One of the most frustrating issues to haunt the halls of alternative economic analysis is the threat of misrepresentative terminology.
For instance, when the U.S. government decided to back the private Federal Reserve in lowering the interest rates on lending windows to European banks last month, they did not call this a bailout, even though that’s exactly what it was. They did not call it quantitative easing, or fiat printing, or a hyperinflationary landmine; rarely does bureaucracy ever apply honest terminology to their subversive activities.
False terminology is the bane of every honest analyst, because in order for them to educate and awaken those who are unaware of the truth, they must first battle through the daunting muck of the general public’s horrifically improper perceptions and vocabulary.
PhiBetaIota: There seems to be an emerging conflict between those who control actual natural resources, and those who control printing presses and goons with guns. Some of the stuff being planned for 21 December 2012 is mind-boggling. The good news is that the eugenics / rule by secrecy crowd appears to finally be losing to the diversity / open source everything crowd. We are pleased to be part of the latter group.
Strong signals of sanity that the status quo minds will consider lunacy. No idea how much of this is solid, but all indications are that 2012 will flip the old system out and that the military will side with the people, not the banks.
Integrity is now back in style. Give this a chance–it provokes reflection.
Benjamin Fulford, former Japanese correspondent for Forbes Magazine, is interviewed on the Sean David Morton Strange Universe radio program and talks about the state of the world economy from ‘where he sits’. Ben is in one of the ‘loops’, regarding efforts being made by some of the world’s most powerful people to restore global economic sanity. There are many now attempting to stop the corrupt international financial gangsters (including the Federal Reserve bankers) and their relentless destructive schemes.
Many of Benjamin Fulford’s discoveries have been substantiated by former banker and author of Crisis by Design, John Truman Wolfe: The Financial Crisis: the hidden beginning
PhiBetaIota: In the absence of a professional national intelligence community that is actually capable of addressing the public interest, it is difficult to sort the noise from the signal, especially when 50% or more of the noise is self-generated. This is why public intelligence matters. Secret intelligence, an adjunct of “rule by secrecy,” has failed in the Constitutional sense. Now it appears–there is no way for an honest public observer to be certain of anything at this point–that nuclear devices are being planted to created massive tsunamis and earthquakes that “reboot” the global economy in favor of those who plan in advance for the flooding–one reason this is now the most popular search at this web site, overtaking the search for integrity. There are many contradictions, inconsistencies, even outlandish thoughts, but we are at a point where nothing from official circles can be trusted, and everything from non-official circles must be considered. The specifics are there and need to be verified.
Multiple reliable sources in three continents are all now reporting that a major breakthrough in the financial logjam is imminent. We can confirm from our own sources (including MI6 and Japanese military intelligence) that a large delegation descended on Washington last week and read the riot act to the Washington D.C. establishment.
They have been informed the Federal Reserve Board must be shut down immediately and the new financial system must be implemented or else the United States would be totally cut off from the world. The military is also close to open revolt with more than half of the military supporting a total clean up of Washington D.C., according to a CIA source. The Washington establishment therefore faces a choice between stepping aside and facing a truth commission or else arrest, civil war, chaos and eventual death for all members of the ruling cabal. We believe that sane minds will prevail in such a situation and that a peaceful resolution is imminent. However, it is not over until it is over.
Build Power & Show Power through Mass Participatory Bold Action
To show our power, on May 1st, 2012, we will be organizing for such a mass participatory and bold collective action: a national general strike, mass boycott, student strike/ walk-out and mass day of action. We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there’s no union or the union isn’t supportive- to hold a one-day general strike. Where a strike is not possible, we will be organizing people to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”. Those who are students will be walking-out of their schools (or not showing up in the first place). In the community, we will be holding a mass boycott and refusing to make any purchase on that day.
We, the 99%, will build our power and show our power until we've occupied our workplaces, our communities, our schools, our lives, our world… until we've occupied everything!
IN 1984, after serving three terms in the House of Representatives, Ron Paul was defeated by Phil Gramm in Texas’s Republican Senate primary. Paul left Congress, and a few years later he left the Republican Party entirely to run for president on the Libertarian line. In the 1988 election, after a campaign that Texas Monthly compared to something “out of Robert Altman’s movie ‘Nashville,’ ” he took home just 0.47 percent of the popular vote.
Thus marginalized by the public, the former congressman proceeded to marginalize himself. Through the various newsletters that bore his name — most notably the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report — he spent the early 1990s as a peddler of far-right paranoia. In an exhaustive 2008 piece for Reason magazine, Dave Weigel and Julian Sanchez argued that the most abhorrent language in Paul’s eponymous newsletters — the claims that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced under-age girls and boys,” that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity,” and so on — weren’t actually written by the man himself. But the fact that they had Paul’s imprimatur suggests that the former congressman had grown comfortable way out on the xenophobic fringe.
“There have been many resistance movements throughout history which have made use of the occupation tactic. In the United States, the unemployed Coxey’s Army, which marched across the country decrying injustice and unemployment in 1894, camped out throughout the summer as they converged upon Washington. In the summer of 1932, tens of thousands of WWI veterans and their families occupied parks, military bases and a number of public buildings in Washington D.C., demanding the immediate cash payment of their service certificates, referred to as a ‘bonus’. These ‘Bonus Marchers’ shut down much of the city, and faced the police in camp evictions similar to those we saw this year. In the Depression, many Hoovervilles—the shanty towns of tents and temporary structures built by the homeless–had serious political content, as portrayed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, that is often washed out of the history books. Though a less-favored tactic in the 60s, many university buildings–most famously at Berkeley, Columbia and University of Wisconsin, but occurring all over the country–were occupied at the height of the anti-war movement. At the time of his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. was planning a tent-city occupation of Washington D.C as the first step of his Poor People’s Campaign. Fellow organizers went ahead with the plan, and ‘Resurrection City’ took over the Mall for more then a month in May-June of 1968.
In the last thirty years, occupation has been a key tactic in many of the anti-globalization struggles throughout the world. Started in the eighties, but truly gaining momentum and size throughout the nineties, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (The Landless Workers Movement) in Brazil redistributes farmlands through occupation. Sem Terra gives strategic and material support to landless tenant farmers. From dozens to thousands of itinerant farmers and their families will occupy fallow or abandoned land and build a farming community there. Often facing eviction by police, political repression or violence from (negligent) land owners, these occupations have been largely successful at redistributing land, and 1.5 million Brazilians are associated with the movement, which is still a vibrant political force in Brazil today. Sem Terra, which is organized on a non-hierarchical consensus model, is the largest social movement in the world, giving lie to the claim made by many liberals that consensus and horizontal organization cannot scale.
In 2001 in Argentina, facing the results of major economic crisis, a number of businesses, predominantly factories but also a hotel and several retail businesses, were occupied by their workers, who restarted their machines and brought them back into productivity without management. These businesses were worker-owned and -managed, with total profit and decision sharing, and usually proved to be more efficient and productive per capita, while paying out a much higher wage. Many of these ‘recovered’ businesses continue to this day. And though not part of the anti-globalization movement, the massacre in Tiananmen square in 1989 came after seven weeks of continuous occupation by students and intellectuals demanding liberalization and modernization of the Communist Party.
The occupation is a powerful tactic for a number of reasons: it foregrounds the political issues of everyday life and public space, it produces a positive communitarian solution to the problems it critiques, it is highly visible and struggle is continuous in a way that radicalizes its participants. It has been used throughout history in fights for social justice, peace, and revolution, but now its moment has truly arrived, and there are many more occupations to come.”
HONOLULU (AP) — President Barack Obama signed a wide-ranging defense bill into law Saturday despite having “serious reservations” about provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.
