NSA/GCHQ – The New Praetorians and the New Cold War

In a democracy rule is by consent. In a dictatorship it is by control.

Which do we have in the West? It seems to me, it is no longer clear. We certainly still have the rituals of rule by consent. But behind the elected front men and women is a shadow state. It’s people ritually swear allegiance to those we elect. They declare themselves there to serve and protect. But when it is us they spend their time spying on, whose interests are they protecting? Can you really serve those you do not trust?

In 2008 we discovered that behind the banking system we knew about, there was a vast shadow banking system whose size most of us never suspected. In 2013 we have glimpsed not only the scale of the shadow state but the degree to which it, like the shadown banking system, is out of control and not working for us at all.

Of course Mr Obama and the ‘security chiefs’, brought blinking into the unwelcome light,  justify themselves by telling us that all those things they never saw fit to mention to us, or even to the people we spend so much time electing, have been saving us from un-named terrors. Are we to take such unverifiable assurances at face value from people who we know do not trust us and who make a profession of lying to us?  I remember when Treasury Secretary Paulson told the US Congress that unless they stopped asking questions and simply handed him $600 billion  to bail out the shadow banking system, there would be anarchy and tanks on the streets. Am I wrong to see a parallel?

Before I go on I would like, for the sake of clarity, to make it clear that I am not a Libertarian and therefore my criticisms of the State do not spring from a prior antipathy. I do not consider the State to be an intrinsically bad or untrustworthy thing. I do think the State, like any organization can be, and I think has been, corrupted and perverted. I think some people within the ‘State as we know it’ – the elected part and its attendant civil service – have colluded with the rise of what I am calling the Shadown State. Libertarians may feel the idea of a Shadow State is superfluous. To them I would say, they might, a few years ago, have thought the idea of a shadow banking system was similarly superflous. But it exists nevertheless.

The New Praetorians

The problem with giving people and institutions power over us, even when those people are supposed to be there to protect us, is that power begets the desire for more power. The Praetorians began as an elite corp of body guards, sworn to protect Rome’s military commanders and later the Emperors. But in less than 50 years between the Emperor Augustus and Claudius, the Praetorians changed from protectors of the Emperor, to the force who chose him. The Praetorians put Claudius on the throne, not the people not the Senate. They did not protect, they chose.

I am not suggesting that the shadow state is already in charge but I am saying they are  in position already to wield huge and carefully hidden, almost unchallengeable power. They are already operating without oversight and outside of the laws which we thought were there to protect us from the state. Ask yourself, when the heat has gone from the embarrassing headlines, will the shadow state of the NSA, GCHQ and allied military, do any different? Will they stop spying on us ? Of course not.

The ugliest truth is not how much America has spied on its own citizens or those of its ‘allies’, but how complicit so many other governments have been. The UK has long been America’s fluffer. But I think it is slowly sinking in, in Germany, that the shadow German state knew what was going on and cooperated. I suggest that the New Cold war isn’t between Nations, it is between the machinery of the Shadow State, in every State, and the citizens of every state.

The New Cold War

Of course European governments want to be seen by their people, to be outraged on their behalf. And some of them genuinely are outraged – those who hadn’t been told. But at the top of our governments and key people in various departments, they were told and they did know.

I recently had a conversation with a former British foreign secretary and asked him if he had been aware of some of the MI6 operations that I happen to know about that had gone on in the 70’s. He told me he was not aware of them and frankly didn’t believe they had gone on. Now of course, if those operations were still classified – and they are – he would hardly have blurted out, “Oh yes, I remember that one.” So saying he didn’t know about them is not proof he didn’t. He could very well have been lying to me.

All I can say is I don’t think he was lying. From how the conversation continued I think he really didn’t know and didn’t believe . What he did tell me, quite frankly (or so it seemed to me) was that the security and intelligence services make a point, for security reasons, of not telling the Foreign Secretary about missions. Which on one level seems reasonable. IF, that is, you trust that the operations being kept from you were in the interests of the people you are there to serve. It is easy, I imagine, for a Foreign Secretary to tell himself that a mission should be kept from him, so long as he convinces himself that it is still going to be congruent with the government’s over all policy. But what underpins this comforting idea?

If a mission is secret why not a whole series of missions, a whole policy? Who says the New Praetorians will limit themselves to protecting and serving the interests and policies of an elected parliament or Congress. What is to stop them having their own policy? After all, the shadow state and its directors remain while Congressmen come and Ministers go.

There will be, as I mentioned, those in our governments who are genuinely shocked, because they were not privy to the shadow state and its secrets. I believe the French government genuinely is outraged. France’s secret state  is not part of the Anglo/American axis, never has been and does not want to be. Their security service is arranged in a very different manner to ours. But the upper levels of Britain’s and Germany’s State are playing a game for public consumption. In the UK the public formula is ‘questions will be asked’. Which we all know is UK government speak for the exact opposite.

In Germany the outrage of being spied upon and being referred to as a ‘target’  by the Americans is real and feeds in to the already long running rivalry between Washington and Berlin. Washington did not and does not not like the new assertiveness of the German state that surfaced at the G20 a few years ago. Washington arrived at the meeting with a plan and found Europe led by Berlin simply refused to comply. The German state had its own plan and as paymasters of Europe it was in a position, with French support, to tell Washington to run along.

I believe it is clear that there is an old-cold-war rivalry between Europe/Germany and Washington. With the UK playing its habitual role of Perfidious Albion. Nominally in Europe but acting as agent for America’s interests at the same time. No one in Europe is ever sure whose interest the UK is aligned with. All they are sure of is that the UK cannot be trusted. And they are right.

The problem, I think, is that this old cold war national rivalry is so familiar and easy to see, that it distracts us from the much more insidious new cold war which is not nation against nation , but shadow state, in every state, against the people of every state.  The battle lines in the new cold war are very different from the old cold war, and we must get used to them.

While some in Germany are outraged because they were not aware of American spying, Merkel and a few others, I feel quite sure, are only shocked that the truth came out. They are angry with the Americans more for letting Snowden reveal the truth more than they are with spying itself.

Some in the German state (and not necessarily those you might imagine – remember the British foreign secretary I spoke to) and some in the BND or perhaps some other part of German Security did know. I think we will find they were collaborating and cooperating with Anglo/American spying. Of course I cannot know this for sure, though I think it will become evident in the coming weeks. The question is, why would they cooperate with a foreign intelligence network spying on German citizens, diplomats and politicians? Especially when they are all telling us how outraged they are.

But beyond the posturing and mock shock, the truth is none of our governments, neither those doing the spying nor those spied upon –  none of our governments – trust any of us. None of them are content any longer with rule by consent. They all now want control. And given the endless financial and economic situation, the ratcheting of austerity, embedded and growing inequality, and the likelihood of another financial crisis within 5 years, they all feel they must have control and they are right – they will need it.

The Americans with the help of the British are the ones who have created the vast, off-balance sheet, unnaccountable machine for keeping records of everything we say to each other, but Germany and other governments are, I strongly suspect, keen to enjoy its fruits. So while many in Germany will focus upon and be genuinely angry at the American state spying upon German people and their representatives, the danger is they will be so focused on this familiar old cold war picture, they will not see the more insidious new cold war, of the shadow state in their own country, spying on them.

Which brings me to the last point I want to make about spying on and collecting data on citizens.

Intelligence Arbitrage

If you want to collect and collate data, and spy upon your citizens why do it yourself and risk being caught? Much like torturing people, it is far better to have other people, in other countries do it. That way, when asked you are able to say, “We do not torture and we do not spy on our own citizens’.

In the intelligence world what they want to be able to say, as reassurance to the politicians not in the inner circle and to the rest of us targets – what they want to say is, ‘We are not allowed to spy on you willy-nilly without judicial and political oversight and without permission. A thin lie but they would like to be able to point to some tissue of oversight and control. They are, after all, servants and protectors of democracy are they not?

So the answer is to have other people do the bit of spying and intercepting that might be embarrassing if it was known about. All that other foreign organization  has to do, is freely offer to ‘share’ their intelligence with you and bingo, you have what you were after but did not spy to get it nor even collude with those who did spy. They offered to share, that’s all.

So who could be of help in this effort? Well Canada , Italy and India are ready and, I suspect, quite willing to arrange an informal, off the books, hush hush, no oversight, reciprocal agreement

Canada is obviously well placed to help the US – if they needed help – with a particularly sensitive target. Italy can help Europe, and India can help anyone who off-shores sensitive data handling to Indian companies.

Canada has its own programme for spying on its citizens run by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which is part of the Department of National Defence. The programme was first set up in 2005. In 2011 its license was renewed  by the Canadian Defense Secretary, Mr Peter MacKay. The renewed programme is, according to an article in the Globe and Mail, now run under,

…a regime of ministerial directives – decrees not scrutinized by Parliament ….

So it was set up without bothering with parliamentary scrutiny. What do you bet it is felt – by the agency itself and the in-crowd of vetted ministers and officials, that there is no need for parliamentary oversight of its running either?

Of course its only metadata. So don’t you worry yourselves.

In Italy, Mario Monti ‘s out-going, unelected government of technocrats also decided to skip any sort of partlimentary scrutiny and pesky court orders, and issued a Presidential decree, (24th Jan. 2013), outlining new guidelines for

 …the protection of national cyber security  .

According to  Italian Lawyer Fulvio Sazrana in this article,  It basically gives Italian security services almost unlimited access to data and with hardly any oversight at all by parliament or even the courts. Mr Sazrana quotes part of the decree which I ran through a translate programme ( I don’t read Italian)

Article. 11 of Decree obliges operators of telecommunications and internet service provider, but not only, for example, who also manages the airports, dams, energy services, transport, to give access to security services to their databases, for purposes unspecified “security.”

So in Italy it’s not just emails and phone calls, its going to be whole data bases as well. That opens up a whole new lot of data about you.

And then there is India. According an article in the Indian National Newspaper, The Hindu, the Indian state is about to set up a new agency the NCCC (National Cyber Coordination Centre) in which all India’s other security and communications agencies will have a role.  According to a  government note,

“The NCCC will collect, integrate and scan [Internet] traffic data from different gateway routers of major ISPs at a centralised location for analysis, international gateway traffic and domestic traffic will be aggregated separately … The NCCC will facilitate real-time assessment of cyber security threats in the country and generate actionable reports/alerts for proactive actions by the concerned agencies,”

The Indian agency, it is made quite clear, will spy on its own citizens as well as international traffic. It will be real time, so content, not just metadata. Given that Indian citizens log on to Google in America, and UK citizens read articles in the Indian press let’s not fall in to the trap of thinking that what Italy or Canada or India does will not effect us in our own country. Data and those who handle it are  not bound by national boundaries, rules and laws. You only have to look at corporate tax avoidance and evasion to see that.

Now here is my speculation – unfounded as yet – that another tranche of your supposedly privatec and personal data may yet be opened and read. The British state, like many other western nations off-shores its public data handling. NHS records and some tax records are now handled in other countries – the US and India so far.

In Britain such records are protected. But once abroad they are private corporate data. How bound by the laws of a distant State will global companies feel? If they broke UK law who would arrrest them? Undercover British reporters have already found they could buy the health data of British patients from Indian data companies, including,

Databases of information including names, addresses, and NHS numbers are being sent overseas along with private health notes as managers come under increasing pressure to cut costs.

It is illegal but they did it. How open would such data be for a very powerful, lightly  overseen Indian intelligence organization? And might the Indian cyber snooper be very willing to share such information if asked by a curious sister intelligence organization in Britain or America?

Just speculation at the moment.

But what I want to emphasize is that there is a New Cold War but it is not like the old one. It is not country against country. It is the shadow state in every nation against its own people, with the collusion of an inner core within the regular State. If this is correct, and I believe Mr Snowden has made it very difficult to believe otherwise, then we must not allow ourselves to be distracted by politicians and media barons telling us stories in the familiar mold of the old cold war, of one whole country against another, America against Germany, Britain against France, or Greece against Europe. There are, of course, still real rivalries between nations and they do compete with each other and do try to destabilize each other – but this is not our most pressing problem as citizens, as free men and women. I believe our real problem is what I have called the New Cold War. Because our enemy in that war is here among us.

Nominally we live in democracies but the trust which makes government by consent work is eroding fast. Distrust, fear and control are replacing it. And it is not you and me pushing that change. It is the shadow state allied, as I believe it is, with the shadow financial world, which is pushing it.

As I have said before, we are at war – a frighteningly cold war – of austerity and spying, poverty and trial without jury – but the lines are not between nations any more. They are between you and me on one side and an elite who style themselves as technocrat experts and cyber praetorians, here to help, but in reality here to control us and do away with democracy wherever they can.

157 thoughts on “NSA/GCHQ – The New Praetorians and the New Cold War”

  1. Peak Democracy, perhaps?

    Peeking over the parapet,
    Piqued by curiosity
    I wondered I thought privately
    Could this be Peak Democracy.

    Strictly entre nous of course,
    We after all have no secrets between us. or anyone else it seems?

      1. Dynamite Independence Day post. Thought you’d appreciate a similar essay by the revolutionary poet and philosopher Subcommandante Marcos (circa NAFTA and 1997) on The Fourth World War: “The war which neoliberalism is conducting against humanity is thus a planetary war, and is the worst and most cruel ever seen.”

        http://mondediplo.com/1997/09/marcos

  2. In case of Snowden it appears to me that the “year of the snake” is well in its developing stage. The emperor without clothes has been reckognized and the powers are now showing their blank face. No justification why they spied so much, no sorry about it. But now they just go out through their media-whores to tell the world that the Snowdens of this world are traitors and hunted down wherever they hide. Today i posted a mail in one of the main swiss newspapers (Tagesanzeiger) and as many times before my mail got cencored. It was about Morales being forced down to land in Vienna and how our leaders have no backbone anymore. My question was then: how comes that the governments of Europe let this happen and the only answer for myself was that they knew all along the way what the American and English did, they are part of it and now play the shocked. The censoring of my post confirms what you are saying in the article. It is just scary, or maybe good, for all of us to see how the shadow state (secret services and elite) wants you to obey! Keep up the good work!

  3. I was reading this morning about the Bolivian presidents plane being forced to land, and then about Russia saying Snowden could only stay if there were no more leaks. My response was to say to myself that it is no longer state against state, but is now states against the people. Thanks for confirming that I’m not getting paranoid.

  4. David, no doubt you already have way too much on your plate, but if you have any interest at all in an alternative perspective, please look into anarchist analyses of the state for a different perspective. “The Art of Not Being Governed” by James Scott is excellent, as is Rudolf Rocker’s “Nationalism and Culture”. “The Early State” (edited by Claesens and Skalnik) is a collection of about 20 essays by about 20 historians (‘plain’ historians, not anarchist) on how states emerged across the world and thus what characterises them. Elitism, class divisions, exploitation and other such unsavoury attributes are high on their deeply researched list. Democracy does really not come into it, except as a sop for the masses after much struggle on their part. The watered-down representative democracy we know today was fought for against the state, and much blood was shed fighting for it. Now that cheap oil is a thing of the past, we see the state revealing its true face again, what you here call the shadow state. (As Weber put it, the state is a monopoly on force.) As things unravel, we can clearly see where the state’s priorities lie: with the elites. This is only logical, as the state is rigidly and inherently hierarchical. Those at the top are its guardians and prime beneficiaries. As resources become scarce, those people and things of lowest value to the state’s survival are sacrificed first, and they tend to be things which produce no profit/tax revenue.

    Also, as David Graeber details in “Debt: the first 5000 years”, the libertarian’s assertion that the market is somehow anathema to the state is not born out by history. There is more evidence to suggest that the market is a child of the state, that one cannot really live without the other (both are linked by private property). That view makes far more sense to me than to suggest the state is somehow for The People while markets are engines for the rich to get richer (or vice versa if you’re a libertarian). That, I believe, is a fairy tale. You don’t have to be a libertarian to be suspicious of the state’s true dynamic.

    For the record, I am not a libertarian. I just find the anarchist analysis the most accurate and helpful of those I have examined. It is unprejudiced. Besides, the state’s propaganda against anarchism, casting it as violent and chaotic, is obviously untrue (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you). Is there a more violent social form than the state? Has more damage, degradation and destruction been wrought by any other form?

    The governance you instinctively defend (and which I want to see emerge as time goes on), is, if I may be so bold, ‘classless’ self-governance (with the vital caveat that diversity is the spice of life!). The state cannot allow this, for such would be its demise. The Internet, for all its warts and potential for Big Brother ‘total’ control, is, I hope, the beginning of an apparatus that could allow humanity a good shot at broad and lasting self-governance. Time will tell if we can live up to our potential.

  5. Hello Toby,

    I will try to read some of what you recommend.

    The reason I talk about the State is that I do believe there is a place for an organization of people who are charged with making sure that the things we cannot do individually, or in small groups, get done for us, in our name. Such things as a health service. Schools, Universities, Expensive research programmes and large scale building works.

    I don’t know, would such a belief find a home in an anarchist world view?

    1. I think yes, but the need for, e.g. an enormously complex health service presupposes, in a way, that cure is better than prevention. We live lives that make us sick. Far healthier ways of living are possible which would render the need for a large, complex health care system close to zero. This is of course speculation, but not idle speculation. As for schools, state education is not really necessary as we have it now, and was designed/conceived to break the will of its charges and prepare the majority for mindless factory work:

      http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

      FTA (“How public education cripples our kids, and why” by John Taylor Gatto):

      “Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.”

      See also presentations by Sir Ken Robinson on YouTube and the work of John Holt, particularly “Why Children Fail” and “How Children Learn”.

      In principle, anarchy is about self-governance. This does not preclude hierarchies for projects such as those you list, nor does it preclude leaders and followers. It simply reserves the right to question authority. Authority has to be earned, like respect. If force keeps authority in place, it is tyranny. For this principle to be meaningfully applied, governance must be transparent. Secrecy is thus anathema to anarchism but necessary to the state (when it comes to public affairs, privacy is of course needed for private matters etc.), but I digress…

      The Graeber article I link to is a neat little set of questions and quickly read. Of the books I’d recommend starting with “The Art of not Being Governed” because it is full of eye-opening info.

      I think it is important to remember that fanatical adherence to any ideology leads bad places. Hence your point, which is probably about managing very complex societies, is a good one. I’m not a purist, I’m a pragmatist.

      Thank you again for your work and always-polite responses!

        1. Both the extreme of the noble savage and the extreme of the terribly warlike savage are rather exxagerations. The (perfectly legal) pdf I am linking to may be of interest to you, and it mentions Keely (the author of the book you mentioned) and that book you mentioned many times, both critiqueing him and praising him.

          It may be of interest to you if you have the time. Though you may just want to look Keely up the index to find the pages directly relevant to that book you linked to. The author makes some good criticism of Keely.

          http://dreamflesh.com/ebooks/war-noble-savage.pdf

          1. Massinissa, thanks for the link but I’m not really persuaded by his criticisms of Keely. I agree that hunter gatherer tribal life has much to commend it BUT I still find the idea of constant killing hard to stomach. Our state does now kill people in Afghanistan etc and I also find that hard to stomach but the intensive prevalence of tribal warfare killing still shocks me.

            And Toby, your argument seems to me to fly in the face of the facts about tribal warfare. The facts may be perplexing but they are the facts. People do act in perplexing ways. Collectively we often act in a way that perplexes all of us. Violence isn’t the only example. Involuntary unemployment is another example.

        2. I agree with Massinissa. Humans are neither ‘naturally’ warring nor ‘naturally’ peaceful, We tend to one or the other depending on prevailing conditions. As for war, war is violent. But the state wreaks more destruction because it has more power. And in that destruction I include ecological destruction, since ‘nature out there’ is seen by the state as a kind of enemy to control and master. The state is all about control and measurement.

          I do not agree with the Hobbesian position that without the state there will be a “Warre of each against all”. Were that true a state could not have arisen. If the natural state of affairs were permanent and all out war of all entities against all other entities, how is it that we (mostly) hate war and violence? Does the word “violence” come with good or bad connotations? If humans were born in war to make war and once knew only war, why did we go to such trouble to overcome it and establish states (following Hobbes’ logic)? What appeal could stable peace possibly have if we had never experienced such a thing? And surely, being born to make war, wouldn’t our biology would find stable peace boring or wrong?

          If you look at “The Art of Not Being Governed” and “Stone Age Economics” and “Debt: the First 5,000 Years” and a bunch of other stuff, you’ll see that life outside the state in primitive tribes does include violence, but is not characterised by violence. Humans, like all other animals, are capable of violence. That is beyond dispute (though violence is surprisingly hard to define). My point is that the state is necessarily about tyranny because it is a monopoly on power and defends itself at all costs. This is not to say that there are no peaceful statesmen or noble citizens within states, nor that the state, despite itself, cannot produce historical and social pressure towards democracy, but democracy and self-governance are currents that are fundamentally opposed to the state dynamic of rigid and institutionalised hierarchical power, i.e. elitism. This is clear from the history of the state as a social form and clear now as we see what elements of itself the state defends first when the going gets tough.

          Again, anarchy is not hopeless disorder. Chaos is an impossible social form except briefly during social collapse; humans are social animals and thus naturally seek to establish socialising agreements. An anarchic tribe can lapse into chaos dealt a sufficiently weighty blow, just as a state can collapse into chaos when it fails.

          1. I rather think that Hobbes’s views were based upon his real life experience in the English Civil War. My recollection from studying this many years ago was that the collapse of a powerful central state as the two sides fought for supremacy resulted in effective anarchy in many places and it was not a happy experience.

            So Hobbes was not, I believe, theorising about something hypothetical but reflecting lived experience for many.

        3. Hi stone,

          I don’t understand your point; which of my arguments flies in the face of which facts? I have read a lot of literature by various historians and anthropologists which strongly suggest that state warfare and tribal warfare are not that different from each other in terms of violence visited upon the enemy.

          As for Hobbes, my arguments are logical rather than historical. That said, “Mutual Aid” by Peter Kropotkin is littered with references about humanity’s (and other species’) cooperative instincts. Again, if life were simply war of each against all, there would be no organisms, let alone social animals, let alone language.

          1. I suppose a lot depends on what is considered civilisation. Mr. Keely has chosen a pretty narrow definition & appears to have an interest in making certain so called facts support his theory. I am only going by his examples listed on the Wiki page & perhaps there are more in his book, but in the case of Native North Americans if the Clovis point is used for dating, it seems to me that the evidence is very scant over a period of roughly 13,000 years of settlement.

            According to Wiki civilisation started in the Neolithic period due to the development of agriculture leading to the advent of larger settlements. If this is the case the example listed of Sand Canyon in Arizona is invalid. This is due to the fact that the occupants practised farming, built a small town & had their own rich artistic culture. This settlement & many others like it were abandoned at this time mainly due to drought conditions. I would suggest that the events were more in keeping with what would happen to our civilisation rather than to nomadic hunter gatherers in a time of famine:

            http://gamblershouse.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/was-there-any-cannibalism-during-the-great-drought/

            The Crow Canyon massacre could also have occurred for the same reasons. The people who were butchered suffered from long time malnutrition & they were also farmers. Nobody knows if the perpetrators were other settled Indian farmers or nomadic hunter gatherers.

            ‘The events leading to this massacre are unknown, but there are many hypotheses that exist to explain such a horrific event. The most plausible of these explanations is that “overpopulation, land-use patterns, and an unstable climate caused the people to compete for available farmland”.[23] The malnutrition suffered by the Crow Creek villagers was most likely not uncommon for people in that region during this time period. Because of this, there is a strong chance that another Initial Coalescent group or several groups in the region attacked the Crow Creek village for the arable land and resources.’[24]

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Creek_massacre

            The example of the supposed genocide of the ‘ Yellowknife ‘ tribe by the ‘Dogrib’ tribe didn’t happen. They were involved in a turf war which resulted in probably a high percentage of fatalities per population size, but the antagonism it seems was caused by tensions & disease caused by European fur trappers.

            http://www.mpm.edu/research-collections/artifacts/dogrib/history

            Yellowknives Dene First Nation was formed in the 1990s following the collapse of a territorial-wide comprehensive land claim negotiation. They currently negotiate a land claim settlement for their lands as part of the Akaitcho Land Claim Process

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowknives

            Iriquois did in fact torture etc but it seems they were also farmers :

            In Reflections in Bullough’s Pond, historian Diana Muir argues that the pre-contact Iroquois were an imperialist, expansionist culture whose use of the corn/beans/squash agricultural complex enabled them to support a large population. They made war againstAlgonquian peoples. Muir uses archaeological data to argue that the Iroquois expansion onto Algonquian lands was checked by the Algonquian adoption of agriculture. This enabled them to support their own populations large enough to have sufficient warriors to defend against the threat of Iroquois conquest.[19]

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois

            It all depends on what or who you consider civilised, Keeley obviously thought that these people were not, i imagine he considers the Romans who decreed the Carthaginian genocide were. I do not believe in the ‘ Noble Savage ‘ I think we are all have a potential for savagery when things get really tough, whether we live in a city or a tepee. As usual the truth is a shade of grey between the competing standpoints of black & white.

  6. Roger, that was a very good, and subtle comment above, from my perspective…
    Better than my expository prose will be…
    Why am I not surprised that my government is spying on me ? (yes, well, my government is definitely more interested in spying on me than on some other citizens who are currently living within its borders, and are not.. traitors to the cause)
    Why am I not.. outraged that my government is spying on me ?
    Because I realize that this monumental worldwide push to eliminate.. every shadow that could possibly come between the.. light and us.. works to displace shadow elsewhere.
    I think Roger would agree with me that come noon, when the sun is high in the sky and there is neither a shadow, nor a cool breeze.. the heat is insufferable.
    There is no escaping it…
    Why is my government spying on me ?
    Because as an undifferentiated atom of “the people”, I have mandated it to provide my absolute security at all times, while I continue business as usual.
    Because… that is what YOU have done too, my friends.
    Look around you. The pressure for security is everywhere. That pressure comes from the People. (You may think that “the others” are sheeple, but sit down and ask yourself how much insecurity you can tolerate.)
    I think we would all do well to pick over the French Revolution with a fine tooth comb. While trying to sift through the “winner’s” rhetoric that could cloud our understanding of how democracy and totalitarianism make excellent bedfellows. France is a textbook case.
    On the relationship between Europe and the U.S., it is important to understand that since at least the beginning of the 20th century, the… colony has begun colonizing its colonisers. The U.S. was the ultimate Enlightenment experiment, as I Iike to repeat, the New Jerusalem (paradise), a beacon for generations of European immigrants. That counts, all that idealization, all those hopes and dreams that are coming unraveled right now.
    What do the U.K. and the U.S. have in common ?
    A.. language. And the fact that the U.S. government’s institutions originated in New England. What’s in a name ? Sometimes.. a lot.
    Right now, the colony is busy trying to destroy its roots as a European experiment, and its ties to Europe.
    While we.. in Europe are busy kowtowing to it, and embracing ITS colonization.
    Go figure.

    1. Hi Debra,

      In the security bargain the price it seems is being set after the bargain was struck when all prospects of a renegotiation of terms is to be denied. I personally and I suspect many others are no longer willing participants to this faustian pact.

      “It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs should be conducted in secret… But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare, the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead… Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”

      Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus

      We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

      Plato

      Whilst only Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the Mid day sun Debra a bout of feverish sunstroke will usually pass and what ever one committed to in that confused state should not have any binding contractual value.

      1. Is it possible to be a peon and disagree with Spinoza, Roger ??
        Look at that binary thinking in your quote. That parallelism contrasting “right” and “evil”. The repetition of the words “one” and “absolute”. So.. Biblical, Roger, for a man who managed to get excommunicated, and not from the Church, either… I have no qualms with biblical.. authority, Roger, but it is not my sole authority, nor is Spinoza.
        Last night I read through a children’s summary of the chronology of the Kings of France, from the beginning.
        Lots of stuff that I didn’t know there.. (I really should never have got citizenship because of my willful ignorance…)
        Several things stuck out.
        The Frank practice of dividing the kingdom between several hereditary male inheritors led to its division into several small kingdoms.
        Whose inheritors promptly started slugging it out.
        Who suffered under this ?
        The… people (but not just).
        What we call “feudalism” resulted from a weakening of the Carolingian monarchy. Under Charlemagne, (a strong relatively centralized power), the country prospered, and slugging it out diminished.
        When we talk about the monarchy, we are talking about several distinct phenomena, according to the period of history, and the country. And at the end of the previous Merovingian monarchy, the Kings really didn’t have very much power. Their.. STATESMEN/BUREACRATS did…
        Centralizing power helped to diminish all that slugging it out. Fewer inheritors helped too. What also helped to diminish slugging it out was harnessing the Church’s authority/legitimacy in order to make the King the representant of God. Divine right, which took a long time to materialize in the French monarchy, and was not there from the beginning. What Toby did not talk about above was the “civilizing”… influence of the Catholic Church in delegitimizing physical force/physical violence. But.. not only was the Catholic Church extremely influential in delegitimizing violence, it also transmitted its extensive institutional structures to the political sphere. The Catholic Church as institution, and as a structure which promulgates an INSTITUTIONAL solution to human ills is not to be passed over when trying to understand where we are right now, and how we got there.
        Why do we individually and collectively fantasize so much about what goes on in secret, Roger ??
        Why are we so paranoid about feeling left out ?
        Freud would have had some interesting things to say about that.
        I happen to feel that paranoïa is the natural consequence of an exacerbated impression of one’s individual importance in the world. A result of feeling atomized, cut off from one’s “semblable” as we say in French, which leads the individual to desire omnipotent control over himself and his environment. (Not very poetic there.. sorry.)
        As well as a result of too much importance being given to the visual sphere.
        Our consciousness is highly dependant on our.. eyes, right now, while neglecting our other senses.
        The Greek plays talk about this very well. That’s what makes them so relevant to us over 2000 later.

        1. I can not speak for anyone but myself Debra. I object to being spied upon and presumed guilty until proven innocent, for me thats the wrong way around. I operate on the basis of doing no harm and wish to live in a society where others feel the same way and if thats impossible like Ingrid Bergman, then I vant to be alone:
          There is so much mythology supporting justifications masquerading as truth and necessity a sort of political and cultural re boot is necessary. until the collective conscious reaches the conclusion that its time for a re boot of the mainstream mainframe, I am remaining in my own little network being the change i would like to see in the world. be it ever so humble theres no place like home, as a GNU/Linux user Richard Stallmans philosophy on freedom are very interesting, I would find it impossible to live my life according to his high ideals and standards but aim in his direction.

          1. Lol, Roger, I suspect that we are living very similar lives…
            On spying…
            MODERN spying is all about algorhythms, and the statistical probability, determined by a machine, that the presence of a particular word is.. proof… (of what, we would like to know, but that question is rarely tackled).
            Before we got so much mystical faith in the machines, there was truly an intelligent intelligence person with his (mostly his..) neurons lit up trying to figure out if you were spying or not.
            Those.. advantages have their disadvantages.
            Now we can “spy” on everyone who has a Visa card.
            But just how much does that teach us ?
            Not much, I bet.
            So, I am not WORRIED about my government spying on me, not too much.
            What makes me desperate is what a waste it is.
            Time to get back to cultivating my garden…

    2. Your government is not really spying on *you*. Or me.

      Because we have no value.

      They are mostly indulging in industrial and commercial espionage in order to give an advantage to US (+UK?) banks, corporations, military etc. because that has a real money and power value, and can be used to facilitate insider dealing, foreknowledge of contract tenders, as well as juicy bits of information which could be useful leverage against commercial and political rivals.

      Of course, if you were in the process of setting up a new political party, organising protests against some corporate body, a union leader or representative, etc. then yes, you would become a target too.

      That is also the point of all of this spying.

      If you, as an individual, non-threatening person, have have nothing to hide then, yes, they’re probably right, you personally have nothing to fear.

      But those people who do put their heads above the parapet, *on your behalf *- they will be the ones that feel the heat…

      It’s not about your personal privacy – it’s about the privacy of those who would stand up and fight for you.

      Beyond all the industrial espionage, they’re the real targets.

        1. Thanks, Golem. I seem to remember asking you once on CiF if you had a blog….you didn’t at the time…but, oh, how times change!

          More power to your elbow!

          Best, Mr S.

  7. “EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT Session document”

    11 July 2001

    “This report makes an important point in emphasising that Echelon does exist, but it stops short of drawing political conclusions. It is hypocritical for the European Parliament to criticise the Echelon interception practice while taking part in plans to establish a European Secret Service.”

    http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm

  8. David, thank you for your analysis. Your thoughts fit in well what Bertram Gross in his book – already in 1980 – describes as “Friendly Fascism”, or look into the report by Crozier, Huntington, Watanabe, published in 1975 (“The Crisis of Democracy. Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission”) – how to conserve “democracy” against unsubmissive citizens, and you see, it was a long-term project coming to maturity….Very informative to re-read it today. One could could get the impression it was sort of a blueprint for the developments in the last few years.

  9. Contrary to what you say in this otherwise excellent article, the French are not shocked by NSA spying – thanks to a decade+ of Chirac and Sarkozy submissive policy, France is now fully integrated into NATO and is nothing more than a junior partner of the UKUSA – NSA agreement, on a par with Germany and other European partners.

    There was an article in “Le Monde” a few years ago (2010-2011 perhaps?) that mentioned that cooperation at the secret/intelligence services was “excellent” and that American, in particular, had nothing but praise for the cooperation and professionalism of French secret services, including DGSE and its electronic intelligence arm the “Direction Technique” (such a bland name).

    Yes, “cheese-eating surrendr monkeys” definitely have their uses for our American masters…

    I – as a Frenchman – think all this show of being “shocked, truly shocked” by the recent NSA leaks is nothing more than political theater by François Hollande, since DGSE now operates its own electronic/SIGNIT operation, dubbed “Frenchelon” – named after the “Echelon” program of the NSA.

    And let’s not forget that French spying in the USA is now a long and honorable tradition (See: Boeing, IBM, etc.)

    One last data point: the recent “Cahuzac” affair (so named after the French budget minister, who had bank accounts in Switzerland and Singapore) was the result of a leak by the French Secret Services, angered at Cahuzac for demanding severe cuts in their budgets and in the French army budget in general. The information leaked came directly from Mr Cahuzac DGSE file…

  10. David, Your analysis is spot on yet again. The forcing down of Bolivian President Evo Morales plane merely on the suspicion that Edward Snowden might be on board and then letting it proceed once it was found that he wasn’t demonstrates just how the fake the outrage in European capitals about the NSA spying really is.

    The way the shadow state is developing reminds me of Dani Rodrik’s trilemma that proposes that we can have any two of democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration but not all three. It seems that the power that be have decided that democracy is the one of the three that is most dispensable (although, naturally, it would never do to admit as much so the hollowed out forms must be preserved).

    http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/06/the-inescapable.html

    Actually, I suspect that the problem is more acute than Rodrik suggests and that neither democracy or national sovereignty is compatible with unlimited global economic integration which must sweep aside ALL barriers to its advance. This is the evil objective of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its Atlantic sibling the TTIP free trade treaties currently being negotiated in secret. They are the cutting edge of the shadow state.

    http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2013/04/obama-administration-takes-aim-at-public-interest-policies-of-tpp-countries-in-new-report.html

    1. backwardsevolution

      Gordon – “…..neither democracy or national sovereignty is compatible with unlimited global economic integration which must sweep aside ALL barriers to its advance.”

      This appears to be where the current is taking us, yes.

    1. Thanks for that JM.

      ‘Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

      So I said, call me Trimtab’ – Richard Buckminster Fuller.

      http://www.gekkosblog.com/2013/07/the-us-vs-edward-snowden-does-world-not.html

      1. As trimtabs we can ´´Become the change we wish to see in the world´´(Ghandi)
        To go further with the nautical metaphor we are it seems all adrift in a sea of contradictions all trapped within the same tangled Web, our common assumptions and presumptions. The biggest lies are perhaps those we tell ourselves.

        Walter Kaufmann (1966). “§ 37”. Hegel: A Reinterpretation. Anchor Books. ISBN 0-268-01068-4. OCLC 3168016. “Whoever looks for the stereotype of the allegedly Hegelian dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology will not find it. What one does find on looking at the table of contents is a very decided preference for triadic arrangements. … But these many triads are not presented or deduced by Hegel as so many theses, antitheses, and syntheses. It is not by means of any dialectic of that sort that his thought moves up the ladder to absolute knowledge.”

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesis

        I was reading something the other day , it started out saying just read all the following first and understand what it is saying before re reading and looking for contradictions or filtering it for arguments that support any predisposed conclusions you might wish to draw, it was good advice.

        Bearing this in mind I read the Wikipedia Article on Capitalism.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

        Two Take aways for me.

        Capitalism has existed under many forms of government, in many different times, places, and cultures.[5] Following the demise of feudalism, capitalism became the dominant economic system in the Western world. Capitalism successfully overcame a challenge by communism and is now the dominant system worldwide.[6][7] ( Oh Really? i’m not sue the Laurels are so easily placed over the Shoulders of the sainted Capitalism, are you?)

        One key figure in institutional economics was Thorstein Veblen who in his book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), analyzed the motivations of wealthy people in capitalism who conspicuously consumed their riches as a way of demonstrating success. The concept of conspicuous consumption was in direct contradiction to the neoclassical view that capitalism was efficient.
        In The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) Veblen distinguished the motivations of industrial production for people to use things from business motivations that used, or misused, industrial infrastructure for profit, arguing that the former often is hindered because businesses pursue the latter. Output and technological advance are restricted by business practices and the creation of monopolies. Businesses protect their existing capital investments and employ excessive credit, leading to depressions and increasing military expenditure and war through business control of political power.( I am partial to a bit of Veblen)

        If you read the Article in Wikipedia it is striking that as Steve Keen says, there is precious little discussion on the nature of money. The money system is just assumed to be there?

        We often dismiss the sociopathic motivations of the various political and business figures that seem to be calling the shots, it seems to me that they are trapped along with us within their own presumptions and assumptions how does the Captain of the Ship along with his crew admit to the passengers that they have no idea of which direction to steer how does the Captain avert a mutiny?

        Judge Merrick Garland of United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit referred to the Bellman’s Rule in his ruling in Parhat v. Gates, saying, “The government suggests that several of the assertions in the intelligence documents are reliable because they are made in at least three different documents … We are not persuaded. Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact the government has ‘said it thrice’ does not make the allegation true. In fact we have no basis for concluding that there are independent sources for the documents’ thrice-made assertions”.[24]

        “Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
        That alone should encourage the crew.
        Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
        What i tell you three times is true.”

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunting_of_the_Snark

        And of course the Emperors New Clothes were of course a very splendid admirals Uniform.

  11. Hi David – I respect you and your blog so this is written more in sadness than disappointment.

    Your statement that “I am not suggesting that the shadow state is already in charge but I am saying they are in position already to wield huge and carefully hidden, almost unchallengeable power.” still shows you’ve not yet grasped the magnitude of the situation..

    The shadow state has been in power since time immemorial, but a good place to start would be 1694 with the establishment of the Bank of England – a private monopoly lending to the State with taxes as collateral. Of course most men didn’t get to vote until 1884/85, with women having to wait until 1918. Not that it mattered, since whoever you voted for were beholden to The City of London – who have been pulling the strings ever since to ensure we remain debt slaves to a master that can never be repaid.

    I know you know this already, so why are you shocked at the current revelations? They are simply a ‘natural’ consequence of a psychopathic parasitic class simply using current technologies – known and as yet undisclosed – to keep us, the unwashed and illiterate in our place.

    Only now are people waking up to the truth that we’re under 24 hour surveillance with a security apparatus fully armed and ready to stamp their heels upon our face for the rest of eternity. Take a long hard look at Gaza and The West Bank and it will give you some idea of where we’re heading – fast!

    The question is not that how do we regain ‘democracy’ – as i’d assert we’ve never really experienced it. The real question is how can we break our chains of servitude within this economic prison?

    I’m genuinely looking for some answers, so all suggestions will be gratefully considered.

    Peace.

    1. Anthony

      It is natural for people to be fairly sceptical about this sort of accusation. If it has been going on this long why haven’t we noticed or been impacted by it beforehand? I guess the answer is that many in the UK benefited from it.

      Until now that is, when the pound of flesh is demanded from closer ashore.

      Two books shed enormous light on the viewpoint that you put forward. The first is Nick Shaxson’s “Treasure Islands”, and the other is this little known book written in the 1940s:

      http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Empire-City-History-Financial/dp/1585092622/

      I will aim to dig up some quotes from it at some point, because the author describes the Modus Operandi of financial oligarchy with such prescience that it could equally apply to the current crisis.

      1. Spot on Hawkeye – Knuth’s book is old enough to be free here:
        http://archive.org/details/TheEmpireOftheCity

        Early quote:
        Many people realize that this mystifying situation, in which an alleged
        democratic and self-governing nation is actually controlled against the will
        of the people in its foreign affairs, is a clear indication that there must be a
        very powerful and well-financed secret organization which plans and directs
        American foreign affairs, and for lack of a more specific identification this
        suspected secret organization is popularly referred to as the International
        Financiers,

      2. Good stuff David – as ever I worry we could be talking somewhere between 1910 and 1935 – not in the sense we are out of date, but more to do with how ‘our side’ has failed. The concerns have often been raised and somehow shoved aside despite solid argument. ED Morel unseated Churchill in Dundee in 1924 on a platform most of us would vote for.

        There’s a very ancient take here: http://www.historytoday.com/michael-antonucci/war-other-means-legacy-byzantium

        One interesting aspect of surveillance is less to do with what they know about us, but what they know about the shadow government Frank Soddy predicted in 1934. I find it hard to believe that GCHQ and SIS don’t know what the bankers are doing.

  12. “We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.”

    ― Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class

    “The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.”

    ― Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class

    http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/04/10/a-voice-worth-listening-to/

    1. backwardsevolution

      Just Me – Mr. Roberts also says, “Apparently now even PEN has been purchased by Washington. Chris Hedges Resigns From Human Rights Organization PEN.”

      Here’s an interesting article re Human Rights Organizations and their ties to the war machine:

      “So we have learned that presidents cannot be trusted. They cave under pressure. But what about the human rights organizations (HRO’s). We believe that the people who lead these cash-starved organizations are Incorruptible and Pure and free of ties to the War System. We cannot even imagine them ever lying to us.

      For that very reason, the propaganda arm of the War System regards the HRO as an enormous asset. Where we may doubt what the head of Halliburton or Dyncorp or Blackwater is telling us, we would never think to doubt the head of an HRO.

      Here then is how the revolving door operates:

      The HRO, bowing to the demands of rich donors, issues a dire report on “Human Rights” in the targeted country.

      Guilt-ridden liberals call for the War Machine and its government to “DO something! Do ANYTHING!” to save the persecuted.

      CNN uses pictures of dead children to whip liberals into War Frenzy; who actually killed the children is insinuated without proof.

      The War Machine flattens the targeted country, killing tens or hundreds of thousands, including countless children.

      Human rights in the targeted country cease to exist, as the survivors scramble over the corpses.

      The HRO instantly loses interest in the targeted country and “moves on” to cheering for the next big slaughter.

      Could this actually happen? It just has!”

      From Libya to Syria, anyone? As the article says, whatever happened to that rape victim they plastered all over the news in Libya?

      http://my.opera.com/NonZionist/blog/2012/07/12/the-new-pro-war-face-of-amnesty-international-inc

      1. Human Rights Organisations have basically become NGO’s aligned to globalist and neoliberal policies in recent years, we’ve seen this through groups like Human Rights Watch lobbying governments to intervene in places like Syria and to arm the FSA. They have become detached from their traditional ideas of promoting collective social justice and now become re-orientated around the nebulous concept of individual civil liberties which can be ‘spun’ to defend almost anything that belligerent governments like the US and UK choose to do.

  13. I must say, with apologies, that it was one of the few times I read the article in full before I read the comments. Always get to it, though the spectrum of thought in here is one of the jewels of the blog. On a roll here. Momentum building, food for thought aplenty.

    And yes, beautiful speculation. And the best kind of speculation. Turning the tide of thought. Enjoyable to live in the age of real time, where you can see TPTB gesture in silence….’ok, what happens here…?’

    My speculation here is ‘how do they second guess an opponent who acts as a mob inside the collective mind…?’

    When TPTB write the algorithms for that answer, we say hello to SKYNET.

    The wow factor of today is huge. Sad that so many cannot awake from the slumber to see it.

    Great post.

  14. backwardsevolution

    Here’s a story from 1999:

    “A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA “help information” trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled. […]

    Two weeks ago, a US security company came up with conclusive evidence that the second key belongs to NSA. Like Dr van Someren, Andrew Fernandez, chief scientist with Cryptonym of Morrisville, North Carolina, had been probing the presence and significance of the two keys. Then he checked the latest Service Pack release for Windows NT4, Service Pack 5. He found that Microsoft’s developers had failed to remove or “strip” the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for the two keys. One was called “KEY”. The other was called “NSAKEY”.

    Fernandes reported his re-discovery of the two CAPI keys, and their secret meaning, to “Advances in Cryptology, Crypto’99” conference held in Santa Barbara. According to those present at the conference, Windows developers attending the conference did not deny that the “NSA” key was built into their software. But they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users’ knowledge.

    A third key?!
    But according to two witnesses attending the conference, even Microsoft’s top crypto programmers were astonished to learn that the version of ADVAPI.DLL shipping with Windows 2000 contains not two, but three keys. Brian LaMachia, head of CAPI development at Microsoft was “stunned” to learn of these discoveries, by outsiders. The latest discovery by Dr van Someren is based on advanced search methods which test and report on the “entropy” of programming code.”

    http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5263/1.html

    And this:

    “Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said. These programs, whose participants are known as trusted partners, extend far beyond what was revealed by Edward Snowden…”

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

    Here’s Karl Denninger’s (Mr. Techie, who ran his own Internet company) take on it:

    “But these people are going to keep doing it until and unless we, the people, force them to stop — and put them in prison where they belong.”

    http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=221823

    1. I have always wondered why certain corporations have received such generous tax loopholes. I imagine that it’s the most convenient way to give them kick back for their contributions to the NSA.

      1. Yeah, Lemieux, I do not think that Internet companies succeed or fail due to their own merits, but to the degree to which they will play ball, or do the bidding, of others.

        An example of that, perhaps, was the start-up of Wazzup … Within a short period of time, all three of the founders had mysterious accidents which killed them.

        The REAL systems are social pyramids of power, which have well-developed means to apply the methods of organized crime to keep themselves going. Indeed, AFTER one faces those basic facts, it become practically impossible to imagine how to resolve any of our real problems, since controlling the world through legalized lies, backed by legalized violence drives society to become increasingly insane. HOWEVER, anybody who becomes effective enough to maybe change that then become a target to get discredited or destroyed.

        Therefore, around and around we go, wherein the successful corporations are integrated into the established systems. …

        Still we may be lucky to have been born so near to the original creation of the Internet, so that many of its founding principles still have some effect … Unfortunately, the history of such technological breakthroughs has been that, eventually, “the powers that be” end up owning and controlling that technology, (with the power of governments to back them up) so that the technologies result in driving worse social polarization.

        I take it as a give, these days, that all the biggest Computer/Internet based companies are integrated into the global systems of organized lies, operating organized robberies, and they are working hard towards transforming the potential of those technologies, to neutralize their potential to wake more people up, and therefore change things.

        We are back inside the situation where a few have vastly more resources to be able to promote their lies, and back their lies up with coercion, in the realm of the Internet, as we were before that Internet was developed.

        Whether or not the Internet could survive with some of its freedom of expression and association left functioning is probably one of the most important questions of our times!

        That Web sites like this one even exist is clearly in jeopardy!

        1. backwardsevolution

          Blair – good comments. Yes, I too think the Internet is just too “wild wild west” for TPTB, and that they will eventually tame it. We just can’t have people going around shooting their mouths off and peering behind the veil, can we! (sarc)

          “…so that the technologies result in driving worse social polarization.” Yes, this is a sad fact.

      2. backwardsevolution

        Collusion of the highest order and no jail time – and we have been asleep through it all. Just imagine what else lurks out there in our great democracies.

  15. backwardsevolution

    Golem – I logged off, then quickly realized I hadn’t commented on your absolutely wonderful article, and that will just not do. Thank you so much for writing this. It’s simply great!

    It makes me realize that it’s futile to talk of reforming the financial system without first reforming the political system and getting our countries back (that is, if we ever really had them to begin with, which I doubt).

    Thank you.

  16. backwardsevolution

    “I remind you once again of what I call The Higgs Principle. As I have emphasized, you can apply this principle to every significant policy in every area, including every aspect of foreign policy. Here is Robert Higgs explaining it:

    ‘As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent “failed” policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: follow the money.

    When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly successful, so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

    So U.S. soldiers get killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and confined to a set of squalid concentration areas, so the “peace process” never gets far from square one, etc., etc. – none of this makes the policies failures; these things are all surface froth, costs not borne by the policy makers themselves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine taxpayers at large, and foreigners who count for nothing’.”

    http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/intelligence-corporatism-and-dance-of.html

  17. Thank you for the excellent article. It reminded me of the following:
    ” What is left out of the equation is the fact that, in every society on earth, there is a certain percentage of individuals that are extremely deviant from the masses of normal people, and this small group is generally very active in ways that can affect hundreds, thousands, millions of other human beings in negative ways. The analogy of a disease pathogen in a body serves very well to convey the proper perspective.”
    ” We are and have been infected for a long time by a particular species of pathogen that, due to its long presence and gradual weakening of the organ systems has finally generated a cancer that has gone metastatic” .
    [Laura Knight-Jadczyk ]

    The very essence of government is an elite capable of anything and everything through treachery and immorality .What is most interesting is that in this early twenty first century all this has become as clear as daylight.

  18. And behind the shadow banking system are millions of The People, gambling with the households and children of others in the giant pyramid sale called The Mortgage.

    You are still trying to blame your enemy in which there is no credit. And there is no credit in only ‘loving your brother’. Have thought about reversing your psychology to one that does have some credit?

    http://www.meltfund.com/2013/07/famehall-george-clark-ponzi-master.html

    How much do you really know about slavery? Do you think it was abolished when Christ revolutionised Rome?

    http://archive.org/stream/riseprogressphas00obriuoft#page/28/mode/2up

    The people submitting to modern day forms of slavery is something you may wish to consider. It goes far deeper than hypocritical blame of the powerful. True, it is extremely hard to believe we are all still slaves mostly. Yet that is what slaves across the ages have felt. And that submission is the real cause of powerful injustices.

    I recommend you do not at any cost read these links. Am happy to talk about it, preferably in person or by phone.

    Yours
    Robin Smith
    CFO MeltFund
    07786 078836

  19. Great article, and lots of intelligent comments!

    Here is my two bits worth of perceptions about what is going on: Human civilization is an energy system, and the general energy laws apply to that system. However, that is fraught with paradoxes which create almost infinite tunnels of deceits.

    A profound problem with understanding energy systems is that we understand entropy backwards. When the original thermodynamics was developed, the people doing that wanted to give power a positive value, and so the arbitrarily inserted a minus sign into the equations, because, otherwise, all measurements of power ended up giving negative values. When thermodynamics was extended into information theory, the same profound philosophical error was also extrapolated.

    We live in a Bizarro Mirror World were everything is proportionately backwards and distorted. Our most basic concepts in the widely accepted philosophy of science are backwards. In fact, human realities are ALWAYS organized systems of lies, operating organized robberies. There is always some dynamic equilibria between those systems. What the current events are manifesting is the relative runaway of the established fascist plutocracy juggernaut, going more and more wildly out of balance.

    It is not being brought back into better balanced rates of social robberies, because almost everyone still believes what they see in the Bizarro Mirror World is straight up what it is, and therefore, they continue to get all the mechanisms backwards, regarding what to do about that. Imagine looking in the mirror and not understanding that everything one sees is backwards. That is a lot like how we run our current political systems.

    Here is an outline of how that happened. Warfare is the oldest and best developed of social sciences. However, success in warfare was based on deceits. That paradox always surrounded the War Kings, that were the source of the self-organizing and self-justifying evolution of sovereign states. In more recent times, the War Kings’ powers were taken over by the Fraud Kings.

    I point out this quote, as the most important one to understand political events during the previous few Centuries. Historian Carroll Quigley commented on the creation of the central banks in his 1975 book Tragedy And Hope:

    “The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far reaching (plan), nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank For International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank … sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the Country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”

    However, it is wrong to call those the “powers of financial capitalism.”

    The closest English world to describe that system is PLUTOCRACY.

    However, the word “plutocracy” still is not accurate, since it is not government by the “wealthy” in any ordinary, common sense way that the word “wealth” is understood. The greatest “wealth” that the bankers have is their power to make “money” out of nothing as debts. I am not aware of any good word, recognized widely in the English language, able to be understood by other people, when referring to the kind of governing system that currently dominates the world. I am well-aware of a whole bunch of other bullshit words that other people variously use to refer to this, such as the “powers of financial capitalism.” However, “capitalism” is way too good a word to describe what is really going on. The REAL situation is that the bankers are the biggest gangsters, for which the word “banksters” was coined in the 1930s to describe what they are actually doing through the privatized banksters’ power to create the public money supply out of nothing as debts.

    However, almost nobody that I am aware of goes beyond that kind of correct analysis of history in ways which then stays consistent with what is thereby discovered! Instead, almost everyone then proposes bullshit “solutions” which collapse back to the same old false fundamental dichotomies, and their related impossible ideals.

    The bottom line is that money is backed by murder, and must necessarily be. The political economy is inside of the human ecology. The central concepts in human ecology are about the death controls. However, the militarism that the War Kings were selected to develop was based upon being the best at lying about what they were doing. Thus, the profound paradoxes that our society is controlled by the people who are the best professional liars, and immaculate hypocrites, and must necessarily be.

    The vast majority of people, for many, many generations, have adapted to accept surviving inside of social slavery systems, which have become more and more sophisticated. Therefore, the vast majority of people have been brainwashed to believe in the biggest bullies’ social stories. That includes almost all of the reactionary revolutionaries, in the controlled opposition, who tend to correct analyze the problems, but then return to false fundamental dichotomies, and return to relying on impossible ideals, when proposing their “solutions.”

    In fact, governments and states were created by the history of warfare. Then the best of the best at being deceitful, and backing that up with destruction, in the most crucial ways, with the most leverage, were the Fraud Kings that covertly took control over the War Kings’ powers, as manifested through the powers of sovereign states. Sovereignty is based on the power to rob, with the ultimate power to rob being the power to kill. We therefore live inside of a combined money/murder system, where the debt controls depend upon the death controls. Technologies which are trillions of times more powerful and capable are being used to amplify the old Neolithic Civilization style to ever more astronomically sized magnitudes.

    To understand “The New Praetorians” etc., one has to understand that the most labile component controls the system, and in the human realm, that means that the people who are the best at being dishonest, and backing that up with violence, control our civilization. Furthermore, that is due to the fundamental nature of energy systems themselves! In human terms, going down the path of least resistance means going down the path of least morality. To change that require organizing resistance, in order to change what the path of least resistance may be. That is, we are thereby changing the dynamic equilibria between the different systems of organized lies, operating organized robberies. Those are ALWAYS the basic human realities. Governments, and those who effectively control governments, are always the best organized gangs of criminals, and the biggest terrorists.

    As ambrosius wrote in a comment above:

    “The very essence of government is an elite capable of anything and everything through treachery and immorality. What is most interesting is that in this early twenty first century all this has become as clear as daylight.”

    I would recast that description of human ecology to say that the banksters are currently fulfilling the role as the top carnivores. “The New Praetorians” are working with the banksters, because the money system pays for the murder system, while the murder system then backs up the money system in return. There are basically small groups of people that act like Vicious Wolves, and large groups that act like Zombie Sheeple, with a range in between of more Domesticated Dogs, and Black Sheep. However, unlike almost everyone else who recognized those social facts, I do NOT agree that any possible solutions can exist which do not have some murder system of death controls at the center of some system of alternatives. There MUST be some kind of human ecology, and there will be. Furthermore, there is also emerging an imperative that there must evolve some industrial ecology, and both of those have to become consistent with the infinitely larger natural ecologies.

    However, as I said above, we still tend to see everything backwards, and therefore, we still tend to have our mechanisms backwards, whenever we turn to public debates about these kinds of social problems.

    1. A simple question Blair T. Longley :

      Am I to understand that in the thermodynamic equations which you reference, if the minus sign were converted to its (rightful ?) positive value, then we would see reality – not backwards – and would that imply that the Fraud Kings would become Kings of Honor & Integrity and therefore, vis-a-vis the structure of the global central banking cartel actually be strategising / implementing the opposite of what they do now ?

      Best wishes …

      1. Well, Phil T., my point is more that the biggest bullies’ bullshit runs throughout the philosophy of science, down to its core, as well as throughout all of the other more superficial ideologies and religions.

        Of course, there could not be any miraculous political fixes, as I presume you are joking about! However, we might begin to resolve our problems better IF we stopped presuming upon the alleged absolute truth of fundamental dichotomies.

        Changing the entropy equations in thermodynamics and information theory would only mean that the arbitrary minus sign inserted into them would be deleted, because it should have never been inserted in the first place. The philosophical implications of that would be that a creative synthesis of ancient mysticism within postmodernizing sciences would become much more possible to approach.

        The epistemological implications are as I already said: ALL human knowledge is always negative, i.e.. relative illusions and lies. After one defines or relatively subtracts any finite entity from its environment, then all those kinds of defined entropic pump entities MUST obtain flows of energy across their boundaries, in order to continue living. Human perceptions cut the world up into things, which are living fires, which require the flow of energy through them to keep living.

        Energy is spirit, Entropy is satan. … And so on, and so forth … My entire political philosophy is based on the concepts of SUBTRACTION and ROBBERY. Moreover, since the robbery depends upon the original subtraction, my entire political philosophy is based on that concept of subtraction.

        The mainstream society that we live within takes for granted that it has negated the negation, or subtracted the subtraction. It has reified its presumptions regarding how it has cut the world up into pieces. The human mind always works through dichotomizations. The Problem is that we tend to take those for granted. The biggest bullies’ use violence to enforce their lies, which thoroughly drives society to become ever more insane, because it always is behaving in always more inverted and perverted ways.

        In that sense, the answer to your question is “YES,” IF the banksters were to operate their monetary measurements in ways which followed an enlightened philosophy of science, which enabled that to be reconciled with ancient mysticism, and which appreciated the asymptotic approach to understanding that ENERGY IS SPIRIT, while entropy was the distribution of that energy in time and space, but that time and space were NOT independent absolutes, but rather, a relative continuum, THEN we would all begin to have a general philosophical approach to political science which was preferable to the ones we operate through now, which are the biggest bullies’ bullshit promoting their kinds of organized lies as the absolute truth, simply because they were temporarily able to back those up with coercion.

        The banksters run the Force backed Frauds that dominate our current society. In general, any human perception of finite things means that we are operating through some system of organized lies, operating organized robbery. We can NOT have any perception of relatively finite things which does not necessarily require that as the corollary of that original perception. The original subtraction processes are how our minds actually work. However, we collectively tend to fail to understand that elementary philosophy. We collectively tend to be dominated by those who want to prevent any genuine spirituality from being more widely appreciated. Instead, the dominant bullies enforce their kind of bullshit with violence, in ways which insist their stories are the absolute truth.

        That makes working through negotiation between the different dominant crime gangs extremely difficult. That makes working through better dynamic equilibria between the different organized systems of lies, operating organized robberies, much more difficult and dangerous!

        There is no magic solution from simply deleting the arbitrary minus sign in our established entropy equations, which REVERSED the meaning of our understanding of energy systems. Paradigm shifts do not change what exist, only how we perceive what exists, which then may later change how we behave, which then can change what exists.

        If our society as a whole had better philosophy of science, then our technologies making us trillions of times more powerful (i.e., global electronic fiat money frauds, backed up by atomic weapons, which system is all more and more being monitored by computerized surveillance) then we MIGHT begin to adapt to our breakthrough paradigm shifts in other sciences like physics and biology, by matching paradigm shifts in our political science.

        We would operate very different kinds of combined money/murder systems IF more people were more spiritual, and understood that energy is spirit, by understanding the concept of entropy better, instead of presuming they are right, when they actually have everything almost totally backwards!

        IF the whole civilization were to relatively go through those kinds of profound paradigm perceptual changes in their political science, THEN we might be able to survive have sciences and technologies become trillions of times more powerful and capable than those ever were before in known human history … Of course, I do not expect that to happen in any easy way. I expect the actual human ecology to go through more genocidal wars, along with democidal martial law, and I have barely any way to predict what MAY be on the other side of those transformations.

        Yet, my main point is that all of the progress in science and technology, so far, has STILL been channeled through the basic Neolithic Civilization social pyramid systems, in which many people are kept ignorant and afraid by a few people, so that those few can continue to control and exploit those many.

        The philosophy of science is the most important thing to a society that is more and more based on advancing technology. However, in that context, then profound errors in the philosophy of science have increasingly amplified and severe consequences. Atomic bombs go BOOM because we are all the same energy, and all matter is actually that energy concentrated. Genetic engineering is possible and works because all living things on Earth speak the same DNA code, and so on and so forth … However, none of that kind of spiritual insight plays any significant role in the currently operating money/murder systems, which are cutting the world up into pieces, which can not survive on their own.

        A corresponding point to the view that MONEY IS BACKED BY MURDER, is that MONEY IS BASED ON MEASUREMENT. The philosophy of science has made tremendous transformations to the ideas about measurements, but almost none of that has been transferred into the realm of money. Moreover, since power and information is ALWAYS, within established systems, providing measurement numbers which are backwards, therefore, we do not understand measurement, and therefore, do not understand money.

        Both the murder systems, and the money systems, have very different perceptual frameworks, or paradigms, after one recognizes the meaning of the arbitrary minus sign that was inserted into the standard entropy equations, so that measurements of power and information would generate positive values, rather than negative values. The banksters could do a better job, IF they, and their society, understood the basic philosophy of science regarding measurements better. Death controls become differently conceived, after one goes through that kind of perceptual transformation in the paradigms of political science, in ways which are consistent with a similarly radicalized understanding of physics and biology.

        Basically, the REALITIES of the existence of weapons of mass destruction (which sustain the REALITIES of globalized electronic fiat money) should require us to change the ways that we think about militarism. We need a radically different way to think about the murder/money systems, or the death/debt controls. One significant way to begin that process would be to appreciate more of the meaning of the ARBITRARY minus sign that was inserted into the entropy equations, so that our measurements of power and information would yield positive values rather than negative values.

        Of course, I do not believe that will happen in any significant way in the foreseeable future. But nevertheless, I still like to day dream about the hope that political science could be radicalized enough to cope with physics and biology having already understood unitary mechanisms better, in order to enable things like atomic bombs and genetically engineered bioweapons to actually be built. I like to think that my kind of perceptual paradigm shifts can assimilate all the other old-fashioned religions and ideologies. However, I appreciate the social facts that almost nobody else agrees.

        1. Hi Blair,

          Have you seen Davids Film Dangerous Knowledge, the part of Gödel is very relevant to the points which you make.
          I have spent the past fortnight reading some CS pearce, Henry James, Emmanuel Swedenbourg and Claes Johnson.

          http://claesjohnson.blogspot.se/2013/07/quantum-contradictions-1.html

          http://www.spaceandmotion.com/truth-statements-physical-reality.htm

          http://www.quantummatter.com/beyond-point-particle/

          It is the purpose of this article to explain the origin and cause of the strange instantaneous events associated with these laws. We will show that causality is not actually being violated. Instead, the strange events are merely appearances, “shaumkommen” in the words of Erwin Schrödinger. They were created by our former incomplete knowledge of the Wave Structure of Matter and of the energy exchange mechanism of quantum wave structures. All communication is actually at velocity c.

          http://www.quantummatter.com/the-origin-of-instantaneous-action-in-natural-laws/comment-page-1/#comment-5296

          I also Like Maurice Cotterals theory on Gravity, what Claes, Milo and Maurice in common with Einstien and Shroedinger refute is the Wave particle duality contradiction.

          Statistical analysis requires the selection of limits and those are subjective, choose the limits and flavour the outcome to the paymasters liking, a wieghted roulette wheel.

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aiPnve6Iwc

          Lifes Energy Stream.

          when will we know
          for then to tell
          how as energy we flow
          through fates sweet sorrow

          I call your name
          after you had passed
          on mistrals blown
          with currents towed.

          you need not ask
          for we are one, connected still
          in sharing to will, that we
          endure no bitter pill

          I see your light
          hear a distant drum
          static pulls us in time
          our essence harmonise

          can we realise
          can we learn our dreams
          can we live out side
          in lifes energy stream

          Original Lyrics and music by Roger G Lewis aka Stampingdragon 8thjuly2012

          1. P.S.

            Roger, I noticed in the video of your song, your live performance makes what I felt was a better change in the lyrics from the printed version of “through fates sweet sorrow” to become “Life’s sweet sorrow.” And, by the way, typographically, I thought the title should be “Life’s Energy Stream” rather than “Lifes.”

          1. Thanks for that link, Phil T., … which was another one that I had never heard of before.

            Whenever I see a list of important alternative information sources, I usually find that more than half of it I have never heard of before, and those which are listed are usually only things that I have a first nodding acquaintance with.

            In a world with billions of people, there are millions who have worthwhile new ideas … which is always way too many to become familiar with in any depth!

  20. Your use of the Praetorian Guard is inexact, and the context of their rise to power may provide some useful insight into the differences with today’s shadow authority. Bear in mind that these events do not stand on their own, but mark a kind of consent, even with in somewhat restricted groups. Augustus as Emperor marked the transition of power from the Senate with the consent of the citizens of Rome, and Bread and Circuses were the means of maintaining that consent. To keep the Praetorian Guard and the Army sweet, Donatives (about five years salary) was paid on accession, and on other Occasions, by the Emperor either from personal funds or from the Treasury. (It gets complicated as time goes on with as many as six Emperors in a year). Claudius became Emperor because the Praetorian Guard would cede prestige and perhaps power to the Senate if a new Emperor was not in place after Caligula was murdered.
    Two hundred years later, Diocletian dispersed both the Praetorian Guard geographically, added his own bodyguard, and split the governance of the Empire and the Army into four to make it almost impossible for a Usurper to succeed.
    Weak Emperors allowed the Senators to extend their power, and the interplay guaranteed the existence of networks of spies. Historians argue the reasons for the fall of the Empire. It would be presumptuous to lay that responsibility on the shoulders of the Praetorian Guard.
    This is only from my brief reading on this area, hopefully someone with better knowledge can offer further insight

    1. Hello Richard,

      yes I know I did take a few liberties with the details of the history – I had a quick read back through Gibbon and a few others – but the essence is still fair enough don’t you think?

      1. Your analogy is more than fair I think, and I hope I added a little colour and depth to your vision. As I’ve said separately, I’m interested in complexity and hopefully I have suggested that the shadow authority must be intimately connected to the real world, and understands that consent is still needed to function. I’d doubt that it functions as a democracy within a democracy but without being inside it, it’s all guesswork.

          1. Wiki :

            “The reforms of Sejanus, most significantly the founding of the Castra Praetoria, essentially established the Praetorian Guard as the powerful political force for which it is primarily known today.[63] Henceforth the entire Guard was at the disposal of the emperors, but the rulers were now equally at the mercy of the Praetorians.[64] The reality of this was seen in 31 when Tiberius was forced to rely upon the vigiles against the soldiers of his own guard.[51] Although the Praetorian Guard proved faithful to the aging Tiberius, their potential political power had been made clear “.

            An interesting fiscal comparison between Rome’s downfall, the US & a modern day Chicago Coiiseum :

            http://www.finemrespice.com/node/119

          2. One further thought. General Keith Alexander claims “Snowden betrayed us.” General Alexander and Director Clapper lied under oath to Congress in recent months. They could have “taken the fifth” and they had other choices. They lied like seven year old kids found raiding the cookie jar. They lied. To Congress. Under Oath. And Congress seems content with an apology.
            If this is anything to go by, the chances of a fair trial for Snowden are slim to nil. But this is not about one whistleblower.
            The USA provides the world’s reserve currencey, backed only by their full faith and credit. That is a huge amount of trust. And it is being eroded.

  21. Anotherlassic oldie can be found here:
    http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/roehrigw/vickers/

    This is what the once CEO of our major arms manufacturer Vickers said in 1941:
    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 moneylending 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 mere conception that His Majesty’s Forces should fight for the benefit of such dictatorship, which already wields an independent power in exact opposition to social progress throughout the world, is wholly incompatible with the defence and maintenance of democratic freedom and seems utterly absurd. But this world power, with its permitted control of the national money supply and with its support of a monetary System that has plunged every nation into the miseries of irretrievable debt and the world into economic strife, should not be underestimated.

    I guess we underestimated it in the extreme! The current fix for its Ponzi schemes is $15 trillion and we can probably guess the real deal is $100 trillion (against GWP of $73 trillion).

    1. Yes, allcoppedout, that was a Golden Oldie, compete with the classic list of impossible ideals as the proposed solutions at the end. We tend to grossly underestimate in the extreme, since the real money system is based on the murder system to back it up, and therefore, ONLY an alternative murder system could sustain an alternative money system.

      That is true both in the short-term, where the current ruling classes are who they are because they were the best at being dishonest and violent, and will continue to apply those methods of organized crime to control governments in the future, as they did in the past.

      Furthermore, it is also true in the longer term, since human ecology MUST have some limits of the otherwise runway exponential growth, which is impossible to sustain.

      I find that almost everyone who understands the runaway insanity of the money as debt system growing towards debt numbers which are insanities does not match that with an understanding that there will likely be provoked corresponding levels of death insanities, which could ONLY be mitigated by better death control systems.

      There are roughly three groups. The largest does not understand that the banksters are the biggest gangsters. Another smaller group may understand that the banksters are gangsters, but then propose solutions that are based on stopping that kind of fraudulent social robbery. An even smaller group, which I call the Fringe Cubed, go beyond that to recognize that the banksters are acting as the top carnivores in the human ecology (both as predators and parasites) upon the vast majority of the population (some of which prey were productive, while more and more are also degenerating into become parasites, because they are living within the banksters’ overall parasitical systems.) That Fringe Cubed position points out that there still must be some human ecology, and that the death controls are still going to be necessary, as long as any human beings survive.

      The past struggles, such as through World War II, were episodes during which the military murder systems more obviously backed up the monetary systems. Such wars were harvests for the banksters, whereby they drove the overall society through transformations, which ended up benefiting those banksters.

      My objections to that Golden Oldie article is the same as I always make towards all the reactionary revolutionaries, who propose impossibly superficial ideals regarding how to fix the problems, both in the short-term, as well as in the longer term. The banksters were the best at the maximum leveraged death controls (through prolonged application of the methods of organized crime), which enabled them to take control over the political puppets, and shape all legislation to favour the banksters. No realistic solutions are possible which ignore those central social facts. Furthermore, none are possible that deliberately ignore the imperatives that there MUST be some human ecology, in which the death controls are central.

      Thus, I return to the point I made in my earlier comments: it is not good enough merely to denounce the ruling classes for being evil. They fulfill necessary ecological niches, and some new methods to operate those functions would be required in any good solutions, which were adequately realistic and practical …

      Of course, there are no guarantees that we will not go through psychotic social breakdowns, and mass murders, when the current financial systems collapse into chaos … But still, we “ought” to propose good solutions that actually address the real problems on deeper levels.

      1. I read your earlier post with considerable interest Blair. Even Nietzsche said bourgeois morality was.based on being able to send the boys round to collect debts. I have taught organisational theory and economics for a long time and never found any scientific description of the problematics.
        My preferred start is biology and its varying definitions of the biological individual (about 21) and the concepts of co-evolution, ecological systems and energy use and regulation in them. I go for structural realism from the philosophy of science.
        I agree that denouncing the evil is not enough. One of my reasons is that leadership deaths in animals generally produces more of the same and even if we had a cull of the rich we might well default to more of the same. Humans can actually design the control of leadership – Popper said this was much more important than who does the leading.
        Long story – but to keep it short we should be designing democracy accepting its ‘energy costs’ and preventing the financial arms race against it by bank capture of the politicians. This means accepting a policing role and designing participation in that as democratic (lots of us would have to do some of it).

        I think key issues involve planning not to have big government because people can get on with their lives without needing politics a lot of the time if things are reasonably fair. We would have to do something about political parties – their structures are almost primed for infiltration and the selection of psychopaths or agents inserted or turned by foreign or financial interests. Sortition is one possibility.

        Even this only begins the story of a number of reasonable approaches to the problematics of economics. I know no science that would start to use quantitative methods until some reasonable approximations had been established regarding measurement, and the role of approximation and measurement in theory formation (Gunther Ludwig). Current economics places most of what matters outside its calculations as ‘external’ – like people poisoned by oil companies and the choice of frequency distribution models that happen to make risk disappear.

        1. Sortition suffers from the same Catch 22 double-bind paradoxical predicament as do all other possibilities.

          The real system is de facto. It was made and maintained by the people who were the best at applying the principles of organized crime, for a long, long time. There is nothing other than more of the methods of organized crime, which can actually operate in the real world.

          “Democracy” suffers from the vast majority of people having been too successfully brainwashed. I can not imagine how we can resolve the paradoxes of having enough of a real education, in order to have enough of a real democracy.

          Citizens would have to be taught that they are members of an organized crime gang, which had duties to operate the death controls, that maintained the debt controls, and so and so forth …

          As the technologies become trillions of times more powerful, and therefore, progressively, the jobs of almost everyone gets replaced by computer/machine entities, and the ONLY good work left would be to act as citizens, that controlled the social robbery systems, in much more self-conscious ways.

          Of course, I recognize that that too is just pie-in-the-sky dreaming, although it appears theoretically possible. Generally speaking, there is nothing wrong with what is written on paper about the theory of “democracy” and the “rule of law.” The problems are that more than 99% of the population act like Zombie Sheeple, who have been too effectively brainwashed for too long to believe in the bullshit promoted by the way too dominant 1% of the population.

          I have spend some thirty years working on the problems of the funding of politics in the Canadian context, including a couple court cases against the government of Canada over the laws that control the funding of politics in that country. As well, during that time, I have discussed these issues face to face with tens of thousands of different people from all walks of life. My conclusions are extremely dismal dead-ends.

          The established systems are thoroughly entrenched legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, which will not allow any alternatives to emerge. The dominance of the current school systems, and mass media, is way too overwhelming! The established money and taxation systems are runaway social insanities, which can not be stopped, other than by themselves going totally mad, and becoming too self-destructive, which will NOT be a good thing, and is NOT something that I am looking forward to!

          Of course, I agree that we must muddle through “some reasonable approximations … established regarding measurement” … However, we are STUCK inside of the current human ecology systems, which were built on the foundation of the history of warfare being based upon successful deceits, which then was the foundation to understand the monetary systems, and everything else in reinforcing loops of lies, backed up with violence, where the violence can never make those lies become true, but nevertheless, the society is still controlled by the dominating influence of those lies, while that society as whole is thereby constantly driven to become increasingly insane, since that society is more and more controlled by the runaway triumphs of frauds! Of course, we already operate through very rough “approximations, which are good enough to do that, now.

          The central core, keystone, and lynch pin to those processes today are the funding of politics. Every day for thirty years, I have been engaged in an on-going political experiment that involved the Canadian Political Contribution Tax Credit. That on-going political experiment continues to PROVE the social facts that 99% of Canadian taxpayers as like incompetent political idiots, and that they want to stay that way. Therefore, all possible good ideas regarding what we “should” do flounder upon that social reality …

          The situation is similar in the USA, only way, way worse. As you probably know the Supreme Court of the USA has gutted attempts to limit the influence of the funding of politics there, so that money now has almost nothing left to restrain its abilities to dominate the American political processes. Indeed, the real American politics can easily be understood by simply looking at which persons fund that process, while the vast majority of people pay for nothing.

          The American Democratic Republic is pretty well dead, the same as everywhere else the various forms of fake “democracy” conceal the runaway fascist plutocracy juggernaut systems throughout the Anglo-American world, which still dominates the rest of the world, (although that dominance is just beginning to show serious signs of breaking down.)

          I WISH that I could imagine something which was realistic and practical to do. However, I believe we are now so totally controlled by well-established systems of entrenched legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, that the ONLY possible futures are nightmare science fiction scenarios of the final psychotic breakdowns of those system, due to the paradox of final failure from too much “success.”

          The possible ways that some alternatives might survive through that are too difficult to predict, but those alternatives that might survive through the psychotic breakdown of the current Neolithic style of civilization MIGHT emerge through that happening … and thereby opening new niches, AFTER the established systems destroy themselves, due to their own runaway madness …

          I certainly agree with the preliminary prediction about “even if we had a cull of the rich we might well default to more of the same.” What I like to day dream about is the emergence of a new kind of ruling class, after the current one allows its triumphant madness to destroy itself.

          I like to imagine some sort of Translithic Civilization, to grow back after the Neolithic one causes its own self destruction. I like to imagine the emergence of a kind of Transnational Scientific Community, which will be forced to become political, and be radicalized by the collapse of the established social systems, based on runaway triumphant LIES. (Assuming enough of us survive enough to still be able to do something like that, then.)

          However, such new ruling classes would become profoundly paradoxical, since they would have to have a higher consciousness about themselves, and the ecological context they were within.

          That will be extremely intense since a new kingdom of life will be simultaneously emerging, along with its own industrial ecology!

          As I said in my previous comments, a deeper understanding of energy systems enables us to understand how and why human societies ended up being controlled by the people who were the best at being dishonest, and backing that up with violence. Technologies that make weapons become trillions of times more powerful ought to motivate radical paradigm shifts in militarism. However, so far, nothing like that has apparently happened …

          A better murder system, operating better death controls, MUST necessarily be the central feature of any better human ecology, and corresponding political economy. Since the current systems are based on those operating them working deliberately through the maximum possible deceits, while most people have been brainwashed to believe in those maximum possible deceits, the magnitudes of the psychotic breakdowns to evolve, or revolutionized, human ecology goes off the scale of anything predictable today!

          I like the notion that photosynthesis drove the profound revolution of the eukaryotic cell, as the solutions to that technology. Sometimes evolution has some of its diverging branches converge, to provide the starting point for an entirely new kind of divergence, from that source of revolutionary convergence.

          I like to imagine that things like atomic energy will require something as profound as what the development of photosynthesis required, namely a radical convergence, and creative synthesis …

          Therefore, I agree with you that the “preferred start is biology and its varying definitions of the biological individual.” My suggestions are all about redefining the “unit of survival.”

          The current bankster dominated perceptions of human ecology is profoundly WRONG! Unfortunately, the vast majority of people almost totally believe in that kind of bullshit, which they were brainwashed to believe in, and the bankster dominated social systems have every means to continue to promote and enforce that kind of bullshit!

          Therefore, the emergence of different ideas regarding what the better “units of survival” should be may only be able to emerge AFTER the psychotic breakdowns, due the runaway madness of the currently established civilization … ???

          At present, “The New Praetorians” that preserve and promote the banksters dominated social pyramid systems have everything way too well sewed up to enable any practical alternatives to emerge. Since the banksters can make endless “money” out of nothing, they are thereby able to so totally dominate the funding of the political processes that nobody else has a hope in hell of competing with them …

          That basic runaway triumph of force backed frauds, in the form of legalized creation of “money” out of nothing, as debts, has reached debt insanity numbers, which implies we are headed towards death insanity numbers being caused as a consequence! Actually, I see no way to stop those social storms from blowing through, and I can not imagine what the real world might look like AFTER THAT!!!

          I am not aware of anyone who has any possible political solutions, when the funding of politics is already so extremely lopsided, and automatically getting worse, faster, so that ALL possible ideal solutions have NO practical way to ever be implemented, against the current Catch 22, double-bind paradoxes that already fully exist!

          The basic systems 1% Vicious Wolves, ruling over 99% Zombie Sheeple, have no practical ways to change either of those groups … The vast majority are constantly being reconditioned by the systems of lies backed by violence, to continue to adapt by accepting that they live inside of those systems,

          Hence, the ironies continue to pile up higher and deeper, that the theories of “democracy” and the “rule of law” ARE present, on paper as legal theories, enshrined in all kinds of laws, BUT, in reality are almost nothing but a cruel joke. I am not aware of anyone who has anything remotely close to a realistic and practical way to get out of already being inside that double-bind, paradoxical, Catch 22 condition.

          1. A pretty depressing assessment that I for one cannot argue with. Having led an itinerant lifestyle & mainly through work, met with many people, I have come to the realisation that most people given the chance would act in a similar manner to those who currently sit at the high table.

            I have witnessed countless examples of people once given power even in the smallest measure abusing it, many others taking the first step over the line which nearly always leads to further steps, in which the individual increasingly trades their humanity for apparent personal gain. The total lack of empathy towards others coupled with a feeling that those who suffer have brought it on themselves & are therefore inferior, the lack of individuality, kowtowing, bullying of those weaker & the very many small 3rd reichs comprising of a vicious patriarch & those who are leld hostage to love.

            Maybe as a species we are on the whole totally self destructive & simply cannot help acting in a manner that will eventually destroy us, a species a few evolutionary steps up from chimpanzees in a china shop. It does seem to me that trying to untangle our present tangled spaghetti of corruption etc, which I think is wrapped around all aspects of life would only be possible after a gigantic collapse. Maybe then if the lessons are learnt through education it might be possible to build something better, or at least similar but due to a promoted awareness of the causes of downfall, the same old tragic route might at least be for sometime avoided.

            Now I know why Leonard Cohen was never that popular.

            I have been struggling to understand the concept of entropy for some time now. could you provide a link to more info on what you have already written ?

          2. The Dictators

            An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
            a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
            petal that brings nausea.
            Between the coconut palms the graves are full
            of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
            The delicate dictator is talking
            with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
            The tiny palace gleams like a watch
            and the rapid laughs with gloves on
            cross the corridors at times
            and join the dead voices
            and the blue mouths freshly buried.
            The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
            whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
            whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
            Hatred has grown scale on scale,
            blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
            with a snout full of ooze and silence
            Pablo Neruda

  22. Isn’t the whole premise of this supposed “shadow state” operating in the dark in opposition to the declared aims of government rather incredible? Don’t you think that well-meaning politicians – and there must be some – would have revealed its existence, done or said something about it?

    Government has the guns. Government has the responsibility. Government has the opportunity to do something. Yet the tone of your argument runs something like: “well-meaning and benevolent elected governments deceived by shadowy underground cabals” or somesuch.

    I find it naive to give government itself – the real evil – a pass by decrying some sort of Bilderberg-type overseer complex…

    1. Hello Kreditanstalt,

      I think the idea of a shadow government does become incredible IF one imagines it to be a completely separate and parallel organization.

      But if you use the shadow banking system as a template I think it is not nearly so incredible. The shadow banking system is not a completely different group of banks no one had ever heard of – secretly controlling the ones we have heard about in a ‘Bilderberg’ fashion. It is simply a part of the banks we know about – but a part, a function of those banks we were unaware of. And a part that was not connected to paricular nations or their people in the way high street banks are.

      The shadow banking system has a different purpose and agenda from the part we know about.

      I am simply pointing out that different agendas can exist within the machinery of government. If some of those other agendas are allowed to operate outside of oversight, with access to large sums of money and are left in the hands of an unelected and stable group – they will almost innevitably develope their own agendas, own loyalties and their own world view.

      This does NOT relieve the governments we can see of responsability or guilt. They are complicit. Some because they do know and are happily party to it, others by cowardly and determined ignorance.

      But I think we need to be clearer about who we are up against and how they are organized.

      1. Thank you for your clarification. Makes sense, but ultimately our huge and powerful governments not only have their established “monopoly on the use of force” but they are ELECTED.

        I prefer to rein them in; they are the real danger. When their favouritism, monopoly-granting, subsidising, bailouts, social welfare systems, rigged markets, fake money, artificial interest rates, propped-up asset “values” and overprotected labour markets are gone the shadows behind them will lose power too.

        1. Move to Colombia. They have no social welfare system and few labour market protections. You can be murdered just for joining a trade union or indeed for pointing out that the state apparatus permits and protects private monopolies. Because the people in the state and the people in the private corporations are the same – they are friends, they are family. So if one was to dispense with ‘government’ altogether one would simply be left with the land grabbing, people displacing private corporations and their private paramilitary armies.

          And no one would be able to do anything about it.

          1. You’re not optimistic, are you? But last time I looked Walmart and Monsanto (let alone Costa Coffee) did not have “private armies”, did not have their hands in my pockets nor did they compel me to buy their products.

            The PROPER role of a small and reduced, but still necessarily armed, state would be to PREVENT collusion, monopolies, rigged markets, theft, assault and fraud – NOT to confiscate, redistribute and dictate individual behaviour.

        2. @ Kreditanstalt

          What exactly are you suggesting? Do you advocate private competing armies? Somebody has to control force and I would say that the state is best suited to do this with democratic (ha ha) control. Best of a poor set of choices.

      2. This shadow government was predicted by Frank Soddy (1934) and in perhaps extreme form (say Preparata’s ‘Conjuring Hitler’) sees an Anglo-American plot to raise Hitler for a war against the Soviets. The problem is we can always write novels and can’t get to the actual evidence. This is even true in incidents like Hillsborough and celebrity sex abuse where we have had to wait 20 years and more for the cover-ups to end.
        What should not surprise us is that the fraud can be pulled off. Establishing networks of crime, especially fraud, is very difficult. Cops involved in recent sex abuse and grooming prosecutions say the evidence was always in front of them and the big change has been in their training to deal with it and willingness to collate that evidence for prosecution. New technology in control theory helps sift lots of noise to produce nodes, percolation and hubs. The evidence of the ‘shadows’ is obvious like the extent of abuse was 30 years ago (we had known the numbers for 100 years) – what’s missing is not just policing direction, but challenge to the secrecy (privacy) of the shadows. In banking and government transparency limits liquidity and speed of action – so we are told.
        Capital is perhaps little more than the image Saville put up in front of his actual activities. The parallels are in stark relief – the high street shop front and integrity of image management and the real activities of crime hidden behind (insider trading, front running, selling insurance that doesn’t insure … these are old scams). The big pretense of capital is neutrality.

        There is so much academic critique in this area none of us could read it in a lifetime – one stops at some point because it repeats and repeats. What we are always denied is something more practical like police investigation – though I’d stress the “like”. Denied real practical information we have to guess or look to secondary and unreliable information from government or the banks. We have trouble demolishing obvious myths like bankers being extra-smart and worth their pay, let alone the sky will fall if we create simple banking (create, not re-create – it never existed) type of stuff.

        I suspect we have to deal with various factions of the shadow lords to rid ourselves of their hegemony – and we have to ensure we don’t just disturb the balance of their power. I now think economics-politics is so revolting most people try to work a position in life to ignore it. This is what most primates do when they start to ‘gossip’ (the noise is rather human too) about leadership contests. It is always good to drop by for a read here – so thanks David – but I think I’m beginning to crave a manifesto!

        On another tack I wonder if we should start telling modern fairy tales. Imagine a scientist tasked with organising basic production and distribution who comes up with a plan to create an elite that doesn’t work but can interfere with ‘dollar jokers’ at any stage and must receive 85% of the output. Surely no society would be that stupid?

  23. The commentary here is a good exposition of unquestioned acceptance of the institution of slavery still present today, though no longer direct, but masked and indirect and more intense than even in ancient times.

    That is, to blame the powerful for being wealthy, to feign sympathy for the impoverished, but NEVER to call to account the principle cause of social problems – the acceptance by both rich and poor of the institution of slavery.

    Commentary here as among all reform movements is to accept modern forms of slavery as a fait accompli and to try and find a remedy using superficial reforms, so there remains a chance for the slave to one day become master and for todays master to be thrown into slavery. A transfer of power is all that is called for on this forum. But the greater swallows up the smaller, that approach futile.

    Read on Chapter 4 here, apologies for the long winded:
    http://archive.org/stream/riseprogressphas00obriuoft#page/25/mode/1up

    Also:

    “The slaves, on their side, appear to have been perfectly reconciled to slavery as an institution. The writings of the ancients have left us nothing to countervail this opinion, but, on the contrary, much to confirm it. We can nowhere discover any evidence to show that the slaves of antiquity regarded slavery in any other light than as an institution natural in itself, and neither unjust nor unreasonable, provided they (the slaves) were well treated. It is true they often complained of their lot, and sometimes rebelled, too, in order to change it; but, in so doing, it is to be observed, they never complained of slavery as an institution, nor invoked the principle of Equality as the end and object of their complaints or rebellions. Their complaint was, not that slavery existed, but that they, themselves, and not others, were the slaves. And when they rebelled, it was not in order to put down slavery and establish liberty for all ; it was to exchange conditions with their masters, or else to secure their own freedom at the price of taking away other people’s. The idea of making common cause with other slaves, in order to emancipate all slaves, never entered their heads. Principle, or love of equality, had nothing whatever to do with their movements. The principle of liberty for all was too sublime an idea for them. Equality before God and the law was still further beyond them. Slavery, as a principle, they had no fault to find with; they complained only of the accident that made them slaves and others free. Even of this the vast majority never complained, because the vast majority (there is reason to believe) were content with their lot, and satisfied with their masters’ treatment of them. Indeed, the whole tenour of what we read of in history respecting slaves leads to this conclusion. The vast majority were content with their condition. In general they were kindly treated; and as they knew no other state, and saw nothing unjust or unreasonable in slavery, they were attached to their masters as to benefactors (regarding them as the authors of their comfort), and might, mayhap, as a general rule, be pronounced happy.”

    1. For a moment there I thought I had stumbled on Squire Osbourn’s leaked justifications for a future plan to resurrect the British economy. It seems however the author was a 19th century Chartist who spent his whole life fighting for universal suffrage. In my book that made him a good man. However I think that the above tells only part of the story & is anyway an assumption. Perhaps the majority of the millions of slaves who have existed on this sorry planet were reasonably happy with their lot, but I would put that down to having no choice in the matter, which is perhaps in itself is a definition of slavery.

      As for the revolts & the motivations for them, whether they were personal or altruistic, I suppose those subjected to slavery were susceptible to human vices as we all are. Also being subjected to a degrading lifestyle which was I presume the reason they revolted, would I imagine have meant that they probably were not too idealistic & in any case they would probably be further doomed to participate in a system that for the most part was the only one on offer.

      I cannot imagine that those European men, women & children who were dragged off by Barbary pirates, the European& American sailors shipwrecked off the West coast of Africa who were enslaved by Arabs, the African who was not allowed to marry the woman he loved while she was regularly impregnated by their owner to increase his stock & the millions of others stuffed into foul confinement in coffin ships in which the majority of them would die before reaching the land of the free, & the countless sex slaves both children & adult were particularly happy with their lot.

      You add a very modern title to the text: ‘ Dependency Culture ‘, but surely the dependency was that economies & wealth needed a system of slavery to prop them up. As in the US civil war which was fought to protect the interests of a system that relied on slavery to prosper.

      It seems to me that when these unfortunates were given a choice they chose & fought for their freedom & isn’t this the essence of freedom to have a choice ? the World is full of people with little choice & indeed many are still slaves, but to equate the suffering of the above to people like myself is ridiculous, I have a choice even if that choice is constrained by the system in which I live. By your reasoning we will always be slaves.

      1. Mr Meltfund aka Robin Smith harasses Chris Cook, the man who had the courage to blow the whistle on energy market manipulation back in the early 2000s and who has subsequently been proved correct this year, on another forum known as Facebook.

  24. The arguments that relate spying / data collection with security are completely specious. There is no relationship between the two whatsoever, they can’t be compared in a quantitative way. The idea that ‘terrorists’, or for that matter criminals, burglars, financial fraudsters, etc. can be prevented from acting by being caught by some internet drag net or wiretapping is completely stupid, and built on the myth of 9/11. The info. can however be used to backdate actions. I just read a story about a young man who would have been convicted of theft with violence and rape were it not for cell phone records.

    Spying, eavesdropping, recording, data theft or collection are used for: industrial espionage, stealing trade secrets, analyzing and predicting financial matters, getting information on future plans of designated enemies, etc. It can be used against specific individuals, through intimidation and blackmail. It is also used for purposes less nefarious – e.g. analysing social networks, consumer sentiment, the behavior of information generally, etc. Note how the two types seem to jell together – nobody really objects in principle to targeted pop-up ads. It is the same / similar information being used.

    Arguably, the US doesn’t care about the security of its citizens at all. (See food policy, health care, guns, unsafe infrastructure, and on and on.) In fact one might state the opposite – the Shadow Gvmt. or the PTB or the hands behind the curtain want the populace to feel insecure. Psychologically afraid of shadowy enemies (false flag attacks…lame terrorist plots organised by the FBI, etc.) afraid of Gvmt. as well (Big Brother, drug testing, credit scores, etc.) My feeling is that practically everyone – except the most innocent or naive – doesn’t believe this argument anyway but simply use it as a kind of code-word signaling allegiance to those in power. Generally, that is about (off the cuff) 20% of the population in say the US, the UK, etc. That is why this meme endures.

    One dimension neglected in the interesting discussion above is money. Much of this PRISM type activity goes on for one main reason: simply, it can be done – modern technology affords it – 30 years ago it was impossible – and it is highly lucrative. The NSA farms out its ‘work’ to subcontractors – about 70% of its budget I have read. Half a million ppl in the US have access to classified intelligence. Getting the tax payer to pay for activity that is secret and that they can’t be informed about is a wonderful opportunity for endless scams, i.e. a lot of fake busy activity that leads nowhere. Crony capitalism at its best. I had to laugh when I saw the Power Point slides of PRISM, they are at dopey college student level, or that of a lame business type trying to sell snake oil. Even if only intended as a general presentation to ignorant audiences, they are not professional.

    That does not mean that privacy isn’t an issue here or that the data can’t be exploited for evil ends – I am just pointing to a sort of inevitability, which should also take into account the lack of ‘democratic’ governance, of control….. or the shadow State in the top post.

    1. Discussion question:

      Capitalism is not a mathematical arbiter of value, morality or useful products, it is a system of power. Crony capitalism IS capitalism as the wealthy use their pooled resources to lobby for legislation favourable to them up to and including the handing over of public services to them (privatisation). They like the state when it protects their property and businesses and despise it when (after the growth of democracy) it makes them pay taxes or give favourable working conditions to their workers.

      1. If they are so interested in “lobbying for legislation” that might just indicate that the problem is not “capitalism” (such little as we still have) but too-big, too-powerful and too-well funded government…

        1. I first really was challenged to think about the Land Clearances and Enclosures of Scotland and England when I read The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perleman, ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/147231852/Michael-Perelman-The-Invention-of-Capitalism) in which he explains the Marxist Concept of primitive accumulation and he quotes the Lady Sutherland.

          She remarked in a letter to a friend in England, “Scotch people are of happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals.”[9]

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

          To landlords, “improvement” and “clearance” did not necessarily mean depopulation. At least until the 1820s, when there were steep falls in the price of kelp, landlords wanted to create pools of cheap or virtually free labour, supplied by families subsisting in new crofting townships. Kelp collection and processing was a very profitable way of using this labour, and landlords petitioned successfully for legislation designed to stop emigration. This took the form of the Passenger Vessels Act 1803. Attitudes changed during the 1820s and, for many landlords, the potato famine which began in 1846 became another reason for encouraging or forcing emigration and depopulation.

          Corporations are animals of the State and the Money system the concentrations of capital they represent are unlikely to accrue outside of a system that shows great reciprocal patronage.

          Fair Free trade and commerce are not only an inevitable and exclusive result of a system of Political Economy which might be defined as Capitalist.

          I am intrigued presentkly by Henry Mayhews conception of Agipsm.

          In 1851, the English journalist and social researcher Henry Mayhew, discussing means to “a more general and equal division of the wealth of the country”, characterized agapism as “the voluntary sharing of individual possessions with the less fortunate or successful members of the community” and as the alternative to communism (“the abolition of all rights to individual property”)

          I highly recommend the Wiki article on CS Pearce as well.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce

          Monsanto and Walmart? where does one start, they are as good an argument against Capitalism qua Capitalism, a gift in fact for anyone of an Anarcho Syndacalist Bent, in examining what is problematical with large concentrations of Private wealth and power and their abuses, to assume they ( the abuses) would not exist without the State but the wealth would remain is an open question.

          I have an ANarcho Capitalist freind and we have for about a year been batting this question back and forth

          Ricky Peter Newins • @Roger

          “What do we do about money? I was reading about Charlemagnes Monetary reforms the other day.”

          Decentralize it.

          I believe I posted this to you a while back: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article10370.html

          “In the age of Mass communication I am not at all sure that Gold and Silver would cut it, but neither a state or a central Bank or private banking system with debt based money at interest is satisfactory to me. ?”

          I reckon Gold and Silver would be fine as standards, of course they do not have to be the only standards.

          I say laissez faire, laissez passer. Let people use the money and currency they wish, just as long as we get off this fiat debt based counterfeiting system I will be happy.

          “Free trade necessarily has to be fair, what does one do about Contract disputes? In a post industrial society I believe there has to be a return to a Proper Commons, I think Guaranteed incomes are an excellent way of ensuring free and fair trade serve society rather than exploit it.”

          DRO´S. I have read a lot into how DRO´S could function in a stateless society and no doubt they could play a bigger part in a statist society as well if the monopoly on the use of force (the state) shrank in size.

          With regard to guaranteed income, I am all for it just as long as it is on a voluntary basis i.e. the subsidization of individuals incomes came from voluntary sources.

          Roger Lewis • What are D R O’s Ricky, a quick google threw up Debt Recovery Office?
          One of the claims for what is widely called capitalism is that it replaced barter and brought with it money as a means of exchange. The history of money is hopelessly lost in all sorts of mythology and the chronologies of both its development and continuing production are all over the place.

          Where there is want there is the potential for exploitation and the exploitation of market advantage in some situations could be interpreted as Coercive. Decentralised banking is a very good idea ´´A Federated money system´´avoiding all power at the centre, it is theorised that a situation whereby the production of new money is not in the hands of a monopoly, that distorting monopoly size piles of the stuff would not accrue to the advantage of the people favoured with first use of the money created , the prevention of this sort of first mover advantage is something Guaranteed income as a distribution of the amount of new money created would help to avoid. One of the problems I have had with all the alternative money systems I have seen including MMT and Steady state ( small s) envision a concentration of power usually with the writer cast as the commisar.
          Positive money with its public trust Idea is the closest system which makes the system democratic.

          On the linked article Ricky beware ETF.s paper is not necessarily a claim on physical assets much in modern finance is cross collateralised and hypothecated.

          https://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2013/06/etfs-a-warning/

          ´´ETFs have in their DNA everything it takes to become monstrously dangerous. They are wide open to all the fraud and shitty behaviour the banks seem not to be able to stop themselves from bathing in. They are awash in leverage and riding on a tide of derivatives which hide so much concentration of counterparty risk that it makes a mockery of ‘risk management’.
          David Malone ( Golem XIV) Author of ‘the debt Generation’.
          2 days ago

          1

          Ricky Peter Newins

          Ricky PeterUnfollow

          Ricky Peter Newins • Hi Roger mate.

          Dispute Resolution Organizations/Agencies.

          Bartering is fine, and as we know, money in the form of precious mental substituted bartering for practical reasons.

          ETF´s are derivatives, even more precarious than fiat currency.
          1 day ago • Like

          Roger Lewis

          Roger Lewis • precious metal replacing barter is actually an old chestnut that is assumed but not proven, In actual reasoned consideration, the assumption seems unlikely. se David Greeber debt the first 5000 years, also the Levy institute have a very good on line paper on the history of monies.

          http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_717.pdf

          What is the more interesting question is that if money is a flow and not a stock and where economic potential expands how does one regulate the flow so that enough tokens are in circulation to facilitate trade? this is what MMT looks into and steady state economics. Stafford beer also did some interesting systems work on the subject in Chile for alliendes government before Alliende was assasinated.

          And so we go on, A read of Perlemans book would I think shake anyones belief in the virtue of Capitalism.

          http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2011/05/ruskins-critique-of-classical-political.html

          “The whole question, therefore, respecting not only the advantage, but even the quantity of national wealth resolves itself finally into one of abstract justice. It is impossible to conclude, of any given mass of acquired wealth, merely by the fact of its existence, whether it signifies good or evil to the nation in the midst of which it exists. Its real value depends on the moral sign attached to it, just as sternly as that of any mathematical quantity depends on the algebraical sign attached to it. Any given accumulation of commercial wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive energies, and productive ingenuities: or, on the other, it may be indicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, ruinous chicane. Some Treasures are heavy with human tears, as an ill-stored harvest with untimely rain; and some gold is brighter in sunshine than it is in rain.” John Ruskin, from ‘The Veins of Wealth’.

          1. “Let people use the money and currency they wish, just as long as we get off this fiat debt based counterfeiting system I will be happy.”

            To me, that’s the absence of government, of coercion and of violence – free capitalism. ‘Nuff said.

          2. Kreditinstalt,

            Its certainly a starting point but Ricky and I have had some meaningful discussions about externalities and Corporate power is very poor at dealing with these personally I consider corporate power to be analogous to State power they are complimentary sides of the same coin. Ricky usually says that private insurance policies sort out the externalities that are overlooked I am not convinced. Quasi Statist behavior by large Corporations is an un addressed problem as yet in my own mind, do you see any problems in that direction your self?

  25. I’d have to say this shadow government originated back when the Dutch paid for William of Orange to take over here on their behalf and pass the royal prerogative of money creation over to them. It got bound up with what already existed in The City too somehow. It’s been here for centuries hidden, now it becomes overt. Whether that’s through desperation or conceit I couldn’t say.

    1. The rest of that blog has interviews with other employees in finance. It is most enlightening. Or terrifying.

      1. Chilling indeed Phil.
        On our ‘acceptance’ of slavery I’d point to ants – where we don’t assume consciousness. The slavers steal ‘eggs’ and these are ‘hatched’ and work nurturing in the slave nest. Yet even in evolution the enslaved rebel and start to kill the slavers as they pupate (it’s probably a smell thing), even though this can only be an advantage for the species as the ‘rebels’ will die. I go for a much closer look at animals because I sense many control mechanisms in our world are similar and we should be able to guard against there use better.

        Whoever the shadows are, the operation looks live that of a hive. What I know of insect ‘consensus’ is nearly as scary as the stories Phil points to!

    2. Of course it is as bad as that.

      Not too familiar with the BBC, but game shows and the like, are based exactly on this kind of ideology.

      A sadistic master or mistress awards points for correct answers to arbitrary and stupid questions, insults the losers, and finally picks a winner (for I suppose some small monetary prize, don’t know.)

      The peons bow down to try for the jackpot and all is accompanied by dramatic music, lighting, effects. Organized, second by second, by the BBC.

      There is no discussion, no creative answers allowed, no checking out, etc. It is acceptable or allowed because the ppl who enter do so willingly, and the viewers apparently love it. Grand!

      The ppl who want to earn a living working for banks are subject to this kind of stuff. (Not that others aren’t…but the generous pay keeps ppl working for Defense, shady contractors, and surprisingly International Orgs, the pay is to be measured against how much slave behavior one is willing to furnish..)

      My point here is not that the banks are lousy or sadistic employers, which they are: but that this way of functioning is considered acceptable, even wonderful, and beamed to millions of ppl each day, who somehow love it and cheer for winners and so on.

      And that lowly or even professional bank employees really have no choice. One
      part of their obligatory, and paid for function, is to be abused by those superior to them. They work they furnish – good or bad or whatever – is always considered not good enough, just like the slaves on Old Plantations.

      They are paid to look weak, to be downtrodden, to excuse themselves, etc. I won’t mention sex at all.

  26. yes, it is so because the market on war has been shown to be greater than the market on conscience

    1. There are many ways to model a financial system internationally. An example can be found here:
      Nature Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/srep0054

      This one is called DebtWatch and, of course, was stiffed before it started because the data it needed to crunch is confidential – the claim being most financial transactions are such, policing national and the financial world international.

      Given our fears about Prism and GCHQ – and NSA and SIS have the financial security of our countries in their remit – I can’t see them having less sophisticated hard and software trained on financial markets and general bank skulduggery than a few scientists could whip up – they must have one they did earlier. Given surveillance of human rights groups, unions and MEPs – it seems unlikely banks were off-limits.

      What is difficult to understand is why NSA and SIS types were not able or inclined to warn governments (or maybe they did) when the banks put out their begging bowls – that the situation was much worse than the banks were claiming and insolvency not liquidity the problem. Imagine China pulling of a scam in financial markets and asking SIS why they knew nothing about it. Surely we spy on them, and surely we all spy on each other. I suspect the fines rather than prosecution of banks is down to NSA/SIS collusion in the dirty deals and fear of outing just who knew what when.

  27. ” Everything we know of the dark side of human nature is wrong. ”
    Evil comes not from mankind but from an almost human species in our midst who lack that which the rest of us do not : a conscience. They are ” the other ” that Christ spoke of. The tares in our midst.
    They come in all colours , all shapes and are of every race and they hate us for our freedoms. That is, they hate us for our capacity of acquiring the freedom to disengage from these predators that surrounds us. Also as bloated parasites they fear being found out for they know full well that they would be expelled without mercy and thus would no longer be able to feed on us ,their host. They are invisible amongst us and they live in disguise. It is said that they , as toddlers, recognise each other at play and learn that although few, they are not alone. They know that they are different.
    They are a strange intelligence that lacks empathy, understands no mercy and are the fifth columnists amongst us. It is not possible for them to be at peace with any neighbour whatsoever. We are their delight. Our slavery is the tribute they demand because they always take us over when we are not looking; They see our silence as an invitation and our ignorance as consent and since it would not occur to a normal to act like them, “most people are never ready for them.” They see themselves as “special” and boast of being turmoil ,which they are. They know how to suck the juice of stones and their thirst is never quenched. Theirs is an ancient science.They are our exercise, our plague.
    Imagine our whole planet ruled by them absolutely.
    Now you know the New World Order. Their pathocracy is already well on its way to construct this hell on earth and their cacocracy assents. Its getting late.
    The following books are useful for getting to know them:
    Without Conscience by Dr. Robert Hare.
    The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout.
    Snakes in Suits by Robert Hare
    The Mask of Sanity by Harvey Checkley.
    Political Ponerology by Andrew Lobaczewski. [ An extraordinary revelatory gem. ]
    Psychopathology is indeed the scalpel that dissects our age and our bondage to them. Are there are no limits to the hallucinating power of nature when confronting this cancer that repeatedly takes it over ? Tell tale destructions abound.
    ” My people perish for lack of knowledge .”
    ” The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists ” . [ J. Edward Hoover . ]

    ” One must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones.” [Machiavelli. Discourses on Levy ]

    1. dead eye dick
      was made of stone
      knew how to groan
      could slice the bone
      to the quick
      dead eye dick
      could pick a lock
      rob your stock
      slit a coat
      cut your throat
      anything and everything
      to satisfy his dead eye…

  28. What are bonds but a giant tax payer mortgage. Think about it. Carefully. In a quiet moment. Then ask what’s the difference between that and your own mortgage? Then ask how much bigger home owner mortgages are than national debt and get the context right.

    MeltFund mortgage total market size

    For the benefit of our Clients and Partners, here is the total market size of MeltFund.

    Sources of this data can be found in the notes below [1]. Do not worry yourselves with scientific precision. Observe with care and see the general numbers are large enough already.

    Annual number of repossessions [2] – 70,000
    Average selling price of a house – UK£200,000

    MeltFund total annual UK market size:

    = UK £14 Billion

    For the United States, multiply by ~6

    = US $84 Billion

    For the world, multiply by ~20

    = US $280 Billion

    Here are some more interesting UK numbers which may alarm you:

    Number of houses – 23,000,000
    Number of empty homes – 2,000,000
    Number of mortgages – 50% of households
    Average equity in a house – 50%
    Total value of housing stock – UK£4.6 Trillion
    Total value of mortgages UK£1.15 Trillion
    Upside from flipping a repossession at source – 60%

    Remember the term ‘Economy’ is Greek for ‘Household’. National Debt, though a small proportion of the mortgage market, is no more and no less a mortgage on the common property of a nation. Same thing – one giant household with governments of all party’s the ‘Father’.

    What is owned in common by all people has been re-mortgaged, the owners of your country receiving nominally ‘interest’ from the bonds. In reality it is the Economic Rent of your country, all paid for out of the hard earned taxes forced onto you, the patriots.

    And our children will be paying these rents and did not even borrow it. Their parents did put them in debt and lived well on it. No wonder it is forbidden knowledge. Every single parent rich and poor complicit.

    And you know what happens to all pyramid sales… none are sustainable, wealth does not grow on trees forever.

    We’re not making a judgement here or saying running an economy rooted in a pyramid sale is right or wrong. We are pointing it all out with clarity, so that our valued MeltFund clients who do affirm it, can exploit it to the max.

    Go well.

    Robin Smith
    CFO MeltFund
    07786 078836

    What is MeltFund?
    Contact MeltFund

    [1] ONS, Ministry of Justice, Council of Mortgage Lenders, UK Land Registry, HMRC, Department for Communities and Local Government and more official bodies.
    [2] Growing long term annual average currently 1 in every 300 households per year.
    [3] Remember: the exchange value of anything whatsoever, is rooted in and backed by the rental value of the land of that nation, in proportion to its economic productive capacity. If land there has no value neither would any asset, from zero rising all the way to infinity.

    1. Robin

      I’ve always had a gnawing discomfort about mortgages and the method of entrapment they entail. It is only through investigating the causes of our current crisis have I begun to understand the link between Gvt debt and mortgage debts. Both were incurred through fictitious and duplicitous means:

      “A further contradiction arises from the interest-bearing national debt being used as collateral security by bondholders who borrow from banks. Banks create a deposit (new money) for the borrowing bondholder and charge him interest. The public is taxed to enable the government to pay interest on the bond to the bondholder who, in effect, passes the interest on to the bank.”
      http://billtotten.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/economic-thought-of-frederick-soddy.html

      Most people in this country do not realise that mortgages and Gvt debt are both pyramid schemes. They could be forgiven for their ignorance, for they are victims far more than they are bystanders or perpetrators. They are mainly guilty of gullibility.

      That pails into insignificance compared to the maliciousness of those intellectually and politically competent enough to know what they are doing. The conduct of those who truly benefit and perpetuate the lies and smokescreens is unforgivable.

      If you do truly understand what is happening (for which your posts and links to the likes of James Bronterre O’Brien suggest that you do), then you cannot absolve yourself of making a judgement as to whether this is right or wrong.

  29. backwardsevolution

    Was Michael Hastings murdered re his NSA investigations?

    This is an email Michael Hastings sent to friends and colleagues hours before his death:

    “Subject: FBI Investigation, re: NSA -Hey (redacted names) — the Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates.’ Perhaps if the authorities arrive ‘BuzzFeed GQ,’ er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news gathering practices or related journalism issues. Also: I’m onto a big story, and need to go off the rada[r] for a bit. All the best, and hope to see you all soon. Michael”

    “The Michael Hastings Car Crash – No Skid Marks, a Flying Engine and Boston Brakes” – a piece by Michael Krieger.

    “An eyewitness at the scene, Jose, employed at nearby business ALSCO Inc said, the car was traveling very fast and he heard a couple explosions shortly before the car crashed. In fact, the explosion was so intense that it took the LA County assistant corner, Ed Winter, two days to identify the burned-beyond recognition body of Hastings. […] It quickly surfaced that Hastings reached out to Wikileaks attorney Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before his death claiming the FBI was investigating him. […] But the most significant missing evidence was the absence of any skid marks—even though the car made a 60-degree turn into a palm tree.

    Clarke told The Huffington Post that a single-vehicle crash is “consistent with a car cyber attack. There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers — including the United States — know how to remotely seize control of a car.”

    Another significant detail pointed out by some members of law enforcement, is the intensity of the fire inside the car. It’s highly unusual since gasoline generally doesn’t burn that hot. Reviewing video footage from the scene, the intensity of the fire resembles a “thermite” burn.”

    http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/07/09/the-michael-hastings-car-crash-no-skids-marks-a-flying-engine-and-boston-brakes/

  30. Dude,

    You need to make the recent comments section longer. It’s like you miss out on info. It doesn’t take long to lose the thread info.

    We need more intel bro. lol

    We do though. lol

    The comedy aspect just occurred as I wrote. That was honestly a serious comment on the recent post section of the blog.

    1. An excellent article, I’m really not at all surprised by Snowden’s revelations it would have been out of character for those organisations if they weren’t spying on us all ! I’m very glad that it’s come out, as it at least shows the “shadow” elite don’t have total control.

      I really think it’s worth looking at the underlying psychology to grasp why they behave this way. I’ve mentioned before in previous posts a great book “the denial of death” by Ernest Becker. Based on the work of Otto Rank I think it gives the most credible answer to why people pursue money/power/control and why we have a hierarchical order. It’s the fear or knowledge of death and our attempt to suppress it.

      A survival strategy to allow us to live and procreate. After all many other species live in social groups with definite hierarchies.

      So this “denial of death” is probably what drives this behaviour and the pursuit of power is really a pursuit of immortality. It’s sad because I think Becker hoped his work would help educate people to avoid this.

      1. “I’m really not at all surprised by Snowden’s revelations it would have been out of character for those organisations if they weren’t spying on us all !”

        A LOT of people (like you and I) already knew EVERYTHING that Snowden is now telling us!!!!. If I met Snowden I would say to him…Tell me something I didn’t already know.

        “at least shows the “shadow” elite don’t have total control.”

        Wrong, they do, always have had ,sadly, always will have.

        “Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland instructed Police witch-hunt against media leaks. ”

        http://scottishlaw.blogspot.de/2013/07/lord-advocate-crown-office-target.html

        1. “Department of Justice memo codifies spying on the press”

          http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/15/memo-j15.html

          “Under conditions of deepening social inequality and with social tensions rising, Britain’s ruling elite are trampling on fundamental democratic rights like their counterparts in the United States and across Europe.”

          http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/15/jsa-j15.html

          “Like serfs in the dark ages, American citizens can be picked up on the authority of some unknown person in the executive branch and thrown in a dungeon, subject to torture, without any evidence ever being presented to a court or any information to the person’s relatives of his/her whereabouts.”

          http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/07/13/coup-detat-paul-craig-roberts/

  31. David,

    Since you have been tackling the monetary system in greater detail, and if that were ever possible, the intellectual exchange on these pages has made a significant leap forward.

    I greatly appreciate the quality and number of new links to the work of other individuals that were unknown to me prior.

    I am unable to add much on the philosophical level other than to say this.

    Individually, what we choose to use in order to exchange our skills and ideas with other members of society, is inherently something that defines us and helps us hold the value of our endeavor for future use. Freedom of choice of the medium of exchange is the ultimate freedom.

    If an entity is not only given the privilege to impose a particular medium of exchange but it is also given the privilege to enforce the use of said medium of exchange with the threat of violence, man has surrendered a vital and fundamental element of freedom.

    In a context where the medium of exchange is aggressively and constantly devalued, the value of the skills and ideas of man is gradually eroded resulting in the progressive destitution of society. The direct ramification of this dynamic is that the state gradually becomes the largest actor in the economy and therefore it becomes all controlling till it places itself above everyone else thus above the law.

    Eventually, the majority become directly or indirectly dependent on the state for their survival.

    The choice of medium of exchange and the body of laws and regulations that govern its use are critical and fundamental elements of freedom.

    Money is only a noun. Anything can be money: stones, cigarettes, shells or salt have been, are and can be money. What matters is that we should have the choice to make use of one or the other as we see fit and no one entity should have the privilege to decree what money is and how it is managed.

    Imposing one type of money and one monetary system arbitrarily and unilaterally can only result in tyranny. This is not an opinion but an arithmetical truism.

    1. It’s good to know some of us don’t like what is going on. My own brief view is we are being ruled by the Undead and the silver bullet or stake through the heart won’t work. This is because leadership is part of our biology as surely as Bees differentiate to queens, drones, nurses and foragers. We can kill our leaders, but find their reconstruction is based in our own gene pool honed in long evolutionary history.
      What we can change is the system and control of leader behaviour. This is double-edged because currently they control the scrutiny technology and Big Brother looms. The temptation is not to take them on, hope someone else does and we can live uninteresting lives away from the struggle. We rather hope that not controlling (broad laissez-faire) will reduce control on us, but this is a bit like assuming allowing bandits to do what they want is a good idea.
      We have traditionally given up to Hobbes’ absolute monarch to be defended against criminals and raiders. We might now argue that the absolute monarch should be a sovereignty of the people of the earth to cut out the problem of national wars. Simples! So why are we so scared of this we can’t even vote for such a plan?

      I’d just add that a lot of management development managers told me their job was to create a praetorian guard around the CEO – the model may be very apt for politics and finance.

  32. @ ambrosius

    Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.

    – Epictetus (c. 60 AD), Discourses, Book i, Chap. xxvii

  33. @ Patma 2003. Following the summary after Libor, high frequency trading, most unusual weather getting worse, [ but lets not talk about the weather ; or if we do lets blame it all on man ] ; Equities mortally wounded, oceans poisoned, oil prices rigged, nano technology in our food and no normal anywhere , except wars , fewer sun spots and no employments , and dollops offloaded of worthless trash on an unsuspecting public : ” Change has come to this country. ” Indeed !
    ” You’ll never see it coming…You think I’m kidding ? ” [ Barak Obama . ]
    This will also prove nightmarishly true.
    We now have : ” Everyone is NOT being spied upon “. Momentary hope as she-he asks: ” Am I not ? ” Loud guffaws are heard.
    ” Alright, you are, but we say it is legal.” This spells “slavery ” but ” Indifference ” is one’s middle name .
    Who but the damned are so foolish still as to believe what the printed, pacifying, panaceas, spin.
    Just look how they explain the weather:
    “Let us blame it all on man. Nothing else to see there. Move along.”
    Everything , just about, is already theirs .
    .Mrs. Thatcher knew. At the Ritz prime ministers boast of the Shadow Govt.
    ” We tell you what the news is, we write the news.” Read Carol Quigley to understand them and you will also understand why the press is literally ” in their hands “. You will be duped again and again until you do. You, us, being today’s clay pigeons on the shooting range.

    If there is such a thing as a plausible lie, it is also plausible that there might be such a thing as an implausible truth .” [Laura K. Jadczyk .] :
    The so called one per cent is less than two hundred thousand critters under strict obedience and worldwide rules. Its their contract. Instant obedience to severe orders from above. They are observed and spied upon like all of us. Worthy journalists are killed and soon roundups will follow.
    We are less than a hair’s breadth away from global weather collapse. No? You bet. ” Earth benefits from periodic cleansing.” Past cultures left plenty of clues around our pock marked earth if one cares to look. Perilous planet.
    We are less than a hair’s breadth away from global markets collapse. No ? You bet. There are no longer any assets in this cloaca that are safe. Pretty much of everything has already been stolen and the rest will also be taken and offered to an APE.
    Oh yes , but that is tomorrow when the vast multitudes will assent with tears of gratitude running down their cheeks while they are on their knees. Where will you and i be then ? With them ?

    Go on and look the other way, deny it all, as these predators are pacing back and forth in their cages. Quadrillion derivatives tomorrow exploding like bombs.
    Sheets of rain falling and cavernous holes appearing, growing numbers of space rocks ravishing and toxic spraying ; now we have Central banks everywhere backed into a corner and suffering the proverbial whip- lash to their brains. So they meet to pow wow with murderers.
    The future will not be kind to psychopaths and the truth is : they are not really in charge. They believe that they are. They are also being used like us disposable tissues. Much higher predators and intelligences peek and reveal themselves. Confusion is everywhere.
    So ….who ? What is in charge ? Us ? Your government couldn’t possibly lie to you.
    “Never ascribe to malice those things which may be explained by stupidity. One may ascribe to malice those things which stupidity cannot explain “. [Robert Canup. ]
    Not contented with the trillion bail outs , the debauchment through printing, their squashing of future life, now come their bail ins because we are in an economic recovery. Slaves obey. Our diversity conceals total uniformity. Choice is the illusion.
    ” That’s the way to do it!” [ Punch. ]
    Oh yes, they liked Cyprus. I hate to say this but now is our turn again, individual depositors, to bail their stench and further impoverish our families. They must warn us beforehand . They do. What was hidden is already revealed :
    ” Must have slaves forever. Children also. Just another business model. Carbon credits have not worked. Not yet. But we won’t have to care for the elderly.”
    They have been involved in wars against us for centuries. Rituals and an amount of business models are required. We observe them with open eyes , if we have them, remembering that they said : “The real enemy is humanity itself.” [ The Club of Rome. ] Nothing to see here . Go back to bed.
    ” All war is based on deception. ” [ Sun Tzu.]
    How many badges of honour, called badges of ignorance, does one proudly display on one’s chest ; one walks lopsided and yet mysteriously one does not learn that this ravaging is entirely as planned. These financial parasites flaunt their disdain on all of us, their host, over and over again because they can and It is their nature. They are a conduit for something else. They cannot help it .
    “What is your friend’s name ? Fraud. And your other friend? Cheating. To create as many resources as can fall into our lap. Yes, you can call us The Fraternity but you are not one of us. All manipulation is ours. We are the cream.”
    ” Goaded by their character, pathological deviants thirst for global power though it would conflict with their own life interests. They do not understand that a catastrophe will ensure when they are finally exposed for what they are. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing. ” [ Ponerology. Andrew Lobaczewski. ]

    1. Enjoyed that…and includes examples of appearances of the fourth kind…i read your earlier machiavellian quote, and it reminded me of Griffins opening in his oral presentation of his book The Creature of Jekyll Island. Here he used Epictetus’ four states of appearance to pose what The Fed actually is.

      Something that is not, yet appears to be.

      A century old this year, and the populace is still none the wiser to the great cartel. But, the cycle is trending towards an end…as you quote, the germ does not understand that it’s destruction of the host also means an end to itself…its purpose is not at all to live in harmony, and so, disguise will only get it so far before it’s demise.

      85 billion a month…thats the going rate on concealing darkness. Age old trickery by the cartel. A gross distortion, driven by money meant for the people, though given to banks first.

      How long before he blacks the sun to protect us, then deal it back to the people…for a price…? You only need to convince 3 consecutive generations to create the new normal… Please forgive my poor humour…for, while 85B/month ensures destruction, we are also close to the new normal being constant war.

  34. @patma2003 Yes indeed, already a century old and the populace is still none the wiser to the Great Cartel or to the fact that they want to vaporise us like they have vaporised our money.
    Do these demons believe that we are all to be sacrificed in the satanic slaughter that is afoot ? Oh yes they do and they salivate in expectation ” hiding the truth right out in the wide open.”
    The master crafts men who head our Roman Empire play all parties against all sides, who are Ignorant and often dumb and can live with it ; who like anti -depressants while they graze and have no clue that we are all in it together, that there are no others, that free will is not for ever , That good is only good when it is not passive and that corruption has to exist when no action is taken against it.
    Evolution brings to us a filtering technique : ” From non localizable entities ? to sub atomic particles to atomic structures to molecular robots to cells to the tissues to the organs to the human body to contain the peculiar consciousness : Man. “What a piece of work is man…”. But this fire of Prometheus is double edged ; it bounces and is unstable, perpetual conflict is its name because it is anti- entropy and has chosen man woman to make the call. Man woman are not just animals. They are above all species. Their essential nature is very high : the ongoing rediscovery of the new in self awareness.
    “Consciousness is so simple it will pass you by . ”
    Species time and time again get wiped out. Thus the parasites need of a host which is what the great cartel represents. Their ruthless attempt to keep themselves going at infinitum, living of their host, always at its expense is the perfect analogy for the existence of entropy and its hatred of development.
    In this unemployed kingdom, where democracy is a complete sham, we are but reactors to their swindle. When the host eventually wakes up and faces the parasite he has a choice. Either he expels it , thus insuring his development ,or he fails and the dustbin of history then opens its wide jaws. Then nature offers an extinction event . Knowledge is power and great wisdom is required for our time that brushes aside the status quo whose law is betrayal and deceit for its own sake. These are genocidal entities like Lenin in his tertiary phase of syphilis.

    “When you see that trading is done, not by consent ,but by compulsion-when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing-when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favours, when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them,but protect them against you- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self sacrifice- you may know that your society is doomed.” [ Francisco D’Anconia Atlas Shrugged]

    1. Which is fine except for the fact that Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand were the inspirations for Alan Greenspan whose deregulation of the banking system lead to all this.

      It is a remarkable piece of double-think.

  35. Do you think this “Shadow State” is composed of aliens, if not the people that elected it?

    I’m posting this research again because we’re about to dig much deeper into the NASA database, now we have plenty of funding, and see if we can find even more cycles coincident with what happens economically and politically.

    The knowledge is taken from high quality data sources at NASA, the guys who sent 12 people to the moon and got them back safely. The psychology we’re observing is the same as we see in those who deny anyone went to the moon at all.

    The Solar Property Cycle
    http://www.meltfund.com/2013/07/the-solar-property-cycle.html

    Full Text
    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J_p8pnD5hsf49sLztSWg4d9__VJsTVLpB3R5d0nZyEo/pub

  36. “The UK government’s attempt at broadening Internet censorship does not end with the “opt-in” button on a customer’s broadband account. Web site owners and bloggers who attempt to avoid the government’s filter will be confronted with one of two options—self-censorship or being blocked. Anyone trying to get around the filter will likely be identified, recorded and subjected to extensive network surveillance and online traffic analysis, and face the possibility of an array of allegations.

    The government’s firewall is set to block access by default to web censorship circumventing tools, such as proxy servers and virtual private networks (VPNs). It is highly likely that restricted access to the Tor software bundle, which is free software enabling greater anonymity and connects to the heavily encrypted Tor Network, will also be contained within the censorship filter.”

    “Together with the information made available by Edward Snowden, Cameron’s latest move is a clear indication of the British state’s advanced preparations to implement dictatorial rule.”

    http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/07/cens-a07.html

  37. Muzzled: Snowden’s Alleged Email Service Shuts Down
    August 09, 2013 – 12:59 PM

    Has a US company been bullied for providing encryption to Edward Snowden? In a posting on the site of email service Lavabit, owner Ladar Levison alludes to government attempts to access users’ data — and denounces “crimes against the American people.”

    Entire article ==> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/lavabit-email-service-allegedly-used-by-snowden-closes-a-915679.html

  38. Bit late to the game –

    >> While some in Germany are outraged because they were not aware of American
    >> spying, Merkel and a few others, I feel quite sure, are only shocked that the truth
    >> came out … some in the BND or perhaps some other part of German Security did
    >> know … we will find they were collaborating and cooperating with Anglo/American
    >> spying.

    – but I’d like to button down the morally-diffused question of ‘tapping into the cables’ that ‘The Bad Guys’ are guilty of. Fibres cannot be ‘tapped into’. This is underscored by recent (late 2015) research by the US into technology capable of fusion-splicing fibres UNDERWATER using submersibles.

    Each fibre the size of a hair carries thousands of conversations and data in digital form.
    The distance between repeaters can be about 50 miles, whereupon it is relayed digitally by that device. One can imagine the carnage caused by carefuly slicing into the media, one of dozens in a particular bundle of many, and optically polishing the faces of each one you cut and splicing in a piece of kit.

    To do this properly you interpose a small box – plug it in, if you will – which contains a loop of fibre. 10% of the light within each fibre will escape radially from this loop to be detected by sensors and ‘extracted’ as a facsimile of the original.

    It follows that EVERY instance of ‘tapping’ has been done with the cognisance of EACH and EVERY Telco. You can’t just bad-ass your way in and take the system off-line to plug stuff in w/o the network going ape-shit. There is no question that, for whatever reason, strong-arming, bribing, regulatory compliance, every Telco is on board at government (spooks) levels.

    So when your government or Telco throw their hands up with astonished expressions – they’re lying . . .

    Submitted as a Public Servic by Smeg Enterprises/.

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