Month: March 2012

Corruption infects our world in many forms: material and moral, visible and invisible, direct and indirect. But the underlying motive behind all things corrupt is a strong opportunistic instinct to benefit oneself at the cost of others by allurement or deception. No wonder politics has fallen so much into disrepute. The aphorism of the nineteenth-century English historian Lord Acton that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has acquired a special meaning today.

Delusions of Power

by Deepak Tripathi

March 21, 2012

First the video of United States Marines urinating on bodies of Afghans who had been killed. Then the revelation that copies of the Quran had been burned at Bagram Air Base, which also serves as an American prison camp in Afghanistan. Nearly thirty Afghans and several NATO troops died in the violent reaction. The BBC Kabul correspondent described these events, and the violent public reaction to them, as the tipping point for NATO in the Afghan War.

Just as the U.S. commander Gen. John Allen and President Obama hoped that apologies from them would help calm the situation comes another disaster. If official accounts are to be believed, an American soldier left his base in the middle of the night, entered villagers’ homes, woke up Afghan families from sleep and shot his victims in cold blood. After the killings, the soldier was reported to have turned himself over to U.S. commanders, and was flown out of the country. He has since been named as St. Sgt. Robert Bales. Other reports tell a different story, indicating that a group of soldiers was involved. Looking drunk and laughing, they engaged in an orgy of violence, while helicopters hovered above.

Full article below the line.

Continue reading “DefDog: Delusions of Power – Absolute Corruption of US Power”

Huh?

The dangers of reporting the ‘war on terror'

We look at Obama's role in the continued imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist and the issues behind it.

Al Jazeera, 24 March 2012

Rarely does the Listening Post dedicate a whole show to the story of a single journalist. But when that story speaks so eloquently of how world history is being written, or erased, we decided it was something we just could not ignore.

In December 2009, Yemen's air force claimed it had killed 30 suspected al-Qaeda operatives during an airstrike on a training camp in the southern Abyan province.

This version of events was circulated around the world but when Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye managed to get to the scene, the remains of the missiles he found were clearly marked ‘Made in the USA'. And among the dead were 14 women and 21 children.

Shaye's subsequent report incriminated the US in a military operation in which they had been so keen to deny any involvement. Yemen dismissed the report and the US refused to comment – and Shaye became a marked man. He was accused of being an al-Qaeda operative and has been behind bars ever since.

Last month, the Yemeni government pardoned Shaye and was about to release him. But it took just one phone call from the US president urging them to reconsider, and the government backtracked.

Shaye remains locked up.

In this week's Listening Post, we take an in-depth look at the case of Abdulelah Shaye: what it reveals about the politics and the dangers of reporting the so-called war on terror – and what the world stands to lose when the work of independent journalists is put on the line.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Lies are the lowest form of corruption, and they are like sand in the gears of a delicate complex system of systems.  Every lie told has a cost and a consequence far exceeding the temporal benefits to the few of the lie in that time and place.  This is where science, religion, and philosphy converge, in integral consciousness–i.e. intelligence with integrity.

Dr. Thomas Naylor, co-founder of the Vermont Second Republic and the secession movement of Vermont, has written an extremely coherent/cogent account of a new book, Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform by Ross Jackson.

The article alone is priceless, the book is recommended.  I have reviewed books by Thomas Naylor, and met him while participating in one of the annual conferences about secession impulses in the USA as sponsored by Kirkpatrick Sale, himself author of Human Scale and founder of the Middlebury Institute for the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination.

Note:  There are 27 actual secessionist movements  in the USA, some at the city or island (Long Island) level, and at least three are very real: Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska.  There are 5,000 secessionist movements world-wide, most a long-simmering brew created by the artificial boundaries and subsequent corruption (loss of legitimacy) attendant to the imperial order.

Thomas Naylor is in my view the closest embodiment living today of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.  His ethics and his understanding of the roots of a great nation — the integrity that comes with absolute respect for the sovereign individual and the integrity of the smallest political-economic unit within the whole – is exemplary.  Below the line is the entirety of his superb CounterPuncharticle, “An Ideology to End Ideologies: Occupy World Street!”

Book Description

Ordinary citizens the world over have long paid the price for the swashbuckling behavior of the corporate and political elite. We've seen the reigning establishment widen the gap between rich and poor, champion endless growth on a finite planet, wreak havoc on developing nations, and ravage ecosystems in a mad race for natural resources.Now, as demonstrators worldwide demand change, Occupy World Street offers a sweeping vision of how to reform our global economic and political structures, break away from empire, and build a world of self-determining sovereign states that respect the need for ecological sustainability and uphold human rights.In this refreshingly detailed plan, Ross Jackson shows how a handful of small nations could take on a leadership role; create new alliances, new governance, and new global institutions; and, in cooperation with grassroots activists, pave the way for other nations to follow suit.

Below the line: full article and additional links.

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Occupy World Street – Summary Article and Book”