. They may not appreciate the thought that their healthy fats and forever apples also contain proven toxins. And on a business front, consumer brands will not relish defending dsRNA technology once they understand the reality. They may not wish to find themselves defending the indefensible.
The bottom line is this. Either dsRNAs will sicken or kill people, or, they will give opponents of biotechnology plenty of ammunition. The scientific evidence, as it currently stands, suggests they will do both. dsRNAs, therefore, are a potentially huge liability.
The last pipeline problem stems from the first two. The agbiotech industry has long held out the prospect of "consumer benefits" from GMOs. Consumer benefits (in the case of food) are most likely to be health benefits (improved nutrition, altered fat composition, etc.). The problem is that the demographic of health-conscious consumers no doubt overlaps significantly with the demographic of those most wary of GMOs.
Show a consumer a "healthy GMO" and they are likely to show you an oxymoron. The health market in the US for customers willing to pay more for a GMO has probably evaporated in the last few years as GMOs have become a hot public issue.
The end-game for GMOs?
The traditional chemical industry approach to such a problem is a familiar repertoire of intimidation and public relations.
Fifty years ago, the chemical industry outwitted and out-manoeuvered environmentalists after the death of Rachel Carson (see the books Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Trust Us We're Experts). But that was before email, open access scientific publication, and the internet. Monsanto and its allies have steadily lost ground in a world of peer-to-peer communication. GMOs have become a liability, despite their best efforts.
The historic situation is this: in any country, public acceptance of GMOs has always been based on lack of awareness of their existence. Once that ignorance evaporates and the scientific and social realities start to be discussed, ignorance cannot be reinstated. From then on the situation moves into a different, and much more difficult phase for the defenders of GMOs.
Nevertheless, in the US, those defenders have not yet given up. Anyone who keeps up with GMOs in the media knows that the public is being subjected to an unrelenting and concerted global blitzkrieg.
Pro-GMO advocates and paid-for journalists, presumably financed by the life-science industry, sometimes fronted by non-profits such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are being given acres of prominent space to make their case.
But so far there is little sign that the growth of anti-GMO sentiment in Monsanto's home (US) market can be halted. The decision by Chipotle is certainly not an indication of faith that it can.
For Monsanto and GMOs the situation suddenly looks ominous. Chipotle may well represent the beginnings of a market swing of historic proportions. GMOs may be relegated to cattle-feed status, or even oblivion, in the USA. And if GMOs fail in the US, they are likely to fail elsewhere.
GMO roll-outs in other countries have relied on three things: the deep pockets of agribusinesses based in the United States, their political connections, and the notion that GMOs represent "progress". If those three disappear in the United States, the power to force open foreign markets will disappear too. The GMO era might suddenly be over.
What Is The Real Agenda Behind John Key's Drive To Change The New Zealand Flag: Due Authority - A Very Silent Coup? May 30 2015 | From: PostmanProductions
TPPA - Flags & The Assassination of the New Zealand Democracy. Fly the Red Blue White and Say No to Prince John and the TPPA!
“God of Nations at Thy feet, In the bonds of love we meet, God defend our free land. Hear our voices, we entreat, Guard Pacific’s triple star From the shafts of strife and war, Make her praises heard afar, God defend New Zealand”
The current NZ Prime Minister has been asked (as have previous Prime Ministers) to remove the New Zealand flag and replace it with their [the cabal's] own made up constitution. This would also take out the treaty as it would not be recognised at all; and place corrupt Maori in the driver's seat with the cabal to prevent another land war.
What is not understood, because of the amount of infighting and mixed agendas within Maoridom is that they have the tools in their hands to unpick the control of the British Empire / Cabal / Illuminati / Khazarian Zionists in New Zealand.
The Cabal are very well aware of this and have killed people in New Zealand to try to stop it - because they know that if their control is destroyed in New Zealand, the same process can be repeated WORLDWIDE.
The nature of heraldry dates back to feudal times when the flags where not just things you waved but a coat of arms stated to whom you pledged allegiance to.
It showed what your rank was, entrenched your legal status from what power or Due authority your knight exercised his rights and privileges, the Crown or the State. One of the frustrating things about the change being made to the NZ flag is that no one has considered that change of heraldry and how it impacts on the very notion of DUE AUTHORITY.
As a graduate of both political science and history the flag issue has been gnawing away in my head for months. I knew that the change had major legislation consequences but I could not put my finger on what the con being waged was exactly.
It was only when I went back and began to research what exactly was the aim of heraldry and of what it importance was to the legislative nature of the states authority, that I came across the term DUE AUTHORITY which I recognised immediately.
It was at this point the penny clicked on just how dangerous any change to our flag is DUE AUTHORITY in a nation like NZ is represented on the NZ flag by the Union Jack and signifies that we are a constitutional monarchy.
Links and institutions inherited from the United Kingdom remain; some are “core" to our current system of government: 10.1 The Queen as head of state of New Zealand;
10.2 New Zealand’s status as a Realm, including the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau and the Ross Dependency;
10.3 Appointment of the Governor-General by the Queen;
12.3 THE UNION JACK ON THE NEW ZEALAND FLAG;
12.4 The appearance of the Queen on New Zealand notes and coins; and
12.5 “God save the Queen” as one of New Zealand’s anthems.
13 These links could be reformed without changing New Zealand’s constitution in any fundamental way.
They are, however, important in reinforcing New Zealand’s national identity as a constitutional monarchy. For this reason, any change to these links may evoke strong feelings in the community.
It is important to note that a constitution is not at end in itself – it is simply the means by which a nation state is structured and ordered.
Constitutional arrangements reflect a nation’s sense of identity.
For that reason, a change to any of the elements listed in paragraphs 10 and 12 above – whether the change is large or small – is likely to require a lot of time, public involvement, education and discussion.
DUE AUTHORITY: Take off the Union Jack we remove the protection of monarch constitutional system and the bill of rights and open our selves wide to the slavery of the TPPA.
A change of flag means not only that we have taken a major step to removing the DUE AUTHORITY of the crown. It also means we take away the very power which enforces both the 1981 Bill of Rights Act (the closest thing NZ has to an entrenched Constitution) and the founding plank upon which the Treaty of Waitangi has meaning.
It does not matter if your pro or anti monarchy but if you take away the DUE AUTHORITY of law (which includes our flag) you then open the gates of hell, or to be precise the means in which John Key can legally sign the TPPA (Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement). Currently if the matter was taken to court it would undoubtedly end up at the Supreme Court.
The Privy Council is our former chief court and unlike the new US-styled NZ supreme Court, has its legal interpretation interpreted by Judges that are picked by the Law Lords of the Common Wealth.
In the new system those Judges are picked by parliament – uh oh.
At the moment it is likely that a legal challenge could be mounted against the TPPA, even if John does sign it, even with the Supreme Court Change, in that it breaches the 1981 Bill of Rights and the Crowns' obligation to Iwi as set out in the Treaty of Waitangi.
However if the DUE AUTHORITY of the State can be removed then the TPPA can not only be signed but it then means that once signed the DUE AUTHORITY of the TPPA would superseded the power of any NZ laws already in place. Such as the 1981 Bill of Rights etc.
This and the specific appoint of the 12 New Zealanders appointed as members of the Flag Consideration Panel who will “engage” the public about a possible new New Zealand flag, all indicate that the flag change has a very sinister element behind it.
John Key is effectively saying;
"Changing the flag is a constitutional matter that needs to be taken to the people".
"Whereas signing the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement has nothing to do with the people..."
The Flag Consideration Panel will be chaired by former deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Canterbury Emeritus Professor John Burrows, ONZM, QC of Christchurch who was co-chair of the constitutional Advisory Panel along with – Sir Tipene O’Regan, former Chairman of Nga Tahu and controversial ex mayor Peter Chin.
Emeritus Professor John Burrows, ONZM, QC
Former deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Canterbury Emeritus Professor John Burrows, ONZM, QC of Christchurch
In a decidedly right wing leading body. The other 10 members are:
Lt Gen (Rtd) Rhys Jones, CNZM
Former Chief of NZ Defence Force.
Chris Trotter note how Jones also sit on the panel of John Key’s “Free thinkers” which Key has drawn around him to act as his personal advisers. Jones dedication to democracy is also underscored by his mishandling of Jon Stephenson who was spied on for daring report the truth of NZ involvement in Afghanistan - a job which had NZDF writing manuals classifying Investigative Journalists as “subversives”.
Director of Julie Christie Inc. and board member, Auckland.
Christie also known as ‘The Bitch of Broadcasting’ is famed as the creator of reality TV (and if that does not inspire you with confidence) and is another professional spin doctor.
Her other close associates include entertainer legal Karen Soich famed of the Mr. Asia Heroin drug ring and the late Neil Roberts, the CEO of TVNZ - who avoided jail despite being busted on the Auckland Harbour Bridge with a kilogram of cocaine.
Peter Chin, CNZM
Former Mayor of Dunedin, director and trustee, Dunedin
Chin whose nick name in Dunedin is “corruptchin” pushed through the $400 million Dunedin Stadium as wanted by investors (who sold the land for the Stadium to the council at 600% above government valuation) the Farry Family and Casino Magnate Earl Hagerman.
At the time Chin was the Commissioner of Gambling. So he was in breach of his charter to never put himself in a position where he could be accused of a conflict of interest. He was also a paid employee of Webb & Farry during his entire tenure as Mayor of Dunedin.
At the 43rd Otago University School of Foreign Policy, on people power, China gave the key note speech in which he declared:
‘I think public participation in the political process is sometime undesirable as it allows the silent majority to be drowned out by the disgruntled and those with an grudge to bear”.
So he is a communist?
Chin, who is known to have ambitions of making NZ’s top judges, maybe even the first of Key desired supreme court, has also being appointed to ensure public participation on constitutional amendment[?!] - to make as the government clearly wish; to become a republic which gives the TPPA more power than a constitutional monarchy built upon the Magna Carta.
Academic, Maori Flag Consideration Panel members announced studies and te reo Maori, Christchurch.
Her father Tipine O’Regan sits on the same Constitutional amendment chair as Chin, is a senior Nga Tahu chief and can be pretty much be anticipated to direct any ideas towards the interest of Ngai Tahu - an iwi which seems quite happy to run rough shod over the interest of its lesser hapu to insure the new aristocracy get their silk boxer shirts.
Rod Drury
CEO of Xero and technology entrepreneur, Havelock North
Drury is of Ngai Tahu, he is vehemently anti-Greens and anti-Mana (he is also a violent opponent of Kimdotcom) and a pure National zealot all the way. His position regarding National is recorded in the Northland paper the Standard where he is quoted as saying of National:
“What I’d like to see is the Government have another term because they’ve had two terms where they got the debt sorted”
Also of Ngai Tahu – that the panel is distinctly absent of any other major iwi, asides from Ngai Tahu, is proof of the dirty deal unfolding between the tribe who made it way up the food chain massacring smaller tribes with European muskets and European boats. Today they have swapped musket for pen but the principal remains the same.
The board also includes light weight sport heroes Beatrice Faumuina, ONZM – Olympian, Commonwealth gold medalist an All Black Sir Brian Lochore and people with no real political nouse such as youth Stephen Jones – an Invercargill Youth Councillor and Kate de Goldi a children’s author.
These are the people who will shape the DUE AUTHORITY of the new flag -
shape it so it serves those who gain to benefit from NZ signing the TPPA.
A treaty which will allow multinational’s to poison our waters, risk our workers safety, rip up our race relations, in a treaty which once singed will supersede all NZ laws and our rights. A treaty which will be entrenched whose due authority will never be able to be removed by any legal means or public protest once signed.
Say good bye Magna Carta say hello to Neo feudalism as it heralds under, the DUE AUTHORITY of Prince John and his hand picked henchmen, an age of corporate slavery which the blue background, four stars, an union jack, has never being associated with.
Stevia Hailed By Overpopulation Propagandists As An Anti-Fertility Agent? May 29 2015 | From: YouTube
Maybe it's not so sweet now... If you've thought stevia, the natural alternative to sugar and artificial sweetners with aspartame, et al., is too good to be true, there may be a catch.
Check out this textbook written in 1970 by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, the precursor to the textbook Ecoscience they wrote with Obama Science Czar John P. Holdren seven years later.
The book advocates all manner of horrors to depopulate what they consider an overpopulated world, including everything from adding sterilants to the water and food to producing a sterilizing virus that requires a vaccine antidote one could apply for... it's a nightmare.
As such, it was pretty shocking to find a passage where the authors excitedly discuss using stevia rebaudiana — the same sweet leaf hailed everywhere today as a wonderful, healthy sugar alternative — as an anti-fertility agent. What's more, it had apparently been used traditionally by indigenous Indian populations in Paraguay for a long time, and rats in studies had shown a large drop in fertility after being administered stevia...
EcoScience: Authored in 1977 advocates for extreme totalitarianmeasures to control the population
p796: One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption - especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it.
Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.
p787-8: Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficultpolitical, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development.
To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must befree of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.
p838: In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?
P942-3: Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist.
Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans.The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.
The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.
More examples and specific page numbers to checkout can be found here.
Greece Is At Breaking Point; Grexit Will Trigger ECB Demise May 29 2015 | From: GeoPolitics / DavidStockman
“Graccident” Will Trigger The Demise Of The ECB And The World’s Toxic Regime Of Keynesian Central Banking
Three days ago, Greece interior ministry admitted it won’t have money to pay its June obligations to the IMF. A sizable $1.8 billion needed to be raised and from the looks of it, nobody in the EU is willing to kick the can one more time.
During the G7 Summit later this week, the United States is anticipated to put pressure on the Eurozone to provide the Greeks some leeway or else it will turn to Russia.
Whatever the case, the entire EU economy is already freezing and the imminent Grexit will only makes matter worse for the single currency.
“Graccident” Will Trigger The Demise Of The ECB And The World’s Toxic Regime Of Keynesian Central Banking
It is not surprising that in a few short months Yanis Varoufakis has proven himself to be a thoroughgoing Keynesian statist. After all, what would you expect from an economics PhD who co-authored books with Jamie Galbraith? The latter never saw an economic malady that could not be cured with bigger deficits, prodigious printing press “stimulus” and ever more intrusive state intervention and redistribution.
In what is apparently a last desperate game theory ploy, however, Varoufakis has done his countrymen, Europe and the world a favor. By informing his Brussels paymasters that they must continue to subsidize his bankrupt Greek state because it is the only way to preserve the European Project and vouchsafe the Euro, the Greek Finance minister blurted out the truth of the matter, albeit perhaps not intentionally:
“It would be a disaster for everyone involved, it would be a disaster primarily for the Greek social economy, but it would also be the beginning of the end for the common currency project in Europe,” he said.
“Whatever some analysts are saying about firewalls, these firewalls won’t last long once you put and infuse into people’s minds, into investors’ minds, that the eurozone is not indivisible,”he added.
He sure got that right. People who believe in democracy and economic liberty anywhere in the world should pray for a Graccident. During the next several weeks, when $1.8 billion in IMF loans come due that Greece cannot possibly pay, there will occur a glorious moment of irony for Syriza.
If it holds firm to its leftwing statist agenda and takes Greek democracy back from the clutches of the EU / IMF apparatchiks, Syriza will strike a blow for democracy and capitalism in one great historic volte-face.
That is to say, defiance of the Germans and the troika would amount to a modern monetary Marathon; it would trigger a thundering collapse of the ECB and the cancerous superstate regime built upon it in Frankfurt and Brussels - and, along with it, cast a mortal blow upon the worldwide Keynesian central banking regime, too.
The hour comes none to soon. In a few short years under Draghi and in the context of Europe’s fiscal and economic enfeeblement, the ECB has been transformed into a hideous reverse Robin Hood machine. So doing, it has gifted financial gamblers and front-runners with hundreds of billions of ill-gotten gains in the euro debt markets.
In the days shortly before Draghi issued his “whatever it takes” ukase, for example, the Italian 10-year bond was trading at 7.1%. So speculators who bought it then have made a cool 350% gain if they were old-fashioned enough to actually buy the bonds with cash.
And they are laughing all the way to their estates in the South of France if their friendly prime broker had arranged to hock these deadbeat Italian bonds in the repo market even before payment was due. In that case, Mario’s front-runners are in the 1000% club and just plain giddy.
Outline Of ‘Future Of BRICS Institutions’ & Other BRICS / AIIB Developments May 28 2015 | From: GeoPolitics
In the run-up to the 7th BRICS leaders Summit to be hosted by Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will attend an event in Moscow on Saturday to outline priorities for Russia within the group of five.
Russia’s National Committee on BRICS research is organizing a forum to discuss trade and a “fair world order”.
Lavrov will speak at the event on Saturday on the “future of BRICS-born institutions” said an official statement.
The biggest emerging markets are uniting to tackle under-development and currency volatility with setting up of institutions that encroach on the roles of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had in 2014 also proposed the countries come together under an energy alliance that will include a fuel reserve, as well as an institute for energy policy.
“We propose the establishment of the Energy Association of BRICS. Under this ‘umbrella’, a Fuel Reserve Bank and BRICS Energy Policy Institute could be set up,” Putin said.
A formal announcement on the BRICS Energy association is expected to be made during the BRICS Summit in Russia in July, Russian official sources said.
The group has already created the BRICS Stock Alliance an initiative to cross list derivatives to smooth the path for international investors interested in emerging markets.
Leaders of the five global powers will gather in the Russian town of Ufa on 8-9 July seeking to pin down further consolidation of political and economic ties.
The BRICS nations have called for an overhaul of management of the World Bank and IMF and oppose the practice of their respective presidents being drawn from the US and Europe.
A BRICS University in the works: Russia
The BRICS economies want to institute a BRICS Network University that could be a potential victory for the cause of higher education in these five countries and to the international postgraduate market.
“A large-scale event to establish a BRICS Network University has been planned for September, and in October, a BRICS Global University Summit will take place in Moscow,” said Russian Deputy Minister of Education and Science Alexander Klimov in St. Petersburg.
He was speaking at an international conference on “Education and global cities” being held in the Russian city from May14-15.
Demographic changes in BRICS mean the appetite for higher education is expanding quickly and providing a source of international postgrad students that the US and UK are currently exploiting.
“Over the course of the next month and a half we should agree on the fundamental structure of BRICS University so that in September, the BRICS Network University, endorsed by all members of the association, will be officially established,” Klimov said.
Both the UK and US universities are heavily dependent on the BRICS, especially China and India, for their international numbers. India, by 2024, will be home to the largest tertiary-aged population, numbering over 119 million.
The ‘BRICS Working Group on Education’, comprised of senior officials and ministers will meet on 25-26 June and later in November in Moscow to formulate the development of the proposed university.
The discussions ahead of the 7th BRICS Summit in Russia is expected to highlight the critical role that education plays in creating a skilled workforce that meets the needs of industry in these emerging markets.
The Bank will have its headquarters in China with India holding its first rotating presidency.
Presidents Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Dilma Rousseff, Jacob Zuma and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet in Russia on 8-9 July to further consolidate ties within the bloc.
Empower Yourself To Fight The Power May 27 2015 | From: GlobalResearch
The enemies of truth, freedom, and justice are highly mobilized, well funded, and efficiently organized. The institutional structures of power, whether local, national or global, are effective mechanisms through which the ruling groups of society establish and entrench their influence, build consensus among each other, brainwash and expand their control over the masses and society as a whole.
Whether they take the form of think tanks, universities, governments, corporations, militaries, intelligence agencies, NGOs, media conglomerates, international organizations, philanthropic foundations, they are institutions of control and conquest.
Whether that conquest is ideological or physical, the effect is the same: the conquered are oppressed and repressed.
These institutions are financed through the global banking system of collusion between the private banks and quasi-governmental central banks, who control the money supply and value of the change in your pocket, which are in fact a highly concentrated group of institutions and individuals. Never in all of human history have so few controlled so much on such a global scale, nor have so many had so little on an equally global scale.
Never before in history have the mechanisms for absolute total global control and oppression been within such close reach. We are seeing the emergence of this ‘new society’ in which governments are increasingly imperialistic abroad and militaristic at home, as domestic police states are established under the guise of ‘homeland security’, sold on the pretense of protecting people from terrorists, but in actuality are designed to protect the powerful from the people.
Increasingly, civil rights and freedoms are being dismantled for the wider populations: countries and peoples all around the world are subjected to bombings, drone attacks from flying killer robots in the sky named “Predators”, and high-tech military equipment is designed and used to more effectively kill and conquer poor people all around the globe.
In the emerging ‘homeland security states’, technology is being used to spy on people, all internet traffic monitored, phones tapped, cameras recording not only our images, but through biometrics they are categorizing and quantifying our specific individual faces and emotional responses. We are, increasingly, seeing the emergence of a hybrid nightmarish scenario of ‘Brave New World’ meets ’1984.’
Technology has largely facilitated the advances in these areas and has, for the first time in all of human history, made possible the notion of a truly global police state.
Yet… there is still hope.
The Technological Revolution has not only facilitated a more rapid and effective apparatus for the institutions of power to exploit in methods of oppression and control, but it has simultaneously facilitated the rapid and effective means through which more people than ever before in human history have access to and empowerment through information and communication on a truly global scale.
As a result of the Internet, the traditional institutions of power have lost their monopoly of control over information and communication.
The very same technological advances that make possible their methods of control and conquest are simultaneously making possible their eventual downfall and failure. While the powerful have the money and are highly centralized, the rest of the world increasingly have the means and remain highly decentralized. And while the powerful are few, the rest are many.
The Internet and social media have become effective means through which people are able to empower themselves to struggle against and expose the institutions of power that seek to oppress and control them.
Naturally, those same institutions seek to influence – whether overtly or covertly – those very same avenues of social media, they are still effective and available for the struggle for liberation from oppression.
Every Man, Woman And Child:
Why NSA Surveillance Is Worse Than You've Ever Imagined May 26 2015 | From: Sott
Last summer, after months of encrypted emails, I spent three days in Moscow hanging out with Edward Snowden for a Wired cover story. Over pepperoni pizza, he told me that what finally drove him to leave his country and become a whistleblower was his conviction that the National Security Agency was conducting illegal surveillance on every American [and everyone in every other country covered by the Five Eyes network]. Thursday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York agreed with him.
In a long-awaited opinion, the three-judge panel ruled that the NSA program that secretly intercepts the telephone metadata of every American — who calls whom and when — was illegal. As a plaintiff with Christopher Hitchens and several others in the original ACLU lawsuit against the NSA, dismissed by another appeals court on a technicality, I had a great deal of personal satisfaction.
Comment: Interesting to note that Establishment-media outlet Reuters published this article.
It's now up to Congress to vote on whether or not to modify the law and continue the program, or let it die once and for all. Lawmakers must vote on this matter by June 1, when they need to reauthorize the Patriot Act.
Comment:Even if lawmakers actually vote to modify what the NSA is doing - which they most likely won't because they are likely already blackmailed or want to appear "strong" on issues of "national security" - the NSA is, with few exceptions, super-secretive and practically an entity unto itself; it would never allow its goals of profit and totalitarian awareness be curtailed.
It is a behemoth bureaucracy of malevolent intent that serves no one but the few within the 1% who are the real movers and shakers on the planet. And few of those interested parties have anything in common with normal and healthy-minded humans.
A key factor in that decision is the American public's attitude toward surveillance. Snowden's revelations have clearly made a change in that attitude. In a PEW 2006 survey, for example, after the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed the agency's warrantless eavesdropping activities, 51 percent of the public still viewed the NSA's surveillance programs as acceptable, while 47 percent found them unacceptable.
After Snowden's revelations, those numbers reversed. A PEW survey in March revealed that 52 percent of the public is now concerned about government surveillance, while 46 percent is not.
Given the vast amount of revelations about NSA abuses, it is somewhat surprising that just slightly more than a majority of Americans seem concerned about government surveillance. Which leads to the question of why? Is there any kind of revelation that might push the poll numbers heavily against the NSA's spying programs? Has security fully trumped privacy as far as the American public is concerned? Or is there some program that would spark genuine public outrage?
Few people, for example, are aware that a NSA program known as TREASUREMAP is being developed to continuously map every Internet connection — cellphones, laptops, tablets — of everyone on the planet.
"Map the entire Internet," says the top secret NSA slide. "Any device, anywhere, all the time." It adds that the program will allow "Computer Attack/Exploit Planning" as well as "Network Reconnaissance."
One reason for the public's lukewarm concern is what might be called NSA fatigue. There is now a sort of acceptance of highly intrusive surveillance as the new normal, the result of a bombardment of news stories on the topic.
I asked Snowden about this;
“It does become the problem of one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic," he replied,
"where today we have the violation of one person's rights is a tragedy and the violation of a million is a statistic.
The NSA is violating the rights of every American citizen every day on a comprehensive and ongoing basis. And that can numb us. That can leave us feeling disempowered, disenfranchised."
In the same way, at the start of a war, the numbers of Americans killed are front-page stories, no matter how small. But two years into the conflict, the numbers, even if far greater, are usually buried deep inside a paper or far down a news site's home page.
In addition, stories about NSA surveillance face the added burden of being technically complex, involving eye-glazing descriptions of sophisticated interception techniques and analytical capabilities. Though they may affect virtually every American, such as the telephone metadata program, because of the enormous secrecy involved, it is difficult to identify specific victims.
The way the surveillance story appeared also decreased its potential impact. Those given custody of the documents decided to spread the wealth for a more democratic assessment of the revelations. They distributed them through a wide variety of media — from start-up Web publications to leading foreign newspapers.
One document from the NSA director, for example, indicates that the agency was spying on visits to porn sites by people, making no distinction between foreigners and "U.S. persons," U.S. citizens or permanent residents. He then recommended using that information to secretly discredit them, whom he labeled as "radicalizers."
But because this was revealed by The Huffington Post, an online publication viewed as progressive, and was never reported by mainstream papers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, the revelation never received the attention it deserved.
Comment: Nazis used the word "undesirables".
Another major revelation, a top-secret NSA map showing that the agency had planted malware — computer viruses — in more than 50,000 locations around the world, including many friendly countries such as Brazil, was reported in a relatively small Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, and likely never seen by much of the American public.
Comment:That's a new oneon this reader, but somehow not surprising. The question is why, however. Why view so many others - even friends - as "the enemy". And what other bag of dirty tricks is the NSA up to that we have no clue of?
Thus, despite the volume of revelations, much of the public remains largely unaware of the true extent of the NSA's vast, highly aggressive and legally questionable surveillance activities. With only a slim majority of Americans expressing concern, the chances of truly reforming the system become greatly decreased.
While the metadata program has become widely known because of the numerous court cases and litigation surrounding it, there are other NSA surveillance programs that may have far greater impact on Americans, but have attracted far less public attention.
In my interview with Snowden, for example, he said one of his most shocking discoveries was the NSA's policy of secretly and routinely passing to Israel's Unit 8200 — that country's NSA — and possibly other countries not just metadata but the actual contents of emails involving Americans.
This even included the names of U.S. citizens, some of whom were likely Palestinian-Americans communicating with relatives in Israel and Palestine.
An illustration of the dangers posed by such an operation comes from the sudden resignation last year of 43 veterans of Unit 8200, many of whom are still serving in the military reserves. The veterans accused the organization of using intercepted communication against innocent Palestinians for "political persecution."
This included information gathered from the emails about Palestinians' sexual orientations, infidelities, money problems, family medical conditions and other private matters to coerce people into becoming collaborators or to create divisions in their society.
Another issue few Americans are aware of is the NSA's secret email metadata collection program that took place for a decade or so until it ended several years ago. Every time an American sent or received an email, a record was secretly kept by the NSA, just as the agency continues to do with the telephone metadata program.
Though the email program ended, all that private information is still stored at the NSA, with no end in sight.
With NSA fatigue setting in, and the American public unaware of many of the agency's long list of abuses, it is little wonder that only slightly more than half the public is concerned about losing their privacy.
For that reason, I agree with Frederick A. O. Schwartz Jr., the former chief counsel of the Church Committee, which conducted a yearlong probe into intelligence abuses in the mid-1970s, that we need a similarly thorough, hard-hitting investigation today.
“Now it is time for a new committee to examine our secret government closely again," he wrote in a recent Nation magazine article, "particularly for its actions in the post-9/11 period."
Until the public fully grasps and understands how far over the line the NSA has gone in the past — legally, morally and ethically — there should be no renewal or continuation of NSA's telephone metadata program in the future.
James Bamford writes frequently on intelligence and is the author of three books about the National Security Agency, most recently, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America."
Chief Constable Simon Bailey, chair of Operation Hydrant, said that referrals to new suspects “are increasing on an almost daily basis.”“The numbers I refer to today are a snapshot in time,” he added.
So far Operation Hydrant, which was created by National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC), is investigating a number of alleged abuse inquiries, but is not specifically leading a particular investigation.
Comment: The NSA is a technocratic beast; a runaway train with a gaping maw that would seek to label every man, woman and child on the planet as either a threat or a sheep to the very apparatus it seeks to serve. Its power and intent are largely unknown and unimaginable to most because information about it, until only the last few years, has been scarce. It also didn't have the name recognition of the CIA though it is several times larger! And is the stuff of dystopian science fiction novels.
Though presented with a decidedly fundamentalist Christian point of view, the book Project L. U. C. I. D.: The Beast 666 Universal Human Control System by Texe Marrs is well researched and points to what the NSA has been doing for quite a while now. It is all the more interesting since the book was written nearly twenty years ago, and well marks the NSA's development and the growing fruition of its true purpose.
Secret Pentagon Report Reveals US "Created" ISIS As A "Tool" To Overthrow Syria's President Assad
& War is Peace: US Needs External Enemy To Ensure Internal Unity May 26 2015 | From: ZeroHedge / Geopolitics
Pentagon Report Predicted West’s Support for Islamist Rebels Would Create ISIS
Anti-ISIS coalition knowingly sponsored violent extremists to ‘isolate’ Assad, rollback ‘Shia expansion’: A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.
The document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, and that these “supporting powers” desired the emergence of a “Salafist Principality” in Syria to “isolate the Syrian regime.”
According to the newly declassified US document, the Pentagon foresaw the likely rise of the ‘Islamic State’ as a direct consequence of this strategy, and warned that it could destabilize Iraq.
Despite anticipating that Western, Gulf state and Turkish support for the “Syrian opposition” - which included al-Qaeda in Iraq - could lead to the emergence of an ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the document provides no indication of any decision to reverse the policy of support to the Syrian rebels. On the contrary, the emergence of an al-Qaeda affiliated “Salafist Principality” as a result is described as a strategic opportunity to isolate Assad.
Hypocrisy
The revelations contradict the official line of Western governments on their policies in Syria, and raise disturbing questions about secret Western support for violent extremists abroad, while using the burgeoning threat of terror to justify excessive mass surveillance and crackdowns on civil liberties at home.
Among the batch of documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal lawsuit, released earlier this week, is a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document then classified as “secret,” dated 12th August 2012.
The DIA provides military intelligence in support of planners, policymakers and operations for the US Department of Defense and intelligence community.
So far, media reporting has focused on the evidence that the Obama administration knew of arms supplies from a Libyan terrorist stronghold to rebels in Syria.
Some outlets have reported the US intelligence community’s internal prediction of the rise of ISIS. Yet none have accurately acknowledged the disturbing details exposing how the West knowingly fostered a sectarian, al-Qaeda-driven rebellion in Syria.
Charles Shoebridge, a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer, said:
“Given the political leanings of the organisation that obtained these documents, it’s unsurprising that the main emphasis given to them thus far has been an attempt to embarrass Hilary Clinton regarding what was known about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012.
However, the documents also contain far less publicized revelations that raise vitally important questions of the West’s governments and media in their support of Syria’s rebellion.”
The West’s Islamists
The newly declassified DIA document from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their regional allies.
Noting that “the Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” the document states that “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” while Russia, China and Iran “support the [Assad] regime.”
The 7-page DIA document states that al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to the ‘Islamic State in Iraq,’ (ISI) which became the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,’ “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media.”
The formerly secret Pentagon report notes that the “rise of the insurgency in Syria” has increasingly taken a “sectarian direction,” attracting diverse support from Sunni “religious and tribal powers” across the region.
In a section titled ‘The Future Assumptions of the Crisis,’ the DIA report predicts that while Assad’s regime will survive, retaining control over Syrian territory, the crisis will continue to escalate “into proxy war".
The document also recommends the creation of “safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre for the temporary government.”
In Libya, anti-Gaddafi rebels, most of whom were al-Qaeda affiliated militias, were protected by NATO ‘safe havens’ (aka ‘no fly zones’).
‘Supporting powers want’ ISIS entity
In a strikingly prescient prediction, the Pentagon document explicitly forecasts the probable declaration of “an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”
Nevertheless, “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts” by Syrian “opposition forces” fighting to “control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar)”:
“… there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
The secret Pentagon document thus provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led coalition currently fighting ISIS, had three years ago welcomed the emergence of an extremist “Salafist Principality” in the region as a way to undermine Assad, and block off the strategic expansion of Iran. Crucially, Iraq is labeled as an integral part of this “Shia expansion”.
The establishment of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, the DIA document asserts, is “exactly” what the “supporting powers to the [Syrian] opposition want.” Earlier on, the document repeatedly describes those “supporting powers” as “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey.”
Further on, the document reveals that Pentagon analysts were acutely aware of the dire risks of this strategy, yet ploughed ahead anyway.
The establishment of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, it says, would create “the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi.” Last summer, ISIS conquered Mosul in Iraq, and just this month has also taken control of Ramadi.
Such a quasi-state entity will provide:
“… a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy.
ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of territory.”
The 2012 DIA document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), not a “finally evaluated intelligence” assessment, but its contents are vetted before distribution. The report was circulated throughout the US intelligence community, including to the State Department, Central Command, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, FBI, among other agencies.
In response to my questions about the strategy, the British government simply denied the Pentagon report’s startling revelations of deliberate Western sponsorship of violent extremists in Syria. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said:
“AQ and ISIL are proscribed terrorist organisations. The UK opposes all forms of terrorism. AQ, ISIL, and their affiliates pose a direct threat to the UK’s national security.
We are part of a military and political coalition to defeat ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and are working with international partners to counter the threat from AQ and other terrorist groups in that region. In Syria we have always supported those moderate opposition groups who oppose the tyranny of Assad and the brutality of the extremists.”
The DIA did not respond to request for comment.
Strategic asset for regime-change
Security analyst Shoebridge, however, who has tracked Western support for Islamist terrorists in Syria since the beginning of the war, pointed out that the secret Pentagon intelligence report exposes fatal contradictions at the heart of official pronunciations:
“Throughout the early years of the Syria crisis, the US and UK governments, and almost universally the West’s mainstream media, promoted Syria’s rebels as moderate, liberal, secular, democratic, and therefore deserving of the West’s support.
Given that these documents wholly undermine this assessment, it’s significant that the West’s media has now, despite their immense significance, almost entirely ignored them.”
According to Brad Hoff, a former US Marine who served during the early years of the Iraq War and as a 9/11 first responder at the Marine Corps Headquarters Battalion in Quantico from 2000 to 2004, the just released Pentagon report for the first time provides stunning affirmation that:
“US intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a US strategic asset.”
Hoff, who is managing editor of Levant Report - an online publication run by Texas-based educators who have direct experience of the Middle East - points out that the DIA document “matter-of-factly” states that the rise of such an extremist Salafist political entity in the region offers a “tool for regime change in Syria.”
The DIA intelligence report shows, he said, that the rise of ISIS only became possible in the context of the Syrian insurgency -
“there is no mention of US troop withdrawal from Iraq as a catalyst for Islamic State’s rise, which is the contention of innumerable politicians and pundits.”
The report demonstrates that:
“The establishment of a ‘Salafist Principality’ in Eastern Syria is ‘exactly’ what the external powers supporting the opposition want (identified as ‘the West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey’) in order to weaken the Assad government.”
The rise of a Salafist quasi-state entity that might expand into Iraq, and fracture that country, was therefore clearly foreseen by US intelligence as likely - but nevertheless strategically useful - blowback from the West’s commitment to “isolating Syria.”
Complicity
Critics of the US-led strategy in the region have repeatedly raised questions about the role of coalition allies in intentionally providing extensive support to Islamist terrorist groups in the drive to destabilize the Assad regime in Syria.
The conventional wisdom is that the US government did not retain sufficient oversight on the funding to anti-Assad rebel groups, which was supposed to be monitored and vetted to ensure that only ‘moderate’ groups were supported.
However, the newly declassified Pentagon report proves unambiguously that years before ISIS launched its concerted offensive against Iraq, the US intelligence community was fully aware that Islamist militants constituted the core of Syria’s sectarian insurgency.
Despite that, the Pentagon continued to support the Islamist insurgency, even while anticipating the probability that doing so would establish an extremist Salafi stronghold in Syria and Iraq.
As Shoebridge told me;
“The documents show that not only did the US government at the latest by August 2012 know the true extremist nature and likely outcome of Syria’s rebellion” - namely, the emergence of ISIS - “but that this was considered an advantage for US foreign policy. This also suggests a decision to spend years in an effort to deliberately mislead the West’s public, via a compliant media, into believing that Syria’s rebellion was overwhelmingly ‘moderate.’”
Annie Machon
Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer who blew the whistle in the 1990s on MI6 funding of al-Qaeda to assassinate Libya’s former leader Colonel Gaddafi, similarly said of the revelations:
“This is no surprise to me. Within individual countries there are always multiple intelligence agencies with competing agendas.”
She explained that MI6’s Libya operation in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of innocent people, “happened at precisely the time when MI5 was setting up a new section to investigate al-Qaeda.”
This strategy was repeated on a grand scale in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, said Machon, where the CIA and MI6 were:
“… supporting the very same Libyan groups, resulting in a failed state, mass murder, displacement and anarchy. So the idea that elements of the American military-security complex have enabled the development of ISIS after their failed attempt to get NATO to once again ‘intervene’ is part of an established pattern.
And they remain indifferent to the sheer scale of human suffering that is unleashed as a result of such game-playing.”
Divide and rule
Several US government officials have conceded that their closest allies in the anti-ISIS coalition were funding violent extremist Islamist groups that became integral to ISIS.
US Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, admitted last year that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Turkey had funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Islamist rebels in Syria that metamorphosed into ISIS.
But he did not admit what this internal Pentagon document demonstrates - that the entire covert strategy was sanctioned and supervised by the US, Britain, France, Israel and other Western powers.
The strategy appears to fit a policy scenario identified by a recent US Army-commissioned RAND Corpreport.
The report, published four years before the DIA document, called for the US “to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.”
The US would need to contain “Iranian power and influence” in the Gulf by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.” Simultaneously, the US must maintain “a strong strategic relationship with the Iraqi Shiite government” despite its Iran alliance.
The RAND report confirmedthat the “divide and rule” strategy was already being deployed “to create divisions in the jihadist camp. Today in Iraq such a strategy is being used at the tactical level.”
The report observed that the US was forming “temporary alliances” with al-Qaeda affiliated “nationalist insurgent groups” that have fought the US for four years in the form of “weapons and cash.” Although these nationalists “have cooperated with al-Qaeda against US forces,” they are now being supported to exploit “the common threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties.”
The 2012 DIA document, however, further shows that while sponsoring purportedly former al-Qaeda insurgents in Iraq to counter al-Qaeda, Western governments were simultaneously arming al-Qaeda insurgents in Syria.
The revelation from an internal US intelligence document that the very US-led coalition supposedly fighting ‘Islamic State’ today, knowingly created ISIS in the first place, raises troubling questions about recent government efforts to justify the expansion of state anti-terror powers.
In the wake of the rise of ISIS, intrusive new measures to combat extremism including mass surveillance, the Orwellian ‘prevent duty’ and even plans to enable government censorship of broadcasters, are being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic, much of which disproportionately targets activists, journalists and ethnic minorities, especially Muslims.
Yet the new Pentagon report reveals that, contrary to Western government claims, the primary cause of the threat comes from their own deeply misguided policies of secretly sponsoring Islamist terrorism for dubious geopolitical purposes.
War Is Peace: US Needs External Enemy To Ensure Internal Unity
The object is not only about national unity, but the underlying principle has always been to keep the mind occupied and distracted while they empty the national treasury of each nation involved including America itself.
The US Cabal keeps fabricating pseudo-enemies to sustain the need for their services, i.e. governance and security.
When everybody is prosperous and secured, who needs government?
War is Peace: US Needs External Enemy to Ensure Internal Unity
Since the end of the Cold War the US has fabricated two enemies for itself – Radical Islam and Russia – but now it has to choose only one, and the best candidate is Radical Islam, according to French historian, diplomat and novelist Jean-Christophe Rufin.
The totalitarian party principles from George Orwell's "1984"
The US needs an external enemy to ensure community cohesion, Jean-Christophe Rufin said in an interview with the French Le Figaro newspaper.
“American society, similar to the Roman Empire is in need of an external uniting enemy. Since 1991, in its striving not to miss out on one, the US has made up two,” he said.
On the one hand, he says, by overthrowing Arabic-Muslim secular regimes, “rightfully labelled as dictatorships destined for public reproof,” the US and its European allies have contributed to the emergence of a considerable number of Islamist enemies (starting with Bin Laden and continuing up to the Islamic State) financed by some oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf region.
On the other – the US has pursued its systematic policy of besieging post-Soviet Russia. From Georgia to Mongolia and through the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) the US has laid the ground for a new cold war.
Now, the historian says, the US faces a choice of keeping only one enemy. The best candidate is Radical Islam, he says.
“However we should not forget the prophecy of Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw Russia as the only continental power capable of competing with the US,” Rufin stated.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859) was a French political thinker and historian, who was famous for his analysis of the American democratic system; best known for his works ‘Democracy in America’ and ‘The Old Regime and the Revolution.’
Over 1,400 suspects investigated in UK historical sex abuse inquiry. Back in the day, Asia-Pacific natives were branded as uncivilised, unsophiscated and outright cannibals. Coloured races were all considered inferior.
Yet, even within these most “advanced societies”, monsters of the worst kind walk the streets freely and some even gracing the halls of power. Over 1400 individuals are under investigation by British police as part of an inquiry into a historic VIP sex abuse network believed to include celebrities and politicians.
Information released by Operation Hydrant, the group of police officers tackling the alleged ring, said that the 1,433 suspected offenders included 76 politicians, 43 musicians, and 135 from film, television and radio.
A further 216 were revealed to have died.
Chief Constable Simon Bailey, chair of Operation Hydrant, said that referrals to new suspects “are increasing on an almost daily basis.”“The numbers I refer to today are a snapshot in time,” he added.
So far Operation Hydrant, which was created by National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC), is investigating a number of alleged abuse inquiries, but is not specifically leading a particular investigation.
The alleged abuse is primarily thought to have happened in institutions, Bailey said, with 666 of the suspects believed to have targeted victims in establishment places. A total of 154 schools, 75 children’s homes and 40 places of religious worship were among the institutions identified.
Bailey stressed UK authorities are seeing “an unprecedented increase” in the number of allegations surfacing.
“There is no doubt (Jimmy) Savile has had an effect on us.We are dealing with more and more allegations,” he said.
In March, it also emerged that Britain’s police watchdog was expanding its operation to investigate police cover-ups of historic sex abuse in the UK.
Allegations being investigated by the IPCC span from the 1970s to the 2000s, and include cases where inquiries into MPs, actors and the clergy were dropped due to pressure from senior officers.
One claim asserts detectives in central London gathered evidence against a high-profile pedophile ring operating in Britain, and that a file has been submitted to begin proceedings against those identified.
Royal Sex-Scandal Accuser Spills More Salacious Details
From: RT
A day before Prince Andrew is expected to address his sex-scandal woes in a speech at Davos, his accuser is spilling more salacious details in court and demanding to “interview” him under oath.
The Duke of York, second son of Queen Elizabeth II, is due to host his annual British trade reception at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Thursday.
Buckingham Palace announced arrangements for a media pool to cover his speech, as The Telegraph and other British media reported Wednesday that he is expected to start off his remarks with an emphatic denial that he ever had sex with an underage American girl hired by his friend, financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Telegraph
Prince Andrew ‘will open Davos speech by addressing sex abuse allegations’
The palace has already issued three such strong denials but now Andrew, in a royal first, is preparing to personally address the allegations against him.
His accuser is Virginia Roberts, a 31-year-old mother of three, who has joined a civil lawsuit in Florida over the Epstein case. In it, she accused Andrew, as well as super-lawyer Alan Dershowitz, of having sex with her in 2001 when she was a teen and working as a “sex slave” to Epstein.
USA Today
Key questions answered in Prince Andrew ‘sex slave’ case
On Wednesday, her lawyers filed more documents in which she spills more details about her three alleged sexual encounters with the prince, 54. Among other things, she says she told Epstein that Andrew’s sexual interests include feet, which Epstein found amusing.
“Epstein appeared to be collecting private information about Andy,” as she called the fifth-in-line to the throne, a long time pal of Epstein.
She also declares herself miffed by the palace denials of her accusations.
“That denial is false and hurtful to me,” she says in an affidavit. “I did have sexual contact with him as I have described here - under oath".
“I was hoping that he would simply voluntarily tell the truth about everything. I hope my attorneys can interview Prince Andrew under oath about the contacts and that he will tell the truth.”
But a chat with Andrew looks unlikely. Roberts’ lawyers, former federal judge Paul Cassell and Bradley Edwards, tried to have a letter delivered to Buckingham Palace earlier this week seeking such an interview but the letter was turned away, according to The Guardian.
The Guardian
Prince Andrew asked to respond under oath about claims of sex with 17-year-old girl.
“This letter is a formal request on behalf of Mr. Edwards and Professor Cassell to interview you, under oath, regarding interactions that you had with (Roberts) beginning in approximately early 2001,” the letter reads.
“(Roberts) was then 17 years old.”
The letter included a picture, now familiar to British news consumers, of Andrew with Roberts, his arm wrapped around her waist, her midriff bare.
In her court filing, Roberts says she is seeking to have criminal charges filed against Andrew and other unnamed “powerful people” she says she was forced to have sex with.
She complains that her credibility has been attacked. “I am telling the truth and I will not let these attacks prevent me from exposing the truth about how I was trafficked for sex to many powerful people,” she concludes. “These powerful people seem to think they don’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else. That is wrong.”
Dershowitz has vociferously, repeatedly, publicly denied Roberts’ allegations against him, calling her a liar and her lawyers sleazy. He and her lawyers have filed dueling defamation lawsuits against each other.
Dershowitz says that if she’s lying about him, then she’s lying about Andrew, too, and that the prince should fight back.
But generally royals don’t do that sort of thing. The last time a senior royal went on TV to talk about something in their personal life was Princess Diana’s famously disastrous 1995 interview on the BBC about her failed marriage to Prince Charles. But she had not been accused of criminal behavior.
Meanwhile, flight logs of Epstein’s private jet, which appeared in the Daily Mail and then disappeared online, compared with records of Andrew’s public engagements, show that Roberts and Andrew were both in London, New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands when she claims they had the sexual encounters.
Elites Panic As Information Control Flounders:
Google Devising Method To Rank Websites By 'Truthfulness' May 24 2015 | From: TheInternationalForecaster
Alright, here’s the bad news: Google is about to start ranking sites according to their conformity with mainstream opinion. Or at least that’s what the headlines would have you believe.
The usual sources in the controlled corporate media are telling you that this is a good thing and that only “Anti-science advocates are freaking out about Google truth rankings,” but if that seems like a remarkably blase attitude to take when facing the prospect of a 1984-like reality where the modern-age Ministry of Truth (Google) is going to determine the “truth” of controversial subjects and rank search results accordingly, then keep in mind that such articles are written by the likes of Joanna Rothkopf, daughter of mini-Kissinger and author of “Superclass,” David Rothkopf. New Scientist–the website that broke the story with their article “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links“–also framed the story, predictably enough, as “science” versus “anti-science,” starting their article by lamenting the fact that “Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free ‘news’ stories spread like wildfire.” The article rejoices in the fact that the good chaps at Google have come up with a bulletproof answer to this mess: “rank websites according to their truthfulness.”
The slightly good news is that, ironically enough, the New Scientist article seems to be a perfect example of a fact-free story spreading around the internet like wildfire.
While the story does link to a research paper from a Google research team that outlines a “novel multi-layer probabilistic model” for assigning a “trustworthiness score” to web pages, it neglects to mention that the idea is still very much a theoretical work-in-progress at the moment and is nowhere near ready to be launched.
If you have a fetish for multivariate equations, dynamically selected granularity, and line graphs comparing calibration curves for various data analysis methods, have at it! For the rest of us who are not fluent in boffin-speak, the gist of it is this:
First, a page is harvested for its “knowledge triples.”
These are connected triplets of information consisting of a subject, predicate and object. The paper itself helpfully provides the example:
Obama – Nationality – USA. A “false value” (again according to the paper itself) would be Obama – Nationality – Kenya.
These knowledge triples are assessed for their (Google-determined) accuracy and the page is assigned a KBT (Knowledge-Based Trust) score, which Google could use in place of (or perhaps in some combination with) the traditional PageRank score to determine how high in the search results the web page should place.
The paper uses a list of 15 gossip websites to demonstrate that using this method, sites with disputed and often incorrect information (gossip sites) might rank high in traditional search results, which are weighted toward popularity, but low in the KBT results. But even the paper itself admits there’s a long way to go before this KBT method would be usable by Google to rank billions of web pages.
This is good news for those alt media websites (and their readers) who realize that they are the ones directly in the crosshairs of this technology.
Given that Google is nothing other than an American intelligence adjunct (and has been since its inception), would we expect anything resembling a fair assessment of the “truthfulness” surrounding the most politically controversial subjects of our time?
The Federal Reserve is a private cartel created by the banksters for the express purpose of manipulating the money supply and controlling the economy? CONSPIRACY THEORY! No Google for you!
Governments always and throughout history use false flag terrorism in order to justify their wars of aggression? SLANDER! Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to the bottom of the search results!
Google and every other major Silicon Valley firmis in bed with the DOD and/or the CIA and/or the NSA? BLASPHEMY! You have been excommunicated from the church of Google.
You get the idea.
But here’s the really good news:
“...even if Google does launch such a system, it is doomed to failure. The internet is one of the last, best bastions of the free market in action that we have in our stultified, regulated, controlled, manipulated economy."
Google’s popularity did not come about because government goons pointed a gun at everyone’s head and forced them to use it. They didn’t even create a licensing system for operating search engines, a favorite government trick for keeping genuine competition out of the market.
It became popular because it was a million times more useful than AskJeeves or Yahoo! or any of the other outdated, clunky, dysfunctional search “portals” that dominated the web in the late 1990s.
Granted, the power of Google’s PageRank may have come directly from the NSA’s own engineers, as some have speculated, but the fact remains:people use it because they can find what they want quickly and easily with minimal fuss.
At that point at which Google stops being useful for its intended purpose (helping people to look for information), people will start to look for alternatives. And alternatives do exist.
DuckDuckGo is another popular alternative search engine focusing on privacy protection that uses a number of innovative tools to make searching quicker and easier.
SigTruth is an “Alternative Media Search Engine for Liberty Minded People” that uses Google’s own custom search abilities against itself by returning only alt media website results on various topics.
And even the news that Google might at some point start using its “truthiness” score to downgrade the alt media has spurred others in the alt media (like Mike Adams) to announce the creation of their own search engines.
This is how the free market of ideas is meant to work, and if and when Google starts returning sanitized propaganda, those who are uninterested in sanitized propaganda will vote with their feet (fingertips?).
But here’s the best news of all:
What this urge to categorize sites by “truthfulness” (and all of the back-slapping, high-fiving articles about this news from the dying establishment mouthpiece media) really shows is just how desperate the would-be gatekeepers are becoming in their fight to put the alt media genie back in the bottle.
And even better yet, this is by no means the first sign that the gatekeepers are losing their war to keep the people in the dark on the topics that matter.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
In 2008, arch-globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski started lamenting how, for the first time in human history “all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive.” This, as he stressed in speeches and articles at the time, means that it is no longer possible to dominate people in the same ways that they have been dominated for centuries.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton admitted that the US was losing the information war to alternative media outlets of all stripes.
In 2013, PopularScience.com had to turn off comments on all of their articles because, they said, a “decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics” like catastrophic man-made climate change.
And poll after poll after poll in year after year after year continues to chart the decline of the dinosaur print/radio/tv media and the rise of the internet as a source of daily news and information for the majority of the public.
Yes, there are dark skies and reasons to be concerned about what’s coming in the inevitable digital clampdown. But there are bright spots as well, and these deserve to be noted, highlighted and celebrated. After all, the people have had a taste for real information and now more people than ever before see through the increasingly clumsy propaganda of the establishment. And that makes the propaganda increasingly useless for setting the political agenda.
The internet revolution toothpaste is out of the tube, and it’s going to be one heck of a job getting it back in. And that’s good news.
BBC: UK Public Funding Worldwide Propaganda May 23 2015 | From: PressTV
The UK public funds the BBC and yet the BBC is provably failing to deliver independent, impartial news reporting that truly serves the public interest.
The BBC was founded by Royal Charter; the structure of the charter is such that the Queen is at the top of the pyramid and the trustees of the BBC Trust (completely appointed by the Queen) are responsible for maintaining the purposes of the BBC. In this program, we point to the growing numbers of license fee payers who refuse to pay the BBC due to scandals like the Jimmy Savile affair or the BBC simply breaching all of its major obligations to the paying public, especially independence and impartiality.
Our conclusion is that the license fee payers have valid reasons to refuse to pay the license fee and we also lay the foundation for the second part of this program with the charge that worse than breaching its own charter, the BBC is protecting the terrorists responsible for the destruction of WTC 7 on 9/11 by withholding critical information that is of vitalpublic interest.
10 More Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True May 23 2015 | From: AntiMedia
In an interesting non-affiliated follow up to 10 "Conspiracy Theories" That Came True we now have this: In recent years, the mere notion of the conspiracy theory has increasingly been stigmatized and ridiculed by mainstream news outlets, internet trolls, and “rational” thinkers.
Yet, with powerful revelations by Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks, and generations of intrepid journalists, we now know that many outlandish geopolitical and domestic “conspiracy theories” were and are cold-blooded truths of the modern world. Here are 10 that are well-documented and profoundly disturbing.
1. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of US involvement in the Vietnam War, never actually occurred.
It’s true. The original incident – also sometimes referred to as the USS Maddox Incident(s) - involved the destroyer USS Maddox supposedly engaging three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats as part of an intelligence patrol. The Maddox fired almost 300 shells.
President Lyndon B. Johnson promptly drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became his administration’s legal justification for military involvement in Vietnam. The problem is the event never happened.
In 2005, a declassified internal National Security Agency study revealed that there were NO North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident. So, what was the Maddox firing at? In 1965, President Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
Worth pointing out: The NSA’s own historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote a report stating that the agency had deliberately distorted intelligence reports in 1964. He concluded:
“The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964.”
2. Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on rural African American men who had contracted syphilis. The Public Health Service never informed these men they had a sexually transmitted disease, nor did they offer treatment, even after penicillin became available as a cure in the 1940s.
Tragically, it’s true. Rather than receiving treatment, the subjects of these studies were told they had “bad blood.”
When World War II began, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were only then, for the first time, informed they had syphilis. Even then, the PHS denied them treatment.
By the early 1970s, 128 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis and syphilis-related complications, 40 of their wives had the disease and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.
Worth pointing out: A similar experiment conducted on prisoners, soldiers, and patients of a mental hospital in Guatemala actually involved the PHS deliberately infecting the patients and then treating them with antibiotics.
It’s so true that in 1995 President Clinton actually issued a formal apology on behalf of the US government.
Essentially, the CIA used drugs, electronics, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and torture to conduct experimental behavioral engineering experiments on subjects. The program subcontracted hundreds of these projects to over 80 different institutions, including universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.
Most of this was uncovered in 1977 when a Freedom of Information Act exposed 20,000 previously classified documents and triggered a series of Senate hearings. Because CIA Director Richard Helms had most of the more damning MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973, much of what actually occurred during these experiments is still unknown and, of course, not a single person was brought to justice.
Worth pointing out: There is growing evidence that Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, was a subject of the Project MKULTRA while he was at Harvard in the late 1950s.
4. Operation Northwoods
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military drew up and approved plans to create acts of terrorism on US soil in order to sway the American public into supporting a war against Cuba.
It’s true and the documents are out there.
Fortunately, President Kennedy rejected the plan, which included: innocent Americans being shot dead on the streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere; people being framed for bombings they did not commit; and planes being hijacked.
Additionally, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, planned to fabricate evidence that would implicate Fidel Castro and Cuban refugees as the perpetrators of the attacks.
Perhaps most horrifyingly, Lemnitzer planned for an elaborately staged incident whereby a Cuban aircraft would attack and shoot down a plane full of college students.
5. CIA Drug Trafficking
During the 1980s, the CIA facilitated the sale of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army. [It should be noted that this practice onstinues to this day and has been used to fund a myriad of Black Projects including the Secret Space Program].
It’s convoluted and complex, but it’s true.
Gary Webb’s book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion outlines how CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into the U.S. and then distributed crack to Los Angeles gangs, pocketing the profits. The CIA directly aided the drug dealers to raise money for the Contras.
“This drug network,” Webb wrote in a 1996 San Jose MercuryNews article, “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.”
Worth pointing out: On December 10, 2004, Webb committed suicide under suspicious circumstances, namely the fact that he used two bullets to shoot himself in the head.
6. Operation Mockingbird
In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was just getting underway, the CIA launched a top secret project called Operation Mockingbird. Their goal was to buy influence and control among the major media outlets. They also planned to put journalists and reporters directly on the CIA payroll, which some claim is ongoing to this day.
The architects of this plan were Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), who planned to enlist American news organizations and journalists to basically become spies and propagandists.
Their list of entrenched agents eventually included journalists from ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, and Copley News Service. By the 1950s, the CIA had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives.
Fortunately, our media is no longer lured in by corporations and governments to disseminate propaganda and disinformation….hmmm, never mind–strike that last statement.
7. COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of clandestine, illegal FBI projects that infiltrated domestic political organizations to discredit and smear them. This included critics of the Vietnam War, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and a wide variety of activists and journalists.
The acts committed against them included psychological warfare, slander using forged documents and false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment and, according to some, intimidation and possibly violence and assassination.
Similar and possibly more sophisticated tactics are still used today, including NSA monitoring (see #10).
8. Operation Snow White
Operation Snow White was the Church of Scientology's plot during the 1970's to purge unfavourable records about Scientology and it's founder L. Ron Hubbard
Operation Snow White is the name given to an unprecedented infiltration of the US government by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s. They stole classified government files regarding Scientology from dozens of government agencies.
In 1977, the FBI finally cracked Snow White open which led to the arrest and imprisonment of a senior Church official.
The core mission of the program was to expose and legally expunge “all false and secret files of the nations of operating areas” and to enable Church seniors and L. Ron Hubbard himself to “frequent all Western nations without threat.” By the end, of course, there was nothing legal about their endeavors.
9. Secret Global Economic Policies
For years, activists who feared a sinister globalist corporatocracy were told they were being paranoid. Whether you want to call it the New World Order or not: they were right.
In 2013, WikiLeaks released the secretly negotiated draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. It revealed a closed-door regional free trade agreement being negotiated by countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says TPP has:
“extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and [will] hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate.”
Worth pointing out: In June 2014, WikiLeaks revealed the even more far-reaching Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), a 50-country agreement that will promote unprecedented levels of privatization across the world.
The agreement will essentially prevent governments from returning public services into public hands.
This could dramatically affect our ability to enact environmental regulations and keep workers safe.
10. World Governments Illegally Spy On Their Own Citizens
This used to be laughed at as a dystopian fantasy derived from an overactive imagination, Orwell’s 1984, and a juvenile distrust of the government. When you claimed “they” were spying on you, people labeled you a paranoid conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil hat-wearing loon.
Even after it was revealed that the NSA has been illegally eavesdropping on us and collecting our cell phone metadata for over a decade, people still hedged on the meaning of it. Yes, they are analyzing our transmissions, but it’s under the auspices of national security. “In a post 9/11 world” certain liberties must be sacrificed for the sake of security, right?
It turns out that is patently untrue. Not only is there no evidence that the NSA has protected us from terrorism, there is growing evidence that it makes us more vulnerable. Thanks to revelations about the NSA and their Prism project, we know that the scope of the NSA’s eavesdropping is even beyond what we originally believed.
In early June of 2014, the Washington Post reported that almost 90% of the data being collected by NSA surveillance programs is from Internet users with no connection to terrorist activities. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, this is in clear violation of the constitution.
The ACLU is pursuing a lawsuit against the NSA, claiming that the dragnet-style mass collection of data violates the Fourth Amendment right of privacy as well as the First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
It’s Official, Alternative Media Win Over Mainstream Media May 22 2015 | From: GeoPolitics / Sputnik
It’s been a while since the alternative media began fighting for this. Finally, it’s here, it’s official. Mainstream media is history. Nobody wants to listen and watch it anymore, except for the deeply brainwashed segment of our society which is depleting by the day.
People are fed up with mainstream media coverage of events in Iraq and Iran, CODEPINK activist organization national coordinator Alli McCracken, told Sputnik on Tuesday. McCracken’s comments come following the release of an ICM Research poll conducted exclusively for Sputnik, revealing that a total of 60 percent of European and US citizens surveyed wanted to receive information on global events from alternative news sources.
“I think people are really fed up with mainstream media, especially after over a decade of being fed lies about Iraq, now more lies are being told about Iran.”
Western mainstream media coverage of the developments in Iraq gave rise to doubt from the beginning of the US military invasion in 2003. High-profile television channels were faulted for copycat reproduction of primary government talking points, including allegations of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction and the use of state-sponsored foreign agents for local information.
US news outlets have come under fire for their coverage of Iran. In 2013, experts at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland released a report suggesting that influential US and UK newspapers created inaccurate impressions of Iran’s nuclear activity by using “very vague and inconsistent terminology” and avoiding reputable local information sources.
Turning to the results of the poll published earlier in the day, McCracken expressed hope that the percentage of those in favor of access to alternative media would grow.
ICM Research surveyed over 5,000 people in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the United States and Greece between March 20 and April 9, 2015. The poll revealed that more than half of US citizens responding to the questionnaire, 57 percent, are interested or very interested in accessing alternative news coverage on global events.
These Are The Top 5 Signs That Trade Negotiations Are Way Off Track May 22 2015 | From: SumOfUs
Two years ago, conventional wisdom said that in the epic fight between corporate-backed trade deals and regular citizens, stopping these dangerous deals would be nearly impossible.
In one corner, there are hundreds of corporate lobbyists and government officials doing everything they can to increase corporations' power over our lives through two massive trade deals called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). In the other corner, there's all of us regular people, joined by thousands of other organisations banding together to stop these sneaky deals.
Against all expectations, we are actually winning.
How do we know?
1. Last week, we had some really good news. In the US, politicians were voting on legislation that would “fast track” the process for agreeing to trade deals, making it easier for Obama to sign the US up to TPP and TTIP and push the deal ahead. They thought they’d win.
Shocking everyone, those backing the trade deal lost the crucial vote -- throwing a wrench into the process and potentially delaying negotiations by weeks. Debate now moves to the other chamber, where SumOfUs members in the US have been hard at work overwhelming the email boxes, offices, and Facebook pages of key legislators like Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi with calls to stop “fast track” and the TPP:
Comments left on US Democratic Leader Pelosi's Facebook wall.
2. TTIP is being negotiated under a cloak of secrecy with special access for corporate lobbyists: from Monsanto to Nestlé, corporations are scuttling around Brussels to get their agenda into the deal.
European citizens, on the other hand, have been faced with shut doors wherever they turn. So we made sure European leaders and TTIP trade negotiators would get our message anyway: SumOfUs members chipped in to place ads in two top Brussels newspapers and made sure EU politicians and negotiators can no longer turn a blind eye to where we stand on TTIP. Check them out:
Splashy ads funded by all of us in two major European papers.
3. Thousands of SumOfUs members in New Zealand and Australia, along with our partners at Action Station and It’s Our Future raised over $15,000 to blanket over 140 radio stations across New Zealand with our hard-hitting radio ads. The ads got loads of play, reaching hundreds of thousands of people -- including key decision-makers involved in TPP and other trade deal negotiations:
4. SumOfUs has teamed up with more than 400 partner organisations to form a EU-wide, self-organised Citizens’ Initiative against TTIP. Already a whopping 1.8 million of us have signed on to stop the deal -- and the number is rising by the minute. Exploding opposition against the TTIP has European leaders terrified. They're scrambling to save the deal by proposing superficial changes to appease the public.
5. TPP negotiators keep picking isolated, far-away places (increasingly, at gorgeous tropical resorts) to hold their talks. Maybe they don’t want to be bothered with people marching and chanting, disturbing their rounds of golf? Well too bad, because at every turn, we’ve been following them and making sure they know we want this disastrous deal stopped. Here’s a video of a crew of awesome SumOfUs members in Hawaii making their presence known:
If these deals pass, here's just a bit of what we could be in store for: Corporate power grabs that span the world and could change the way we live forever. Deals that set some of the worst global inequalities in stone and make them almost impossible to fix. And a blank cheque for multinationals to draw down the world’s resources, without any rules and regulations to protect future generations.
Does this sound nasty to you? Then you're on the right team. Together, we're standing up against big companies that have hundreds of high-paid lobbyists and slick advertising campaigns, big ad budgets and fancy spin doctors.
But all of that can’t beat what SumOfUs has to offer: millions of committed members, ready to take on corporate trade deals wherever they show up.
These campaigns aren't over yet, and we still have a lot of fight ahead of us, but we are proving that people power can do amazing things.
Just over a year ago, the odds of stopping the TPP and TTIP seemed bleak -- but now public opinion is shifting. These deals are no longer a sure bet, thanks to the work that all of us, and our partners across the globe, have been doing.
Thanks for all your support. We know we're powerful when we work together to stop these dangerous deals. SumOfUs members are the reason this campaign is working -- and together, there's no doubt we can win.
Former Governor Of The Bank Of England Says Banking Fraud Is Threat To Civilisation May 21 2015 | From: PublicCreditOrBust
This document contains perhaps no greater insight of the international private banking pyramid scam crime ring from perhaps no higher authority.
Former Governor of the Bank of England - Vincent C Vickers - ran the loan book for a global elite for a decade before coming out against it until the day he died. The document titled - Economic Tribulation - he wrote in 1939 outlines how the senior elements of private banking had made record profits from the finance, military, industrial complex of World War 1 and the dangers to humanity if it were to continue. I am puzzled at the lack of interest when compared to similar articles of evidence I have posted?
I am wondering if it is because the first 4 chapters are a bit heavy for all but the serious students of the history of money and suggest that others might find it more palatable by reading first the note + forward then start reading from:
This document was published in 1941 - How many lives could have been saved if the warnings and solutions of this man had got the attention they deserved?
Vincent Cartwright Vickers
"He was a Deputy Lieutenant of the City of London, a director of Vickers, Limited, for twenty-two years, and a director of the London Assurance from which he resigned in January 1939. In 1910 he was made a governor of the Bank of England, and resigned this appointment in 1919. Later, he became President of the Economic Reform Club and Institute.
I therefore decided to take the unprecedented course of offering to my readers my own qualifications for putting down before the British people the very precarious condition of our monetary system as it exists in this country to-day; that this our money system forms the most important part of our, economic system, and that the nation’s economic system forms part of our social system.
Let us acknowledge the truth. Humanity is not suffering from unavoidable circumstances over which it has no control, but from the results of deliberate and dishonest actions of its own creation and invention.
Fundamental laws, originally designed for the common welfare of the individuals of a community, have been broken – community laws which were never intended to permit the individual to grow fat upon the poverty of others; nor to permit him, in pursuit of his own personal profit, to base his standard of honesty upon his own flexible conscience, consoling himself with gratitude that he is within the law.
Nevertheless, just as man has brought, upon himself, or has permitted, this world tribulation, so can he play his part in undoing the harm that has been done.But how is this possible? How can the ordinary individual change the world?
Shall the man in the street become an expert economist, or a banker, or a cabinet minister and control the press and public opinion?
How otherwise can he assist in the regulation of mankind?
What is meant by ‘lack of economic equilibrium’, ‘sound finance’, ‘stability of foreign exchanges’, ‘currency restrictions’, ‘the creation of credit’, ‘the inverted pyramid of credit’, and a host of other such phrases?
They smell of long study, special technical ability, and great learning. Surely, then, it is commonly felt, it is better that ordinary individuals should leave economics to the economists, finance to the bankers, and national policy to the politicians?
But, alas, that is exactly what we have for too long been doing. Look at the result! The experts have hopelessly failed. What is needed is a little less economics and a little more common sense.
Although it is the money system which is to be accused of dishonesty, those who use and depend upon a dishonest system, knowing that system to be dishonest, cannot themselves be regarded as honest men.
Moreover, it may be that the present system, which international finance has forced our democratic government to adopt, uphold, and protect by every possible means, has undermined the character of the people and forced them to alter their definition of the word honesty so that it may be made to comply more nearly with modern practice.
No greater threat to humanity and the progress of civilisation can be conceived than the general spread of the Hitler regime of brute force. To crush out that regime for all time even if it stood alone as our sole war aim, would seem enough in itself without the necessity of searching for other objectives.
Although we recognise how serious and how immense is the task that we have undertaken, the vast majority of us gain added strength from the knowledge that righteousness and justice are on our side. The nation has reached a state of preparedness, both mentally and physically, both for offence and defence, which will render the sacrifices and hardships and swift calamities that we must inevitably endure powerless to divert it from the set course which it has determined to pursue to the end.
Yet even then, even when this first great objective shall have been gained, our labours will by no means be over. There is still a long way to go before we can begin to contemplate that promised land of peace and justice for mankind which no destructive war can ever of itself attain, and there remains vital work of preparation and reconstruction at home which cannot be neglected or delayed.
Unless we can contrive to design and establish an improved and reformed financial system, which is the first essential towards a new and better economy in our own country, no satisfactory outcome of the war is possible; for where there is still widespread injustice and discontent there can be no ending to that war, unless it be a tangle of internal revolts and revolutions.
How can we presume to hold up our own social System as a pattern for other nations to follow, whilst it breeds selfishness, unrest, and dishonest competition amongst our own people, and whilst it is dominated by a decadent financial system in which we possess an ever-diminishing confidence and which is not even under the unbiased control or management of Government chosen by the will of the people?
How can we hold out to the German people or to the world, the promise of justice under a new and better economic system that will eliminate poverty, malnutrition, and unemployment, whilst no such system exists, and whilst our own system is still permeated with these same evils?
On the other hand it is unthinkable that we should pretend to ourselves that we can, first of all, and by the successes of our arms, create in Germany an economic vacuum and, having done so, compel her to adopt a money lending system of international finance, designed for the benefit of international financiers who will become more and more anxious to preserve their monopoly and their immunity from governmental control.
Are we now fighting to uphold freedom and democracy, or are we fighting to uphold and strengthen the dictatorship of international finance?
The Direction of Future Policy
State control and State issue of currency and credit through a central organisation managed and controlled by the State - Stabilisation of the wholesale price level of commodities.
That is to say, a fixed and constant internal purchasing power of money; so that a pound will buy tomorrow what it bought yesterday; an honest pound, not a fluctuating pound.
And this can be done by so issuing and regulating the volume of available credit and currency that it shall at all times be adequate to permit of the purchasing power of the consumer being equated with the volume of production; not by limiting the purchasing power, but by firstly increasing purchasing power more in proportion to the productive capacity of industry.
Any additional supply of money should be issued as a clear asset to the State; so that money will be spent into existence, and not lent into existence.
The abolition of the Debt System where all credit is created by the banks and hired out at interest to the country."
Watchdog Starts Second Spy Probe / Spy Review Hobbled Before It Begins May 21 2015 | From: NewZealandHerald / DominionPost
Herald story triggers look at agency’s role in minister’s bid for top world trade job +
Is it a whitewash from the outset?
A new inquiry into NZ's electronic surveillance service is being started as the country's intelligence watchdog tries to find out if it makes good decisions about who to spy on, and how it stays politically neutral. The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Cheryl Gwyn, linked the inquiry to claims the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) spied on foreign diplomats competing against Trade Minister Tim Groser to lead the World Trade Organisation.
Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Cheryl Gwyn
But she said it was unlikely she would be able to probe the allegations. Instead, she said, the inquiry would study the way the GCSB chose its targets, what its decision-making process was and how it stuck to its duty to be neutral in cases where there might be political advantage.
The Groser claims were among a string of stories broken by the Herald in a collaborative reporting project with investigative journalist Nicky Hager and The Intercept, the US news site with access to the trove of secret documents obtained by intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Tim Groser
It is the second inquiry to be started after the Herald published stories based on top-secret GCSB and National Security Agency documents. The first inquiry was into New Zealand spying in the Pacific.
Ms Gwyn said the new inquiry was instigated by her office;
"I consider the issues raised about the process followed when the GCSB considers undertaking particular intelligence activity are of sufficient public importance to warrant an own-motion inquiry.
"While it is unlikely I will be able to publicly confirm or deny the specific allegations relating to this process, I can inquire more generally into how the GCSB determines, within its statutory constraints, what intelligence activity to undertake and what policies and procedures are in place to regulate its activities."
Ms Gwyn said the inquiry would study how the GCSB established whether a proposed spying job fitted its legal role and New Zealand's needs.
It would also look at the GCSB analysis of benefits and risks, and how it handled situations in which there could be perceptions of political advantage.
It would also consider how the GCSB kept its minister informed in situations where there was a "potentially contested assessment" of the justification for the spying.
The Herald reported that the GCSB set up search filters to extract online references to those competing from other countries for the WTO job.
Criticism was voiced after the story appeared over how this served New Zealand's interests as the WTO job is meant to be administrative and neutral.
Editorial: Spy Review Hobbled Before It Begins?
The new committee carrying out a wide-ranging review of intelligence oversight is not equipped for the task.
Sir Michael Cullen is part of the committee carrying out a review of intelligence oversight
Sir Michael Cullen served while an MP on the Intelligence and Security committee, a toothless watchdog which meets for only a few hours a year and has no power to hold the spies or their political masters to account.
This committee is a constitutional monstrosity: it meets at the pleasure of the prime minister and he controls it. It is not a select committee that can test the executive.
Cullen showed no inclination to question the role of the committee. He was, it seems, perfectly happy to serve on a hollow and useless institution.
The Labour Party, in fact, [also] has in general been uninterested in reform of the spy services and their oversight.
The appointment of Dame Patsy Reddy as the other inquirer is even stranger. Reddy is a lawyer and businesswoman who serves on many boards. She has no experience in the field of intelligence. She might, perhaps, have been a useful lay member of a larger inquiry.
She certainly does not have the firepower to be one of only two investigators.
Dame Patsy Reddy, DNZM with the Governor-General of New Zealand, Lt Gen The Rt Hon Sir Jerry Mateparae
Intelligence pundit Paul Buchanan says the committee needs truly independent members, preferably from overseas, and far more than two.
He is right. This matters a great deal, because there have been successive scandals in the spy services and the public is in desperate need of reassurance about the democratic accountability of those services. They won't get it from this committee.
It is true that the Inspector-General of Security, Cheryl Gwyn, has shown a genuine independence in her inquiries. Her investigation of the spies' role in the Phil Goff affair was truly damning.
Phil Goff
She has also rightly launched an inquiry into the scandalous revelation that the GCSB spied on the overseas rivals of Trade Minister Tim Groser in his failed bid to head the World Trade Organisation.
But the inspector can't do an independent investigation of the role of the politicians who appointed her and whom she serves. For that, another agency is needed.
The best approach, as former prime minister Geoffrey Palmer has argued, is to set up a parliamentary select committee, similar to the congressional oversight committees in the United States.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer
For too long the spies have used the mystery of their profession to avoid proper democratic oversight. The various abuses uncovered by Edward Snowden should have shattered this mystique forever. The spies have enormous powers and their oversight has been lamentable.
Edward Snowden
Prime Minister John Key has dismissed Snowden's revelations as "just wrong".
All the evidence suggests that Snowden is right.
But Key's response in these matters is typically mere bluster, and so is Chris Finlayson's.
Chris Finlayson
The Minister in charge of the SIS and the GCSB responded to questions on radio in his usual waspish and unpleasant way.
Clearly Key and Finlayson won't hold the spies to account.
So somebody else needs to do it.
Five Major Banks To Plead Guilty To Rigging Currency Markets May 20 2015 | From: BlacklistedNews
Five major international banks are expected to plead guilty as soon as next week to criminal charges in the US related to their deliberate manipulation of global foreign exchange markets, which allowed them to rake in billions of dollars at the expense of retirees, university endowments and municipalities.
The Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) is one of the oldest, dirtiest banks
in existence. In cahoots with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) they have illegally mirrored, raped and pillaged the Global Collateral Accounts for over 75 years. These assets were the primary sources of stolen funding used by the 'elite' Illuminati / Khazarian / Zionist / Cabal / criminals in attempting to bankroll their 'new world order' into existence.
Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Barclays and UBS are expected to plead guilty to felony fraud and antitrust charges. They will pay fines totaling several billions of dollars, according to bank and regulatory officials who spoke anonymously with the New York Times, Bloomberg and Reuters.
The effect of the guilty pleas will be essentially zero, beyond the immediate costs of the fines levied on the institutions. As the Times put it;
“life will go on, probably without much of a hiccup.”
But we will see.
In the years since the financial crisis, federal regulators avoided bringing criminal charges against banks and their executives, opting instead for either cash settlements and so-called deferred-prosecution agreements, in which charges are delayed on the basis of the banks’ compliance with certain conditions.
In 2012, it became clear that major global banks, including UBS and Barclays, were systematically engaged in manipulating LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), the benchmark global interest rate on the basis of which hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial contracts are valued.
In June of that year, Barclays was fined $200 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and $160 million by the United States Department of Justice.
This was followed by UBS’s agreement in December 2012 to pay regulators $1.5 billion in connection with the scandal and an agreement by Deutsche Bank in 2015 to pay $2.5 billion to regulators. Numerous other banks, including Citigroup and JPMorgan, were fined by European authorities.
UBS was offered a deferred-prosecution agreement in connection with the LIBOR scandal, but broke the terms of the agreement by manipulating the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign exchange markets in the subsequent periods.
In late 2014, six banks - JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC - agreed to pay $4.3 billion to federal regulators to settle civil charges.
[In effect these minuscule pay-offs amount to a 'license to defraud', paid in arrears, because word got out]
The investigation charges also had a criminal component, which the Justice Department is now seeking to settle with guilty pleas from the banks. Unlike some previous cases, however, these guilty pleas are expected to come not merely from the subsidiaries of the banks, but from bank holding companies themselves.
Financial regulators have released voluminous records in connection with the foreign exchange scandal, showing how brazenly and openly bank traders discussed rigging currency rates, even as they knew their employers were being investigated for similar activities with regard to LIBOR.
Despite the unprecedented character of the pleas, the actual impact of the admissions of criminal wrongdoing by the banks is expected to be next to nothing.
As the Times reports;
“Behind the scenes in Washington, the banks’ lawyers are also seeking assurances from federal regulators - including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Labor Department - that the banks will not be barred from certain business practices after the guilty pleas.”
In particular the banks are seeking waivers to retain their status as “well-known seasoned issuers,” allowing them to raise credit more easily, as well as the ability to operate mutual funds. The Times reports that “a majority of commissioners” of the SEC are in favor of granting such such waivers.
In fact, for the biggest corporations, being convicted of a felony is increasingly becoming legally irrelevant, and just one element of their normal operations. As the Times points out, the guilty pleas are merely “an exercise in stagecraft.”
One former Justice Department official told the Times that an “underlying assumption” of the Justice Department is that “the bank is not a criminal operation.”
But the emergence of scandal after scandal, including the selling of toxic mortgage-backed securities that caused the financial crisis, the forging of foreclosure documents, widespread complicity in Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, money laundering, and tax evasion by Wall Street testifies to the fact that the banks are, in fact, criminal outfits.
Since taking office shortly after the onset of the financial crisis, the Obama administration has sought not to hold the banks to account and prevent criminal wrongdoing, but rather to conceal their crimes and, when this becomes impossible, to issue wrist-slap punishments that allow the banks to go on largely as before.
In these cases, the fines levied by financial regulators remain a cost of doing business, and pale in comparison with the billions of dollars made by the major banks every year through criminal activities.
The guiding principle of the Obama administration, in the words of former Attorney General Eric Holder, is that the giant banks are “too big to jail.” As the Times article explained, prosecutors are “mindful that too harsh a penalty could imperil banks that are at the heart of the global economy.”
[Or that their failure would be the death knell of the cabal's already faling control mechanism].
In exchange for their services, top financial regulators are almost universally provided with high-paying positions in Wall Street after their stints with the government.
Most notably, Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman who funneled trillions of dollars in government funds to Wall Street, announced last month that he has been hired by Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel LLC.
This followed the announcement in November 2013 that former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner joined the hedge fund Warburg Pincus.
To this day, not a single executive at any major bank has been criminally prosecuted for helping to cause the financial crisis, or any of the crimes that followed.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement: Is It The Death Of Democracy And The Birth Of ‘Corporatocracy’? May 19 2015 | From: Peter Drew - Independent Journalist
On May 16th the US Senate reversed their decision of two days prior and voted by a margin of 65-33 to allow President Obama and the trans-national corporations to fast-track the authorisation of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 12 nation trade deal between the US and Pacific Ring partners, including New Zealand and Australia.
This highly controversial outcome in the US Senate may end up being one of the most significant votes in the history of New Zealand and Australia. It may well be the beginning of an inevitable and unstoppable process of global change where democracy, national governments, and national sovereignty become a quaint thing of the past and the world moves headlong into a new world order of ‘corporatocracy’.
What is ‘corporatocracy’? It probably isn’t even a real word yet. But perhaps the Oxford Dictionary needs to get it into its next edition, with a definition something like this;
Corporatocracy:A global political system instigated in the early 21st century whereby the maximising of corporate profit becomes the determining factor for all laws and human rights, even superseding those laws of the elected national governments, and superseding the human rights of the people of those nations.
Does that sound impossible in New Zealand and Australia, in these bastions of freedom and democracy? The current TPP process is literally the attempted birth of the above definition or corporatocracy.
How else could you describe it when the various governments involved in the TPP negotiations are being asked to authorise the biggest trade agreement/legislation in global history and yet the MPs of the governments and the people of those nations aren’t even allowed to know the content of that legislation.
The trans-national corporations have written the legislation and our governments are asked to authorise it, but aren’t allowed to know what is in the legislation. Quite an incredible situation, and one that certainly fits our new definition of corporatocracy.
Democratic governments around the world are already hugely influenced by the power of big corporations. We all know that. But there is at least an illusion of governments still being somewhat in the driver’s seat and making decisions.
If the New Zealand and Australian governments actually go ahead and authorise the TPP without even being allowed to know exactly what is in the legislation, and without also sharing it with the public, then even the illusion of democratic government of the people will be gone completely.
The world and the human race are at a crossroads right now, and what happens with the TPP may very well be the determining factor as to which path the human race takes. In the medium to long term, the path of corporatocracy can have only one possible outcome.
Destruction of the environment and destruction of the only home that we have to live on.
The corporatocracy pyramid - click on the image above to open a larger version in a new window
That is a mathematical certainty because corporate growth and increasing profit can only ever be finite, and will always be at the expense of the environment. We live on a finite planet, with finite resources. So with corporatocracy it can only ever be a matter of how long before the cancer kills the patient.
What is now known about the TPP has only come to light through WikiLeaks, not by any disclosures to our governments by the corporate architects of the TPP. So why are the architects of the TPP agreement so desperate to be so secretive?
What is now known about the TPP is that there will be a new international judgement panel formed where TPP disputes will be resolved. This is not a judgement panel made up by the 12 participating nations. It is a panel formed independently by the trans-national corporations involved in the TPP.
The TPP allows the trans-national corporations to sue the government of a nation if that government implements laws which are deemed to be counterproductive to the profits of the corporations involved.
The outcome of that legal action against the government would then be determined by the TPP international judgement panel. So the judicial systems of the 12 participating nations will be completely side stepped.
The specific environmental elements of the TPP legislation are of particular concern. Let’s have a look at a working example of how this could potentially impact New Zealand, a nation that has built an international image on a supposedly clean, green, and pure scenic beauty.
Global oil companies such as Anadarko have spent the last few years trawling the New Zealand oceans and land in search of significant oil fields. Let’s say for example that an oil company identified a huge untapped oil field directly beneath Milford Sound.
That company could make a request to the New Zealand government to set up and drill Milford Sound.
The New Zealand government would quite rightly inform the oil company that New Zealand’s environmental protection laws do not allow for this, and that the New Zealand people would certainly not agree to this.
The oil company could then sue the New Zealand government for perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of lost profit.
The judgement on that legal action will not be heard by the New Zealand judicial system which is accountable to the New Zealand people, in theory anyway.
It will instead be heard by the TPP international judgement panel.
If that panel decides that the laws of the New Zealand government have resulted in a loss of potential profit to the oil company then the law suit can be upheld and the New Zealand government sued for potentially hundreds of billions of dollars.
Essentially New Zealand law will be totally at the mercy of the corporations through the TPP.
This is perhaps a rather extreme example of the TPP in action, but we are already seeing this kind of thing happening with the corporate led process of fracking whereby many governments around the world, including New Zealand and Australia, are prepared to allow our liveable environment and our fresh water drinking reserves to be destroyed literally from under our feet, all in the name of corporate profit for the gas companies.
At the moment there is at least still some kind of legal recourse against the fracking industry. But not under the TPP. So this clearly demonstrates just how important the TPP will be and how it completely changes the entire fabric of our society.
What if a cigarette company decides that anti-smoking legislation is negatively impacting their profits?
What if laws allowing cheap, natural, herbal remedies were deemed to be counterproductive to the profits of the big pharmaceutical drug companies?
Welcome to the world of the TPP and corporatocracy.
No wonder President Obama and his TPP associates have been so desperate to prevent our governments and the public from knowing any detailed content and implications of the TPP, and why they have been so desperate to fast-track this through the US Senate to allow for minimal scrutiny and challenge.
But it doesn’t have to be like this.
The human race is at a cross roads, not a one way motorway to hell. We have a choice, and we can still make a collective decision to take a different path that is more aligned with the good of the people and the planet. New Zealand has a proud history of standing up to international intimidation and doing what is right, no matter what the risk, and no matter what the consequences.
New Zealand and Australia just recognised the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli where both countries lost a significant percentage of their entire population.
Those who sacrificed their lives died at least in the belief that they were fighting for the freedom and future sovereignty of their country.
In the 1980s New Zealand stood out like a beacon to the rest of the world when we refused to bow down to the international terrorist attack on the Rainbow Warrior, and when we defiantly sent the US nuclear warships packing from our waters despite the impact on the ANZUS agreement.
The Rainbow Warrior was a former fishing trawler Sir William Hardy, acquired by Greenpeace in 1978 and sunk in a state-sanctioned terrorist attack by the French intelligence service in Wellington, New Zealand 1985
The New Zealand psyche and our history is defined by standing up to the world on these issues and saying no, because we believe it is the right thing to do.
This trait seems to be in our DNA. That is the New Zealand way, and right now, perhaps more so than ever before in our history, that attitude, conscience, and action needs to be found once again. Not just by the New Zealand public, but by our MPs and by our media.
A line needs to be drawn in the sand somewhere. If that line is not drawn for the TPP, then our country and our future freedom and sovereignty is at great risk.
So, with the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli still fresh in our minds, perhaps now is the time in New Zealand and Australia for the 21st century ANZACs (Australians & New Zealanders Against Corporatocracy) to stand up and ‘fight’ for our countries and say no to the TPP and corporatocracy.
The Two-Faced John Key And The Hapless Andrew Little May 19 2015 | From: Converge
Poor John Key. It must be hard for a Prime Minister to keep up a far-fetched façade for as long as John Key has in denying GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau) involvement in mass surveillance of New Zealanders.
Confusing and confounding the public with smelly red herrings is a normal part of his job but when Key has to explain again and again, because his previous dishonesty has been exposed and new obfuscations are needed, it gets tedious and frustrating.
In the face of incontrovertible evidence that the GCSB conducts mass surveillance of our Pacific neighbours and sends the unprocessed data direct to the US National Security Agency (NSA) the Prime Minister was properly rattled. He offered no counter argument or evidence but instead delivered strident attacks on the messengers – Nicky Hager in particular – who were exposing his various fabrications.
Faced with calls for his resignation because he’d previously said he’d resign if claims of mass surveillance by the GCSB were proven Key then created another. It’s not mass surveillance says Key – it’s mass collection of data! Like a burglar who says it’s not theft – its relieving people of burdensome property, Key is a two-faced manipulator of language.
You have to respect his gall and the ability of the mainstream media to sell his line to the rest of us. In the normal course of politics a Prime Minister would be held to account for such lies and dissembling but Key has two important factors on his side.
Media & Labour Key Allies On GCSB Spying
Firstly, the mainstream media have poo-poohed the latest revelations of mass surveillance of Pacific nations.
Wedded as they are to US-dominated global capitalism they say it tells us nothing we didn’t already know and we should just shrug our shoulders alongside John Key and move on.
Leave it to the GCSB and the NSA to keep us safe.
Yeah right! So aside from widely reporting the Prime Minister’s incredulous bluff and bluster there has been little deeper analysis.
Secondly, and just as important to Key’s position, is that Labour has precisely the same policy and Labour Leader Andrew Little’s comments have simply added to the smokescreen John Key is doing his best to create around this issue.
[ Notice how in all of the political parties noted here - the main contenders are always a blue party versus a red party - they are two masks on the same face ]
In my lifetime the Labour Party has been as tightly wedded to unquestioned support for US global surveillance as National.
Even when the rift over access to New Zealand ports for US nuclear warships came to a head in the mid-1980s under Labour, and the US directed heavy criticism of New Zealand’s position, the flow of surveillance information to the US continued untroubled.
It was under a Labour government that the Waihopai mass surveillance spy base was commissioned to ensure the New Zealand “deep state” kept up business as usual with the NSA.
So while Labour expresses muted concern at indiscriminate mass surveillance it has no policy alternative to National.
The best it would come up with during the 2014 election campaign was support for a “security review” to ensure the GCSB was following the law. In other words: business as usual.
And after the latest revelations of mass spying on our Pacific neighbours Labour Leader Andrew Little was given a private briefing by the GCSB and emerged to tell us that as a result he is “more assured about the activities of the GCSB”.
What a pathetic comment.
Later in 2015 the Government will conduct a security review of our intelligence agencies with Labour on board and we can be absolutely assured the outcome will ensure the GCSB can continue to provide unfettered support for global mass surveillance by the US.
We owe a huge debt to people like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Katharine Gun and Nicky Hager* who have exposed global mass surveillance and in whose interests it operates.
It is over to us as citizens to act on it.
*All of those names will be familiar to readers, except maybe Katharine Gun. See Bob Leonard’s review of “The Spy Who Tried To Stop A War: Katharine Gun And The Secret Plot To Sanction The Iraq Invasion”, by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, in Peace Researcher 39, January 2010, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr39-183b.htm. Ed.
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Ms Gwyn said the inquiry would study how the GCSB established whether a proposed spying job fitted its legal role and New Zealand's needs.
