Some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of Republican Party disinformation as if there is no disinformation from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to americans.
If I may give some examples: The other day Chuck Colson, one of the Nixon officials imprisoned for Watergate crimes, died. This gave NPR the opportunity to relive the Nixon horror.
What precisely was the Nixon horror? Essentially, there was no such thing. Watergate was about President Nixon lying about when he learned about the Watergate burglary.
When Nixon learned about the burglary, he did not act on it prior to his reelection, because he reasoned, rightly, that the Washington Post would blame him for the burglary, although he had nothing to do with it, in the hopes of preventing his reelection.
By going along with a cover-up, Nixon enabled the Washington Post to make an issue of the precise date on which Nixon learned of the burglary. White House tapes indicated that Nixon had learned of the burglary before he said he learned of it. So Nixon had permitted a cover-up and had to go, but what was the real reason?
What was the Watergate burglary? We don’t really know. A group of men including former CIA operatives were hired by the Committee to Re-elect the President to break into a Democratic campaign office in the Watergate complex. We don’t know the purpose of the burglary. Some claim it was to wire-tap the telephones in the belief that the Democratic Party was getting re-election money from communists in Cuba or elsewhere. Others claim that the burglars were looking for a list of call girls, that compromised a White House official, as his fiancee was allegedly one of the call girls.
Looking back from our time during which Bush and Obama have deep-sixed the US Constitution, violated numerous US and international laws, and behaved as if they were caesars unconstrained by any law or any morality, Nixon’s “crimes” appear so trivial as to be unremarkable. Yet, Nixon was driven from office and is regarded as a criminal.
My intern Patrick Maxwell and CII president John Abbe have initiated a project I'm quite excited about. In high quality dialogue they plan to engage local people together about their personal concerns in today's rough economy – and then to expand the conversation to include how we could change our economic system and create innovations that would be more sustainable and satisfying. They'll include experts in the mix, but the main energy will come from the community itself.
They are starting with a 3-month pilot project to test the concept here in Eugene. They plan to share their learnings and potentially extend the project further in space and time. You can find out more about it in their note below.
I've been studying and writing about the emerging living economy for about 14 months – you'll be hearing more about that soon – and I am very excited with what I'm learning and where this initiative could go.
I invite you to support this ambitious experiment. Since it is being launched with a crowdfunding approach, even very small donations add tremendously to the momentum.
Thanks for any attention and support you give this. In the larger picture, I expect the return on your investment will be very good indeed.
Coheartedly,
Tom
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Dear friends of the Co-Intelligence Institute,
We are writing to alert you to an engaging new project from the CII.
For the next few months – and, if all goes well, for many months to come – board president John Abbe and intern Patrick Maxwell will be convening a series of dialogues here in CII's hometown of Eugene, Oregon, focused on our economy and its impact on local people's lives. Community members will explore questions like “How can I meet my needs with less money?” And “How do we create systems that work for us?”
I confess: I have an interest in an unseemly topic. Last year I coauthored a report on the subject and testified before Congress about it. The subject is labor trafficking.
This is not, of course, a problem exclusive to the PMSCO sector but neither is it something that has happened only now and then either. Suffice it to say that it enough of a problem that this is the second conference ISOA organized on the issue, the first being seven years ago. The conference program guide minced no words in stating why a conference is necessary:
Labor trafficking is a disgraceful practice that plagues many country as well as international peacekeeping and stability operations. Poverty creates pools of desperate labor at high risk of human trafficking of all kinds, including forced labor. The problem is morally reprehensible but of such enormous complexity it cannot be solved by a single sector and must be addressed by stakeholders working in partnership from all sides — private, governmental, nongovernmental and humanitarians sectors; clients and employers
As a sign that of its recognition of the seriousness of the problem ISOA's Code of Conduct has long had a provision stating that “Signatories shall not engage or allow their personnel to engage in the act of trafficking in persons.”
Trafficking in persons takes different forms. It might be forced labor, sex trafficking or bonded labor, to name a few examples. The first two types have happened in the PMSC industry.
As an article in JIPO notes:
Human trafficking on U.S. government contracts in the Central Command (“CENTCOM”) sector is chronic, overt and unabated. The appalling fact that hundreds of thousands of men have been used as slave laborers to support “freedom” operations is not lost upon the victims.
Investigative journalists reporting of widespread human trafficking of laborers on U.S. government contracts in CENTCOM date back to 2004. The New York Times reported the too common fraudulent recruiting scheme that began in 2003 when contractors first started trafficking men to perform services on government contracts. The Chicago Tribune also covered human trafficking in 2005, calling out the use of US tax dollars to provide slave labor during wartime. Articles in USA Today have reported labor trafficking abuses of Asian workers in Saudi Arabia as well as forced labor of Thai workers in the United States, considered “the nations biggest human trafficking operations.”
Personal investigations both on the ground in Iraq, and in conducted interviews of victims who have returned to the Indian subcontinent, have produced conclusions consistent with other investigative journalists. Other investigative journalists such as David Phinney and reporters who have been on the ground, observed the practice and interviewed thousands of victims have also highlighted this blight on our national image. In fact, the only thing parties agree upon is that the practice is prolific, unabated and contrary to the very foundation and core of American values.
A more blunt way of putting is, as one conference speaker noted, is that we now have people enslaved than at any time in human history, with estimates ranging from 12 to 27 million people.
Interestingly, this is not an issue where people think this is something best left to industry to self-regulate. As the morning keynote speaker Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, senior adviser to the secretary of state, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said:
Government is the answer, government is the solution, but it is not the only player. We have to dismiss the notion that this is someone else's problem. This is our problem and we have to be part of the solution. Our starting point has to be that we're not making the problem worse.
Those wanting more detail should see the current (May/June) issue of ISOA's JIPO magazine, which is devoted to the subject. According to ISOA it will be online later this week.
This represents one of the dishonorable acts a politician can commit. Using other people's lives to win an election…….a clear indication of the lack of integrity of an individual who holds the highest office of the land….and the speech sounds like it was modeled after LBJ's equally incoherent speech in the closing days of Viet-Nam. The second article is pure propaganda, witless and without merit.
WASHINGTON — The 10-year security compact that President Barack Obama signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai contains promises the United States and Afghanistan cannot guarantee they will keep, and loopholes for both nations.
The deal signed Tuesday also allows either nation to walk away on a year's notice. That could allow the next U.S. president, or the next Afghan leader, to scuttle a deal negotiated by his or her predecessor.
For Obama, the agreement represents a compromise with Karzai after messy negotiations over U.S. military detention of Afghan suspects and raids on Afghan homes that offend Afghans.
The radioactive Fukushima Genie is out of the bottle and is primed to accomplish a worldwide disaster. If the roof of Reactor building #4 collapses, a building that is now seismically rated at zero, a pool of 1563 spent fuel rods perched 100 feet above the ground would also collapse ~ resulting in a gusher of global radiation that would put most of the world’s human and biological populations at severe risk.
The greatest and most dangerous on going cover up in the world today is not the official 9/11 cover up (now into its 11th year); it is not the supposed assassination of Bin Laden by Navy Seals last year (an operation with no confirmed body, no video and completely staged as a re-election gimmick as we are now witnessing); but instead, it is the unspoken on going conspiracy of silence regarding the spreading worldwide nuclear radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011.
. . . . . .
Just recently, authorities in Japan confessed that the amount of cesium-137 released by Fukushima is equivalent to 168 of the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A brief confirmation came from a recent article in the Telegraph ~ “Japan’s government estimates the amount of radioactive caesium-137 released by the Fukushima nuclear disaster so far is equal to that of 168 Hiroshima bombs.”
Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.
The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.
I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.
The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell. This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.
Edmonds took a job as a translator at the FBI shortly after 9-11. She considered it her duty. Her goal was to prevent any more terrorist attacks. That's where her thinking was at the time, although it has now changed dramatically. It's rarely the people who sign up for a paycheck and healthcare who end up resisting or blowing a whistle.
Edmonds found at the FBI translation unit almost entirely two types of people. The first group was corrupt sociopaths, foreign spies, cheats and schemers indifferent to or working against U.S. national security. The second group was fearful bureaucrats unwilling to make waves. The ordinary competent person with good intentions who risks their job to “say something if you see something” is the rarest commodity. Hence the elite category that Edmonds found herself almost alone in: whistleblowers.
As I said in the interview, the reason I started the letter was because I strongly believe that the most successful, happiest people on the planet in twenty years will be living in resilient communities.
Lots of good stuff in the RC letter — from DiY sewage systems to how to power an entire neighborhood with solar energy.
Phi Beta Iota: Creating resilient communities from the bottom up is what the federal government should be but is not facilitating. We're on our own.
