¡Ya Basta!

Mayor James Valley wants to lock residents in their homes, and hopes nobody will notice his blatant doublespeak: “…some infringement on constitutional rights is OK and we have not violated anything as far as the Constitution.”

via: Yahoo News

By JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press Writer

HELENA-WEST HELENA, Ark. - Officers armed with military rifles have been stopping and questioning passers-by in a neighborhood plagued by violence that’s been under a 24-hour curfew for a week.

On Tuesday, the Helena-West Helena City Council voted 9-0 to allow police to expand that program into any area of the city, despite a warning from a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas that the police stops were unconstitutional. Continue Reading »

It’s a pretty simple formula: destroy a country’s economy, pump drugs into low income neighborhoods, and then offer a police state to quell the violence. Create the problem, create the solution. Ordo ab chao. This will only become more common.

via: AP

By JON GAMBRELL – 1 day ago

HELENA-WEST HELENA, Ark. (AP) — Officers armed with military rifles have been stopping and questioning passers-by in a neighborhood plagued by violence that’s been under a 24-hour curfew for a week.

On Tuesday, the Helena-West Helena City Council voted 9-0 to allow police to expand that program into any area of the city, despite a warning from a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas that the police stops were unconstitutional.

Police Chief Fred Fielder said the patrols have netted 32 arrests since they began last week in a 10-block neighborhood in this small town on the banks of the Mississippi River long troubled by poverty. The council said those living in the city want the random shootings and drug-fueled violence to stop, no matter what the cost.

“Now if somebody wants to sue us, they have an option to sue, but I’m fairly certain that a judge will see it the way the way the citizens see it here,” Mayor James Valley said.

“The citizens deserve peace, that some infringement on constitutional rights is OK and we have not violated anything as far as the Constitution.”

The area under curfew, in what used to be a West Helena neighborhood, sits among abandoned homes and occupied residences in disrepair.

White signs on large blue barrels warn those passing by that the area remains under curfew by order of Mayor James Valley. The order was scheduled to end at 3 p.m. Tuesday, but Valley said the city council’s vote would allow police to have the same powers across Helena-West Helena.

Among the curfew operation’s arrests, 10 came from felony charges, including the arrest of two people carrying both drugs and weapons, Fielder said. The police chief said the officers in the field carry military-style M-16 or M-4 rifles, some equipped with laser sights. Other officers carry short-barrel shotguns. Many dealing crack cocaine and marijuana in the city carry pistols and AK-47 assault rifles, he said.

“We’ve had people call us, expressing concern for their children,” Fielder said. “They had to sleep on the floor, because of stray bullets.”

Fielder said officers had not arrested anyone for violating the curfew, only questioned people about why they were outside. Those without good answers or acting nervously get additional attention, Fielder said.

However, such stops likely violate residents’ constitutional rights to freely assemble and protections against unreasonable police searches, said Holly Dickson, a lawyer for the ACLU of Arkansas who addressed the council at its packed Tuesday meeting. Because of that, Dickson said any convictions coming from the arrests likely would be overturned.

“The residents of these high-crime areas are already victims,” she said. “They’re victims of what are happening in the neighborhoods, they’re victims of fear. But for them to be subject to unlawful stops and questioning … that is not going to ultimately going to help this situation.”

The council rejected Dickson’s claims, at one point questioning the Little Rock-based attorney if she’d live in a neighborhood they described as under siege by wild gunfire and gangs.

“As far as I’m concerned, at 3 o’clock in the morning, nobody has any business being on the street, except the law,” Councilman Eugene “Red” Johnson said. “Anyone out at 3 o’clock shouldn’t be out on the street, unless you’re going to the hospital.”

The curfew is the second under the mayor’s watch since the rival cities of Helena and West Helena merged in 2006. That year, Valley set a nightly citywide curfew after a rash of burglaries and other thefts.

Police in Hartford, Conn., began enforcing a nightly curfew for youths after recent violence, including a weekend shooting that killed a man and wounded six young people.

Helena-West Helena, with 15,000 residents at the edge of Arkansas’ eastern rice fields and farmland, is in one of the nation’s poorest regions, trailing even parts of Appalachia in its standard of living.

In the curfew area, those inside the homes in the watch area peered out of door cracks Tuesday as police cruisers passed. They closed the doors afterward.

via: In These Times

Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@

By Joel Bleifuss | 1.27.03

VONNEGUT: “I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!”

See also: Twilight of the Psychopaths

Here’s a few related articles, about the rise of our Amerikan stasi. Chalmers Johnson offers a solid synopsis of the current privatized intelligence apparatus, but he glosses over the most important point, instead focusing on incompetence and greed. Johnson quotes from Yale professor David Bromwich who wrote,

“The separate bookkeeping and accountability devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and similar outfits was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice-president and the stewards of his policies in various departments and agencies. To have much of the work parceled out to private companies who are unaccountable to army rules or military justice, meant, among its other advantages, that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond all detection.”

People, use occam’s razor, please. The principle advantage of subverting public oversight and making the intelligence community accountable only to the Executive branch is that the intelligence community becomes accountable only to the Executive. Hiding costs and profits is a side issue. Fundamentally, power is being consolidated in the Executive in order to make it a dictatorship. This is not about profit, it is about power because even profit is only about power. Money is not important in its own sake - it’s desirable because it gives the wealthy power.

Now, if you can get power without money, say, by changing the laws, that’s all the better. Johnson concludes his article by lamenting that the new private sector CIA and military are now more susceptible to the president’s whims. America is a land of euphemisms, (extraordinary rendition, simulated drowning) as Johnson points out in his essay, but unfortunately even his conclusion is euphemistic. We’re not more at risk of a war the way someone who goes from smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day to a full pack is more at risk of lung cancer. We’re more at risk the way a prisoner who puts his head in the noose is more at risk of being hanged than the prisoner still in his cell.

Every president has wanted more power. Even the “good” ones. Remember FDR and court packing? He didn’t like the Court’s rulings so he tried to subvert the Constitution and create a rubber stamp institution. Liberals love Clinton, but he accelerated government privatization more than even Reagan or Bush Sr. (as Johnson points out). The presidency was designed to be a weak office, it was like an anti-king, subservient to the Congress, which is the branch closest to the people. Federalists like Alexander Hamilton and the other elitist authoritarians who’ve followed, however, have worked to strengthen the Executive and create an American monarchy.

Privatizing the US intelligence network is just one (of many) recent moves towards this goal. All subsequent presidents, Democrat or Republican, will wield these new Executive powers and whether through manufactured catastrophes like the Great Depression of 9/11 or through subterfuge, like under Clinton, subsequent presidents will try to tighten their grip on America. How far the authoritarians will get depends on whether the American public begins to recognize the pattern, and stand up to authoritarian ambitions.

via: Common Dreams

The Military-Industrial Complex: It’s Much Later Than You Think

by Chalmers Johnson

via: Washington Post

Travelers’ Laptops May Be Detained At Border - No Suspicion Required Under DHS Policies

by By Ellen Nakashima

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

via: The Raw Story

Scahill: Blackwater now in the private intelligence business

Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, is worried about the giant mercenary firm’s latest foray into private intelligence. “They’re marketing their services to not only foreign governments, but to Fortune 500 corporations,” he recently told an interviewer.

…

“Blackwater started a private intelligence company,” he explained, “a private CIA essentially, called Total Intelligence Solutions. And the man running Total Intelligence Solutions is J. Cofer Black. He’s a thirty-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also was the guy who ran the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the government-sanctioned kidnap-and-torture program.”

“His thirty-year CIA career, his network of contacts, his knowledge that was gained through his work in the most sensitive areas of the United States government is now on the open market for hire,” Scahill said sadly.

“This isn’t a liberal or conservative thing,” concluded Scahill. “You have a lot of traditional conservatives who are outraged at what they see as the degradation of the United States armed forces. … This has everything to do with the future of war-making and global stability.”

by David Edwards and Muriel Kane

via: Survival Blog

This is the full interview that was used for an Alternet article that’s less good.

AlterNet: Is survivalism a failure of community? A celebration of it?

JWR: I’d say that survivalism is indeed a celebration of community. It is the embodiment of America’s traditional “can do” spirit of self-reliance that settled the frontier.

AlterNet: Is it engineered by personal issues? Is it a racial, or economic phenomenon, in your opinion? Or both?

JWR: Survivalism [is a movement that] crosses all racial and religious lines. It is essentially color blind. For 99% of us, we could care less about the color of someone’s skin, but we care a lot about about including people with valuable skill sets. The preparedness movement is simply a rational quest for family and community level self-sufficiency in an increasingly dangerous world. There is unfortunately a very small but very vocal minority that are disgustingly racist idiots. I’m sad to say that they also call themselves survivalists. They get an inordinate amount of press coverage, making that 1% look much larger than it really is. In my opinion they should be ignored and shunned, and I certainly don’t give them a platform on SurvivalBlog.

The economic cross section of SurvivalBlog readers is also amazing. We have working class readers that a worried about how they are going to make their next car payment posting alongside surgeons and entrepreneurs. We have both starving students and Little Old Lady pensioners. The readership is also global. We have regular readers in more than 90 countries. But even with this diversity, we all get along. [I didn't mention that I also edit out a lot of rants and foul language from the readers' letters that I post.] Part of this is the realization that the next Great Depression will be a tremendous “leveler”.

AlterNet: Do you think survivalism is a rational response to our current crises?

JWR: Absolutely. Continue Reading »

via: Reality Sandwich

Propaganda Anonymous: I’m sitting here talking with Mr. Robert Anton Wilson. I originally came out here to see the world premiere of his documentary entitled, Maybe Logic, premiering on July 23rd, 2003.

Mr. Wilson, July 23rd, 2003 seemed like a special date on more than one instance for that night.

Robert Anton Wilson: Well, it was Monica Lewinsky’s 30th birthday. I only blew the minds of a few people. She blew the minds of the whole country….or she blew something.

Prop: And along with Monica Lewinsky’s 30th birthday, it was also a day that was named after you, for the city of Santa Cruz, by the Mayor.

Wilson: Yeah, a friend of mine in Massachusetts is trying to make it a national celebration among my fans, which would be called Maybe Day. He asked me to suggest rituals. I wrote back in e-mail just before you arrived. I suggested he should invite Christians, Jews, and Moslems, and have chanting of “Jesus is the only Son of God, maybe” “Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God is one, maybe” and “There’s no God but Allah, maybe, and maybe Mohammed is his prophet.” I think this will do a great deal to restore sanity to this planet. It depends if Jews and Moslems show up for this celebration. Maybe it’ll do their heads a lot of good.

Prop: And also on that day, as mentioned in Maybe Logic, was the 30-year anniversary of when you first received communications from what seemed to be an extra-terrestrial-higher intelligence. Has there ever been any recurrences, small flashbacks, if you will, since those 30 years past?

Wilson: Oh… um, it never really stopped. But my metaphor for it changes. Now I prefer to regard it as an increase in intuition and psychic abilities, rather than a separate entity guiding me. But the experience takes different forms. Sometimes I forget about it for weeks on end. I prefer to think of it as a white rabbit from County Kerry, because there is no chance anybody will take that literally, including me.

Prop: You were involved in a protest in September 2002 concerning the issue of medical marijuana. What exactly has the federal government impinged upon in crossing the rights of citizens in California, concerning that issue?

Wilson: Well, the government kills people. Take Peter McWilliams, the best-selling author. [And I'm not a best-selling author; I'm a cult author. I have a small but passionate following. It'd be nice to write a bestseller. I admire people who have that skill. I wish I had it.] He was a best-selling author, and one of the leading gay rights advocates. And he had AIDS and Cancer. They took away his marijuana, which controlled his nausea, and a few weeks later he choked on his own vomit, and died.

Now, of course, there are thousands of people in pain all over the country, because the government won’t let them have medical marijuana.

And then there was a case in Virginia. It was on 60 minutes. On CBS news! Goddamnit. The truth even gets into the corporate media sometimes.

This doctor had his license suspended for three years for giving an unnamed drug, they wouldn’t name it –I think it was heroin, but I’m guessing — to a patient who had some condition I never heard of, it’s very rare. This guy was in horrible pain, all over his body, 24 hours a day. The only relief he got was from this unknown drug this doctor gave him. So the doctor’s license was suspended, and this guy committed suicide. He made a video of himself, shooting himself in the head, denouncing the United States government. They showed that on CBS.

The only possible rationale that can justify the behavior of the federal government and the Tsarist bureaucracy, would be that, no sick person in the country, nor their doctor and none of their family in consultation, none of us, can judge what’s best for the patient. Only the Tsar knows what’s best for the patient. The only way this makes any sense is if we assume the doctrine called Mystical Tsarism, which arose in the 19th century in Russia as a defense against European rationalism.

Mystical Tsarism held that the Tsar is directly guided by God, and therefore no one can understand his decision except him and God. That’s the same rationale as our government today — the Tsar must be directed by God; how else could he know what medicine is best for every patient? He must be guided by God, so they revived mystical Tsarism, and incorporated it into the Constitutional democracy we once had in this country… and they’re killing people, and they’re hurting people all the time, and they’re doing this for reasons nobody knows. Either they’re mentally stark staring batshit crazy, and they really do believe that some “god” is gonna to run the whole system for us, or else they are so superstitious and stupid that they should really be put in remedial reading classes and start over in Kindergarten or something like that. Or they’re in conspiracy with the large pharmaceutical companies to keep people from getting cheap effective medicine and force the sick people to use the expensive and rather ineffective medicine that the big drug companies keep pushing at us. “Let them eat Celebrex.”

more

GOOD magazine wrote a fluff piece mocking conspiracy theorists and dismissing the dangers of Bilderberg, Skull and Bones, et al. It was crap journalism and I spent a long damn time composing a response that will probably end up in a spam box. Oh well. I might as well put it here.

The GOOD article

Hello Matt,

I have read and enjoyed your magazine before, but was greatly disappointed by the GOOD Guide: to the Shadowy Organizations That Rule the World. It is the kind of snarky, self-satisfied fluff I expect from hip youth-oriented political-esque media like MTV News or an E! election special, not GOOD. The research is fairly accurate, but the analysis is insubstantial and glossy, letting the reader remain comfortably in his or her smug liberal worldview without really considering the issues presented. This is a weak article and I’d like to discuss some of the flaws I found in it.

History is distended with conspiracies. It’s very simple: those who have some power and desire more seek allies and make clandestine plans to achieve their aims. We all understand that the Iraq War was plotted in secret by a group of political elites, don’t we? That’s a conspiracy. Iran Contra. Watergate. The USS Liberty attack. Bay of Pigs. All well documented conspiracies. Basically everything the CIA has ever done from drug smuggling to assassinations and foreign coups (see the Congressional Church Committee’s findings in 1975) originated in conspiracy. In 1934 Major General Smedley Butler—the most decorated Marine in US history and the author of War is a Racket—warned Congress of the Business Plot, a conspiracy by business elites to overthrow the government and install a fascist regime. Even the Revolutionary War was conceived by a group of men (many of whom were wealthy Freemasons as you point out) meeting in secret. Continue Reading »

Is this a big deal, a medium deal, or a small deal? Are we already in a national emergency? I don’t know.

via: The White House

Executive Order: Continuing Certain Restrictions with Respect to North Korea and North Korean Nationals

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) (NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that the current existence and risk of the proliferation of weapons-usable fissile material on the Korean Peninsula constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat. I further find that, as we deal with that threat through multilateral diplomacy, it is necessary to continue certain restrictions with respect to North Korea that would otherwise be lifted pursuant to a forthcoming proclamation that will terminate the exercise of authorities under the Trading With the Enemy Act (50 U.S.C. App. 1 et seq.) (TWEA) with respect to North Korea.

Continue Reading »