I’ve now been writing this blog for just about two years, and this will be my 200th post. Being something of an anniversary then, I’ve been wondering how to mark the occasion. How about some kind of a retrospective, for instance… reviewing my earlier reports on the decline of the world’s economy as an inevitable consequence of systemic fraud and failure; or the rise of the surveillance state with the introduction of fingerprinting of kids in Britain and of drones over America; or the serious environmental threat from nuclear power and fracking (this ultra-destructive ‘technology’ coming to Britain almost immediately after I first heard and wrote about it!); mixed in perhaps with another reminder of how the neo-imperialist wars of the twenty-first century are being expanded into Africa and why the civil war in Syria is really just a proxy war with the al-Qaeda-led rebel forces being covertly supported by their own sworn enemy, America. (To read posts on any of the above just follow the relevant links from the main menu or use the search tool.)
However, to do justice to such a monumental post would possibly have taken a month or more. All the troubles I have written about, and sadly with very few exceptions, worsening during the past two years; our descent into chaos and tyranny happening quicker now than before I began.
More wars; more environmental devastation in the name of environmental protection; greater infringement of our civil liberties and human rights; and an economy that is teetering on the very edge of total collapse. Indeed, the economic situation is now so bad that on BBC2’s Newsnight a few nights ago [Tuesday 19th], Jeremy Paxman was reduced to interrogating an MP from Cyprus. And just think about that for a moment, and bear in mind that Cyprus (and I mean no offence to Cypriots when I say this) is an economic gnat. Yet we are seriously contemplating how the effects of a debt problem in Cyprus might undo the entire Eurozone. All of which is actually a measure of how broken the banking system has become.
Yes, the financial system of much of the world (and especially our region of it) is bankrupt, and has been for some time. The reason is the multiple hundreds of trillions of dollars of so-called ‘toxic’ derivatives that have still yet to be deleted. But instead of cancelling the odious debts and prosecuting a corrupt banking establishment, the proposed solution is instead to openly steal money from personal bank accounts in order to keep the Ponzi scheme up and running just a little longer. This brazen theft being described in places like the BBC as “a haircut” or “a tax on savings”. You just can’t make it up any more! And sooner or later, we must expect that all of this will be coming to a bank nearby…
Those who have listened carefully to people really in the know, like former regulator William K Black, are aware not only of the real cause of this crisis (and the resulting depression which the mainstream media have also helped to play down) but also precisely who is really to blame – and let’s name names here: hands up Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch! The three credit rating agencies who gave triple-A’s to toxic trash on the basis of mere opinion and yet continue to downgrade the credit worthiness of nation states in a deepening crisis which they were instrumental in starting… you really can’t make this up! And hands up Goldman Sachs, J.P Morgan, Citibank, Barclays, HSBC, and all the cronies in government, at the ECB, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the IMF, and not forgetting the FSA and other supposed “regulatory agencies”. Agencies working for whom and to what ends, we may all reasonably demand.
It is the greed, incompetence and malfeasance across the whole of the financial sector that has brought us to this brink. It was never the fault of “the lazy Greeks” and it’s not the fault of pesky Cypriots either, but the mainstream media still hesitates at telling the people the truth – and why? Just how deep does the cronyism run…?
I hate to say this but quite frankly our world, by which I mean our civilisation, is going to hell in a handbasket. Because just as our economies collapse, and the social structures we rely upon follow, at very same time the controls on us are being tightened one notch at a time, and at an accelerating rate. This is another big theme I have returned to time and again. How in America there was Obama’s introduction of the NDAA “indefinite detention act”, and how in Britain we look set to get our own secret trials too. How in America (and most probably in Britain, although here the available evidence is less certain) there is already universal surveillance of internet activity and soon (certainly if Obama gets his way) of bank accounts too.1
These are the considered thoughts of veteran investigative journalist John Pilger, writing almost a year ago an article on his own website entitled “You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it?”:
You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely “al-Qaeda”, but “exercise”, “drill”, “wave”, “initiative” and “organisation”: all proscribed words. The British government’s announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming western democracy.
What are you going to do about it?
In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with “terror suspects”. Habeas Corpus is dying. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be extradited to the US even though none except one has been charged with a crime. All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty which was signed one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to “cruel and unusual punishment”. One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic who has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free, they go – along with young Richard O’Dwyer, who faces 10 years in shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly infringed US copyright on the internet. 2
Click here to read John Pilger’s full article.
Meanwhile, of course, the neo-imperialist adventuring remains not only unchecked, but is actually gathering momentum. The war racket pressing full-steam ahead and flattening all before it. It doesn’t matter that we don’t have money to fix our broken hospitals, or to build houses and renew infrastructure, or that in America there are fifty million people already on food stamps – and if you picture those people in sepia forming a queue then you’ll see how this depression has already reached 1930s levels. But in spite of these hardships at home, no amount of money is ever spared when it comes the next country on our checklist for “humanitarian intervention” – and more thoughts on this in my next post.
So these days I am finding every post I write is harder than the last. How many ways are there to say that nuclear power and fracking are a menace not only to human beings but to most other life on the planet (cockroaches aside perhaps)? How many times do you need to say that “austerity measures” are not merely ideological in design but that they serve no useful purpose other than to wreck economies (as the IMF and World Bank have done in so many other countries across the globe) whilst redistributing wealth from the relatively poor to the mega-rich? How many times does it need pointing out that America is backing al-Qaeda when it suits their ends? – when, after all, al-Qaeda owes its origins to Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CIA and their dirty campaign to overthrow the Soviets in Afghanistan. So it is genuinely painful to have to repeat these things, and totally depressing to be shown to be right – that our collective future really is becoming so absolutely bleak, and unremittingly brutalised. Sooner rather than later, I want to be proved wrong – this hope is the only thing that actually keeps me writing this damned blog.
Now if any of the above sounds to you like craziness, then let me confirm that on one level it really is, though the craziness is not mine. For, in a sense, this is simply the way things have always worked: policies of expedience, of realpolitik. It is how ruling elites prefer to govern the masses, and all that stuff and nonsense about “freedom and democracy” and “saving the planet” is for the proles and “the gentlemen” (as neo-con political philosopher Leo Strauss called them) – those in the higher-up echelons who truly believe in the goodness of the system, but whose real job is to protect the interests of the powers that be. But the difference now is that the ruling elites are ready to assume a more complete dominion over all of their underlings. And it will be achieved by a scientifically-driven programme of social engineering that is already well underway: bringing us into the scientific dictatorship that globalist bigwig Zbigniew Brzezinski famously called “the Technetronic Era”:
“In the Technetronic society the trend seems to be toward aggregating the individual support of millions of unorganized citizens, who are easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, and effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotion and control reason.” [..]
“Another threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy. More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific knowhow. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control.” 3
Do Brzezinski’s words represent a warning or a blueprint… this ambiguity remains only because Brzezinski quite deliberately never makes his position clear:
The Technetronic age is that which is created by the (theoretical) Technetronic Revolution. It is always fairly ambiguously presented as to whether Brzezinski is actually predicting this revolution based on observation/trends, or whether he is abstractly philosophizing. It certainly is not a work of political science. With this in mind, his concluding line in the book, ‘In the technetronic era, philosophy and politics will be crucial’ serve to confuse the reader further rather than give some closure. 4
The quote above is taken from a rather favourable review of Brzezinski’s book written by Stephen McGlinchey in 2011. The book itself has been out of print for three decades.
There is plenty of speculation about Brzezinski’s real intent when he wrote the book, but does this even matter – especially as we have good reasons to be suspicious given his record in other more tangible ways – the more important point is that the direction he outlines is evidently the direction our world has taken. And I would like to think that my own ant-sized efforts to halt the progress of this imposed revolution, alongside the efforts of countless other out-spoken ants, all trying so hard to speak up with truth to power is having some effect. That we may be small and struggling to be heard above the largely controlled, mainstream din, with tiny readerships and such small spheres of influence, but that our combining ripples are building in amplitude and spreading wider…. And then I read an article and I think that yes indeed, tiny as we are, we really must be having some effect, because it seems that the government is suddenly intent on shutting voices like mine down altogether.
Never letting any good crisis go to waste, the government it seems has twisted the whole Leveson Inquiry around to its own advantage – in a fashion reminiscent of what happened with the Hutton Inquiry (from which, of course, the BBC has never properly recovered). The Leveson Inquiry, we should remember, was set up to deal with crimes, and specifically the crime of phone hacking, perpetrated by media giants (most prominently Rupert Murdoch’s News International), and to also look into the role played by the London Metropolitan Police, yet in consequence, the results of that inquiry look likely to close down parts of the alternative media instead. Here’s an extract from Tuesday’s Guardian:
Bloggers could face high fines for libel under the new Leveson deal with exemplary damages imposed if they don’t sign up to the new regulator, it was claimed on Tuesday.
Under clause 29 introduced to the crime and courts bill in the Commons on Monday night, the definition of “relevant” bloggers or websites includes any that generate news material where there is an editorial structure giving someone control over publication. […]
Kirsty Hughes, the chief executive of Index on Censorship, which campaigns for press freedom around the world, said it was a “sad day” for British democracy. “This will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on everyday people’s web use,” she said.
She said she feared thousands of websites could fall under the definition of a “relevant publisher” in clause 29.
Hughes said: “Bloggers could find themselves subject to exemplary damages, due to the fact that they were not part of a regulator that was not intended for them in the first place.” 5
Click here to read the full article.
My belief has always been (and remains) that the best way to lose your freedom of speech is by refusing to use it, and so this ludicrous regulatory overreach is more reason to keep offering some small alternative to the mainstream behemoths. And rest assured that I certainly won’t be signing up to any regulatory body.
Finally then, and if the authorities ever do decide to go after me for daring to disagree with mainstream authority, then I ask in advance for your support – why? Because I’m the little guy, the ant, the gnat, the gadfly. The main difference between you and I, in this respect, is merely that I have perhaps put my head a little higher above the parapet. So once I’m firmly in the cross-hairs, assuming this should happen, then you can be absolutely certain it’ll be your turn next, and rather sooner than you might suppose…
1“The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.
“The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates.”
From an article entitled “Obama Administration Proposing To Let U.S. Spy Agencies Have Access To Massive Financial Database”, written by Emily Flitter, Stella Dawson and Mark Hosenball, (from Reuters) published by Huffingtonpost. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/obama-spy-agencies_n_2868389.html
2 From an article entitled “You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it?” written by John Pilger and posted on his own website on April 26, 2012. http://johnpilger.com/articles/you-are-all-suspects-now-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it
3 Both quotes taken from Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, published in 1970 (although out of print since 1982).
4 Taken from a review of Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, written by Stephen McGlinchey and published July 22, 2011. The full review can be found here: http://www.e-ir.info/2011/07/22/review-between-two-ages-america%E2%80%99s-role-in-the-technetronic-era/
5 From an article entitled “Press regulation deal sparks fears of high libel fines for bloggers: Websites could have to pay exemplary damages if they don’t sign up to new regulator, claim opponents of Leveson deal”, written by Lisa O’Carroll, published by the Guardian on March 19, 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/mar/19/bloggers-libel-fines-press-regulation
wall of controversy 