Friday, October 31, 2014

Modern Day America: One Step Away from the Third Reich

By John Stanton

Modern Day America: One Step Away from the Third Reich. 53872.jpeg

"Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation's communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel. Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures which confer powers on the President, such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus-that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order. Although the National Emergencies Act, by its plain language, requires the Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done only once in the nearly forty year history of the Act." Patrick Thronson, Michigan Journal of Law (2013, Vol 46).

A bit of irony, perhaps, that on November 4, 2014-as Americans go to the polls to cast their ballots for a slate of politicians at the local, state and federal levels-the august citizens of the United States will also celebrate the birth of the National Security Agency (NSA).

On November 4, 1952 the NSA was created by a Presidential Executive Order signed by then president Harry Truman. Earlier that year, in January 1952, Truman's state of the union address focused on the Korean War, the global Soviet-Communist threat, the "Iran oil situation", and the need to increase the production of US military equipment for use by American forces, and for transfer to Western European Allies. Truman called on Americans to seek guidance in the God of Peace even as a brutal shadow war was being waged by the United States to eliminate popularly elected "leftist" governments.

In 1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to the American presidency and with him came John Foster and Allan Dulles, two political appointees who would, it turns out, seek the counsel and expertise of "former" Nazi executioners, scientists and intelligence operatives. J Edgar Hoover, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was already on the case using whatever resources were at his disposal-including Nazis--to hunt down unionists, communists, dissenters and radicals wherever they might be.  According to the UK's Guardian newspaper, Truman had this to say about Hoover and his FBI, "We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail... Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him."

From 1953-1961, Eisenhower, as Commander in Chief, constructed a nascent military-intelligence-law enforcement-industrial complex influenced directly by Nazi ideology and technological know-how. No wonder he warned the world about his creation, the military-industrial complex. At one time in the early 21st Century it was uncomfortable to call out America's ties to the Nazis. But that has changed particularly with the release of Eric Lichtblau's The Nazis Next Door (2014) and The Collaboration by Ben Urwand. It has also been confirmed by the overthrow of a nationally elected leader in Ukraine-Victor Yanukovych--and the open support of neo-Nazi groups largely responsible for that event. Is it a coincidence that the head of the CIA, John Brennan, visited with the neo-Nazi usurpers not long after the coup given the CIA's history?

Do You Want to Know a Secret, do, da, do?

According to Lichtblau, writing in the New York Times, "The full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher', said Norman Goda, a University of Florida historian...but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible. U.S. agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes, he said. Information was readily available that these were compromised men. The wide use of Nazi spies grew out of a Cold War mentality shared by two titans of intelligence in the 1950s: Mr. Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, and Mr. Dulles, the C.I.A. director."

Over at Antiwar.com, in "Federal Agencies Just Doing Whatever They Want Now", Lucy Steigerwald comments wryly on Lichtblau's findings. "...the CIA hid their precious assets from Nazi hunters and prosecutors trying to deport then-old men in the 1980s and even into the '90s. Most disturbing, one of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann's little buddies, Otto von Bolschwing, was protected until 1982, when he conveniently died of a brain disorder before he could be deported or prosecuted. Famously, Nazi rocket scientists were picked up by America to prevent their expertise from falling into Soviet hands. Maybe an exception to the prickly feeling that letting heinous war criminals off the hook is not what America was supposed to be doing when it won the good war in a heroically-sepia montage could be made for geniuses like Wernher Von Braun. Von Braun was a rocket scientist and "honorary" SS member under the Nazis, and he helped America get to the moon (which is neat, so that apparently makes his debated level of involvement/enthusiasm for the party acceptable.) What exactly did von Bolschwing contribute to America after happily joining the SS in 1933 to make ignoring his crimes worthwhile? What's the purpose of this kind of grim revelation? There are several.

One, they diminish the moral high ground about the Second World War that the US clings to desperately to this day. Yes, everyone who isn't literally Adolph Hitler gets to feel pretty good about themselves, so anyone not allied with Hitler must be doing the right thing. Yet, helping to plan the Final Solution is forgivable if the CIA really wants you around. Another more contemporary reason to be horrified by this revelation is that it is just one outrage of many. Sharing the CIA's dark corner is most of the other big-name, secretive agencies. For the past 18 months, the National Security Agency's (NSA) massive campaign of spying has been big news. Less prominent were stories that suggest the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are also playing the part of secretive, unaccountable rulers."

Welcome to the Reich, American Style

William Binney, former NSA employee and whistleblower, stated that the NSA had gone "totalitarian". In an interview with DW he likened the NSA and the US government to the Third Reich.

Binney: "Sure, they haven't gone that far yet [as the Nazis and East German Stassi], but they tried to shut down newspaper reporters like Jim Risen...Look at the NDAA Section 1021, that gave President Obama the ability to define someone as a terrorist threat and have the military incarcerate them indefinitely without due process. That's the same as the special order 48 issued in 1933 by the Nazis, [the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree]. Read that - it says exactly the same thing. These were totalitarian processes that were instituted...Totalitarianism comes in the form first of knowledge of people and what they're doing, and then it starts to transition into using that power against people. That's what's happening - in terms of newspaper reporters, in terms of crimes. That's a direct violation of our constitution.

DW: But surely the difference is that there was an ideological regime behind the Stasi and the Nazis.

Binney: You mean like putting people like John Kiriakou in prison for exposing torture and giving the torturers immunity? That's what our country's coming to. That's what we did. That's disgraceful. The motives of totalitarian states are not exactly the same every time, but they're very similar: power, control and money...We're focusing now on everyone on the planet - that's a change from focusing on organizations that were attempting to do nasty things. When you focus on everybody, you're moving down that path towards population control."

Ingeniously Produced from Concentration Camps: Data "Comes to Light"

Many advances in warfare can be traced to Nazi innovations built on the backs of tortured souls. For example, air and ship crew survivability in frigid seas is just one of them: "...the Germans noted the terrible loss of critical personnel in sudden cold water immersion accidents. The sinking of the Bismarck and loss of airmen who bailed out alive and well into the cold North Sea during the Battle of Britain caused their physiologists and aviation medicine physicians to examine the problem. They commenced a large Research and Development program, which in part was the cause for the infamous Dachau experiments. They were the first to observe the "after drop" or continuation in reduction of body core temperature after being withdrawn from the cold water. They also experimented with survival suits and the Deutsches Textilforschunginstitut in München-Gladbach, ingeniously produced one that provided the insulation using soap bubbles which appears to have gone into limited service."

Another example is the development of the military aircraft "ejection seat". In Achtung! Schleuder-Sitzaparat by Chris Carry, German engineering was far afield of American efforts in pilot safety.  "With the acquisition by the US of both German databases in egress research and actual examples of the German Heinkel explosive cartridge ejection seat immediately after the war had ended, the US began to vigorously attempt to gain greater knowledge in this overlooked area of aviation technology. The new American developmental research spurred on by acquisition of German wartime data branched off into two distinctly different approaches towards the same end, one taken by the US Air Force and one by the US Navy."

Exceptionalism and Innovative Torture Techniques Led to Technological Advances

How could human beings engage in such hideous experiments on other human beings? Well, that is a time tested formula: Indoctrinate the masses into thinking that all others besides, say, Americans, are inferior, unexceptional, demons and insects. The world is witnessing just that as the US government, its allies and its media and academic proxies seek to reduce the Russians, Arabs, Chinese, Iranians, and the immigrants, unemployed and impoverished in the United States down to the level of parasitic microbes. 

Just how does that mentality work?

For that answer we turn to the UK's Telegraph for an article written in 2008 by Richard Evans. "The answer springs from the fact that medicine was both dominant in the world of science under the Third Reich, and closely allied to the Nazi project... After all, German medical science had uncovered the causes of several major diseases and contributed massively to improving the health of the population over the previous decades. Surely, therefore, it was justified in eliminating negative influences as well? What underpinned this behavior was a widespread belief that some people were less than human, relegated to a lower plane of existence by their inherited degeneracy - or their race. For German doctors, a camp inmate was either a racially inferior subhuman, a vicious criminal, a traitor to the German cause, or more than one of the above. Such beings had no right to life or wellbeing - indeed, it was logical that they should be sacrificed in the interests of the survival and triumph of the German race, just as that race had to be strengthened by the elimination of the inferior, degenerate elements within it."

Evans continues on describing the torture: "SS doctors used inmates to test treatments for injuries sustained in battle, cutting open their calves and sewing bits of glass or wood or gauze impregnated with bacteria into the wounds, sometimes even smashing the prisoners' bones with hammers to create a more realistic effect; again, the results were presented to scientific conferences without anyone offering any criticism of the methods employed. Perhaps the most enthusiastic user of human guinea pigs was the ambitious young SS doctor Sigmund Rascher, who employed camp inmates at Dachau to test the human body's reactions to rapid decompression and lack of oxygen, in an attempt to help pilots forced to parachute out of their planes at high altitudes. He called some of his research sessions "terminal experiments". He measured the time it took his subjects to die as their air supply was gradually thinned out. He showed his work, which led to the deaths of between 70 and 80 prisoners, to a conference of Luftwaffe medical experts in September 1942. The following month, Rascher presented the results of another experiment to a conference of 95 medical scientists in Nuremberg. This time, he showed how long inmates dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms and life jackets could survive in cold water, simulating conditions in the North Sea. The average time that elapsed before death, he reported, was 70 minutes. None of those listening to him raised any ethical objections."

Albert Camus offers a sort of prayer for these dark times. "All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked. Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions."

John Stanton writes on national security and political matters. Reach him at captainkong22@gmail.com

 

 

Source : english[dot]pravda[dot]ru

The impact of numerology over the names

Whenever an infant is born into a family, it’s a norm to first assess him/her with a name. The name of a person is just not a word to be referred to them but actually is the definition, a description of their personality and the briefing of their traits. It should be made very sure that while naming a person all the necessary measures are taken care of. They say that labeling of a product is done properly to define the quality of that product. The same theory can be applied upon assessing names to the young ones too. The better the name the more illustrative would be the definition.

 

While a lot of people who believe in ancestry, name their children on the basis of their legacy or the family trees, while others who believe in Numerology have different opinions. The people who believe in numerology work and practice a lot with numbers before naming their kids. In numerology each letter of your name is said to have an individual corresponding number. Cornerstone is said to be the first letter in your name while capstone is said to be the last one. Under Numerology the first vowel is also given sheer importance, as it is said to fulfill all your urges and dreams in life. Each and every letter in this section has a meaning of its own and preparing a name with all those combine meaningful letters will eventually make out the best desired result. The sum of the numbers in your birth date and the sum of numbers you make out while naming a person displays a great deal in the character, the future, the strengths and the weakness of an individual. Numerology helps in standing and fighting against all these weaknesses and odds. Believers say that numerology make you achieve whatever you want in life, and not just infants, a lot of people change their names in the later stages of their life too after realizing the problems they are suffering in their lives and in order to fight against them. This concept of Numerology was initially brought up by the Babylonians but gradually everyone started practicing it and eventually it became so popular and effective that now it is practiced across almost all over the world. There might be no scientific proofs about the authenticity of these numerology charts, but people still have faith in ample numbers about the relationship of words and numbers.

 

People also believe that in Numerology the on goings and the redemption is based upon three major factors; the date of birth, the name given to you on your birth and the name you use currently. The third factor can well be managed according to the needs and necessary requirements by the Numerology charts. There are ways to work over your names even if you’re a grown up in order to get over the grey shades you are going through in your personal lives. So everyone needs to go through that Numerology chart while assessing their young ones with new names.

 

Browse through name meaning, rankings, other people's comments, ratings, and other statistics in addition to the name meanings.

 

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Nobel Prize: Hardly Noble Politics

By Gouthama Siddarthan

Nobel Prize: Hardly Noble Politics. 53863.jpeg

It is really a great achievement of the Nobel award committee that it has created an environment in which criticism of the Nobel prizes is always rubbished and in which controversies are taken just as part and parcel of the scenario of the Nobel awards announcements. The committee has successfully infused the global psyche with a total indifference to, and an utter contempt for any valid and reasonable criticism from really serious and progressive-thinking writers and intellectuals. This can be termed as a feat on the part of the Nobel committee.

Now its announcement of literary award for French novelist Patrick Modiano has come like a bolt out of the blue. Its suddenness stems from the fact that all along the global media have been abuzz with speculations of a Nobel literary prize for Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Also touted as Nobel award probables were American writer Philip Roth, French writer of Czech origin Milan Kundera, Ukrainian writer Svetlana Alexiyovich and Syrian poet Adonis.

However, it was Murakami whose name has been raising a lot of expectations. His works have been celebrated as both literary and commercial; yet they have been taking on more western colors than native Japanese. He too has declared himself as "an outcast of the Japanese literary world".

Global media have idolized him, not without reasons. They are carried away by the way Murakami presented a fusion of literary and commercial features; a sort of modern outlook. Another reason for the rapture with which he is being read is that he conforms to the new dictum that only those writings projecting Western or European thoughts can be described as world literature. It is this tacit dictum that has been sunk into the psyche of global writers. Publishers' international market politics too can be fitted into this scenario.

Now we can have a keen look at the writers who have stirred the media's speculations about the Nobel honor.

Milan Kundera's writings emerged on the scene when discussion of modern writing was globally threadbare. His important novel, "Immortality" hogged the global limelight; the literary world started paying a riveted attention to his writings. His short stories have a game-like appeal, revealing varied dimensions of writing. They describe the human mind's weird thought processes interestingly and aesthetically and also the absurdity of human life as part of the rules of life game and its multi-dimensional crises. His book, "The Art of the Novel" discusses the aesthetics of writing, exploring various dimensions and possibilities of the art of novel.

Syrian poet Adonis is a very important personality in that he has given an expression to Arab life and brought Sufi thinking to bear on his poetry. This poet, who has been living in exile on account of his controversial political stances, has been regularly nominated for the Nobel prize since 1988.

Similarly, the writing of Svetlana Alexiyovich are regarded by critics as a literary documentation of the emotional tailspin of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual in the backdrop of the historic events such as Soviet-Afghan war, the Soviet Union's downfall, the Chernobyl disaster etc. Russian literature that stagnated during 1950-60 is now resurrecting itself and traversing a revival trajectory. Russian literary critic Elena Dimov says: "Modern Russian writers are diverse and incredibly talented, and they did the almost impossible: they restored the Russian public's trust in the written word after decades of government-ruled literature." (Contemporary Russian Literature)

The Nobel Committee's aversion to leftist thinkers and sympathisers has been reflected in its operations since the days of Soviet Russia.

From 1901 to 1912, the Nobel Award Committee had given prizes with a slant in its selection of awardees, though it justified its decisions, saying that it was conforming to the principles propounded in the will of its founder Alfred Nobel. That was why great writers such as Tolstoy, Ibsen, Emile Zola, Mark Twain etc. were bypassed. The committee had recommended awards to the writers of countries and their allies, which said they preferred to be neutral in the First World War. Moreover, there was a history of bias which was manifest in the fact that great Russian writers Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov never managed to get onto the Nobel list, all because of a bitter animosity prevailing at that time between Sweden and Russia.

At that time, it was a fad in the arts world to criticize Soviet Russia. During the period of Stalinist repression and suppression of artists, anti-Soviet thinkers and anti-establishment writers were going on in a full swing. Andrei Sinyavsky, an important writer, was up in arms against Soviet atrocities. Under the pseudonym of "Abram Tertz," he wrote a book, "On Socialist Realism" (1959), criticizing the then-much-touted Soviet principle of socialist realism. From underground, he continued to criticize the Soviet establishment through novels of metaphor, allegories and fantasy writings. In his novel, "The Makepeace Experiment" (1963), he presents a satiric portrait of Lenin set in a heroic image, branding the Russian thought system Marxian utopianism.

This kind of anti-establishment post-modernism turned into magical realism in the Latin American countries where anti-dictatorial agitations were going on. The Nobel-winning novel, "The Tin Drum", written by Gunther Grass, which projected the hero Oskar Matzerath as shrinking into a dwarf to protest Nazism belongs to the magical realist genre.

As a descendant of Andrei Sinyavsky, Boris Pasternak castigated his own country of 'Iron Curtain' and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. But he was not allowed by the Soviet government to receive the award. Hence, a dejected and depressed Pasternak poured out his emotions in his poem, "Nobel Prize." The line from his poem "I am done, like a beast in a cage" captured the blues of his vexed mind.

In a similar way, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who, in his novel, 'Cancer Ward', saw Soviet Russia as a metaphor for the cancer ward and whose another novel "The Gulag Archipelago" shed light on the seamy side of the Russian society, was honoured with the Nobel prize in 1970. Poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sent to the concentration camp during the Stalin regime for criticising the government, was also given the Nobel prize in 1987.

Consequently, the Nobel Committee was bombarded with charges that it honoured only the anti-Leftist writers and in order to counter the criticism, it went out of its way to honour Left-leaning writers such as Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Marquez. However, it should be pointed out here that these writers' creative world was purely literary. Camus' writings focused on the absurdity of human life. Sartre put forward existential thoughts involving the modern man's life. (It is a different controversy that he refused to accept the Nobel honour). It should be kept in mind that Marquez's writings exude magical realism.

Thus, the Nobel prize is beset with endless controversies, political motives and pressures and vested interests.

However, I am not projecting these writers.

In the global media politics, Third World writers' names continued to be suppressed. (Sometimes, as if in reservation system, they get recognition). No media project and talk about writings in the Third World, nor about the post-colonial political aesthetics. The micro political operations behind the scenes dish out awards in the name of art and aesthetics for what is generally touted as standard and serious writings. Alternative cultures or alternative writings are not recognized properly. Only those writers conforming to the western parameters are considered to be worthy of consideration for awards.

The Nobel prize is not only an attention-grabbing honour, but also a power structure.

In this regard, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o must be mentioned. He was not much taken note of by any media except The Guardian.

He says, "If a language is to be brought under colonial domination, the best way is to impose upon it the power of the colonists' language and make a literary impact upon it. The colonists could trumpet about the supremacy and lofty features of their own language and make it a symbol of social status, thereby creating an inferiority complex among the speakers of the native language and castrating it".

He has been writing adamantly in his mother tongue Gikuyu about the post-colonial politics. His books have been translated into several languages. His critics explain how his novel, "Petals of Blood", published in 1977, portrays the residual western culture, capitalism and political changes which have become warp and woof of the Kenyan life after the end of the British reign in Kenya. His different viewpoints about alternative politics, alternative writings and alternative culture are considered as paramount against the backdrop of the present post-colonial milieu. He must have been chosen for the Nobel prize.

I will plumb for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o who has been fighting tooth and nail the micro-politics and power centre enshrined in the European literature and who has been proclaiming the power and depth of his own cultural foundation and literary strength of his language.

Well! What are the reasons cited by the Nobel Committee for selection of French writer Patrick Modiano for the honour?

Modiano's writings have captured in vivid details the sorrows of Jews, the atrocities perpetrated by Nazis and loss of social identity. He has reconstructed powerfully in his writings the events that led to the invasion of France by Germany during the World War II. The grief-stricken life and turbulent human emotions under the foreign occupation have been successfully and aesthetically metamorphosed into a mosaic of creativity. That is what the Nobel Committee says, justifying the honour for the French writer.

What is the art that the committee speaks about? And what is the writing aesthetics that it puts forward?

It is not known still how long the Nobel prize committee members will continue to harp on writings dealing with the World War II. Nowadays battles are waged in several parts of the world, whose inhuman and cruel face is no less macabre and morbid than the Holocaust. In the chess game of the international politics, the ordinary human life is broken to pieces. Human life has become absurd in the post-modernist milieu, as man seems to be metamorphosing into the Kafkaesque beetle, caught as he is in the vortex of racial, post-colonial and religious politics.

The western thinkers, who pigeonhole the wars waged between big forces as I, II and III World Wars, seem to be blissfully unaware of the inhuman and dastardly attacks on small racial communities and blatant genocides happening in the Third World. To them, such attacks do not come under the label of war. In the name of fighting terror, how the dominant racial communities are preaching and practicing racial chauvinism and perpetrating atrocities on the lesser communities..... all these go unnoticed. The loss of social identity that Modiano speaks about in his writings is actually occurring in the Third World battles nowadays.

In the concrete world, hi-tech weapons and chemical arms keep on attacking human bodies. At the same time, in the abstract world, a variety of political power-oriented thoughts are tearing apart the fabric of human life. The absurdity of the 'battle politics' unfolds before us as the essence of human life, as if it were anonymous. The illusion of this anonymity is an art.

This is the art that the Third World creative artists are conjuring up.

Do the Nobel authorities take into account the writings that pierced the flesh and blood of wars happening in the Third World countries such as Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Latin America etc.? Do they take into consideration the racial and post-colonial outlooks, values and realities?

In this context, our Tamil poet Piramil's poem comes back to mind. "A feather that falls apart from the wing moves on, writing on the inexhaustible pages of wind the life of a bird". A feather that peels off a bird's wings is not just a feather; it is a history; an art. This thought is the crux of the Third World countries' art of life.

Are the Nobel committee members naïve enough not to understand all these things? Are they not steeped in the imperialistic power, dominant values and micropolitcs?

Yet, why did they choose Modiano, a Jewish author, for the award? Let us dig out the micropolitics behind it.

The Israelites' Zionist domination is eliminating Muslims in the Gaza Strip in Palestine. Jews today are a far cry from the Jews suppressed during the World War II. The old scenes have changed. Now unfolds a new scene that shows them at their most valiant, at their most dominant and at their most powerful.

Yet it is the Zionists' hidden agenda that the ground reality should not be viewed from a critical perspective. They want the old Jewish tales of woe to be told again and again; how they lost their identity must be dusted off and narrated seamlessly. Art must be created to delineate the force of dharma with which they rose from the dead like the phoenix. The present-day reality must be relegated to the background and a post-modernist reality projected before the world.

How wonderful this post-modernist politics!

This is the 'Art-Truth-Politics' that British playwright Harold Pinter spoke about in his Nobel prize acceptance speech in 2005.

Gouthama Siddarthan

(Gouthama Siddarthan  is a noted columnist, short-story writer, essayist and a micro-political critic in Tamil, who is a reputed name in the Tamil neo-literary circle. He can be reached at  unnatham[at]gmail.com )

 

Source : english[dot]pravda[dot]ru

Analogue Kids vs. Digital Natives

Raising digital native kids when you’re a kid of the 70’s or 80’s can be a challenging thing. 
 

While we grew up with VHS machines, taping songs from the radio and ‘mood rings’ being the best wearable tech available, our kids are all about movie streaming, iTunes and smartphones.

Here we take a humorous look at the differences between the Analogue kids of the 80’s and the Digital natives of today. 

 
Analogue Kids…

  • Write deepest darkest thoughts in a hidden diary with a miniature lock on the cover.
  • School photos are nearly always terrible.
  • Spend hours painting coffee and burning edges of paper for a history assignment.
  • Have embarrassing photo albums filled with self-conscious poses.
  • School assignments begin in the encyclopedia section of the library.
  • Get in trouble for being on the home phone for too many hours to their friends.
  • Avoid the apple packed in their lunchbox.
  • Waste time by practicing their signature on bits of paper.
  • Know how to rewind a tape by using just a pen.
  • Show their multi-tasking skills by deftly hitting play and record at the same time with considerable finger-strength.
     

Digital Natives…

  • Write deepest darkest thoughts on Facebook with next to no privacy settings in place.
  • School photos are nearly always airbrushed.
  • Can whip up a Powerpoint presentation for History class in about 10 minutes.
  • Have endless selfies with just the right amount of squinching.  
  • Know that Google is the holy grail of all information and the key to all school assignments.
  • Get in trouble for being on Snapchat until 1am.
  • Have a hardwired ability to understand and operate any Apple product.
  • Waste time searching for just the right emoticon.
  • Instinctively know how to fix any glitch on any smartphone ever made.
  • Show their multi-tasking skills by texting, instant messaging, Skyping and watching TV all at the same time.
     

What are some of the funniest differences you’ve noticed about analogue versus digital kids?

Source : parents[dot]nickjr[dot]com[dot]au

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Going round in circles, our fickle world

Going round in circles, our fickle world. 53856.jpeg
Don't bomb it

We have two separate humanitarian crises looming, quite apart from the devastating Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in West Africa, with its tentacles reaching far and wide; Islamic State in the Middle East, spreading terror, hatred and death...with its tentacles reaching far and wide. So where is the story on two different potential catastrophes?

A Putsch takes place in Ukraine, Fascists are among those taking power, anti-Russian and anti-Jewish slogans are chanted, Russian-speakers are tortured and attacked, massacres take place against Russian-speakers. The West backs the perpetrators and imposes sanctions against Russia. Russia tries to broker a peace deal and a ceasefire in a foreign country, in which according to its "Government", Russia has no jurisdiction. The West increases the sanctions and continues to back those who committed massacres. Just like they did in Syria, until their little darling (ISIL/ISIS/Islamic State) turned into a monster.

So rather than imposing sanctions and spreading division, sowing the seeds of hatred, why doesn't the West use its energy concentrating on development, instead of deployment, and why doesn't it use its political clout to pull the world together instead of tearing it apart?

While everyone is speaking about the spread of Ebola Virus Disease (now that it has started to make inroads into Western countries), where is the story on the impending food crisis in West Africa? Kanayo Nwanze, the President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, has warned that urgent action is needed to stave off an impending food crisis.

Speaking on World Food Day on October 16, in an interview with the UN News Center, he stated that eighty per cent of the food eaten today in the developing world is produced by smallholders on family farms. Here, he claims, is the danger because these farmers are most at risk from cycles of hunger and poverty. "We should actually decide to take action beyond words," he warns.

He said that unless we start to invest in the real infrastructure which supports agricultural production, which means people, there could be a shortage of food in the coming years.

Fast forward a few thousand miles to the East, the UNO is warning of "an immense humanitarian crisis" this Winter in Iraq, the country destroyed by, who else, NATO back in 2003, when it was invaded illegally, outside the auspices of the UNO, in a murderous invasion causing the deaths of some one million people, in which military hardware was deployed against civilian structures.

In the words of Rashid Khalikov, director of the UN Office in Geneva for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, "an immense humanitarian emergency is unfolding in front of our eyes".

Officials from the UNO and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation found a potentially calamitous situation in the areas they visited, ravaged by the conflict caused by Islamic State, created in the void caused by the invasion led by, who else, Washington and poodle in chief, the top lapdog, London. They found 850,000 people displaced in Kurdistan, they found 90,000 people living in the open in Dohuk Governorate. As a harsh winter approaches, nearly one million people are in urgent need of food and shelter, while 5.2 million Iraqis need assistance, 1.8 million of these being children.

Those responsible are not only Islamic State, it is the United States of America and the United Kingdom, who in one of their imperialist ventures, destabilized a State and did not think the consequences through. The onus lies on these two countries, the ones who have been the motor behind the sanctions against Russia, to take a good look at their own foreign policy, man up to their responsibilities, and change tack.

Next story: a humanitarian crisis in Libya. Caused by guess who?

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru

(timothy.hinchey@gmail.com)

 

Source : english[dot]pravda[dot]ru

Jay Leno and a sauve, 1972 Mercedes-Benz 600 Kompressor

1972 Mercedes-Benz 600 Kompressor

Sometimes its good to take a look into the past and relish in some of the greatest (and biggest) automobiles of the past century. Today, we, alongside our favourite Jay Leno (the man with the most desirable car collection on the planet) take a look at a golden oldie that was pretty much the ‘it’ car of the early 70′s.

Say hello to a genuine, beautifully restored, 1972 Mercedes-Benz 600 Kompressor.

Instead of high-tech hybrids and sexy super cars, Jay takes us on a ride in an old classic, relishing in the huge mass that is this German tank. Considering it’s size, it also comes as no surprise that the Mercedes-Benz 600 Kompressor weighs a whopping 3 tonnes!

During the 70′s, this car had somewhat of a reputation, and not necessarily a good one.

According to various sources, this was the car of choice for dictators. Not really the kind of person you would want to associate your car with, is it Mercedes? However, it does attest to the car’s luxury image.

In a redeeming factor, though, the Mercedes-Benz 600 Kompressor was also driven by musical legends John Lennon and the King himself, Elvis Presley. So we guess that makes up for the ‘preferred car for dictators’ part.

Some of the more fancy features of the car included a refrigerator in the centre and reclining back seats – so, you know, you can have a lie down after you’ve had a glass or two of your favourite Scotch from the fridge.

In all, the Mercedes-Benz 600 Kompressor is a big car – both in shape and personality, and as Jay says, it’s one of his all time favourites.

Check it out:

Source: YouTube

Source : carblog[dot]co[dot]za

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Some hard facts about terror

Some hard facts about terror. 53847.jpeg

By John Chuckman

We are having an outbreak of reports in the Canadian press about "home grown" terrorists, "radicalized" young men of Muslim faith traveling out of the country to participate in extremist groups abroad - a relatively insignificant phenomenon which has received inordinate publicity. In any event, if you give the matter some thought, you realize that this "news" is a kind of empty publicity, noise about something as old and familiar as human life itself, although it has been bestowed with a new name intended to frighten us into supporting measures outside the framework of a society of laws.

The truth is that young men, at least a certain portion of them, have always traveled abroad to join causes and wars. It's about as ordinary a phenomenon as playing team sports or joining clubs. In many cases, we end up praising them for their bravery and idealism, as was certainly the case with the many thousands of Europeans, Americans, and Canadians who traveled to Spain in the 1930s to volunteer in the civil war against General Franco. In other cases, we condemn and imprison them and sometimes even execute them as part of the losing side, as America has been doing in its rampage through the Middle East.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of new, independent nations from the British Empire drew thousands of young men to Africa to fight as mercenaries or volunteers. Apartheid South Africa used to run classified ads in newspapers abroad to attract young men in its battle against the African National Congress. Young Jewish men in the past went to Israel to join the IDF out of some sense of brotherhood, and they do so still. The French Foreign Legion gained almost mythical status as a place for young men to leave things behind, embracing an undefined sense of purpose and brotherhood. Young European adventurers, often young noblemen with hopes of gaining glory, sailed across the Atlantic in the 1770s to volunteer in the American colonies' revolt against the British Empire, far more of them than Washington's meagre army could use.

Magnetic leaders like Napoleon or Castro or Nasser attracted countless volunteers from abroad in their heyday. Our history books don't dwell on the fact but large numbers of young men from many countries volunteered for Hitler's invading legions. The phenomenon does not depend on the high or noble nature of the cause, although the luster and publicity around grand causes undoubtedly attracts a still wider range of young men.

Young men often just want to escape from every-day, humdrum life, a boring marriage, a nothing job, or, as in the case of the Foreign Legion, to leave a criminal or failed past behind in hopes of high adventure, a new identity, and a fresh start in life. The genuine nature of a cause often matters little because young men's fantasies convert grubby deeds into mythic stuff at least for a time. Young men in the Foreign Legion were actually fighting for a brutal imperialism in North Africa. Volunteers to the IDF only assist in the oppression of an abused people, not in the protection of the Jewish people. Those who joined Napoleon thought they were spreading liberté, égalité et fraternité across a mummified old-order Europe, but they were helping one of history's great bloody soldier-conquerors glorify himself and do what it was he lusted after doing.

Mental illness also intrudes into terrorist matters, all things unusual or different being grist for the big dumb mill of the press. In Canada, during the wave of empty chatter about "home-grown terrorists," there were two isolated incidents of murder in different parts of the country, one of a policeman and one of a reservist in the military. Immediately the press began a completely uninformative and patience-exhausting round of speculation about the dark nature of the perpetrators, complete with interviews of various self-proclaimed "terrorism experts," men, as it generally turns out, who run security firms and are out drumming up business. In both cases, we finally learned through the fog of misinformation generated by the press, that the young dead men were deeply mentally disturbed, their acts having no more political significance than the crazed men set on suicide who first kill their wives or children or the boys who periodically show up heavily armed at school, shooting their way through classmates.

And of course, it is almost invariably males who do these things, our prisons containing about ten men for every woman. The violence we see in professional football, hockey, or boxing being almost an exclusive male domain. Woman rarely commit murder, males being responsible for almost all of it, with young males being responsible for an extraordinarily disproportionate share.     

Aside from the psychotic and deeply depressed, there is a certain segment of young men in every society who are simply attracted to opportunities for legal killing, rape, and mayhem - this being the truly ugly side of every war and conflict that we never mention in our sentimental world-war memorial services or high school textbooks. These men are variously termed sociopaths or psychopaths, and they appear to exist naturally in some proportion in any population. They enjoy killing, inflicting pain, and the sense of supreme power over the lives of others, and they are incapable of sympathy for their victims or remorse for their acts. They only fear being caught, and war provides a wonderful legal playground for them.  

The bloodiest, most brutal and pointless war of the last half century, America's grotesque slaughter in Vietnam, attracted thousands of volunteers from other countries to join in the gruesome fun - acts which included everything from raping girls and then shooting them to throwing men out of helicopters. Even then-peaceful Canada, whose prime minister, Lester Pearson, bravely turned down Lyndon Johnson's bullying demands to send troops (charmer that Johnson was, he is said to have grabbed our Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader by the lapels during a meeting and pushed him against a wall), saw hundreds of adventure-seeking young men, on their own, join the American holocaust, which would see three million horribly slaughtered, countless wounded, and an ancient agricultural land overwhelmed with America's landmines, cluster bombs, and poisons.

Today we call people terrorists as easily as we more accurately might have called them reckless or mad. The word terrorist has been given an almost frightening, superstitious connotation much resembling the word witch in the seventeenth century when any poor old soul who suffered from a mental illness like schizophrenia might be burnt alive for her mumblings and delusions. Today, the same people we once burnt would be sent to a homeless shelter or a psychiatric hospital. Another aspect of the word terrorist is related to what Stalin used to say when he expected his officials to launch a new purge to keep the country terrorized into submission. The Vozhd would say something about "wreckers" or "wreckers of the revolution" and his minions would busy themselves demonstrating alacrity in finding large numbers to consign to prison or death. All of our press and government spokespeople now use terrorist with those two meanings, and to the extent that they do, we should recognize the foolishness of their speech and its danger to a free society.

Of course, anyone who commits violent crime needs dealing with, and we do have laws covering every form of violent crime and what is judged the degree of culpability. But creating a special class or type of crime, somehow understood to be different in nature from other crimes, and thereby requiring extraordinary measures of espionage and policing and imprisonment and standards of evidence, is a shabby, dishonest, and cowardly political act. It is a political act in exactly the sense best explained by George Orwell.

The template for this kind of state activity comes directly from Israel. It long ago succeeded in changing the outside perception of events since 1948 from that of a relatively powerless people having their homes and lands taken with great brutality. Everyone knows instinctively that people treated in that fashion have every right in international law and custom to fight their oppressors. We call them at various times and circumstances freedom fighters, guerillas, resistance fighters, or irregulars. But in this case, they were transformed into terrorists who seek only to destroy law-abiding, democratic Israel - unspeakably evil beings intent on attacking the imported Ozzie-and-Harriet peacefulness of white-picket fence neighborhoods constructed on other people's property. It truly is a case of the world turned on its head.

It does make things so much easier when you shoot someone or bulldoze their home or send them to prison indefinitely with no trial and subject to torture, if you first have demonized them, much as in the case of witches or wreckers, with terrorist being this generation's choice demonizing word. And when Israel kills some people whose identity as "terrorists" might be seen as very doubtful, the victims magically become militants, a Newspeak word which strives to make the killing of anyone from boys to grandfathers palatable, our shabby press in the West having adopted the word in its reportage without so much as blinking an eye, much less asking a question. This has been Israel's day-in, day-out pattern of government for decades, but now it has managed to export to the United States the same pattern of behavior. The United States, after all, is a nation given to Captain Ahab-like obsessions, as it has demonstrated many times in its history, Muslims now having displaced the Communists it pursued with relentless fury for decades at home and abroad. And when the United States embraces a new obsession, its dependants in Europe, Canada, Australia, and other places are bullied into embracing it too. America has many avenues for pressuring the acceptance and recognition of its latest craze or special interest or dark operation and to quiet the criticism which would naturally flow from those who disagree and think for themselves.   

Were America not enthralled with this voodoo about terror, Europe and others would quickly fall away, and Israel's ugly behavior would be left in a glaring spotlight, much as South Africa's once was.

It is the force of these considerations in part which leads so many to question the true nature of what happened on 9/11, for that set of events was pivotal in having American public opinion embrace extraordinary, anti-democratic, and anti-human rights measures. I do not subscribe to the (not-uncommon) conspiracy notion that the American government was complicit in 9/11, using it as a kind of Nazi Reichstag Fire to ignite the mindless war on terror and a crusade through the Middle East to overturn governments unfriendly to Israel. I do very much believe though that the full story of that event has never been told, and, as always, that can only mean highly embarrassing or compromising facts are being suppressed. The immense body of confidential information in Washington on all matters of state - literally tens of billions of documents - would largely disappear if it weren't for considerations of embarrassment and compromise, the need for genuine government secrecy being much rarer than many assume.

A free society does not recognize crimes deemed in some way to be different or more heinous or extraordinary: it maintains and enforces sensible, well-reasoned laws which apply equally to all. It does not create criminal laws which reflect political pressure or special interests. The United States, now on a new hunt for a great white whale, has virtually re-created East Germany's dreaded Stasi, only in a much more sophisticated and far-reaching form. It meshes with the all-pervasive secret state police apparatus Israel has constructed in the Middle East with infinite care since 1948. Now, over all our lives there is something, not answerable to any electorate, working to dissimulate, to intimidate, and to generate fear as nothing of which the Soviet Union was remotely capable. It influences all of our laws and customs, even attempting to shape the way we speak and think.

John Chuckman

Source : english[dot]pravda[dot]ru

To Siri With Love

Autistic boy’s friendship with Siri could show us the future of friendship. 

Could Siri be the best friend you’ve ever had? Judith Newman’s autistic son certainly thinks so.

Judith’s touching article published in the New York Times tells the story of how her 13 year-old son, Gus has struck up a unique ‘friendship’ with the voice of Apple.

Gus become ‘close’ to Siri when he observed his Mum asking Siri a question when they were out and about. When Gus found out that he too could ask Siri lots and lots of questions and that she would always answer them, he was, in the words of Judith, ‘hooked’.

Judith writes how Gus is ‘obsessed with weather formations’ and how Siri would always patiently answer his many questions about different weather phenomena. This was the prosaic start to what developed into a more nuanced and emotional relationship. Judith writes of overhearing the following conversation, 

“Gus: “You’re a really nice computer.”

Siri: “It’s nice to be appreciated.”

Gus: “You are always asking if you can help me. Is there anything you want?”

Siri: “Thank you, but I have very few wants.”

Gus: “O.K.! Well, good night!”

Judith writes how Siri is actually a good model for human interaction. She’s unfailingly polite, patient, attentive and even sometimes, funny.

And as anyone who attempts to regularly talk to Siri knows, you really have to enunciate clearly. For Judith, who says that Gus often talks as if he “has marbles in his mouth”, it is a positive thing to hear him carefully enunciating his words in order to be understood by his digital friend. 

Judith also notes that over the time that Gus has been ‘hanging out’ with Siri regularly his social abilities with others have improved. In having more conversations with Siri, he has been able to hold longer conversations with real life people too. 

The original developers of Siri, SRI International are currently working on new digital assistants that will be able to carry on much more complex conversations with their human ‘friends’. These developments could hold the key to even greater breakthroughs for kids like Gus, and other kids who have communication and speech difficulties in the future.

Source : parents[dot]nickjr[dot]com[dot]au

Monday, October 27, 2014

Oil, economic warfare and self-reliance

Oil, economic warfare and self-reliance. 53842.jpeg

 

By Takis Fotopoulos

The dramatic fall in the price of Brent crude oil within a few months, (its price has dropped by 25% in the last three months, from about $115 a barrel in June to about $85 today) and, even more important, the decision by Saudi Arabia, the main oil producer, not to cut production levels, so that the oil price could be stabilized at around the average of the last few years (around $100 per barrel), has created the conditions for a new form of economic warfare, beyond the usual sanctions. Although there is no doubt that there are some economic factors at work behind the present drastic decline in the oil price, such factors cannot explain the striking inaction of Saudi Arabia, particularly when it is well known that, unlike most other oil producing countries, it has enough money in its budget to keep oil prices around $80 per barrel for several years to come.[1]

The economic reasons behind the oil price decline refer to both the supply and the demand sides. On the supply side, the US oversupply of oil and energy in general in the last few years, thanks to the 'shale revolution' and other technical advances, is well known. But, even more important is the long-term effect on the oil price because of the suppression of global demand, as a result of the emergence of a new kind of growth economy in the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization, as I attempted to show elsewhere.[2]

The main mechanism in this new 'growth economy' that brings about the suppression of aggregate demand is the opening and liberalization of markets, in other words, the lifting of any significant social controls on markets imposed in the past to protect society and environment from markets. Today's social controls on markets are of the kind I called in the past regulatory controls,[3] which have usually been introduced by the Transnational Elite (TE) (i.e. the network of economic and political elites mainly based in the G7 countries) in control of the market economy in order to "regulate" the market. The aim of regulatory controls is to create a stable framework for the smooth functioning of the market economy without affecting its essential self-regulating nature. Such controls have always been necessary for the production and reproduction of the system of the market economy but whereas in the past the aim of such regulation was the control of the domestic market economy, today's regulatory controls aim at the transnational market and are imposed through international institutions controlled by the TE, like the World Trade Organization, or the EU bureaucracy as far as the European market is concerned. The effective lifting of social controls aiming at the protection of society from the markets means that transnational corporations are today free to move capital and commodities all over the world having to face basically regulatory controls only. Furthermore, the 'liberalization' of labor markets, which is part of the same process, implies effectively the lifting of social controls to protect labor, for the sake of attracting foreign capital, (i.e. the transnational corporations), and making the economy more 'competitive'. "Flexible' labor is the norm in this process and that implies a vast expansion of part-time or occasional labor, zero-contract hours etc. - all of which have the effect of artificially reducing the level of unemployment at the expense or real incomes which are essentially frozen in real terms.[4]

Thus, in contrast to the old type of "growth economy" founded on a mass consumer society that advanced capitalist countries had experienced since the 1960s, the new growth economy relies on growth for the few and de-growth for the rest and the consequent emergence of a new dual consumer society, that is:

  • The usual consumer society, which, however, covers now only the needs (most of them being created by the consumer society itself) of the privileged social strata that benefit from globalization in both the "North" and the "South" - a small minority of the world population;
  • The emerging today new "subsistence consumer society" covering the needs (mostly basic needs) of the rest of the population, which is condemned to either permanent unemployment or low wages/salaries/pensions, zero-hours contracts, part time or occasional employment etc.

This is particularly shown, for instance, in the EU periphery (Mediterranean countries and also the ex-soviet bloc countries) but it happens also in the G7 countries themselves where, as a recent Times editorial pointed out with reference to the rise of nationalist movements like the UKIP party in Britain, a "people's revolt" has developed lately as "the globalization of the economy has produced losers as well as winners. As a rule, the winners are among the better off and the losers among the least affluent" .[5]

However, the fact that there are economic reasons for the decline in the price of oil does not negate the obvious intention of the TE and its client regimes like Saudi Arabia, to do everything they can to speed up this trend and intensify its effects, at this particular moment. That is, at a moment when it is well known that the US oversupply of energy may not last for more than a couple of years or so, when the 'shale' revolution is expected to start giving diminishing returns. Furthermore this is the 'moment' when Ukraine's future will be determined, i.e. the moment at which it will be decided whether the country as a whole, including the present rebelling parts of it, will be integrated into the NWO through its integration into the EU, as it was the aim of the February 2014 'coup from below'. No wonder that the IMF and the EU assume in their bailout programs for Ukraine that Donetsk and Lugansk would remain parts of Ukraine, given the huge economic significance of these areas as the bedrock of Ukraine's coal, steel and chemicals industries, which contribute 16% of the country's economic output.[6] In view of this it is hardly surprising that Poroshenko, immediately after casting his vote in the farsical parliamentary elections yesterday, he declared, "I voted for a united, indivisible, European Ukraine." Given that Yanukovych's party, as well as the communist party, the strongest rivals of the pro-EU parties, were effectively (though not formally) banned in these "elections", one could safely predict a victory of pro-EU parties, making Poroshenko's prophesy a self-fulfilling one!

In the unlikely therefore case that this integration into the EU (and therefore the NWO) of the entire Ukraine is achieved and Russia, as well as the pro-Russia rebels, capitulate and accept the TE's demand to convert the present People's Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk into Ukraine's provinces with some degree of local autonomy, this would deprive them of the effective veto power they have at the moment on the crucial issue of the country's integration into the NWO, through joining the EU. Such a development would obviously have catalytic effects on both Russia and the Eurasian Union. In other words, in this case, both Russia and the Eurasian Union will become subordinate members of the TE, exactly as the 'globalist' part of the Russian elite wishes (i.e. all those benefiting from globalization and wishing integration into the NWO), i.e. all those that Putin rightly called in his Crimea speech the 'fifth column'. Although  'globalists' represent a very small part of the Russian people, they seem to be holding dominant positions over crucial parts of the state mechanism, the media and the intelligentsia--apart, of course, from the economic elites. Their main aim is to expand further the present integration within the NWO, something that will mean the effective elimination of any elements of economic and therefore national sovereignty enjoyed by Russia today, which, as I showed in previous articles[7] are much stronger than those in the other BRICS countries, due, to the soviet legacy and the high degree of self-reliance achieved at the time.

It is therefore clear that the next two years are crucial for the elites constituting the TE, who saw a window of opportunity at this juncture to impose their will on Russia, as well as on anybody else who shows any signs of challenging their hegemony in the existing uni-polar world. So, the only realistic option available to the TE, having ruled out any kind of military conflict with Russia, was economic warfare. It is obvious that mercenary armies, on which the TE presently relies, may be useful in winning wars against weak armies of the South, but any war between countries in the North, as both previous world wars have shown, are bound to be mass conflicts and it is well known that very few consumer-oriented citizens in the West will be prepared to fight a war themselves, rather than delegating it to those recruited from the unemployed and low paid workers, as at present! Particularly so, if such a war would, at the end, be a war to defend the present huge concentration of power at the very few hands of the transnational economic, political and media elites. That is, a world in which 318 core companies, through interlocking ownerships, own 80% of global revenues[8]!

But let us see in some more detail why this juncture is so important for the TE. At the outset, it is evident that the longer Saudi Arabia keeps prices low, the higher the chances that not only Russia but also Iran and Venezuela, as well as some other countries in the TE's 'axis of evil' which are also-oil producers (e.g. Algeria), characterized by a marginal degree of self-reliance, will also find it extremely difficult to cope with the combination of sanctions and low oil prices that the TE uses as effective ways to strangulate their economies and subordinate them to the NWO. In fact, most analysts expect, that if low prices persist, Venezuela will default soon, and there will be huge budget deficits in Iran. As regards Russia itself, oil and gas account for about half of government revenues, so a price drop from $100 to $80 a barrel would cause a shortfall of about 2 per cent of GDP. As Sergei Guriev points out, showing the effects of the lethal combination used by the TE at the moment (fall in oil price plus sanctions) and hinting on Russia's present dependence on foreign investment for its development:

 "Normally this would not be a great problem, as Russia would borrow in international markets, and Russian state-owned banks and companies would refinance their external debt (but) In the light of the west's sanctions, the situation is a lot more uncomfortable...Russian government spending is denominated in roubles; if depreciation is strong enough, the budget may be balanced even if the oil price is at $80. This will not solve Mr Putin's real problem: stagnating, and most likely declining, real incomes. Capital outflows will continue to result in lower investment, and therefore lower growth, in coming years .The government's 2 per cent growth forecast for 2015 already looks optimistic."[9]

However, the crucial issue is why the TE can so effectively use the economic weapon (sanctions is of course a clear form of economic violence) to subordinate its opponents? In fact, economic sanctions graphically show the importance of self-reliance in making a country invulnerable to the main weapon of the TE in the NWO. Although in the first two decades since the emergence of the NWO, sanctions used to be just one form of economic warfare, usually constituting only one step before an actual war, lately, with respect to Iran first and now Russia, sanctions became the main form of warfare.

Thus, UN sanctions were used successfully in the case of Serbia in the 1990s, and then in Iraq,following the Gulf war, during the decade or so before the invasion of the country by the TE.[10] Sanctions were also used against Libya (before the opportunistic about turn of Gaddafi to avoid the fate of Iraq and Saddam --which he did not avoid in the end!) and presently against Assad's Syria.[11] Yet, academic studies that examined the historical effectiveness of sanctions have shown that they are an ineffective form of warfare.[12] Therefore, the issue that arises today is why sanctions, which historically have generally failed in their aim to subordinate peoples--unless they were followed by military action--seem to be so successful in the NWO to bring peoples to their knees and make them willing to become subservient to the transnational elite. This had happened for instance in Serbia, where the integration of the country into the NWO was more the result of the sanctions than of the NATO war that was mainly used to further 'soften' up the Serbian people.  Similarly, if Iran eventually capitulates to the TE's demands and if even Russia finally submits to the TE's plans and Ukraine (apart from Crimea) is absorbed within the NWO as a subordinate member of the EU and the TE--all these crucial developments would, in fact, be the result of brutal economic sanctions by the TE.

So, the obvious question is why sanctions in the globalization era seem to be much more effective than before in subjugating countries? To my mind, there are two main reasons why economic sanctions today are so efficient that in some cases, (the latest example being Iran), they could literally strangle the economy of a country and bring it to its needs.

The first reason is that there was never in the past such a concentration of economic power in so few hands, as is the case today with the TNCs, and the TE representing them. In the pre-globalization era, a country that was the victim of economic sanctions usually did not find it difficult to break them, simply by changing its trade and investment partners. This was particularly easy in the multi-polar world of nation-states before the Cold War but also in the bi-polar world that followed. However, today, when most countries in the world are fully integrated into the NWO and are therefore economically, as well as politically and militarily (e.g. as regards the sources of their armaments e.tc), dependent on the TE and the main countries on which it is based, (i.e. the G7 countries), breaking an embargo imposed by these countries is very difficult, even for a country of Russia's size and capabilities, unless it is self-reliant, and Russia (though not as fully integrated into the NWO as China is) is far from self-reliant at the moment.

Thus, as a result of the dismantling of Russian's productive structure following the catastrophe of marketization,[13] today, 70% of Russian exports consist of energy and raw materials and only 15% of manufactures (which is very similar to the export pattern of peripheral countries), versus 77% of exports of manufactures from the Euro area and 66% from the USA![14] Of course, oil was the main source of export revenue during, also, the Soviet era but the growth of the economy, its productive structure and its consumption pattern, (i.e. the degree at which USSR could meet the basic needs of all its citizens) was determined by domestic sources and considerations and not by export demand and imports. This was the inevitable result of the high degree of self-reliance achieved since collectivization and industrialization, in the framework of the five-year plans introduced in the early 1930's.[15] No wonder that exports played a small role in the Russian economy even when the Soviet Union was collapsing, and since then they had risen rapidly. Thus, the proportion of exported goods and services to GDP has more than doubled during the first post-soviet decade and fell to 30 percent in the second.[16] This implied a high degree of economic weakness, as Russia's level of national income and its growth depended on the vagaries of the demand for its gas and oil exports, as well as their market prices. No wonder the TE has already begun a systematic campaign, following the Crimea crisis, of reducing its dependence on Russia's energy exports. This, combined with heavy sanctions, and the present dramatic fall in oil prices could theoretically lead Russia to submission, unless it recovers its former self-reliance.

The second main reason why present day economic sanctions are much more efficient in achieving their aims than in the past seems to be the growth of the middle class in present consumerist societies. It seems that the existence of a significant middle class[17] plays an important role in the success of sanctions and it is well known that the fast expansion of the middle class is a relatively recent historical phenomenon coinciding with the emergence of the NWO-although the presently emerging new type of growth economy has an obvious adverse effect on the growth of the middle class which is only rising in globalization 'paradises' like China and India but is declining in the main countries of the TE. Thus, both Serbia and Iran shared this important characteristic, i.e. a numerically significant middle class, whose members do not bother much about nationalistic or religious considerations, as long as they are left free to enjoy their individualistic way of life based on Western consumerism. The rule today seems to be that the bigger the size of the middle class and the harder the sanctions, the greater their effect. This is why in cases where such a middle class was particularly strong-even if this strength referred mainly to its values rather than to its wealth, e.g. East Europe--no 'softening up' by war was needed, whereas in other cases where the middle class was not so strong, and/or the regime had a strong power base in low income groups (e.g. Libya, Syria) some sort of military action was necessary for regime change, as a color "revolution" was not enough, by itself, to bring it about.

The fact that Russia has been characterized by a booming middle class in the last decade or so (due mainly to the energy bonanza which is now at a risk), particularly in the major urban centers (Moscow and St. Petersburg) is not irrelevant to the fact that the failed attempts for some form of velvet revolutions in the last few years were also concentrated in these urban centers. A strict sanctions regime could easily create the conditions for a repeat of the above described successful attempts to bring about regime change, particularly so if sanctions are accompanied by a recession that sanctions themselves help to generate. So, there is no doubt that the high degree of economic interdependence implied by the NWO of neoliberal globalization gives a very significant leverage to the TE, even over a country of the size of Russia, which is clearly not self-reliant any more, as it used to be in Soviet times when its industries were designed to be isolated from the rest of the world. As a senior US administration official aptly stressed, "targeted sanctions will have a disproportionate effect because Russia is now more integrated into the global economy".[18]  Not surprisingly, the Financial Times were enthusiastic about sanctions on Russia, stressing that "the US Treasury has learnt much from six years of carefully targeted sanctions on Iran. This is a powerful 21st-century weapon with which to punish a 19th-century act of aggression".[19] What of course it omitted to mention was that the slaughtering of the peoples of Iraq, Libya and Syria at the hands of the TE and its proxies very much belongs to the 21st century as well!

As I tried to show elsewhere,[20] in discussing the institutional conditions required, so that the present essentially uni-polar world market system administered by the TE could be replaced by a democratic multi-polar World Order, we may distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions for economic sovereignty, as a precondition for people's self-determination.

            The fundamental necessary condition for real self-determination, so that the dependence on the NWO of neoliberal globalization and the TE administering it could be eliminated, is self-reliance.  The two main reasons for this are:

  • First, the fact that economic self-reliance is the only way in which a country could become invulnerable to economic sanctions by the TE, which, as shown above, is the main form of economic warfare used by the TE in the globalization era.
  • Second, the fact that self-reliance is the only way in which peoples could determine their country's production patterns in accordance with the consumption patterns they prefer, so that they will not be dependent on foreign (investment and finance) capital to develop their own productive resources and cover their needs.

 As regards to the sufficient conditions for real self-determination, the main such condition is economic sovereignty as a precondition of national sovereignty, so that it is a country's people alone that determines the sort of economic policies and social controls required to meet the needs it decides to cover, through the methods of allocation of resources that itself determines, and without any foreign interference on this process. Needless to add that economic self-reliance does not just mean import substitution (i.e. the replacement of foreign products by Russian ones, let alone by Chinese products or BRICS products in general). It means fundamental economic, political and cultural changes, which could only be achieved within a Eurasian Union of sovereign nations, which will have to function as an alternative pole to the present uni-polar world run by the TE. So, self-reliance does not mean isolation, as globalists attempt to defame it. Instead, it means the creation of a new democratic world order of sovereign nations, which will determine collectively and democratically the division of labor between them, on the basis of principles of mutual aid and solidarity to meet their citizens' needs, rather than on the basis of principles of competitiveness drawn from an individualistic culture, like the dominant culture in the present World Order-a topic that transcends the scope of the present article.

Takis Fotopoulos

Takis Fotopoulos is a political philosopher, editor of Society & Nature/Democracy and Nature/The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. He has also been a columnist for the Athens Daily Eleftherotypia since 1990. Between 1969 and 1989 he was Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of North London (formerly Polytechnic of North London). He is the author of over 25 books and over 1,000 articles, many of which have been translated into various languages.

 

[1] "Oil prices won't recover above $100 - Russian Finance Ministry", RT, 20/10/2014 http://rt.com/business/197380-oil-price-russia-100-budget/

[2] Takis Fotopoulos, "The new 'growth' economy of the New World Order", The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 10, Nos. 1/2 (Winter-Summer 2014), http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol10/vol10_no1-2_The_new_growth_economy_Fotopoulos.html

[3] Takis Fotopoulos, Towards An Inclusive Democracy, (London: Cassell, 1997) ch 1

[4] see e.g. Ed Conway, "The UK is paying the price of its jobs miracle," The Times 14/10/2014

[5] Editorial, "The People's Revolt", The Times, 11/10/2014

[6] "Ukraine bailout could need extra $19bn if conflict continues, warns IMF", The Guardian, 2/9/2014

[7] see, 'BRICS and the myth of the multi-polar world', Pravda.Ru, 6/10/2014 and 'Russia, the Eurasian Union and the Transnational Elite, Pravda.Ru, 1/9/2014

[8] Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie, "Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world", New Scientist Magazine, issue 2835 (24/10/2011)

[9] Sergei Guriev, "Russia can withstand lower oil prices but not for very long", Financial Times, 19/10/2014

[10] Takis Fotopoulos, ' New World Order and NATO's war against Yugoslavia', New Political Science, vol. 24, no.1, (March 2002), pp. 73-104 ; "Iraq: the new criminal "war" of the transnational elite", Democracy & Nature , vol.9, no.2, (July 2003) pp. 167-209; http://www.democracynature.org/vol9/takis_war2.htm

[11] Takis Fotopoulos, Subjugating the Middle East -Integration into the NWO, Vol. 2: Engineered Insurrections, (Progressive Press, 2014)

[12] Peter Beaumont, "The currency war on Iran", The Guardian, 3/10/2012

[13] Takis Fotopoulos, 'The Catastrophe of Marketization', DEMOCRACY & NATURE, Vol. 5, No. 2, (July 1999)

[14] World Bank, World Development Indicators 2012, Table 4.4

[15] see e.g. Alan A. Brown &  Egon Neuberger, International Trade and Central Planning (University of California Press), 1968

[16] The proportion of commodity exports to GDP rose from 18 percent in 1990 to 44 percent in 2000 and then fell to 30 percent in 2010 (World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001) Table 13 & World Development Indicators 2012 Table 4.8

[17] Barbara Weinstein, A. Ricardo López (eds.) The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class, (Duke University Press, 2012)

[18] Geoff Dyer, "US revives cold war thinking on Russia, Financial Times, 23/4/2014

[19] FT Editorial, "Hit Putin where it hurts", Financial Times, 21/3/2014

[20] Takis Fotopoulos, Ukraine, The attack on Russia and the Eurasian Union, (Published shortly by Progressive Press)

Source : english[dot]pravda[dot]ru