They just want to keep us afraid Dept: From the Intercept

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Capn Jimbo
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They just want to keep us afraid Dept: From the Intercept

Post by Capn Jimbo »

It ain't just rum folks...

"Cindy
10 Dec 2014 at 8:10 pm

Does torture “work”? Well, it depends what you want it to do.

It isn’t reliable in terms of “getting information,” but it is supremely effective in “scaring the hell out of people.”

Do drone strikes “work”? Well, it depends what you want them to do.

They aren’t reliable in terms of combatting terrorism, but they are supremely effective in “scaring the hell out of people.”

Does police abuse and murder (and prison abuse by authorities) “work”? Well, it depends what you want it to do.

It isn’t reliable in terms of reducing crime, but it is supremely effective in “scaring the hell out of people.”

Does bulk surveillance (and other NSA/establishment privacy invasions) “work’? Well, it depends what you want it to do.

It isn’t reliable in terms of focusing on and thwarting actual threats, but it is supremely effective in “scaring the hell out of people.”

The (elite that controls the) establishment’s goal is not to produce a healthy society, it is to instill fear in anyone who has questions or grievances regarding the behavior of United States “authorities.” Frightened people, even if genuinely appalled by the authorities’ behavior, will self-censor and not express their opinions.

With each revelation of wrongdoing, from torture to drone strikes to police abuse to the surveillance state to securities fraud etc… the message is blunt:

THE ESTABLISHMENT WILL BREEZE PAST THIS, THE RULING CLASS WILL NOT BE DISCIPLINED BY THE LAW, WILL NOT BE REINED IN BY THE PEOPLE, WILL NOT OBEY THE CONSTITUTION AND BILL OF RIGHTS.

Notice that with all revelations there is NEVER severe legal redress for the state, or the corporations controlling it. This only entrenches the corruption, as well as mocking any real attempts to seek accountability. Moreover it only makes people more afraid to speak out.

It is not enough to expose wrongdoing in high places. It must be prosecuted. If not, all potential whistleblowers and activists will ultimately succumb to conformism (with corruption) because the decent cause is demonstrably hopeless. This conclusion is what the elite wants the people of the world to accept.

That US authorities monitor, abuse and murder without fear of reprisal is actually something the establishment loves to “get out there,” I reckon, for it shows their reach is vicious and operates with impunity regardless of what they do, and this apprehension instills self-stifling fear in anyone with even the mildest anti-establishment sentiments, and this pacifies many potential “upstarts” at home at the same time as inflaming the (useful) anger of actual “militants” already enraged by Western arrogance and impunity overseas.

So yeah, torture “works.” The abuse of US authorities “works.” It “works” because it isn’t punished, and it makes people outside the establishment afraid."



*******
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014 ... l#comments
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Post by Dai »

Regarding the current report on torture that has just been released and the fact there will be no prosecutions (which I find disgusting) and no one to be held accountable. Not even in Europe or the UK for our part in this crime. I have one thing to say to all those who say there should be no prosecutions.

Imagine it was US or UK soldiers who were tortured and it was the Russians who did the torturing would the rhetoric be the same or would they be crying for blood. Would they be screaming from the roof tops how despicable an act it is and that justice needs to be seen to be done. More than likely!

Now it should not matter who were the tortured or who the toturer's are, all that matters is this should never happen to anyone and if it does, whom ever the perpetrator's are need to be held to account for what they have done and I include my own country in this for part in illegal rendition and other things that will most likely come out in the future.

This is not the act of a civilized society or of a democracy trying to spread democratic values. One thing that strikes me in my old age the things we used to accuse the old Soviet Union of doing we in the West freely do today and call it security.
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Post by The Black Tot »

"The more I see of man, the more I like dogs. " ~Mme. de Staël

It seems that the further we go down the road of the American experiment, the more we are willing to accept an ever-increasing spiral of viciousness and inhumanity towards people in distant lands or with different opinions just such that the apple cart of our $3/gallon orgy of consumption is not disturbed.

As expressed above, we are also willing to immolate our personal privacy (which is the crucible of strong character, I am convinced) on the altar of social media and connectivity. I think about my nieces and nephews, who will never know the wonderful mysterious feeling of driving down a highway at night (using a paper map) without a tracking beacon sitting on the console, reporting on their every movement, and a debit card statement telling some corporate analyst everything they've been interested in enough to purchase.

They won't even know what they missed. Who will fight for the magic of privacy when nobody is left who remembers it?

Everyone is allowing more and more of their business to be accessible, because we can't figure out how to socially draw the line and say "I'm going back to a land line and cash, I don't want to be tracked". We insist that we don't have to worry about privacy because we're not doing anything wrong.

Until they raise the goalposts, of course. Personally, I think we would do well to always keep in mind this poem, attributed to pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about pre-war Germany.

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me"

The horror of humanity seems to be that the ignorant, who are the overwhelming majority, prefer a culture of fear, because it is black and white, and has clear rules to follow. This group thrives during times of persecution. They get the enforcement jobs. The positions of "responsibility and reliability". Straight as an arrow, dumb as posts, and no spark of creativity or passion. They are made to feel exceptional and powerful in a way they never could if genius was allowed to flower in their midst. Mowing it down while it is still sprouting is far preferable to them.

We praise and celebrate participants of violence. Active duty military walk a red carpet in the USA, and anyone who wants to debate whether or not the missions they are involved in are worthy of this respect or even in our best interests is automatically and without any thought flagged as the equivalent of a traitor. The message is clear if you're a young power tripper who is about to lose his youthful schoolyard dominance in a more complicated adult society - a life in uniform has its benefits.

Just once before I die, I would like to walk in a culture that lets its artists and philosophers board the plane first.
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Post by Dai »

Well said!

It always amazes me when people say to the privacy question what have you go to hide.

My answer is simple MY PRIVACY that's what I've got to hide. Other wise it's not private.
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Post by Capn Jimbo »

Wiser and more observant minds than mine have noted that what they call a mega-corporate coup is now pretty much complete. What was once a democracy is now a corporate sham, with all the participants, candidates, gerrymandered districts, et al, determined in advance.

It matters not who "wins" or who the people "choose". All are corporate pawns, almost all are multi-millionaires there to serve their corporate masters, and from whom they are guaranteed the bonus of campaign funds, and even more millions later after passing again through the moneyed revolving doors.

America is simply the latest in a string of empires, replacing the colonization of last century with our non-stop attempts to capture and control any country, government or place that offers valuable raw materials, particularly carbon-based fuels. The "great" American corporations long ago abandoned the United States, whose remaining function is a diminishing source of consumer dollars. These very same huge enterprises are neither beholden nor loyal to any flag.

Their interests now supercede sovereignty as we and our forefathers once knew it. Governments and elections seem to exist only as a facade for the people, while our meager net worths and property are diminished as the wealth of the people and the commons are all turned into private, profit-producing property for the 0.1%, the few thousand people who have captured most of the world's resources and capital.

Here in the States we long ago stopped regulating unfettered monopoly as an embarrassingly few companies, interlocked with one another, control and manipulate the markets. Who will demand and capture your hard earned dollars today? Big Pharma? Big Ag? Big Carbon? Big Retail? Big Mailorder? Big Medicine? Sales and income taxes somehow avoided by the borderless giants?

The prices we pay are determined not by value, but based on control and manipulation as we all become wage slaves with ever fewer jobs paying liveable or better wages.

Still, as empires fail - and the American version is - our government spends untold billions, now trillions of our money in failed foreign attempts to control, and which we are "losing", unless you realize the military/industrial/intelligence/power complex sucks up those dollars of war as fast as they can be printed or collected from us. We have not really "won" a war really, since WWII. The people have had quite enough of our sons and daughters doing the dirty work and returning in pieces and PTSD. Or become debt slaves to ever more student debt, yet without sufficient good jobs making repayment impossible.

Debt and meager wages have replaced whips and chains.

One of the signs of failing empire - as we are finally forced to abandon useless foreign wars - is to bring our killing forces home as we militarize our police with their killing technology. The motto of "Protect and Serve" now becomes "Kill and Win" as the police abandon their blue uniforms to become faceless, nameless Robocops dressed to face the new enemy - us. Unarmed men and even children - hands in the air, or waving plastic squirtguns - are chased and shot within seconds, without negotiation or attempts to mitigate.

Still it is not yet too late for the people to discover that we all - regardless of alleged political beliefs - have much more in common than our corporate media talks about. Here's a few actions that the great majority of all people agree upon:

1. Get the Dept of Defense to audit its currently unauditable books.

2. Establish strict procedures to evaluate the claims of corporations seeking subsidies, aka handouts.

3. Restore effective government procurement, and make the records public.

4. Establish a minimum, guaranteed liveable wage and link it to inflation.

5. Reform taxation so that corporations actually pay taxes and fair ones, to include speculation taxes. Collect the many billions of taxes evaded by corporations and hidden overseas.

6. Cause corporations to redirect billions of dollars now lying fallow to charitable entities, at least up to their limit of allowable charitable deductions. There are literally trillions of dollars simply sitting in bank and money market accounts that are currently earning almost no interest, and not being invested. No trickle down there. Cause the corporations - who exist only as we have allowed them to - to donate their fair share of fallow dollars to create literally millions of good paying jobs.

7. Expand legal restrictions on the standing to sue so that any citizen can legally challenge abusive actions by government/corporate corruption.

8. Expand direct democracy to include all states, so that citizens can directly cause important issues to appear on our ballots to address common problems.

9. Encourage and subsidize true small business, coops, and community owned enterprises including local banks who actually support local citizens and businesses.

10, Make elections truly competitive beyond our curren duopoly of Republicrats, to facilitate 3rd parties, and independent citizen legislators. Get the mega-money out of politics via publicly financed campaigns. Require that the media using our public airwaves must make reasonable free airtime available to all legitimate candidates. Redraw congressional districts using computer technology so that districts are drawn from geographical proximity, not the bizarre shapes chosen by politicians to guarantee their own reelection.

11. Restore civil liberty and privacy. Stop the extreme abuses of the "Patriot" act, etc. No searches of private property, phones or information without a warrent. No sharing of information between mega-corporations and government.

12. Expand civic education through both primary and secondary education so that our children understand the true history of our country, our goals, our successes and failures and their duties as citizens. Reestablish physical education, and insure that all foods and vending machiines contain good and nutritive foods.

13. End non-declared, non-approved wars and endless militarism.

14. Revise or cancel NAFTA, the WTO and all similar "free trade agreements" that put mega-corporate interests ahead of local and even national sovereignty.

15. Protect our children from commercialism. Stop the use of corporate marketing in our schools and on television programs directed toward children.

16. End the notion of corporations as "people" with human rights such as "free speech. You may be unaware that achieving "personhood" and freedom from regulation has long been a goal, now much achieved by them. Corporations are not people - if heaven forbid they are, then perhaps its time for their CEO's to be prosecuted and jailed for fraud and murder (think airbags, or known faulty ignition switches).

17. Regain and control our commons - our common heritage. Public lands, forests, water and the like. Stop spending billions of our public dollars for medical and other research which is then given - given! - to private corporations for their private profit. If public dollars discover a new good medicine, then we the people - not the corporations - should benefit from our own discovery. No more lobbied gifts.

18. Enforce corporate crime. No more handslaps, or what to the mega's are minor fines and to them just a small cost of doing business. BP should be put out of business for destroying the Gulf of Mexico. No more "deferred prosecutions" (a don't do it again farce), no more privately negotiated settlements. Nope, go to trial and put the CEO's in jail. Reagan did, hundreds of them.

19. Empower shareholders of public corporation. Allow them to hold the CEO and board's financially responsible for fraud, mismanagement and personal enrichment, collusion with private equity and buyouts, insider trading, and so forth.

20. Make the patenting of life forms illegal, Period.

21. End the "war on drugs". This is simply an excuse for militarization, doesn't work, and makes felons out of minor crimes and misdeameanors. The "war" is massively expensive and a total failure. Redirect the money to education and rehabilitation, and job training.

22. Make our world climate priority #1. On our current course our grandchildren and perhaps even our children will suffer greatly. Renewable energy - especially if we stop subsidizing Big Carbon - is more than competitive. Our real and only war has to be a "War on Carbon" and this is more than doable, will save trillions in damages to our commons and to our health, and will create many millions of good paying, local jobs.

23. Rebuild our 75 year old infrastructure that is now failing badly: bridges, water and gas mains, public schools, roads, etc. Millions of good paying jobs with massive public benefit in every regard.

24. Make health care a right, not a limited resource designed to make a handful of health insurance and providers wealthy. Follow the lead of medicare for all, or of the Veteran's Adminstration as it used to work. It's time to make health a focus of public education, again for the benefit of all.


Believe it or not...

There is a left-right convergence on all of these issues, with a majority of both sides sharing similar views. The only thing that prevents people from coming together is the "two party system" that works hard to simply avoid these issues in favor of a limited number of "hot button" issues like gay marriage, abortion, illegal aliens and the like.

Think about it: by far a majority of both left and right have had enough of war. They've heard the pitches of both parties, they understand the claims and phony fears, and all told - the people want out, and right now. How about a minimum liveable wage? By far most people are in favor, but do our representatives uh, actually represent us? Nope. And so it goes.

It's time for a left-right alliance for common values. We must set the few hot button differences aside, and come together on the many, many bigger issues on which we agree. That is the greatest fear of our so-called corporatocracy who would prefer we remain at odds with each other over a few ridiculous issues, while they continue doing what they do best: redistributing public money to their corporate benefactors.

Have a nice day. You may carry on...
Last edited by Capn Jimbo on Sat Dec 13, 2014 6:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Dai »

Again well said!

Here is an article that might interest you Jimbo:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/no-cons ... over-world

It's quite surprising and shocking.

This party might interest you:
http://taxwallstreetparty.org/
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Post by Capn Jimbo »

Great links Dai, and a must read for all. In sum this article identified and graphed the relationships of over 43,000 international companies. Of 37 million corporations the study identified about 43,000 large transnational companies. Of these they thus identified a "core" of about 1300 key companies who controlled 80% of all corporate assets and had ties to two or more of the other large transnationals. And of these they found just 147 "mega-corporations" who together controlled 40% of all the world's corporate assets.

That is simply amazing. Not scared yet? In the United States just five financial firms control close to 60% of our national economy. We have reached the point where governments and the megacorporations are indistinguishable. These few entities are now much "too big to fail", and "too powerful to jail". They have been bailed out to once again create artificial bubbles, and continue to ravage the rest of us and the public commons as everything is privatized.

These entities pay very little in taxes, while the rest of us are expected to bail them out via "austerity" wherein our remaining large assets like social security, etc., medicare, the post office and other social programs are stripped of their remaining assets.

We are now at a point where there is no more "average" and the mere remnants of what was the middle class. There is now just the 0.1% (actually more like 0.001%) - and - the rest of us who are simply slave labor, and expendable. The big question I have is this?

What will happen (and soon) when these few thousands own it all? When the ever fewer good jobs are gone, and the rest are done via robotics? It would appear that only enough of us necessary to empty the garbage, fix the robots and turn on the switches will be needed.
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Post by The Black Tot »

I think depression 2.0 stands a chance of ushering in change, although the powerful are much more prepared for the revolt of the people this time around, so I'm not sure.

Perhaps it will resemble medieval times, where the poor must form their own farming collectives, outside the gates of the great castle.

On the subject of people not wanting war: I'm less sure of that as time goes on. I think more and more people that I have met are being sold more and more on the idea that war is good for the economy, and it is necessary to preserve the American way of life at home. This is a lot of what I meant by the rising viciousness and cruelty.

I think the average American believes that there is probably merit to concepts such as trickle down economics, because some rich guys on TV said so. On average, the education standards have dropped to the point where the general public believes almost anything. We are also conditioned that a discussion about issues is a threat and an attack, to be met with memorized buzz phrases, and to be discouraged among decent family or general social discourse.

But the militarization bothers me the most. People don't find anything uncomfortable about fighter jets flying over stadiums during the national anthem at sporting events with the fireworks going off. It's barbaric, and if we saw another nation do that we would be wierded out. This remembrance day was the first one where I noticed that people shifted significantly away from contemplating the WWs and started posting on the Facebook pages of active duty soldiers they knew and gushing "Thank you for your service". That was a wow moment for me.
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Post by Dai »

I like to watch alternative media to get a more balanced view

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRealNews/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/democracynow

These all put a different spin on the main stream media it helps when getting both sides of a story.
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