I always wondered about this connection between firearms and sex. Stay with me here. One day I had a dream as I was trying to figure out why rape and war go together. In this dream I was told that men shooting guns actually get sexually aroused and that once that happens they need to relieve themselves so they rape. It is also about power and control. If you look at the language used when describing sexual intercourse, you get words like “firing his shot”, “blasted” “busted” and various other metaphors for what it means when a man ejaculates. And then there are these synonyms: emission, ejection, discharge, release, expulsion.
So, we have in this story, a barrage of senseless bullets shooting up a car where clearly the men had to be dead long before 377 shots to their vehicle. Are we dealing more with sexually frustrated men who have to act in this manner? Are we dealing with men who ejaculate too quickly? Are we dealing with men who can’t seem to satisfy their partners and who feel so inept that by this obscene show of force they can, ejaculate over and over and over, hundreds of times without needing to stop and regroup? Are they insecure because after on orgasm it’s over for them, whereas by assaulting someone while wearing a badge they can “orgasm” over and over and over again?
I hadn’t thought about the sexual implications of war and police brutality in that way before. But It always appeared to me to have sexual overtones. When you watch how the police force suspects into handcuffs. Or how they “knock” you to the ground in a what appears to be sadomaschistic demonstration of dominance over someone they have rendered weak and helpless.
We keep looking at the sociopathic indicators that this type of behavior reveals, but I am wondering if we are missing an even deeper psychosis. Are we actually looking at folks who have sexual hangups, possibly sexual abuse and assault in their own history? Are we looking at a sexual perversion that can be shrouded in a uniform and a badge where a take down is imminent? Do these folks have a license to kill?? Or a license to rape, mentally, emotionally, physically and psychically?
I remember years ago noticing that weapons tend to resemble, in some way, the male phallic. From guns to to rockets to bombs they all look the same. The male phallic. Does this mean that there is an innate insecurity that men have about their manhood which is many instances is determined by their sexual prowess, however distorted this perception may be. What do bombs, guns etc. do? They penetrate, they explode, they ejaculate.
We have been living in an era of the Patriarchy for the past several thousand years. Male dominion over all life on Earth, particularly when looking at Male dominion in so many religions, politics, economics and social institutions around the world. It is expected that men should dominate! If a man does not carry that energy he is considered effeminate and a disgrace. Looking at our world we are seeing how this distortion has lead to more destruction and chaos since the days of the Gladiators.
The male principle in its desire to have dominion over all has become so distorted that the idea of freedom. peace, justice etc. is skewed and gleaned through the lens of destruction. Their creations have become destructive toys that hurt, maim and kill.
Frustrated, insecure and competitive men with killing toys are running our world and the consequences are devastating.
Excerpt: “In prison, infliction of mental and physical agony on helpless captives provides sexual pleasure to sick individuals. No penetration is needed, violent predators value power and control more. Sandra’s treatment, particularly isolation, are techniques found in CIA prisons and Guantanamo Bay. They are unbearable and leave no marks. The UN calls it torture.” Read More:
In my opinion, any editing of the information released to the authorities is suspect. In this video there is a shot you may want to check out. Sandra has a huge lump on her head that has been obviously photoshopped out. Here’s the link to that photo. http://www.conspiracyclub.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ne55be5a07.jpg Why did they do that? I am still suspicious and I don’t think the person in the video of Sandra in a orange jumpsuit is Sandra, maybe another person from another time, maybe it’s staged, with no timestamp and no identifying info on this video it could have come from anywhere. Proof that Sandra Bland’s Mug Shot Was Edited & Why: http://www.conspiracyclub.co/2015/08/02/sandra-blands-mug-shot-edit/
From the Urban Dictionary: EjaculationThe one time a male says the words “I love you” and really means it. While depositing an ejaculation into your partner the male screams with authority… “I love you!” by Lummer HummerDecember 30, 2011
March 13, 2013 12:56 p.m. My Adventures With ‘Penis-Numbing’ Spray In a bold step toward remedying the world’s least pressing health issue, the FDA recently approved an over-the-counter topical spray to treat premature ejaculation. (Similar products have long been available, but this is the first to win FDA approval.) Manufactured by Absorption Pharmaceuticals, Promescent’s active ingredient is lidocaine, a local anesthetic you have probably encountered at the dentist. Promescent’s website boasts that it “benefits both men and women by helping a man have staying power.”
May 14, 2014 7:34 pm· Police abuse doesn’t get much more flagrant than this. Recently dozens of Miami-Dade police officers filled Adrian Montesano’s vehicle with 377 bullet holes, shot from every imaginable angle. The frenzied show of police force was described by witnesses as “chaotic” and “contagious” in nature.
The vehicle’s 2 occupants had been trying to surrender, but 23 police officers in total decided to act as judge, jury and executions, shooting up the car, the suspects and also neighboring houses, businesses, vehicles. Even fellow police officers were hit by the insane barrage of bullets from the high capacity magazines carried in triplicate by each officer. The events began back in the early morning hours of December 10th, 2013, but questions about the massive show of police force have begun to mount in the community. Adrian Montesano had already crashed, and his vehicle remained pinned between a utility pole and a tree after an earlier police pursuit around 5:00 a.m. Dozens of officers aimed their M4 assault rifles, as well as high capacity handguns towards the from every angle, and for several minutes, they shot round after round into the unarmed suspects. Anthony Vandiver witnesses the assault from his house. He ran upstairs to watch the whole thing unfold, from a perfect, unobstructed view.“They said, ‘put your hands up!’ And the guys were still moving after they shot, like maybe 50-60 times,” Mr. Vandiver told CBS-4 Miami. “And the guys tried to put their hands up, and as soon as they put their hands up, it erupted again.” Read more: Counter Current News
Times are tough for America’s “color revolution” industry. Perfected in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, and honed during the so-called “Arab Spring,” the process of backing subversion in a targeted country and overthrowing a sitting government under the cover of staged mass protests appears to be finally at the end of running its course.
That is because the United States can no longer hide the fact that it is behind these protests and often, even hide their role in the armed elements that are brought in covertly to give targeted governments their final push out the door. Nations have learned to identify, expose, and resist this tactic, and like Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime’s tactic of Blitzkrieg or “lighting war,” once appropriate countermeasures are found, the effectiveness of lighting fast, overwhelming force be it military or political, is rendered impotent.
This was most recently observed in Armenia during the so-called “Electric Yerevan” protests – Yerevan being the capital of Armenia, and “electric” in reference to the alleged motivation of protesters – rising electric prices.
American-backed “color revolutions” always start out with a seemingly legitimate motivation, but soon quickly become political in nature, sidestepping many of the legitimate, practical demands first made, and focusing almost entirely on “regime change.” For the Armenian agitators leading the “Electric Yerevan,” they didn’t even make it that far and spent most of their initial momentum attempting to convince the world they were not just another US-backed mob.
The Stealth Coup
Nikol Pashinyan and his “Civic Contract” party are transparently US-backed. So many found it suspicious that he was the most prominent voice insisting that the “Electric Yerevan” was not political and by no means a US-backed movement.
“Even if you look at the ongoing processes through the microscope, you cannot see any foreign political or domestic political components in the demonstrations. People do not want electricity to grow in price. That’s all,” said Pashinyan. He said electric power is first of all a product: the Electric Networks sells it and the citizens buy it. “The protest actions should be considered as protection of consumers’ rights. Politics is nowhere near,” he said.
The appeal to create a human wall was made by opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan late on Tuesday as he urged all former and current MPs, scholars, show-biz representatives, lawyers, reporters, religious representatives and other public figures to visit the standoff site in order to ensure no force is applied against the protesters.
Other obvious ties between the protests, Pashinyan, and US-backed NGOs have been laid out by geopolitical analyst Andrew Korybko in his article, “‘Electric Yerevan’ is Sliding Out of Control.”
Despite these links, some have attempted to claim Pashinyan was merely an opportunist and that his US-backing, and attempts by US NGOs to manipulate the protests had little to do with the protests themselves. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Stealth Agitators
America’s next generation of “color revolutions” attempt to obfuscate all possible ties between themselves and their agitators in an attempt to take back the strategic initiative by maintaining maximum plausible deniability. But if one knows where to look, they will find that no amount of obfuscation and subterfuge can cover the links between the US State Department and its mobs.
The protests were the work of the “No To Plunder” group, led by lawyers and activists emanating from the US State Department National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, and Open Society-funded Armenian Young Lawyers Association (AYLA) and the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor Office who openly coordinated efforts with “No To Plunder” to pressure the government on a number of issues.
At least 2 members of AYLA, Ara Gharagyozyan and Arthur Kocharyan, were identified as core members of “No To Plunder.” AYLA’s news website “Iravaban” would list a number of young lawyers and activists attending one of its internship programs in 2014. Iravaban would also cover the protests in intricate detail from start to end, as well as report on activities AYLA and the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor Office undertook to support the protests.
A number of other pro-protest “news sites” included Hetq, which while it admits it is funded by convicted financial criminal George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, does not list the US NED as a sponsor – NED however does list Hetq. There is also Media.am, funded by USAID as well as the European Endowment for Democracy. All of this adds up to a large network of locally-based but foreign funded and directed media outlets that help add the illusion of consensus to disinformation spread regarding the protests.
Together with US-funded training programs indoctrinating students and training lawyers and activists in the finer arts of sedition, then allowing them to go off on their own to lead mobs, the US believes sufficient plausible deniability has been created to hide ties between themselves and protest leaders. Similar efforts have been made in both Hong Kong and more recently in Thailand, where overtly US-backed mobs have been replaced by students trained, then unleashed by US-proxies.
Despite this careful arrangement, the “Electric Yerevan” protests never reached critical mass. The reason for this is simple – they were suspected of being US-backed and the more overt US assets that would eventually need to move in to lead the protests were unable to, lest they confirmed that suspicion and undermined the entire effort. Without these more mainstream assets moving in and providing support, larger protests are logistically and politically impossible.
How to Shoot Down a Stealth Coup
Russia’s emerging media influence on the world stage played an essential role in unmasking and disrupting America’s efforts to destabilize and overthrow the government in Armenia. The ability to be one step ahead of the Western-narrative and expose the players before they even take to the stage, meant that people already knew what to look for.
When the protesters hit the streets, and as the protests dragged on, US NGOs and Western media reports supporting the protests confirmed initial Russian warnings. When clumsy, overt assets like Pashinyan began getting involved, there was little doubt that electrical prices, while a real point of contention, were being used as a means to create a larger, more disruptive, and ultimately dangerous attempt at foreign-backed regime change.
In the future, the government of Armenia should be careful about giving such points of contention for foreign interests to use in the first place – meaning that dedication to economic and social progress cannot be ignored, even if one is confident they can tamp down potential protests.
Other nations around the world have a lot to learn from how Russia disrupted this latest attempt by America to project power beyond its shores and disrupt the lives of a sovereign people thousands of miles away. By simply informing people of what is really going on, following the money, and exposing the players involved, people in Armenia were able to assess for themselves whether or not to support the mobs – they chose wisely not to. Were Armenia to adopt similar laws as Russia’s regarding NGOs – mandating that they declare openly and often their foreign funding – people can better assess whether or not mobs these NGOs are supporting are truly marching for their interests, or Wall Street and Washington’s.
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Bill Cosby’s daughter, Erinn, talks sexual assault by Mike Tyson; relationshop with father Greg Garrett 1992 Do you believe Erinn had any inkling of her father’s proclivities?
NANA’S COMMENTARY
This is so ironic. Erinn Cosby having a run in with Mike Tyson, accusing him of attempted rape. Her reaction to being assaulted by a well known celebrity is quite poignant. She admits her mental state and her use of drugs, but does seems to be a bit guarded in her words.
It’s the world of Sports/Entertainment. Wine, Women, Drugs and Sex. Now looking at the current allegations against Bill Cosby, why on God’s Green Earth would Cosby upset the apple cart when his own apple cart was full of worms. So, to keep all things “in the family” Cosby didn’t bring his daughters accusations against Mike Tyson out into the public eye but suggested getting help for Mike Tyson. See video below.
Imagine how much courage it would have given the women who have accused Cosby from that era to come out against him if he attacked Mike Tyson? Imagine the outrage they would have felt if they saw him moralizing against something that he has been “allegedly” doing himself?
So, yeah, in the police force, they call it the Blue Line, where they protect one another. I don’t know what they call it in Sports/Entertainment/Politics but many scandals are swept right under the rug, and the bigger they are as celebrities the quick and easy fix is in, automatically. And then again, there comes that time when, for whatever reason, known or unknown, the “fix” don’t work no more. What I truly like about this video is how it shows a woman who has been violated and the many nuances of that and its impact on her as a human being. It shows her fears, confusion, need to be supported by her family, and the pressure of the society to bring to the fore something about a “big, powerful” man who has a lot of fans and backing. Who would believe her? Did she get paid to tell or did she get paid to shut up? The scrutiny that a woman would be subjected to; i.e., doubts and innuendos about her character, family relations, mental state, academic history, etc. all play a role in shaping the reaction of any woman in the position of being violated by a “popular” man or any man for that matter..
This is so incredibly ironic some 23 years later….. with Cosby “Himself” being exposed.
I don’t agree with all that he says, but he really does have some strong points.
When I was in college I had a dynamic Professor and she would talk about stuff like this in terms of how we are kinda mixed up on what we perceive as what we want in a male partner, etc., etc., She really made me think about myself as a mother, wife and sister and how we actually do enable our men on too many levels in our efforts to make them be”???” She said that because we knew that the Slave master was frightened of the power and strength of black men, in order to protect them, women would coddle their boys. These coddled boys became men who were literally dis-empowered and ineffective when it came to forming healthy partnerships. One of the things that is so important to note is that without a societal construct that supports the male/female and familial construct and without the societal expectations matching, Black men are literally thrust into a whirlwind of inconsistencies and incongruities because it just don’t match up.
I don’t think that traditional matriarchal societies are non-supportive of the male energy. I think that traditional matriarchal societies recognize the role and purpose of both males and females and honor both, but because every one is born through/from a female, like the earth produces, the woman brings forth, so in that vein she has respectability and is highly regarded. This expands and expresses itself through the way that matriarchal society folks take care of the land, animals and nature overall. Women farm and men are taught to cook, sew, and various other crafts. There’s no stigma attached to a man being able to cook, clean, sew, etc. But men hunt, protect and provide for their family’s security. Women run the market place. Men are the political leaders; in general but even here there is a sharing of responsibilities considering what is needed.
Often times, matriarchal societies include the concept of the extended family, community, village, clan, etc. So the support system is there. When Africans were enslaved, they were thrusted into a totally alien environment, with different morals, preceps, values and lifestyle. That in and of itself caused mental distortions of various degrees, Post Traumatic Slave Disorder, if you will.
I think that it’s the western world’s ideology and dominion over lifestyle and it’s definition of what male/female relationships should look like; what family structures should look like, that is perpetuated across the relationship/familial landscape and even they know the model doesn’t work or is ineffective, hence the high rate of divorce and broken families in the Western Patriarchal world.
I think that there is a middle ground, where mutual responsibility for the cultivation, sustenance and maintenance of a society can be shared by all involved. That with mutual respect and understanding and allowing individuals to reach their fullest potential with an air of cooperation; healthy relationships across the spectrum of human interactions can be achieved. I believe that no extremes are good and that there is something to learn from a comparative study of the matriarchal and patriarchal constructs, but with all historical indicators considered and not in a vacuum and certainly not using the present day dysfunctional societies as a yardstick.
Racist Killing Fields in the U.S.: The Death of Sandra Bland
Posted on Jul 23, 2015
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout
Sandra Bland, 28 years old On July 9, soon after Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, moved to Texas from Naperville, Illinois, to take a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, she was pulled over by the police for failing to signal while making a lane change. What followed has become all too common and illustrates the ever-increasing rise in domestic terrorism in the United States. She was pulled out of the car by the police for allegedly becoming combative, and was pinned to the ground by two officers. A video obtained by ABC 7 of Bland’s arrest “doesn’t appear to show Bland being combative with officers but does show two officers on top of Bland.”
A witness reported that “he saw the arresting officer pull Bland out of the car, throw her to the ground and put his knee on her neck while he arrested her.” In the video, Bland can be heard questioning the officers’ methods of restraint. She says: “You just slammed my head to the ground. Do you not even care about that? I can’t even hear.” She was then arrested for assaulting an officer, a third-degree felony, and interned at the Waller County, Texas, jail. On July 13, she was found dead in her cell. Quite unbelievably, the police reported that she took her own life, and the Waller County Jail is trying to rule her death a suicide. Friends and family say that this scenario is inconceivable, given what they know about Sandra: She was a young woman starting a new job, who was eagerly looking forward to her future.
Sandra Bland was an outspoken civil rights activist critical of police brutality. She often posted videos in which she talked about important civil rights issues, and once stated: “I’m here to change history. If we want a change we can really truly make it happen.”
Sandra Bland’s family and friends believe that foul play was involved in her death, and rightly so. Their belief is bolstered by the fact that the head sheriff of Waller County, Glenn Smith, who made the first public comments about Bland’s in-custody death, was suspended for documented cases of racism when he was chief of police in Hempstead, Texas, in 2007. After serving his suspension, more complaints of racism came in, and Smith was actually fired as chief of police in Hempstead.” Bland’s death over a routine traffic stop is beyond monstrous. It is indicative of a country where extreme violence is the norm – a society fed by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the incarceration state, the drug wars and the increasing militarization of everything, including the war on Black youth. There is more at stake here than the fact that, as federal statistics indicate, the police are “31 percent more likely to pull over a Black driver than a white driver”: Routine traffic stops for Black drivers contain the real possibility of turning deadly. This regular violence propels a deeply racist and militarized society. It is a violence that turns on young people and adults alike who are considered disposable. This type of harassment is integral to a form of domestic terrorism in which Black people are routinely beaten, arrested, incarcerated and too often killed. This is the new totalitarianism of the boot-in-your-face racism, one in which the punishing state is the central institution for both controlling poor people of color and enforcing the rules of the financial elite. How much longer can this war on youth go on?
CONFIRMED: Dashcam Video of Sandra Bland’s Violent Arrest was Indeed Edited Read more at
The United States has become a country that is proud of what is should be ashamed of. How else to explain the popularity of the racist and bigot, Donald Trump, among the Republican Party’s right-wing base? We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system. Markets and power are immune to justice, and despise it. All that matters is that control – financial and political – serves soulless markets and the Darwinian culture of cruelty. How many more young people are going to be killed for walking in the street, failing to signal a lane shift, looking a police officer in the eye, or playing with a toy gun? How many more names of Black men, women and young people will join the list of those whose deaths have sparked widespread protests: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones and Sakia Gunn, among many others – and now, Sandra Bland. Is it any wonder that one funeral director in Chicago stated that “young people in the city do not expect to live late into their adult life”? Moreover, police violence in the United States is not only a direct manifestation of state violence, but also serves as a gateway to prison, especially for people of color and the poor.
Yet, the mainstream media is more infatuated with game shows, financial brutishness, celebrities and the idiocy of Donald Trump than they are concerned about the endless violence waged against poor children of color in the United States. This violence speaks clearly to a society that no longer wants to invest in its youth. And if one measure of a democratic society is how it treats young people, the United States has failed miserably.
The form that the “war on terror” has taken at home is a war on poor people of color, especially Black people. Racism and police militarization have created a new kind of terrorism, one in which extreme violence is being used against Black people for the most trivial of infractions. The killing of Black youth by the police – a norm that stretches back, in an unbroken line of terror, to slavery – takes the form of both routine affair and spectacle. Nowadays, acts of domestic terrorism perpetrated by police take place increasingly in full view of the US public, who more and more are witnessing such lawlessness after it is recorded and uploaded onto the internet by bystanders. New technologies now enable individuals to record such violence in real time and make it a matter of public record. While this public display of the deployment domestic terrorism is undeniably crucial, in that it makes visible the depravity of state violence, these images are sometimes co-opted by the mass media, commodified, and disseminated in ways that can exploit – and even attempt to erase – Black lives, as William C. Anderson argues.
In the current environment, racial violence is so commonplace that when it is perpetrated by the police against innocent people, justice is not measured by holding those who commit the violence accountable. The official measure of justice is simply that the presence of violence be noted, by the authorities and the mainstream media. Few of the most powerful people seem distraught by the ongoing shootings, beatings, and killings of African-Americans in a society in which a Black man is killed every 28 hours in the US by police, vigilantes or security guards.
In a country in which militarism is viewed as an ideal and the police and soldiers are treated like heroes, violence becomes the primary modality for solving problems. One consequence is that state violence is either ignored, rendered trivial or shamelessly legitimated in the name of the law, security or self-defense. State violence fueled by the merging of the war on terror, the militarization of all aspects of society, and a deep-seated, ruthless and unapologetic racism is now ubiquitous and should be labeled as a form of domestic terrorism. Terrorism, torture and state violence are no longer simply part of our history; they have become the nervous system of an increasingly authoritarian state. Eric Garner told the police as he was being choked to death that he could not breathe. His words also apply to democracy itself, which is lacking the civic oxygen that gives it life. The United States is a place where democracy cannot breathe.
This authoritarianism fueled by the mainstream press, which seems especially interested in stories in which it can (wrongfully) frame victims as assailants, as in the case of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, but is less interested when the old stereotypes about crime and Black culture cannot be invoked. When dominant forces cannot figure out a way to label victims of police violence “thugs” – consider the case of Tamir Rice, who was only 12 years old when shot to death by a policeman who in his previous police assignment in another city was labeled as “unstable” – such acts of state terrorism often fade out of the mainstream view.
Why was there not a more sustained and mainstream public outcry over the case of Kalief Browder, a young Black man who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island for than a one thousand days – two years of that time in solitary confinement – waiting for a trial that never happened? Shortly after being released he committed suicide. Would this have happened if he were white, middle class and had access to a lawyer? How is what happened to him parallel to the egregious torture inflicted on innocent children at Abu Ghraib prison?
Not surprisingly, the discourse of “terrorism” once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to commit violence against the government – but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own citizens. What needs to be recognized, as Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out, is that the killing of unarmed African Americans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance against a war on Black youth that is being waged on US soil. The call for police “reform,” echoed throughout the dominant media, is meaningless. We need to change a system steeped in violence, racism, economic corruption and institutional rot. We don’t need revenge, we need justice – and that means structural change.
Ending police misconduct is certainly acceptable as short-term goal to save lives, but if we are going to prevent the United States from becoming a full-fledged police state serving the interests of the rich who ensconce themselves in their gated and guarded communities, the vicious neoliberal financial and police state has to be dismantled. Such resistance has taken shape with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with youth movements such as the Black Youth Project, Million Hoodies, We Charge Genocide and other groups.
A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the flood of intolerable police and state violence. Millions of people are being locked up, jailed, beaten, harassed and violated by the police and other security forces, simply because they are Black, Brown, young and/or poor, and therefore viewed as disposable. Black youth are safe neither in their own neighborhoods nor on public streets, highways, schools – or any other areas in which the police can be found.
You know, they say follow your dreams pursue your dreams, live your dreams and all that other jazz and stuff and all.
Sometimes dreams are simply on another timeline, in another cycle, to be actualized in another reality. I guess what we have to do is determine, what cycle the dream is in and whether or not it can be made to align within the cycle where we become aware of it.
In other words, “Voices Of Africa” Choral and Percussion Ensemble was my dream. A dream of having a family of performing artists who were gifted and talented and well rounded, working in harmony and striving to do something great to impact and change the world we live in.
When I think about it now… I shift from pain to joy, from joy to pain.. as it was the most amazingly joyful experience as well as the most amazingly painful one.
My dream was to do it, and do it well, through the vehicle of African music, children’s songs, dance and fun! We traveled all over the country and we even went to Ghana, and the UK!! We saw many members come and go, but the strong survived, me and my two daughters. We went through marriages and babies and college and jobs and relocations and you name we did it. We were even stranded in Iowa on that fateful day in Sept. 11, 2001.
We navigated through losses and gains and not only in poundage. We did it and yet, it was painful.. on many levels that I could not understand and did not understand until recently.. I would say, just a couple of years ago.
It was a dream that only I had.. it was a dream that only held meaning on an intrinsic level to me. It was my desire to be a “Partridge Family” on the black hand side! Ha, those young folks who were with me, knew nothing of the Partridge Family, nor did they care about them, besides, who said so anyway?? It was my desire to create a family musical group to overshadow my own feelings of abandonment from my own family and the feeling of loss from my one living parent and my one missing parent. The Isolation I felt growing up as a child was hard to bear, yet I wonder if my push to be something that my children could not relate to caused them the same feelings of isolation.
This dream turned out to be more than I would have ever envisioned as it required all the trappings of a bonafide business enterprise. None of that was displayed in the Partridge family series. It required economic stamina in an climate of rises and falls that devastated our audiences and potential venues.
It required the ability to compete with other organizations, groups, clubs and families who had done this for a much longer period of time, but who also faced the same challenges which made our playing field very narrow and overly competitive. It required the comfort of working with your Mom, who was embarrassing at the tender age she place you on the stage. But more than anything, it require, forgetting, getting over, and even forgiving the many inordinances that occurred between the family members before they hit “the big stage.” And that is where the rocky ground made everything else even more difficult to overcome.
At this point in the cycle, I wonder, if I knew then what I know now, if I would have realized that this dream would turn out to be a nightmare because it simply was not in alignment with the reality we, me and my daughters (all members of VOA, whether genetically or not) lived in day to day. Our struggle before, behind and back stage as Mom and daughters was not resolved, concluded or even clear, as it was most transparent for others to see.
We came here to this life time, with some kind of “joint” purpose, whatever that was, it was never conjoined, and my struggle to hold it together while it fell apart around me, really had to do with not knowing what parts to hold on to and what parts to let go. Again, I wonder, if I would have decided to do everything, differently, and follow a totally different course if I was aware of the major road blocks that were preventing this dream of an All Female African American West African Percussion Cultural Music Group from coming true.
I guess I should be fair and say that parts of it did. I should also add that parts of it that I never dreamed of came true as well. But all in all, as I look at this picture, I can’t help but wonder.. what would I have done differently, if I knew then, what I know now. For some reason that truth was blocked or guarded as if something outside of myself wanted me to do it anyway, no matter the obstacles. At least I have a hell of a resume’ as a result of it; with so many Self taught skills I gained over the 25 years of active duty. I am sure that there were so many blessings that came from this experience and all in all, it was memorable.
I still can’t help but wonder.
The “Voices Of Africa” Choral & Percussion Ensemble
Sisterspace, 2008
My dream is not dead.
It is happily, naturally,
Taking place on another time line
That I can be assured of as I move
Forward into my later years on this planet Cause I Still Got It!!!!!
The murders in Charleston South Carolina have ripped the scab of US history off and laid bare the festering sores and oozing puss of the consciousness and psychopathology of white supremacy for the entire world to see. That dastardly act exposed the real America. With that act one of the symbols of white supremacy, the Confederate battle flag that flies over the capital of South Carolina has come under increased scrutiny. The rebel flag has long been a bone of contention and conflict between Africans in America and whites. For Black people, the flag represents one aspect of racial oppression, slavery, terrorism, murder and injustice. I say one aspect because on many occasions US terrorists like the Klu Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils also used the American flag as their rallying symbol! From an accurate historical perspective, the Confederate battle flag is not the flag flown by the original Confederate States of America, the first seven states that separated from the Union: South Carolina (the first state to secede), Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Georgia. Later, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia withdrew from the Union and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy had several flags during its brief existence. The flag known as the rebel flag or the Confederate battle flag was not one of the series of Confederate flags adopted by the Confederate States of America. That battle flag was originally the flag of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia! The rebel flag that flies over the South Carolina State capital was not an official symbol of the Confederate States of America! It became the symbol Southern resistance to the anti-apartheid movement also called “integration” during the twentieth century. In recent years especially during the “Civil Rights” movement, that flag came to represent a consciousness of racial apartheid and animus, political subjugation, socio-economic caste and psychological terror. South Carolina US Senator Strom Thurman popularized that flag when he ran as a presidential candidate in 1948 as a Dixiecrat. During this time the Democrats controlled the South.
It wasn’t until Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Southern whites abandoned the Democratic Party in mass and switched Republican. So in actuality the rebel flag is a modern symbol of white supremacy. Now in light of the Charleston killings, defenders of that ethos are trying to obfuscate and revise American history. They are attempting to deflect the truth about the real meaning of the rebel flag. Since the killings I have read and seen articles and posts on YouTube claiming the War Between the States was not about slavery, that it was about “states rights”, tariffs and finance, that the rebel flag is merely a symbol of family history, tradition and regional pride! There were posts about Blacks owning slaves and African chiefs selling other Africans into slavery; anything to take the onus off of whites to prevent us from seeing not only the individual atrocities like Charleston South Carolina but the systemic holocausts white supremacy has wrought not only here in this country but around the world! If there was ever any doubt about whether slavery was the central issue in the War Between the States, I’ve included a picture of a one hundred dollar bill from the Confederate States of America. Look at the images on the paper. This piece of evidence alone will reveal just how integral the institution of slavery was to the Confederate States of America and its economy. Yes there were issues of “states’ rights”, there were conflicting regional cultural practices and interests, differences in economic philosophy but never forget the fact both the North and South were united on racism and warmongering. Both the North and the South profited from slavery, it’s just the North’s economy was more diverse and did not depend mainly on agriculture as did the South. The Northern financial elites had a major grip on the flow of capital and more access to money than their Southern counterparts. If you look at Western and modern world history you find Europeans love war. There is rarely a year that goes by they are not fighting, killing and plundering somewhere, even today. So from my perspective the issues of tariffs, the fugitive slave act, the expansion of slavery into the territories were just excuses for them to do what they love to do best, kill and maim each other and people of color. Bloody Kansas between1853-1861 is an example where whites used violence to decide whether Kansas would be a “free” state or a “slave” State. Many define Bleeding Kansas as a precursor to the War Between the States. If that logic is correct then the War Between the States was about slavery! Remember slavery was enshrined in the original US Constitution. The original document that bound the former British colonies together was The Articles of Confederation. It said nothing about slavery from a policy standpoint and left it to the individual states to deal with the issue as they saw fit. But delegates to a convention called in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation conspired to created a totally new document that would enshrine their class as the ruling elite in the more centralized government they created! Since many of the delegates were slaveholders or profited from slavery in some form or other, slavery became a key issue in the new document called the Constitution of the Untied States of America.
“A final major issue involving slavery confronted the delegates. Southern states wanted other states to return escaped slaves. The Articles of Confederation had not guaranteed this. But when Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance, it a clause promising that slaves who escaped to the Northwest Territories would be returned to their owners. The delegates placed a similar fugitive slave clause in the Constitution. This was part of a deal with New England states. In exchange for the fugitive slave clause, the New England states got concessions on shipping and trade. These compromises on slavery had serious effects on the nation. The fugitive slave clause (enforced through legislation passed in 1793 and 1850) allowed escaped slaves to be chased into the North and caught. It also resulted in the illegal kidnapping and return to slavery of thousands of free blacks. The three-fifths compromise increased the South’s representation in Congress and the Electoral College. In 12 of the first 16 presidential elections, a Southern slave owner won. Extending the slave trade past 1800 brought many slaves to America. South Carolina alone imported 40,000 slaves between 1803 and 1808 (when Congress overwhelmingly voted to end the trade). So many slaves entered that slavery spilled into the Louisiana territory and took root.” The Constitution and Slavery http://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/the-constitution-and-sla… Slavery (both European and African) was the driving force in both the colonial and US economies. Slavery was woven into the fabric of the US Constitution making it the law of the land! The roots of what we see/saw in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, Ferguson Missouri, Baltimore Maryland and Charleston South Carolina recently go back to colonial America when the European monopoly trading companies and their administrators decided to augment their white slave labor force (indentured servants) with Africans. The profit motive “the top priority is the bottom line” of capitalism forged a brutal system that exploited the white bondsmen and African captives using them both as cheap labor. That tradition continued after the Revolutionary War and up until the War Between the States. White and Black resistance to the colonial administrators abuses (Beacon’s Rebellion and others) forced the colonial governors to make concessions to the poor whites/indentured servants so they would not side with Native Americans and Africans against the elites. They used divide and rule to undermine Black and White unity. They “freed” the indentured servants, allowed them to call themselves “white” then gave them a modicum of “rights”, privileges and mobility they denied Native Americans and Africans. Those divide and rule tactics have allowed the ruling elites to still remain in power and control from colonial times, through the transition to the United States to the present. This is why incidents like Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston happen! Don’t fall for the okey doke. The rebel flag is not the central issue. It is only a piece of material. The real issue is the consciousness and values behind it! As vile as what that flag represents is, taking it down is only a symbolic concession as long as the consciousness of white supremacy, white skin privilege and domination remain.
They Say That Promoting/Protecting or Approving of the Gay Lifestyle (agenda) Will……..
1. Make everybody go gay.
Where is the proof that if the gay lifestyle is accepted that it will turn everyone gay? If it is to say it is a choice then who would choose it once it’s acceptable but folks who already had the tendencies? Does every one carry the “gay” gene that can be activated the moment same sex marriages are lawful?
2. Cause mass genocide cause same sex folks can’t have children.
If it’s gonna cause mass genocide.. how come there are so many people in the world. 7 billion and…….. Here we have the genocide issue again. Come on there a plenty of openly gay folks in the black community who have children and grand children and great grand children.. Not to mention how many other folks have children. Even the “white” proponents of the gay lifestyle have children. Besides, if everyone turned gay, it would take centuries to wipe out the human race, because, seriously, every body ain’t straight gay, there are some bisexuals and some transsexuals who have children. There are sperm banks and plenty of donors. Unless men are gonna stop producing sperm, there will always be that slight chance of somebody somewhere getting pregnant.
counting? Is the fear that so many people will turn gay and stop making babies? Hmm, that’s interesting since many gay folks do have children and adopt children, and the birth rate is going down already for everyone except the “Mexicans” but seriously.. 7 billion people will just stop producing once same sex relationships are acceptable? That’s 7 billion people will all turn gay then lose their desire to procreate because they are gay?
3. It is an attack on the Black race cause it’s a norm for “them”.
Okay, I can see how racism, police brutality, poverty, poor education in black neighborhoods, disproportionate imprisonment, marginal hiring, discrimination, cessation of funding for programs that improve the life of Black Folk, slavery, lynching, etc. etc, etc. as an attack on the Black race, but how does someone being gay do it? How is accepting the gay life style comparable to any of the above mentioned? Better yet, explain how it does damage to the Black community in particular without any generalizations. Does it cause a kind of disease that only Gay people have? Does it make people become more criminal? Would it make more people want to bear arms (I had to throw that one in there). Are gay people more racist? Will police brutality be meeted out under the direction of “Gay” police officers? Just a few of my questions on this notion of an “attack on the Black Race.”
4. It is against God and His word!
Well, since I am not a biblical scholar, I am not going to touch that one with a 10 foot pole except to say, that a I heard about a lot of things that are written in the Bible that folks do not do today… And some take it so far as to threaten to “kill” them or themselves. Like I said, I am not a biblical scholar, but where does it say you can kill them or commit suicide over them in your “Holy Book”?
This whole paranoia about the Gay life style being acceptable and same sex marriages being the law of the land is so overrated. There are so many more pressing issues to concern ourselves with and be proactive about than to worry about, for lack of sounding cliche, what someone does in their bedroom, or who someone chooses to love or marry.
How about what people are doing to other people’s bedrooms, defiling their home, killing their women and children while lying innocently sleeping in their beds. Let’s look at the child trafficking and child pornography that is happening. Let’s look at how many children go missing every week! Let’s look up at our skies and down on the Earth that we are wreaking havoc with, let’s make the effort to be kind to one another, or at least do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
Again, this same sex distraction is so overrated and so full of fallacious fears and innuendos it’s hard to believe that it is getting so much attention with all else that is going on. But then again, maybe that is the real plan. Distract folks so they won’t think about looking into what is really happening on this Prison Planet Matrix called Earth.
On that note, I’m just saying. These arguments are very, very interesting.
Okay, I am probably gonna get some flack for this comment but…. I kinda see his point. If a government can give you dignity, it can take it away. I think he is saying that human dignity is not for sale or barter. That if people believe that their dignity is arbitrary, then anyone can deny it or determine it.
With the perception of knowing who you are, no matter what anyone says or does to you, you are assured within yourself than no one, can take your human dignity away from you. I have to say that that point to me is very powerful and may be missed because he is talking against marriage equality. I believe that is how Africans survived through slavery, that is how any oppressed people survive, i.e., the Muslims in the Middle East who are so outrageously demonized. They still hole their heads up high. I could site so many other examples but suffice it to say, human dignity is not an arbitrary construct of someone’s imagination that can be imposed on another, unless….. the other accepts it and thus gives up their personal power and self determination.
Once a person believes that someone else can take their human dignity away, they whither and die. Only the strong survive, despite the odds, and I think that is the real message of his statement.
No government, person place or thing should have that much power over how someone feels dignified. I understand how a system can attempt to belittle, downgrade, even demoralize another so called “inferior” but a man is as he thinketh. If he believes he has no dignity then no one can give it to him or take it away. He is simply unaware of who he is and therefore is susceptible to viewing himself through the lens of his oppressor.
I have always said that LGBT folks who want to get married should just do that without having to beg to be recognized by the government. There are various ways that it can be done, through contracts, notarized documents and various other steps that can be taken. There were and are always someone who will marry you, and if you can’t find that someone, marry yourself. There is always a way to get around it.
Societies have socialized and institutionalized marriage around the world. They see marriage as a communal act between those who marry and the community they belong to. Over time it has become a system of barter, protocols, laws, restrictions, politics and bellicose religious indictments. It seldom becomes a personal matter between persons but rather a socio-economic and political statement about what and who you are. Because human beings are socialized into believing they must be accepted by their communities, families, churches and other religious institutions, they go through the rituals that in some instances have nothing at all to do with how they feel on the inside. Marriages have gone from being partnerships and dedication to having property and the value, worth and status that comes with it. As a result, people want to be “acknowledge”. And in this case, do to the social construct of this Nation, the USA, they felt the need to make it to the Supreme Court with their case.
Actually, marriage is really an arbitrary situation that is deemed to exist between the people who are “married” and not necessarily something that has to be sanctioned by others. What I mean is that there are so many kinds of partnerships that have contributed to the making of families around the world. In fact, polygamy is a more natural construct than the ownership of another that happens in Western style marriages. The spiritual connection that folks feel towards one another is often shrouded in the external, “how to be” in a relationship that often what is truly happening between the souls of individuals gets lost because of the pressures of society. Some people never marry and live together as a devoted couple for years and years, helping and supporting and loving and even baring children together. Are their unions any more worthy than the ones that are “sanctioned” by the larger community? Just think, with all this marriage equality business folks can run out and spend more money on getting married when they could have very well saved that money to build a business together. And then after all that money is spent to please the onlookers, some of these self same marriages end in divorce. Why? Because they were sanctioned or was it because the true connection on the Soul level was “NOT” made and therefore there was no “glue-on” to hold it together to stand the test of time.
Supreme Court Justice Thomas may very well be married to a European woman and some may say that there was a time where he could not have been legally married to her, but does that or did that determine his love or devotion to her??? Obviously not. And I doubt if her being married to him diminished her dignity. Though I am guessing here, it still stands to reason that no one can tell you who you can love or not love, marry or not marry, or at least no one should have that kind of power over your life, and if they do, to me, there is something very wrong with this picture.
All too often people rely upon someone or something to acknowledge their worth and “dignity” instead of knowing who they are and that it matters not, who else knows it. I think the movie “The Green Mile” shows how a man can remained dignified, no matter how he is treated. He knew who he was and what powers he had, he sincerely knew where his heart was and that he was innocent, but he even went to the electric chair with dignity. I believe that is what Judge Thomas is saying. He may not realize it himself but he said it and it makes sense to me.
Clarence Thomasis one of the most conservative and one of the most controversial justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia gets a lot of attention, in part because his dissents of late have been hyperbolic and bombastic, but Justice Thomas rarely gets much attention. He deserves a lot more, and not in a good way. The 67-year old Georgia-born jurist who replaced – of all people, Thurgood Marshall – on the bench, offered a stunning statement in his dissent of the same-sex marriage case. “Perhaps recognizing that these cases do not actually involve liberty as it has been understood, the majority goes to great lengths to assert that its decision will advance the ‘dignity’ of same-sex couples,” Justice Thomas writes. “The flaw in that reasoning, of course, is that the Constitution contains no ‘dignity’ Clause, and even if it did, the government would be incapable of bestowing dignity.” “Human dignity has long been understood in this country to be innate. When the Framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. That vision is the foundation upon which this Nation was built.” OK, you’re probably thinking, this is nuts, and insensitive, but wait, there’s more. “The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.” Let’s do that again. “Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved.” Is he serious? Being property, being owned by another person, with absolutely no rights, subjected to violence and rape and starvation and whipping and all sorts of other indignities does not cause one to lose their dignity nor their humanity? Speaking personally, I have never been a slave, nor confined in an internment camp, but I can imagine how horrific that was. How is it possible that Justice Thomas cannot? And, as a gay man who married two years ago, almost to this day, I can without qualification state that my personal dignity was greatly affected – positively – upon becoming a legally married man. The exact moment my husband and I were pronounced married I was a changed person. My world changed, and yes, it had to do with legal acceptance and validation, and dignity. Something Justice Thomas, sadly, must not know anything about. Justice Thomas’ dissent is so vile and offensive, he’s actually right now the number two trending topic, right under #LoveWins:
With all this fear mongering and heavy handed responses to the event that happened in Charleston, SC, it makes you wonder over and over again, what is the hidden agenda? Race Riot?Civil War?Martial Law?Polarizing the American public? Discrediting Conspiracy Theorist who align this event with other false flags/hoaxes?$29 million pay out (off) the the victims’ families?Stricter Gun Control Laws?Exposure of Repubs White Supremacist supporters?Shifting the Balance of the Presidential candidacy towards the DEMS?Home grown terrorism and blame it on ISIS?More martial law?And on and on……
So……..
Let’s Talk About the Hypocrisy of Gun Control As a Solution
“The American Military Empire spent 20 billion dollars in training and weapons for the Iraqis. The Iraqis are using those weapons to fight ISIS. ISIS is also using weapons from the American Military Empire. The American Military-Industrial Complex is in the business of selling weapons of war, and they don’t care who to…………..”
The irony of all this is underneath it, this is disaster capitalism.
1. Black folks will buy more guns to protect themselves from whites 2.White folks will buy more guns to protect themselves from blacks 3. All folks fearful of new gun control laws will buy more guns before they make stricter laws about gun ownership 4. The threat of stricter laws just makes the manufacturers of guns even richer as they sell more guns to frightened people who feel they must stock up. So actually, events like this, police brutality, racism, poverty, fear and degradation actually impact on the stock markets and trading and boosts their assets and profits. Question: is this a stimulus package for the corporations and banksters that deal in weapons manufacturing? Is this a tactic to get more money out of the pockets of the consumer who has been virtually holding on to their cash, being more thrifty about purchases and using better budgetary sense? When you think about this stuff and stretch your mind to the realm of “outside the box” you realize that the public is being played, but how and for what end seems to evade us. So like Dora says, “Let’s stop and think.” Who really benefits from all this? The average citizen or the corporations, banksters and globalists who have an agenda that for all intents and purposes is to forment chaos so that they can stay in power. I seriously don’t believe they want to take the guns from the American people. The argument that folks need to protect themselves from the Government Martial Law is whimsical in that seldom do you hear of a person being armed and stopping the police from invading their home or business establishment. And in those case, most often the armed person is taken down! I believe that they want everyone to HAVE guns, that way crimes of passion with a firearm can rise, people can be even more leary of their neighbors, domestic violence can sore, and children can accidentally kill their friends and family. But mostly, they can sell more guns, guns, and more guns……. Heck, they openly sell them to Rebel groups around the world, especially in the middle East and Africa, now the Ukraine, why not arm a restless, frightened, economically beaten down US citizenry? Makes sense?
Obama Sells Guns; Lots of Guns
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2012/08/obama-sells-guns-lots-of-guns.html Excerpt: “When an incumbent president seeking a second term has already put two people on the nine-member Supreme Court who would vote away this basic human freedom [Second Amendment gun rights], they have the right to be fearful. And when you realize that, if reelected, that incumbent president would have a good chance of getting a few more Supreme Court picks, and so could reshape the high court for decades, people have a right to be motivated to buy firearms now. _Forbes”
11 Photos Of U.S. Weapons Used By ISIS — And Some Rockets From America’s Friends Excerpt: “Far less has been made of the captured weapons that are likely most useful to ISIS as the group continues its onslaught in parts of Syria and Iraq: the small arms like assault rifles and handguns that every soldier needs and regularly employs. “A U.S. Humvee might be good for the show, for propaganda, but what’s interesting is to know with what they actually fight,” said Damien Spleeters, a field researcher with Conflict Armament Research, a U.K.-based firm that tracks weapons in conflict zones. “Small arms are less sexy, but I believe they are very important.”
Armed with U.S. weapons, infamous militia beating ISIS
Excerpt: “The U.S. spent $20 billion training and arming the Iraqi army. Now many of its weapons are in the hands of these unchecked militiamen.
But with the Iraqi army in disarray, they have the best track record of defeating ISIS in central Iraq. The villages around Al Muqdadiyah are battle scarred and the local people have all fled. The battle for Al Muqdadiyah lasted four days, and when ISIS was finally defeated its fighters fled over hills where they’ve now regrouped.”
US War on ISIS a Trojan Horse
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2015/03/us-war-on-isis-trojan-horse.html Excerpt: “Few would believe if one told them then, that in 2015, that same discredited US would be routinely bombing Syrian territory and poised to justify the raising of an entire army of terrorists to wage war within Syria’s borders, yet that is precisely what is happening. President Obama has announced plans to formally increase military force in Iraq and Syria “against ISIS,” but of course includes building up huge armies of “rebels” who by all other accounts are as bad as ISIS itself (not to mention prone to joining ISIS’ ranks by the thousands).
All it took for this miraculous turn in fortune was the creation of “ISIS,” and serial provocations committed by these Hollywood-style villains seemingly engineered to reinvigorate America’s justification to militarily intervene more directly in a war it itself started in Syria beginning in 2011.
ISIS could not be a more effective part of America’s plans to overthrow the Syrian government and destroy the Syrian state if it had an office at the Pentagon.
Having failed to achieve any of its objectives in Syria, it inexplicably “invaded” Iraq, affording the US military a means of “easing into” the conflict by first confronting ISIS in Iraq, then following them back across the border into Syria. When this scheme began to lose its impact on public perception, ISIS first started executing Western hostages including several Americans. When the US needed the French on board, ISIS executed a Frenchman. When the US needed greater support in Asia, two Japanese were beheaded. And just ahead of President Obama’s recent attempt to formally authorize the use of military force against “ISIS,” a Jordanian pilot was apparently burned to death in a cage in an unprecedented act of barbarity that shocked even the most apathetic.”
Necessity is what has driven the technology revolution existing today. Many of the products and programs released from the IT sector are a result of the innovators looking at the problems faced by contemporary society and then making a product that solves these problems. Eric Hamilton (pictured) is such an innovator who looked at the increased demand for connectivity in the modern world and came up with a device to link mobile power with television accessibility. In his own words Hamilton said, “I wanted to create something that could unlock the power of the cellphone so that you can use it with your television or for gaming without having to add to your current billing plan.”
Mr. Hamilton is not a new-comer to the IT world, the Detroit-born tech whiz has over 25 years experience in the IT field. He has worked for Netscape and Yahoo! as well as co-founded Around The Way App which ran on Google and was downloaded more than 30,000 times within six months of its launch.
Like with many developers, Hamilton first conceived his latest idea but had a challenge with developing the device.
He consulted a senior marketer who advised him to build the device himself since he could not find its equivalent in the market. Hamilton searched for a company that could make one for him, and it’s from his collaboration with a Chinese firm that Tinystic was born.
The device is the size of a flash drive and uses Airplay and Miracast technology to access your phone and connect it to a screen. It can also access a mouse and keyboard via Bluetooth and is currently accessible on the Android platform.
There are other products that are competing with Tinystic such as the Atrix Lap Doc from Motorola and the Chromecast from Google.
Hamilton has done this venture by himself, having left his partners with whom he had worked on Around the Way App. He is attempting to raise capital for his new product through crowdfunding and has raised $19,000 so far.
Tinystic has sold at least 700 units since December. Another product that Hamilton is working on is the TinyTV which will be used to convert a cellphone into a TV screen. The product is expected to be ready for launch in 2016
Currently, Hamilton resides in New York City. He has a degree from Michigan State University and hopes that his new product will create more jobs for people in Detroit.
The Truth About Black Religion and Spirituality and The Lies of Christianity, Islam
Dr. Umar Johnson, Revolutionary Psychologist
Dr. Umar Johnson, made some really good points particularly when it relates to spirituality. Having gone thru Christianity to Islam to African traditional spiritual belief systems. Clearly, they do entail a great deal of the culture from which they are derived or shall I say controlled by. I have a few points to add.
1. The yin/yang principle is within every one of us, having been born from both a male and female conjugal relationship. Each person has a male principal and female principle within them. Therefore, we are a manifestation of the “whole” in and of ourselves. Gender is a construct but not applicable in the spirit realm, that is, a person may be born with the physicality of a male, but have a strong principal within of a female and the same can apply to a female. Here is where my departure comes as it relates to his statement about homosexuality. All too often, the spiritual nature of same sex relationships is packaged in disdain, hatred, and much confusion as to its purpose and nature. If he reads, studies or observes Malidoma Some’s work he will find that there is a deeper, often hidden purpose for this than is commonly acknowledge. Dr. Some is from Dagara people of Upper Volta in West Africa. In Dr. Some’s culture the homosexual is held in high esteem and are called Gatekeepers.
2. Expanding on my above comment I would also include that in traditional African spirituality, particularly among those who have not been influenced by Western taboos, you will find the notion of re-incarnation. It is believed that we re-incarnate as male or female. With that being said, we may present more closely to our most previous gender in our present life time as we navigate through the sexes. The idea is to experience “spirit” through the physical. In order to do so, we come as male or female through our lifetimes and that in and of itself may have us gravitate to a person of the same sex whom we knew and loved in a past life. There is no so-called gender construct in the spirit realm only as it manifests in 3rd dimensional reality. African spirituality is keenly aware of this, that is, how, a person who is part of the Yoruba/Ifa spiritual system can have an opposite or same sex Orisha as their patron. The male may find himself very intrigued by the female principal of a particular Female Orisha and appear to be “effeminate” but the reality is that the female energy is very strong within him. The opposite is true with women.
3. One point of departure for the Ancients particularly in reference to the Khemetian Spiritual Science; like many other religions that we are familiar with today, it was kept from the masses and only the “Royals”, the Priests and Priestesses were initiated into it. They were set apart from the masses and often revered as God incarnated and here we see the objectification of the God source to something outside of the individual. The separation between the haves and the have-nots was profound and the magic, spiritual practices, etc. were delegated to the royal blood lines, and priests. This carried over into the more modern religions of our time. But even if you look at Ancient China, Mesopotamia, India, and other ancient cultures the same is true. Some how the idea of controlling and manipulating the masses became prevalent for political, social and economic reasons and this system was primarily responsible for the civilizations to thrive. That is not to say they wouldn’t have done so without this separation, but in doing so, the element of controlling the masses for gains of the few was much more manageable. So, when we speak of Empire we must be fair in our delineation of exactly what that meant then and what it means now.
4. Finally, I would like to mention that modern constructs of traditional African spirituality has become more institutionalized and thus there is a chasm between the Knowledge of “God” and the actual imbibing with the God within. Because it has become another tool of control through rituals and sacrifice, those in these “systems” become imprisoned as do the others in institutionalized religious practices. that is, African traditional spirituality becomes the same bastion of mind control and manipulation as the other more popular “religions”. It has become an institution and like he mentioned, it has become a business. People have their finances scarfed from them under the guise of pleasing the Gods/Ancestors and are seldom lead to believe that they can achieve this without all the trappings, i.e., shrines, altars, sacrifices, etc.
We are all here to learn, evolve and develop and for the most part Dr. Umar is clearly on point, and even with admitting his own evolution and development, it is very refreshing to hear him mention that, if just for the sake of perspective.
Personally, I applaud Dr. Umar and his work. He is very intelligent and creative in his manner of educating us about the issues we face in this world as African descendant peoples.
Continue in your work, Dr. Umar, you are a blessing for those who have ears to hear. Like he mentioned, there is no ONE AND ONLY WAY to connecting with the Divine within. In fact, the path may have many twists and turns, but if we remain vigilant we will succeed and the awakening will be all pervasive.
We Are The Change We Are Looking For! Ase’, Namaste
It was the dying cry of Charlton Heston in the creepy 1973 film Soylent Green… and it could
Starfish On The West Coast Are Losing Their Limbs And Turning Into Slime,resemble our desperate near future.
The ocean is dying, by all accounts – and if so, the food supply along with it. The causes are numerous, and overlapping. And massive numbers of wild animal populations are dying as a result of it.
Natural causes in the environment are partly to blame; so too are the corporations of man; the effects of Fukushima, unleashing untold levels of radiation into the ocean and onto Pacific shores; the cumulative effect of modern chemicals and agricultural waste tainting the water and disrupting reproduction.
A startling new report says in no uncertain terms that the Pacific Ocean off the California coast is turning into a desert. Once full of life, it is now becoming barren, and marine mammals, seabirds and fish are starving as a result. According to Ocean Health:
The waters of the Pacific off the coast of California are a clear, shimmering blue today, so transparent it’s possible to see the sandy bottom below […] clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into a desert, and the chain reaction that causes that bitter clarity is perhaps most obvious on the beaches of the Golden State, where thousands of emaciated sea lion pups are stranded.
[…]
Over the last three years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has noticed a growing number of strandings on the beaches of California and up into the Pacific north-west. In 2013, 1,171 sea lions were stranded, and 2,700 have already stranded in 2015 – a sign that something is seriously wrong, as pups don’t normally wind up on their own until later in the spring and early summer.
“[An unusually large number of sea lions stranding in 2013 was a red flag] there was a food availability problem even before the ocean got warm.” Johnson: This has never happened before… It’s incredible. It’s so unusual, and there’s no really good explanation for it. There’s also a good chance that the problem will continue, said a NOAA research scientist in climatology, Nate Mantua.
Experts blame a lack of food due to unusually warm ocean waters. NOAA declared an El Nino, the weather pattern that warms the Pacific, a few weeks ago. The water is three and a half to six degrees warmer than the average, according to Mantua, because of a lack of north wind on the West Coast. Ordinarily, the north wind drives the current, creating upwelling that brings forth the nutrients that feed the sardines, anchovies and other fish that adult sea lions feed on.
The warm water is likely pushing prime sea lion foods — market squid, sardines and anchovies — further north, forcing the mothers to abandon their pups for up to eight days at a time in search of sustenance.
The pups, scientists believe, are weaning themselves early out of desperation and setting out on their own despite being underweight and ill-prepared to hunt.
[…]
“These animals are coming in really desperate. They’re at the end of life. They’re in a crisis … and not all animals are going to make it,” said Keith A. Matassa, executive director at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, which is currently rehabilitating 115 sea lion pups.
In the storm debris littering a Washington State shoreline, Bonnie Wood saw something grisly: the mangled bodies of dozens of scraggly young seabirds. Walking half a mile along the beach at Twin Harbors State Park on Wednesday, Wood spotted more than 130 carcasses of juvenile Cassin’s auklets—the blue-footed, palm-size victims of what is becoming one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded. “It was so distressing,” recalled Wood, a volunteer who patrols Pacific Northwest beaches looking for dead or stranded birds. “They were just everywhere. Every ten yards we’d find another ten bodies of these sweet little things.”
“This is just massive, massive, unprecedented,” said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. “We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far.” (source)
100,000 doesn’t necessarily sound large, statistically speaking, but precedent in the history of recorded animal deaths suggests that it is, in fact massive. Even National Geographic is noting that these die off events are “unprecedented.” Warmer water is indicated for much of the starvation faced by many of the dead animals.
Last year, scientists sounded the alarm over the death of millions of star fish, blamed on warmer waters and ‘mystery virus’:
Starfish are dying by the millions up and down the West Coast, leading scientists to warn of the possibility of localized extinction of some species. As the disease spreads, researchers may be zeroing in on a link between warming waters and the rising starfish body count. (source)
The epidemic, which threatens to reshape the coastal food web and change the makeup of tide pools for years to come, appears to be driven by a previously unidentified virus, a team of more than a dozen researchers from Cornell University, UC Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and other institutions reported Monday. (source)
Changing temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, driven by the natural cycle of gyres over decades, shifts wildlife populations, decimating the populations of species throughout the food chain, proving how fragile the balance of life in the ocean really is.
Commercial fishing for sardines off of Canada’s West Coast is worth an estimated $32 million – but now they are suddenly gone. Back in October, fisherman reported that they came back empty-handed without a single fish after 12 hours of trolling and some $1000 spent on fuel.
Sandy Mazza, for the Daily Breeze, reported a similar phenomenon in central California: “[T]he fickle sardines have been so abundant for so many years – sometimes holding court as the most plentiful fish in coastal waters – that it was a shock when he couldn’t find one of the shiny silver-blue coastal fish all summer, even though this isn’t the first time they’ve vanished.” [emphasis added]
[…]
“Is it El Nino? Pacific Decadal Oscillation? [La] Nina? Long-term climate change? More marine mammals eating sardines? Did they all go to Mexico or farther offshore? We don’t know. We’re pretty sure the overall population has declined. We manage them pretty conservatively because we don’t want to end up with another Cannery Row so, as the population declines, we curb fishing.” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) official Kerry Griffin. (source)
According to a report in the Daily Mail, the worst events have wiped out 90% of animal populations, falling short of extinction, but creating a rupture in food chains and ecosystems.
And environmental factors are known to contribute, with pollution from chemicals dumped by factories clearly tied to at least 20% of the mass die off events of wildlife populations that have been investigated, and many die-offs implicated by a number of overlapping factors. The Daily Mail reported:
Mass die-offs of certain animals has increased in frequency every year for seven decades, according to a new study.
Researchers found that such events, which can kill more than 90 per cent of a population, are increasing among birds, fish and marine invertebrates.
The reasons for the die-offs are diverse, with effects tied to humans such as environmental contamination accounting for about a fifth of them.
Farm runoff from Big Agra introduces high levels of fertilizers and pesticides which create oxygen-starved dead zones which fish and aquatic live is killed off. Also present in agriculture waste are gender-bending chemicals like those found in Atrazine, used in staple crop production, and antibiotics and hormones, used in livestock production, which creates hazardous runoff for fish populations:
Livestock excrete natural hormones – estrogens and testosterones – as well as synthetic ones used to bolster their growth. Depending on concentrations and fish sensitivity, these hormones and hormone mimics might impair wild fish reproduction or skew their sex ratios. (source)
Pharmaceutical contaminants are also to blame for changing the sex of fish and disrupting population numbers, while a study found that the chemicals in Prozac changed the behavior of marine life, and made shrimp many times more likely to “commit suicide” and swim towards the light where they became easy prey.
Fish farms also introduce a large volume of antibiotic and chemical pollution into oceans and waterways:
The close quarters where farmed fish are raised (combined with their unnatural diets) means disease occurs often and can spread quickly. On fish farms, which are basically “CAFOs of the sea,” antibiotics are dispersed into the water, and sometimes injected directly into the fish.
Unfortunately, farmed fish are often raised in pens in the ocean, which means not only that pathogens can spread like wildfire and contaminate any wild fish swimming past – but the antibiotics can also spread to wild fish (via aquaculture and wastewater runoff) – and that’s exactly what recent research revealed. (source)
Mass die-offs of fish on the Brazilian coastline have linked to pollution from the dumping of raw sewage and garbage.
In the last few days it was reported that a massive die-off of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico was connected by researchers to BP’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill. Evidence was found in a third of the cases of lesions in the adrenal gland, an otherwise rare condition linked with petroleum exposure. More than a fifth of the dolphins also suffered bacterial pneumonia, causing deadly lung infection that is likewise rarely seen in dolphin populations.
In May 2015, protests began erupting in Skopje, Macedonia against the Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his government. The protests, led by Zoran Zaev, were allegedly in response to the massive spying and surveillance of Macedonian officials and other individuals as well as an alleged cover-up of a killing of a young man by police in 2011. The protests were largely focused on the issue of government corruption, with tens of thousands of people in the streets of Skopje, demanding the Prime Minister’s resignation as well as that of other members of his government.
A major protest occurred on May 5 and several other anti-government protests have taken place since then. While some protests have remained peaceful, there has been widespread violence from other demonstrations. On the May 5 protest alone, violent clashes took place between protesters and police with injuries taking place on both sides.
In the days that followed, several Macedonian ministers resigned from their posts, including the Interior Minister. Prime Minister Gruevski, however, has refused to resign, characterizing such a move as cowardly behavior.
On May 17, thousands of protesters once again descended upon the streets of Skopje to demand the ouster of the current government. On May 18, however, thousands more took to the streets to protest in support of the current government and Prime Minister Gruevski.
An anti-government, anti-Gruevski camp has been set up outside government offices and remains there indefinitely with several hundred inhabitants on average.
With such social unrest taking place in Macedonia, one need only look to the NATO/US and George Soros-funded networks to see the hidden hand of the Western Color Revolution apparatus at work.
Macedonia may at first seem an unlikely target of the Anglo-American color revolution apparatus, but the truth is that the small country is now the latest battleground in a proxy war between Russia and the West. Not only are the two sides competing for influence over the domestic affairs and political decisions of the Macedonian government, there is also the question of geopolitical positions and the agenda of the creation of micro-states and mini-states. Most notably, however, is the interest regarding the Balkan Stream pipeline (aka the Turkish Stream Pipeline).
George Soros, NATO, US Color Revolution Apparatus Behind the Unrest In Macedonia
George Soros is most well-known for playing a major role in the funding and facilitating of the “Bulldozer Revolution” in Serbia that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” of 2003, the 2006 push to move Turkey toward a more Islamist governing structure, and even the Occupy movement in the United States among a great many others – none of which brought anything other than greater misery, impoverishment, and police state mechanisms to bear on the general public. The Occupy movement, being the only exception, still brought nothing to its participants except the opportunity to burn off excess anger and energy along with a few cracked protester skulls. It was otherwise an incredible waste of time.
In addition, George Soros has been heavily involved in the social unrest and movement-wrecking activity that has taken place all across the United States in recent months. From Florida to Ferguson and then on to Baltimore, George Soros’ Foundations have been involved in making sure that not only are American citizens unable to overcome racial divisions with mutual cooperation but that even the racially isolated participants are unable to accomplish anything of substance.
In Macedonia, like in the United States, Soros organizations work under the pretense of left cover. In other words, Soros NGOs fund and operate organizations and movements that are seen as Left in nature but are, in reality, revolutionary organizations designed to push a political agenda, change Macedonian culture, install puppet regimes, and ultimately serve the purpose of the Anglo-American oligarchy.
George Soros’ most well-known NGO is the Open Society Institute, is highly active in Macedonia and itself works with a plethora of “civil society organizations” throughout the country that function as the OSI (and hence the West’s) tentacles in Macedonian society. This is what has prompted some in Macedonia to say in regards to Soros that “Soros came into Macedonia like a Trojan horse, and now he is an octopus.”
The OSI has been active in Macedonia for some time, with Vladimir Milcin heading the organization for nearly twenty years. Milcin was a former police informant in the days of Communism. Milcin was instrumental in ratting out a dissident actor Risto Siskov.
In America for the past many years, we have had a plethora of Soros-funded groups: MoveOn.org, Media Matters, the Center for American Progress, etc. Macedonia has its rough equivalents. But they mean more in Macedonia than the Soros-funded groups do in America. Back home, we have a zillion conservative groups to counter the Soros groups. The Left has its billionaires, we have ours. You hit me with Soros? Okay, I’ll hit you with a Koch or two. In Macedonia, I’m told, there is no tradition of donating money to a cause. There aren’t think tanks and activist groups and the rest on the right. So, the “Sorosoids” own the field.
While this may be a bit of an exaggeration – the Right clearly has its own agents of control and dissemination – it is clearly true that the Soros influence extends far beyond being able to drive public opinion through clever networking ideas Indeed, through a much tighter grasp upon media outlets themselves, Soros is vastly more influential in the way that news and events are reported than in other locations, even those located in Eastern Europe.
That being said, it should be pointed out that Macedonian news outlets like Telma and 24 Vesti are both major players in promoting the anti-government protests (in addition to other operations). Both of these outlets are funded by George Soros.
Indeed, even “opposition leader” Zoran Zaev is a notorious Soros-funded agent with close connections to the CIA. Not only Zaev, but his entire Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) party (the former Communist party) has been entirely taken over by the Soros machine. As Wayne Madsen writes,
Zaev and [Radmila] Sekerinska are said by Macedonian insiders to be nothing more than fronts for former Prime Minister and President Branko Crvenkovski who continues to head up the SDSM and accept large amounts of largesse from such CIA NGO laundry operations as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Freedom House, and Soros’s Open Society Institute (OSI) to foment a themed revolution against Gruevksi’s right-of-center VMRO-DPMNE government.
It is also a known fact that the OSI receives are large amount of money from the US State Department’s USAID.
Interestingly enough, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, has been charged by Macedonian intelligence of conspiring with Zaev of the SDSM.
Wayne Madsen further describes the role of Victoria Nuland by writing:
The unapologetic foul-mouthed Nuland met on the side of the 51st Munich Security Conference in Germany with Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki and President Gjorge Ivanov to express her displeasure at Gruevski’s insurrection charges against her friend Zaev and his SDSM co-conspirators. Earlier, Nuland had offered to mediate a long-standing dispute between Greece and Macedonia over the latter’s use of the name Macedonia, which some Greeks consider to be a solely Greek name. Macedonian observers viewed Nuland’s interest in the name dispute to be a trap that would enable a pro-U.S. government, along with the Zionist and global banker baggage that comes with any such «themed» coup d’etat, to seize power in Skopje. Nuland and her co-conspirators were hoping for a replay of Kiev in what can be termed «Kiev Version 2.0.»
Nuland and her co-conspirators in Skopje are alarmed over the speed at which the Macedonian security services rounded up the coup plotters. Macedonian police, in raids conducted in Skopje and Veles, seized five laptop computers, three desktop computers, 19 mobile phones, 100 CDs and DVDs, 17 hard disks, and 9 savings deposit books used by the coup plotters, including a number linked to Soros-financed NGOs. The bank accounts of the plotters reportedly were flush with healthy cash deposits from the CIA as the date of the planned coup approached.
The use of social media by the Soros/CIA coup plotters should come as no surprise. Social media served at the very core of the themed revolutions sponsored by the CIA and Soros twice in Ukraine (Orange Revolution and Euro-Maidan uprising), Jasmine Revolution (Tunisia), Lotus Revolution (Egypt), Rose Revolution (Georgia), Tulip Revolution (Kyrgyszstan), and Green Revolution (Iran). In the case of Macedonia, there are clear indications that the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) Thomas Melia, responsible for DRL’s work in Europe, including Russia, as well as the Middle East and North Africa, conspired directly with Zaev to mount a coup against the Gruevski government. Melia is the former deputy director of Freedom House, a Cold War-era neoconservative bevvy of U.S. war hawks based in New York. Although founded in 1941 by such progressives as Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, journalist Dorothy Thompson, novelist Rex Stout (creator of Nero Wolfe), and Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie (who would be considered by today’s Republicans in the U.S. as a stark-raving liberal), Freedom House has devolved into a neoconservative chatter source having employed as their board members in recent years such war hawk cretins as Paul Wolfowitz, Ken Adelman, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Donald Rumsfeld, and Otto Reich. Freedom House has been caught red-handed funneling CIA money to opposition groups in Iran, Sudan, Russia, and China. In essence, Freedom House, like Soros’s NGOs, serves as a conduit for CIA support for rebellious opposition forces in dozens of countries around the world, countries that now include Macedonia, as well as Hungary, Venezuela, Syria, Egypt, Serbia, Jordan, Mexico, and Cuba.
In addition, it has been reported by a number of media outlets, most notably the Russian and Macedonian press, that George Soros has tapped into the Canvas network, enlisting the organization to “help” in Macedonian protests.
According to Macedonia Online,
Canvas members have managed to get themselves permanently banned from ever entering Russia, but they are welcome in the Macedonian capital. Soros Open Society Institute and the CIA via its fronts (PNAC, NED, USAid) have hired Canvas to do work in Macedonia. Canvas issued a memo to Macedonian students (three weeks prior to protests) that they would award the two best protest ideas with $1,500.
The ideas were sent to Sonja Ismail, daughter of Guner Ismail, a popular SDSM member and official.
Macedonia Online further describes the Canvas organization by stating the following:
The gang pretending to be NGOs and trained to overthrow Governments and stage Coups around the world is paying $1,500 for ideas how to better organize demonstrations, reports Vecer.
That gang is Soros’ Open Society Institute, USAid (Front for the CIA) and the Forum Group (another Soros “NGO”). This group has already backed and financed not just the Macedonian opposition SDSM, but their activists & protests, dating back to 2011. Serbian based Canvas led by Srgja Popovic who specializes in demonstrations has been hired both by Soros and the CIA to “help” in Macedonia. Canvas has gained quite the notoriety. Namely, the UAE has listed Canvas in the same ranks as Al-Qaeda, it is the only non-muslim terrorist organization!
Canvas and Srgja Popovic were instrumental in bringing chaos to Ukraine (look at Ukraine today) and in removing Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak from power (look at Egypt now).
[…]
Canvas first earned its notoriety for bringing down Milosevic. But it didn’t stop there. Canvas was repeatedly hired by the CIA to organize protests in Gruzia, Moldavia, the Maldives, Lebanon, Egypt, Ukraine…. Canvas first appeared in Macedonia in 2009, when it became apparent the SDSM will be in opposition once again. The thug for hire himself Srgja Popovic was present in Ohrid to christen the opening of a “Canvas Academy” where future protesters and activists would be trained and be called upon when the time is right.
Who was the financier of this academy? USAID and Soros. Soros employees Gjuner Ismail and Sasho Ordanovski were the promoters.
“Students were paid and agrgresively trained on how to protest in December of 2014 and January of 2015. Srgja Popovic himself showed up and met with Zaev in March, April and early May 2015. On May 6th Canvas (SDSM) activists violently attacked policemen, injuring 38”, reported Vecer.
Canvas was heavily involved in the death of Russian opposition leader Nemtsov, just few days before the opposition protest. The goal was to destabilize the situation, create internal conflict. But most Russian saw through the orchestrated murder for what it was, an ordered hit. When one takes into account the wife of Canvas’ leader worked at Stratfor (another CIA front), then things become clear, says Vecer.
Prior to Canvas, Serbia had another group created by undercover NGOs. It was called “Otpor”, financed by Freedom House, another front for the CIA. Even the UN investigated Freedom House for their ties to the CIA. Members of Otpor have today joined the ranks of Canvas.
Macedonia Online only echoes a report written by Tony Cartalucci of Land Destroyer Report in 2011 entitled “CIA Coup-College,” where Cartalucci exposed Canvas by writing
After its success, Serbia’s Otpor would continue receiving funds from the West and become a “CIA-coup college” of sorts, under the name CANVAS, or “Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies.” It appears that after the Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement finished attending the US State Department funded confab in New York City in 2008, it would make a trip to visit CANVAS in 2009. From there, it took CANVAS’s “curriculum” and apparently their logo, and began assembling a US-funded mob in Egypt.
Amongst CANVAS’s current “partners” are the Albert Einstein Institution, Freedom House, and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The IRI includes amongst its board of directors John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Brent Scowcroft. When John McCain says “We should have seen this coming,” in regards to the unrest in Egypt, he obviously isn’t talking about himself since he helped make it happen.
[…]
A final note to consider is that CANVAS is on record in Foreign Policy magazine’s article “Revolution U,” assisting the “Rose Revolution” of Georgia, the “Orange Revolution” of the Ukraine, and is currently working with networks from Belarus, Myanmar (Burma) and 50 other countries. Taking a look at their activities and the overall globalist agenda, it is clear they are involved in regime change that will directly assist the globalists in their encirclement of Russia and China.
Who Wiretapped Whom?
While the justification for the protests has been presented as a wiretapping and surveillance scandal, there is a great deal of question as to who actually surveilled whom. For instance, while the Western and Soros-funded press is clear that the Macedonian government wiretapped the “opposition” and additional officials, other evidence suggests that it was the other way around and that the “opposition” actually wiretapped members of the Macedonian government.
For instance, as NPR has reported with the certainty of Macedonian government’s guilt,
The small Balkan country of Macedonia is in turmoil after it was revealed that the government wiretapped 20,000 people. . . . . On Sunday night, tens of thousands of people surrounded this building, demanding the resignation of Gruevski, the conservative who has run this country for the last nine years. They say Gruevski’s government has paid off judges, rigged votes and framed political opponents for crimes. A leftist opposition leader, Zoran Zaev, says it’s all on tape. He released 670,000 secretly recorded conversations from 20,000 Macedonian phone numbers. Shumanska says the government is spying on its own citizens.
But, as Wayne Madsen points out, the true nature of the wiretapping scandal may be more complicated than what is being presented in the Western media. In fact, it may have been the “opposition” who was responsible for the wiretapping to begin with. Madsen writes,
In response to Zaev’s charge that Gruevski wiretapped 20,000 Macedonians, including taping phone calls between Zaev and his young daughter, the Macedonian government charged that it was Zaev and his associates, working with a foreign intelligence agency believed to be the CIA, to overthrow Gruevski’s government. An obvious flight risk, Zaev was ordered to turn in his passport to the authorities. Others, in addition to Zaev, accused of working with the CIA to oust Gruevski include Zaev’s associates Sonja Verusevska and Branko Palifrov, as well as the former director of the Office of Security and Counter-intelligence (DBK), Zoran Verusevski. Gruevski charged that Zaev threatened to disclose sensitive information about his government provided to the SDSM by the CIA, referred to as “the bomb” in the Macedonian media, unless Gruevski appointed a caretaker government that would lead to early parliamentary elections. Gruevski has called Zaev’s gambit nothing more than blackmail pressure in order that a snap election be called. As far as pressuring the Gruevski government to resign and call early elections, Nuland resorted to the same gambit that was used in Kiev to oust Yanukovych.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reporter Michael Martens, who reported on the Macedonian coup plot, claimed in an interview with Macedonian television that his initial report on the wiretapping issue had been altered by certain parties inside Macedonia. Martens said that with a population of 2 million, to wiretap 20,000 people would have even far exceed the capabilities of the East German Stasi. In any event, Martens said the 20,000 figure was not true and that Macedonian media and politicians had misquoted him and his article. However, the truth has never been on the side of provocateurs like Nuland and her neoconservative cabal of plotters and disinformation specialists.
The Methods Of Color Revolution In Macedonia
Macedonia unfortunately finds itself in an ethnically and nationalistically susceptible state. Since its formation in 1991, Macedonia has found itself at odds with Greece and Bulgaria (two bordering states) over a naming and territorial controversy as well as with Kosovo, Serbia, and Albania (three other bordering states) in regards to “ethnic Albanians,” from whom a movement has emerged that often flirts with separation. While the Albanians are a minority in Macedonia, they are about 25% of the population according to some statistics, large enough to cause a stir when agitated. Because these Albanians mostly live near the Albania-Kosovo border, they can be tempted to push for a “greater Albania” on the same model as the Kurds inhabiting Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey push for a Kurdistan.
In addition, because of the firm grip that George Soros and his networks have on the Macedonian media, it is much easier to disseminate a certain viewpoint to the population than in a country with competing viewpoints. This is especially relevant when one considers that the total population of Macedonia is only about 2 million people, thus making the goal of reaching the majority of the population with that message a possibility that is all the more real.
Journalist and Geopolitical analyst, Andrew Korybko describes the situation on the ground inside Macedonia as ripe for a color revolution precisely because of these elements, also pointing out that
the ‘opposition’ was already boycotting the Parliament as it was, thereby creating the perfect social situation for a Color Revolution to took root and be ‘convincingly’ broadcast to outside audiences. All of these factors came together to create a situation that the West couldn’t’ resist destabilizing, if only for the fact that its demographics provide it with easily controllable variables to that make for a perfect Color Revolution test scenario.
The Reasons For The Color Revolution
While geopolitical positioning, geostrategic jostling, and the desire for political influence are most certainly reasons for the destabilization of the Macedonian government, the most acute issue regarding Macedonia is the question of the Balkan Stream Pipeline (aka the Turkish Stream Pipeline).
The Balkan Stream, of course, is a Russian restart of the South Stream Pipeline, which would have stretched from Russia through the Black Sea to Bulgaria to Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Austria. The oil and gas would then have been delivered to Europe. This project was abandoned after Bulgaria was bullied by the EU (and the United States) into reneging on its promise to participate.
The Balkan Stream is now a plan to take that Russian gas and oil from Russia and bring it through Turkey, into Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, and in to Austria. It will be a replacement for the South Stream pipeline and an alternate route to provide oil and gas to Europe, particularly now that the decision has been made to begin bypassing Ukraine in 2019.
Currently, Russia provides Europe with about 30% (or 1/3) of its energy. This provides not only the obvious benefits of profits and services to both countries but it also ensures that Russia has Europe over a barrel, the EU being dependent upon the oil and gas rich nation for a wide variety of energy sources. Thus, it ensures dependence upon Russia and thus better (theoretically) international conduct between the two countries if for no other reason than the EU would be hesitant to provoke Russia for fear of having its oil and gas cut off.
The US and NATO have been frantically trying to remove this leverage over Europe by attempting to sabotage oil pipelines in the Middle East that might benefit Iran in favor of oil deals that would benefit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf State feudal monarchies, all essentially satellites of the Anglo-American oligarchy. It is precisely why the US was so adamantly opposed to Bulgaria’s participation in the South Stream project.
As Andrew Korybko comments,
I think that the harsh reaction is definitely due to the fear that Russian influence in the Balkans can serve as the backdoor to soft influence over the rest of Europe. In reality, however, the completion of Balkan Stream would at the very least be a continuation of the existing state of affairs where Russia provides around 30% of the EU’s energy needs. Balkan Stream is basically a replacement for South Stream, which for its own part would have been a replacement for the Ukrainian-bypassing pipelines that will be phased out by 2019. The discomfiting fact that EU policy makers try to forget is that they can’t survive without Russian gas – it’s impossible. The EU and Russia are natural partners by virtue of their geography and history, and the completion of Balkan Stream will reinvigorate their positive bilateral relations.
The conflict, however, is that the US absolutely does not want this to happen since it understands that it would lessen its control over Europe, and consequently Eurasia. One needs only to reference former National Security Advisor and noted Polish-American geostrategic Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘The Grand Chessboard’ to see this explicitly stated. Therefore, the US wants to use its proxy EU elites to enforce pressure on whichever leader or country wants to build pragmatic relations with Russia, hence the current externally driven destabilization in Macedonia. The future of the Balkans runs through Macedonia, and the country is now the latest flashpoint of the New Cold War.
Of course, it is also important to point out that the question of the creation of “micro-states” and “mini states” on the Brzezinski model is, as always, readily present. This method is essentially both a strategy of tension and a goal of creating a world where previously united nations are reduced to petty impotent and squabbling pseudo-states incapable of standing up to any major government, corporation, or bank. Likewise, a planet of peoples who are incapable of viewing anything other than the convenient scapegoat given to them by the world oligarchy will be incapable of resisting the power and will of that oligarchy. In the absence of a fully formed “micro state,” the ability to use poorly drawn borders, ethnic conflicts, racial tension, and religious fundamentalism/antagonism provides this oligarchy with the ability to play national governments and their populations like a fiddle.
Macedonian Reception
The attempt to present the Macedonian color revolution as the legitimate will of the Macedonian people – as in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and others – can easily be disproven by talking with Macedonians. Unlike Western audiences, the Macedonian public is somewhat more hesitant to believe their billionaire owned media outlets.
If speaking with Macedonians is not convincing enough, one can simply witness the massive pro-government demonstrations now taking place in response to the anti-government protests. For instance, on May 18, tens of thousands of Macedonians marched in Skopje expressing support for Prime Minister Gruevski and the Macedonian government. These marches might not be interpreted as love for the government and its politicians so much as a response to the obvious color revolution apparatus at work inside their country. It is more of a statement of rejection of outside influence in Macedonian domestic affairs than support for the status quo.
Conclusion
The unrest taking place across Macedonia over the last few months and currently bringing tens of thousands of Macedonians out into the streets is the result of a the deployment of the Western-engineered color revolution apparatus designed to destabilize and overthrown the Macedonian government, who has agreed to work with Russia to build the Balkan Stream pipeline through the country. This color revolution, created and deployed by Western governments, NATO, and the Soros networks of NGOs, Foundations, and “civil society groups” is an attempt to remove any leverage Russia may have over the EU and to expand the hegemony of the world oligarchy.
We must support the Macedonian people in their resistance to this color revolution and oppose such illegal and unjust intervention here at home.
The Skies Above Me I am sitting beside a lake in Northern California and the sky is an open blue canvas as far to the left and right of me as I can see; but it is smeared with graffiti and it is the wrong shade of blue, dull and pale. Just few years ago it would have been turquoise from where I am sitting and only cumulus clouds might have hung low, seeming almost tangible behind the ridges on the other side of the lake. The rest of that open dome would have been nothing but solid aqua-blue, a shade that is almost beyond description. I fell in love with that sky when we came here to live nearly ten years ago, deeply, crazy in love. On February 14th, I sat in the front row at a conference on geoengineering at the 2015 AAAS meeting in San Jose, California. I watched a panel of scientists and one law professor each take his turn in a sort of performance that made no sense to me. On his way in, Alan Robock of Rutgers University went out of his way to say to a group of activists in front of the convention center, “I don’t know what you’re all protesting. It’s nothing but water vapor.” This is the man who, in 2008, wrote “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea”. During the conference he made it a point to say that the reason those of us in Northern California notice these trails so much more than other people and think they are a problem is because our sky is so blue. Dear Alan: Our sky was “so blue”. The trails you claim are nothing but water vapor are spreading out all over our sky and they’re not only dimming the sun but are completely changing its color to a silvery blue. What I’m struggling to understand is why people would go along with this. As I type, there are almost 20,000 signatures on a petition I wrote several months ago, and those people all see what isreally happening. Their comments are from the heart. They miss the sun. They miss their natural sky. Their children have breathing problems. For me, looking at this smeared mess over my head feels the same as when I am in a place of natural beauty and the rocks are sprayed with graffiti or there is trash on the ground. No matter what the words are or the wrapper that has been left behind, it says, “Disrespectful man was here.”
Who would invent a concept like deliberately spraying pollution into the sky? What kind of mind conceives an idea this horrible and says to someone, “Hey, we could intentionally pollute the sky and make fake clouds so that we can go on polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases for as long as we want. We could even control the weather!” What kind of people sit around the table in the planning room, nod their heads and reply, “Say, that’s a swell idea!”? Haven’t these people ever gone hiking? Have they ever paddled a canoe? Are they people who don’t know the silky feel of a baby’s hair beneath their fingertips? Are they people who don’t see the beauty in a child’s smile when he crosses a finish line and can still breathe? Or is the feeling of a paycheck being pressed into their palms the only thing that makes their heart race a little faster, or pulls their smile a little broader?
It is a beautiful plan, really. First, we were all programmed to think that only those who join the clubs, play for the team, fight for our country, or drink with the frat are “normal”. Those of us who crouched in the woods, dug in the dirt, collected pine cones, insects and objects other than shells on the beach were the weirdos. Most human beings attend ceremonies, follow traditions, perform rituals, stand in line, and fail to question because that is what has been expected of us all our lives. The television writes our script for existence in the modern world. The newscasters tell us only what they’re permitted to say, and we are programmed to blindly accept only that which is “officially” published by certain “credible” institutions or academic authors.
Sky Grafitti
Enter the word that separates the crowd: “Chemtrails”. It is pulled out like a hand puppet to create social exclusion. It manufactures instant division: the Us Team and the Them Team of the world’s skywatchers. The Us Team thinks what is being done to the sky is insanity. We are watching the trees die from chemicals and lack of full sunlight. Some of us are aware of the raspy laugh or hoarse-sounding cough that had its onset when the spraying started above us. For others, the health consequences have been worse.
The Them Team is a mystery to me. Were they forced to wear bow ties at private school somewhere, to stand in line just a little too quietly when they wanted to run around on the playground instead? When they were children, were they forced into submission by an overly stern parent? Or are they just plain insane? Who would do this to our planet or go along with doing it to the only Earth we have? Who would turn a blind eye to what is happening and instantly tack on the title “Chemtrailer” to every person who questions the blatant mess that is intentionally being created daily by jet aircraft? What kind of person would publish a children’s book, a movie, a photograph, or a computer game that subtly sells this concept by incorporating it into the artwork? Who are these people, and how in the name of God did I end up on the same planet with them?
Several times a day, I go out and walk the circumference of my above-ground swimming pool, looking for bumble bees to save from drowning in the water. Most of the time I scoop them up with my bare hands because they seem to somehow know I’m there to help. I place them as gently as I can onto the lavender plants and hope they can hear the others and recover. If they are faltering, I tell them they must try harder and I nudge them to flutter their wings so they will dry sooner. They are a gift. They are something the Them Team would not understand. They were something I overlooked most of my life until they disappeared. In the spring of 2013, only a couple of weeks after I saw the first group of jets spray an aerosol haze above my house, the bumble bees vanished. Every other insect on our property soon disappeared as well. By August of that year, the pool was devoid of insects and the porch light glowed moth-free, a ghostly reminder of what was being destroyed. I knew it was the trails. But I am just a “chemtrailer”. What do I know?
The Them Team has used their social exclusion tactics to draw a line in the sand so they can go on about the business of lying or denying. I think it’s some of both, and I think the people on that team have many different agendas. By pulling out the label and plastering it around, some of them get to stand on a tiny pedestal and do what I call The Academic Chuckle when they deem it appropriate. They get to publicly make fun of thousands of people who have eyes they trust and children they are concerned about. They get to destroy the world while pretending they’re saving it, and hundreds of people are going right along with them by not having the scrotal fortitude to stand up to them and their ready-made label. (Politicians are included in this long list of cowards.)
Geoengineering is happening. The government is manipulating the weather. Very wealthy people and corrupt corporations have a tremendous amount to gain from pushing California into a drought. Giant pharmaceutical companies are making millions on people with depressed immune systems and asthma. Welcome to America, everyone. Land of the oblivious, home of the cowardly. This is why the Them Team is getting away with it.
People want to be part of something. They don’t want to face social exclusion. They don’t want to be ridiculed. They don’t want to hear the Academic Chuckle and be on the wrong side of it. But there was a time when most of the world thought the earth was flat and people who thought it was round were laughed at, a time when Galileo was punished for his views on heliocentrism. Rachel Carson was publicly ridiculed when she warned of the dangers of DDT. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was scorned for his suggestion that doctors wash their hands in a sanitizing solution before delivering babies in order to prevent childbed fever; and Louis Pasteur’s ideas were met with skepticism. What aspect of the human mind makes it so resistant to new concepts, so unable to rise to the challenge of facing existing problems? How hard is it to look up at the sky and see what is happening? How hard is it to see that the trees are dying?
If I cared what other people thought, I wouldn’t be writing this. Oh, sure, we all do to an extent, but there are some of us who were just born to pour the poison Kool-Aid down the drain and say, “Not for me!” When I was four years old, I went to nursery school in a section of the First United Methodist Church, and I knew what was beyond the door in the baby room. It led into the rest of the building and ultimately to the church sanctuary. Every so often, my grandmother would drag me reluctantly to Sunday services and feed me pink mint candy to keep me quiet, so I remembered seeing the sanctuary with its silky blue cushions and looming stained-glass windows. I was determined to find my way to it. I convinced about four other kids to join the caper. We sneaked through the nursery room door and skipped through the dark warren of hallways until we came to the light, and we exploded with giggles in that lofty, enormous room. Without a congregation, it had a beautiful dreamlike quality and it never occurred to me that I was breaking a rule. I only knew that I was on adventure and we had reached our destination. The punishment turned out to be better than the crime itself, for we were sentenced to help prepare lunches in the deepest, darkest part of the church with Mrs. Brezina for a week straight. She was the kindest jailer imaginable and her kitchen was tucked into a forgotten grotto that was as interesting as it was neglected.
Those of us who recruit others to sneak off to find a beautiful place that resides in our memory are the kinds of people who don’t join clubs. We follow only rules that matter and we step out of line. Out of curiosity we play with the water squirter in the dentist chair when nobody is looking. We think for ourselves. We became accustomed long ago to being called names because we’ve always been different, so as a tactic of psychological manipulation, calling us names doesn’t really work. The Them Team can try as hard as it wants to. It’s not going to back us down and make us think, “Good heavens, someone is disdainfully lumping us into a category so we’d better shut up and go on about the business of fitting in.” Did Rachel Carson try to fit in? Semmelweis? Galileo? No, they did what they thought was right despite extreme opposition by their peers. They might not have had happy endings, but they all played a significant role in exposing the truth.
Sky Grafitti
There was brilliance in contorting the word “chemtrails” so that it immediately triggers an emotional response in certain people. It has bought the Them Team time. In just two syllables it creates an obstacle. For people who believe in the established order of things, still believe our government is working for the greater good, and don’t like to buck the system, there is that word like a comfortable old jacket ready to be slipped on to protect them from the truth: “The chemtrail people must be wrong because they are associated with a detestable word that makes them sound nuts.” And then they pull the jacket around them a little tighter. It is a convenient way out. Score one for the Them Team. They just got more time to carry on with their nasty deeds. Human behavior is baffling. When did people become so out of touch with the natural world that they can’t look up at the sky and see that things are just not right? When did seemingly intelligent people lose their ability to use reason? Scientists are “proposing” the very thing we are witnessing, and yet people are letting themselves be manipulated by one simple two-syllable word so that they are completely unable to see the truth hiding in plain sight. The reality is, if our planetary situation is so dire that spraying a layer of pollution into the atmosphere is our only hope, people need to know. And if spraying aerosols into the atmosphere is putting millions of dollars into the pockets of big businesses and allowing companies to keep polluting for the almighty dollar, people need to know. If our governments are manipulating the weather, whatever the reason, people need to know. There is no Us Team and Them Team. We are all riding on a relatively small ship in a very big universe, and it’s dangerously close to sinking and taking us with it. That human tendency to think there is a big fix, that we can pull out all the stops in the end and save the day, is just wrong. We can’t. It’s time for everyone to face what is happening because, at this point, the truth is our only hope. Lisa Thomas, Nevada County, California, May 2015 By Lisa Thomas, contributing writer for geoengineeringwatch.org Pasted from <http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/the-publics-programmed-response-to-the-word-chemtrail/>
‘The war and its results have turned Yemen back a hundred years, due to the destruction of infrastructure . . . especially in the provinces of Oden, Dhalea and Taiz.’
Izzedine al-Asbali Yemeni Human Rights Minister
‘Yemen is devastated. There are no roads, water or electricity. Nobody’s left but thieves.’
A resident of Sana (Yemen)
Introduction
The Euro-American and Japanese ruling classes, as well as their collaborators in the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries, have accumulated vast profit. This has occurred through a complex stratified system re-concentrating the world’s wealth through:
1. The exploitation of labor in the First World (North America and Western Europe)
2. super-exploitation of labor in the Second World (China, ex-USSR)
3. dispossession of peasants, native communities and urban dwellers to grab resources, land and real estate in the Third World
4. wars of genocide against the poorest of the poor in the ‘Fourth World’
Besides all the forms of brutal exploitation and dispossession, which enrich the Euro-US ruling classes, by far the most sinister and threatening to humanity is the concerted worldwide effort to literally exterminate the poorest-of-the poor, the hundreds of millions of people no longer essential for the accumulation and concentration of imperial capital today. This essay will begin by mapping the genocidal wars against ‘the wretched of the earth’, identifying the geography of genocide, the countries and subjects under attack, and the trajectory, which has been chosen and executed by the leaders of the Euro-American regimes. Then we will examine the reason for genocide within the dynamics and forms of contemporary capitalism. In particular, we will develop the genocide hypothesis: that imperial genocide of the poorest of the poor is a deliberate policy to reduce the growing surplus labor, which is no longer needed or wanted for wealth accumulation but is increasingly feared as a potential political threat. In the last section, we will discuss how the ‘wretched of the earth’ are responding to this policy of imperial genocide and what is to be done.
Mapping Genocide Against the Poorest of the Poor
It is no coincidence that the most violent assaults and invasions by the Euro-American powers have taken place against the poorest countries in each region of the world. In the Western hemisphere, the Euro-US regimes have repeatedly invaded the absolutely poorest country, Haiti, overthrowing the popularly elected Aristide government, decimating the population via a cholera epidemic spread by UN mercenary ‘peace-keepers’, killing tens of thousands of poor Haitians and rounding up thousands of protestors. The occupation continues. Honduras, the second poorest country in the region, experienced a US-backed coup d’état deposed their recently elected president and imposed a terrorist puppet regime, which regularly assassinates dissidents and landless rural workers. Peasants are dispossessed; the economy and society are in shambles with tens of thousands of Hondurans (especially children) fleeing the violence. Today, the Euro-American powers actively support the absolutist regime of Saudi Arabia as it bombs and slaughters thousands of Yemeni civilians and resistance fighters. Yemen is the poorest country in the Gulf region. Video Link http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3012403/Saudi-airstrikes-targeting-rebel-military-bases-Yemen.html#v-4135339495001
In South Asia, the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan; its coalition of puppets and NATO allies have massacred and displaced millions of poor farmers and civilians. Afghanistan is the poorest of the poor countries in the region. In Africa, the Euro-American powers and their local collaborators have invaded, bombed and occupied Somalia, Chad and Mali – among the poorest of sub-Sahara countries. After the US-NATO campaign of destruction against Libya, 1.5 million sub-Saharan Africans and black citizens of Libya lost their stable employment and became the victims of ethnic slaughter. Their attempts to escape the violence and starvation by fleeing to Europe are blocked by the leading powers (the same powers that destroyed the Libyan economy and society). Those, who do not drown in their flight, are detained and returned to their devastated countries and early deaths. In Western Europe, millions of Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese, inhabiting the poorest countries in the region, have faced massive job losses, widespread impoverishment and spiraling suicides – all induced by austerity programs designed to pillage their economies and enrich their Euro-US creditors. In the United States, 1.5 million black (mostly male) Americans, are ‘missing’ – products of early death, industrial-scale incarceration and police assassinations. American Indian communities are subject to depredations and early death from the policies of the Federal and State governments. Their lands have been handed over to mining (and now fracking) to serve the interests of the mining and agro-business elite. Throughout the US Latino agricultural workers are increasingly viewed as ‘expendable’ with technology and the effects of global climate change (such as the severe drought in California) depriving them of livelihood. In the Levant, Palestinians, now the poorest of the poor and the most disenfranchised, face continued Israeli land grabs, pillage and violence in the West Bank and genocidal attacks in Gaza. Iraq and Syria have experienced millions of deaths and displacements, reducing previously prosperous, educated and sophisticated multi-ethnic populations into impoverished, uprooted and desperate people deliberately driven backwards to tribal loyalties.
Why Imperialism ‘Genocides the Poorest of the Poor’
With the exception of Iraq and Syria, all of the violated countries have been poor in resources and markets, and possess large unskilled labor. The people are targeted and savaged because they no longer serve as ‘labor reserves’ – they are now excess-surplus labor – in Nazi racial hygiene terminology, they have become ‘useless mouths to feed’. This has intensified as crisis engulfs the West and the least productive sectors of capitalism, finance, real estate and insurance (FIRE), have become the leading sectors of capital. ‘Cheap labor’ is less needed, least of all overseas labor from conflictual regions. The ‘poorest of the poor’ countries under attack lack rich resources ripe for plunder; their populations do not exist among the priorities of the multi-national bankers – except when seen as ‘obstacles’. In the colonial past, sectors of these populations would have been recruited by imperial countries to submit, obey and serve as imperial mercenaries or coolie labor. They would have been transported and employed by empire for ‘dirty’, dangerous and poorly paid jobs in other colonized countries – like the millions of Indians scattered throughout the former British Empire. Today, such coolies have no value.
The IMF’s stated mission is to “foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.” However, there are those who assert that the IMF is actually a destabilizing force within the global economy, while others believe that the countries themselves are to blame for poor economic choices. Africa Action, TransAfrica Forum, and IPS’ Foreign Policy In Focus will host this provocative contest of perspectives and analysis between Rick Rowden, a long-time critic of IMF policy, and Eugene Nyambal, former senior advisor to executive directors at the Board of Directors of the IMF.
The genocidal nature of the wars against the ‘poorest of the poor’ is best demonstrated by the actual targets and primary victims of these wars: Millions of civilians, families, women, children and heads of households have suffered the worst. These ‘targets’ represent the most stable and essential elements responsible for family reproduction and security. The ‘poorest of the poor’ communities are being destroyed. Genocidal bombing has overwhelmingly targeted the essential factors for survival: cohesive households, communal settings, subsistence food growing regions and access to clean water. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that marriage ceremonies and traditional social gatherings have been ‘mistaken targets’ of missiles and drone strikes. Despite the denials from the White House, the geographic extent and nauseating number of such attacks demonstrate that according to the ‘genocide hypothesis’ there is ‘nowhere to hide’: The targeted populations will have no marriage celebrations, no social life, no increase in children among the poorest of the poor, no protection for the elders, no social fabric and no communal organizations – there will be no survival networks left for the superfluous of empire. The ‘genocide hypothesis’ underlies the practice of ‘total war’. The practice includes massive attacks on non-military targets (‘Shock and Awe’) and the use of high tech weaponry to target collectives of the poorest of the poor – repeatedly, over long periods of time and wide geographic regions. If, as the apologists of genocidal wars claim, the bombings of weddings and slaughter of school children are ‘collateral’ in the ‘Global War on Terror’ why are they happening everywhere in the fourth world and virtually everyday? The genocide hypothesis best explains the data. Even the terminology and claims made by imperialist experts regarding their weapons systems support the genocide hypothesis. These weapons, we are told, are ‘intelligent, precise and highly accurate’ in targeting and destroying ‘the enemy’. By their own admission, then, the poorest of the poor have become ‘the enemy’, as imperial weapons makers support ‘intelligent’ genocide with ‘precision’.
Georgia Guide Stones When liberals and leftists criticize how imperial drone strikes kill civilians, instead of ‘armed terrorists’, they are missing the essential point of the policy. The prime purpose of the wars and the imperial weapons of mass destruction is to kill the largest number of the very poorest in the shortest time. No member of the financial-high tech capitalist class has ever complained about the mass killing of the ‘poorest of the poor’ anywhere or at any time because the victims are, for the purpose of accumulating imperial profit and concentrating wealth superfluous. The poorest don’t figure into the formulae of profit and productivity; they don’t ‘make or take’ markets. On the other hand, their continued existence is a potential liability. They are aesthetically unappealing on the outskirts of luxury resorts. To the rich, they represent a desperate criminal element and they may pose a real or imagined ‘terrorist’ threat. For these reasons, the rich would ‘prefer’ that they would quietly cease to exist, or if the warlords have to dispose of them, the world will be a safer and more attractive place to accumulate wealth. ‘Let them kill each other, as they have done for millennia’, the empire piously opines and the bankers and their high tech allies can use their military and mercenaries without soiling their own hands. The elite ignore the mass emiseration while the militarists bomb ‘the problem’ out of existence. Today genocide occurs in once vibrant living and working communities, not hidden in ‘concentration camps’. The secret ovens and gas chambers have been replaced by an ‘open range’ of incendiary weapons that end lives, burn neighborhoods and workshops, devastate livestock and crops. Those who survive the bombing are starved, enclosed, malnourished and inflicted with disease. Eminent doctors tell us that the misery is ‘self-inflicted’ and that the poorest of the poor are ignorant and lack healthy habits. Recurrent epidemics from HIV to cholera to Ebola are quintessential ‘4th world diseases’. Even though the Caribbean had not seen cholera for over a century, its introduction into Haiti via the bowels of imperial mercenary troops (UN peacekeepers from Nepal) was blamed on the Haitians’ lack of access to clean water! Not since the small pox blankets passed out by the US Army to freezing Native Americans in their concentration camps of the 19th century have we heard such apologists for genocide! The truth about genocide is that all this is known, repeatedly documented and forgotten. White workers in the First World cannot even register these ‘facts’ under their own noses, let alone express any form of solidarity. Imperial genocide, committed by proactive militarists and ‘passive’ rich elites, are no secret even if they deny their complicity. The key word here is ‘mission’. ‘Mission Accomplished’ was the celebratory banner over the total destruction of Iraq. The warlords claim rewards for successfully completing ‘the mission’. Yemenis are dying under US-supplied Saudi bombs; Somalis are scattered in tens of thousands of tents to the four corners of the earth; Haitians continue to enjoy the ‘gift of cholera’ from UN ‘peacekeepers’ and rot in massive open air prison-slums – their leaders imprisoned or assassinated.
“One Friday, 28 people were rescued by the Italian coastguard when the boat on which they were fleeing Libya capsized in the Mediterranean. Arriving homeless and without prospects in a strange land, these were — relatively speaking — the lucky ones. As many as 700 are thought to have drowned. Add them to the tally. On Monday, another boat capsized with 400 souls feared lost. Last year more than 3,000 died in the Mediterranean trying to get to the West. It has become a phenomenon of our times.”
In the face of genocide and their irrelevance to the profit motive of modern high tech and finance capital, the poorest of the poor have chosen multiple responses: (1) Mass out-migration, preferable to the First World, where they won’t be bombed, raped or starved as they had been at ‘home’; (2) Internal migration to the cities, under the illusion of an ‘urban safe haven’ when in fact their concentration in slums makes it easier for the bombers; (3) return to the countryside and subsistence farming or the mountains and subsistence herding, but the missiles and drones relentlessly follow them; (4) mass flight to a neighboring country where the local gendarmes will ‘herd’ them into camps to rot and (5) finally resistance. Resistance takes various forms: There are spontaneous upheavals when the scope of abuse exceeds all endurance. This form involves attacking the local collaborators and gendarmes and authorities and sacking food warehouses. Such action burns briefly and dies (many times literally). Some choose to join armed resistance bands, including gangs of brigands, political ethno-religious rivals and terrorists who retaliate against authors of their genocide and its collaborators with their own version of justice and material and celestial rewards.
Total war from above and the outside breeds total war from the inside and below. The rebellion of the ‘wretched of the earth’ in the 21st century is far different from that portrayed by Franz Fanon in the middle of the last century. Fanon described a revolt against colonialism and neo-colonialism. Today the revolt is against deracination and genocide. During colonialism, the ‘wretched’ needed to be subdued to better exploit their labor and resources. Today, the ‘poorest of the poor’ are superfluous to empire and thus the policy of genocide. The current world war between the classes has become a war between exterminators and those who would fight to survive!
While Baltimore burns, the city has proven itself to be yet another staging ground in a long line of scenes involving “violent protests,” riots, and racial violence following an incident concerning police brutality, real or otherwise.
Although the issues that have set off the spark in most of these protests were entirely legitimate, government agencies, foundations, organizations, and NGOs immediately swooped in to divert the protests into racially charged fit throwing and often violent riots.
With a carefully orchestrated network that was capable of organizing large numbers of individuals on a moment’s notice, and a simultaneous media campaign that cleverly showed violence and riots but ignored peaceful or appropriately-directed violent acts, these organizations were able to turn what could and should have been a national movement into a racially-oriented hate-filled display of unrestrained destruction.
With this in mind, one might justifiably ask how these organizations might have such an effective network that operates in concert with a national corporate media apparatus in order to wreck legitimate movements and, out of those movements, create a counter-productive act of mindless fit-throwing?
The answer is the same as it has often been in Europe – the color revolution apparatus and George Soros.
Indeed, George Soros has been heavily involved in the social unrest and movement-wrecking activity that has taken place all across the United States in recent months. From Florida to Ferguson and now to Baltimore, George Soros’ Foundations have been involved in making sure that not only are American citizens unable to overcome racial divisions with mutual cooperation but that even the racially isolated participants are unable to accomplish anything of substance.
There’s a solitary man at the financial center of the Ferguson protest movement. No, it’s not victim Michael Brown or Officer Darren Wilson. It’s not even the Rev. Al Sharpton, despite his ubiquitous campaign on TV and the streets.
Rather, it’s liberal billionaire George Soros, who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what he did with MoveOn.org.
Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times.
In all, Mr. Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson, according to the most recent tax filings of his nonprofit Open Society Foundations.
The financial tether from Mr. Soros to the activist groups gave rise to a combustible protest movement that transformed a one-day criminal event in Missouri into a 24-hour-a-day national cause celebre.
“Our DNA includes a belief that having people participate in government is indispensable to living in a more just, inclusive, democratic society,” said Kenneth Zimmerman, director of Mr. Soros‘ Open Society Foundations’ U.S. programs, in an interview with The Washington Times. “Helping groups combine policy, research [and] data collection with community organizing feels very much the way our society becomes more accountable.”
Indeed, the Open Society Institute has been promoting “democracy” all over the world if, by democracy, one means the overthrow of governments unfriendly to Anglo-American banking interests and installing new and more corrupt leadership in its place.
Soros-sponsored organizations helped mobilize protests in Ferguson, building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign.
Other Soros-funded groups made it their job to remotely monitor and exploit anything related to the incident that they could portray as a conservative misstep, and to develop academic research and editorials to disseminate to the news media to keep the story alive.
The plethora of organizations involved not only shared Mr. Soros‘ funding, but they also fed off each other, using content and buzzwords developed by one organization on another’s website, referencing each other’s news columns and by creating a social media echo chamber of Facebook “likes” and Twitter hashtags that dominated the mainstream media and personal online newsfeeds.
Buses of activists from the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference in Chicago; from the Drug Policy Alliance, Make the Road New York and Equal Justice USA from New York; from Sojourners, the Advancement Project and Center for Community Change in Washington; and networks from the Gamaliel Foundation — all funded in part by Mr. Soros — descended on Ferguson starting in August and later organized protests and gatherings in the city until late last month.
All were aimed at keeping the media’s attention on the city and to widen the scope of the incident to focus on interrelated causes — not just the overpolicing and racial discrimination narratives that were highlighted by the news media in August.
“I went to Ferguson in a quest to be in solidarity and stand with the young organizers and affirm their leadership,” said Kassandra Frederique, policy manager at the Drug Policy Alliance, which was founded by Mr. Soros, and which receives $4 million annually from his foundation. She traveled to Ferguson in October.
“We recognized this movement is similar to the work we’re doing at DPA,” said Ms. Frederique. “The war on drugs has always been to operationalize, institutionalize and criminalize people of color. Protecting personal sovereignty is a cornerstone of the work we do and what this movement is all about.”
Ms. Frederique works with Opal Tometi, co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter — a hashtag that was developed after the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida — and helped promote it on DPA’s news feeds. Ms. Tometi runs the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, a group to which Mr. Soros gave $100,000 in 2011, according to the most recent of his foundation’s tax filings.
“I think #BlackLivesMatter’s success is because of organizing. This was created after Trayvon Martin, and there has been sustained organizing and conversations about police violence since then,” said Ms. Frederique. “Its explosion into the mainstream recently is because it connects all the dots at a time when everyone was lost for words. ‘Black Lives Matter’ is liberating, unapologetic and leaves no room for confusion.”
It should be noted that The Gamaliel Foundation, which is described as a “net-work of grassroots and interracial organizations,” is not only funded by George Soros, it was the Foundation where President Barack Obama began his career as a “community organizer” in Chicago. Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright who drew Conservative ire for a fiery sermon condemning America’s actions (his famous “Goddamn America speech), is a trustee of the Soros-funded Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference, an organization that sent representatives to Ferguson early on.
In Ferguson, the use of clergy and ministers became a major part of the social movement as funded by Soros as well. Riddell reveals as much when she writes,
Representatives of Sojourners, a national evangelical Christian organization committed “to faith in action for social justice,” attended the weekend [Gamaliel’s weekend protest event in Ferguson]. The group received $150,000 from Mr. Soros in 2011.
Clergy representatives from the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference, where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright serves as a trustee, also showed up. Mr. Wright was Mr. Obama’s pastor in Chicago before some of his racially charged sermons, including the phrase “God damn America,” forced Mr. Obama to distance himself. SDPC received $250,000 from Mr. Soros in 2011.
During Gamaliel’s weekend protest event, Sunday was deemed “Hands Up Sabbath,” where clergy were asked to speak out about racial issues, using packets and talking points prepared for them by another religion-based community organizing group, PICO.
PICO is also supported by the Open Society Foundations, according to its website.
The Washington Times article also serves to shed light on a number of other more profile “national” organizations funded by Soros that descended upon Ferguson, now explaining some of the reasons that the protest movement on the ground in MO became such a disgraceful failure. Riddell further demonstrates this by writing,
Larry Fellows III, 29, a Missouri native, did find his voice in the chaos of Ferguson with the help of outside assistance backed by Mr. Soros.
Mr. Fellows is co-founder of the Millennial Activists United, a key source of video and stories developed in Ferguson by youth activists used to inspire other groups nationally.
Mr. Fellows explained how he started his organization in an interview with the American Civil Liberties Union (another Soros-backed entity that sent national representatives to Missouri) in November.
“Initially, it would just be that we would show up for protests, and the next day we’d clean up the streets. A lot of the same people were out at the protests and going out to lunch and talking about what was happening. That became a cycle until a lot of us figured out we needed to have a strategy,” Mr. Fellows explained to the ACLU, which posted the interview in its blog.
“Then a lot of organizers from across the country started to come in to help us do the planning and do the strategizing. That helped us start doing it on our own and planning out actions and what our narratives were going to be,” he said.
MAU has listed on its website that it has partnered with Gamaliel network churches. They’ve also received training on civil disobedience from the Advancement Project — which was given a $500,000 grant from Mr. Soros in 2013 “to build a fair and just, multi-racial democracy in America through litigation, community organizing support, public policy reform, and strategic communications,” according to the Foundation’s website.
The Advancement Project, based in Washington, also arranged the meeting between community organizers in Ferguson and Mr. Obama last month to brief him on the situation in Ferguson and to set up a task force that examines trust between police and minority communities.
In addition, the Advancement Project has also dedicated some of its staff to lead organizations in Ferguson, like the Don’t Shoot Coalition, another grass-roots group that preaches the same message, links to the same Facebook posts and “likes” the same articles as DPA, ACLU, Hands Up Coalition, OBS, MORE and others.
It should also be noted that the Open Society Institute, one of Soros’ main NGOs, has worked closely with Mayor Rawlings-Blake and Google in making Baltimore one of their “test cities” for smart technology and new fiber cables. Rawlings-Blake has had pleasant things to say about Soros in the past.
While the above information addresses the involvement of #blacklivesmatter groups and similar organizations active on the ground inside Ferguson as a matter of historical precedent, these organizations and similar operations such as the Black Youth Project (funded by Soros) and the Open Society Institute and its subsididiaries have had a sizable presence inside Baltimore in the time leading up to the Freddie Gray protests and continue to do so as we speak.
For instance, Baltimore United Viewfinders has received a sizeable grant from the OSI for the purpose of working with a coalition of community partners and the Maryland Institute College of Art to use digital media to engage East Baltimore youth in peer-to-peer arts and social justice programming. Other organizations and individuals have received grants from the OSI to promote “social justice” and “democracy” through theatre and the arts while others operate on a more charitable basis, providing guidance in healthcare matters and community organizing skills. As one will see from the discussion of the methodology of color revolutions below as well as the discussion of the preparation that goes into these social phenomena, the structure of “community organizations” and “community influence” is important to the color revolution apparatus. The ability to take advantage of unemployed, under-educated, lonely, and hopeless youth is one of the greatest opportunities that the Soros color revolution organizations understand and firmly grasp.
The relevance of the Soros connection may seem confusing to many. Certainly, however, no one in their right mind will suggest that a man that has made his fortune bankrupting nations and impoverishing their peoples lies awake at night wringing his hands over concerns for black people in America.
Soros is most well-known for playing a major role in the funding and facilitating of the “Bulldozer Revolution” in Serbia that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” of 2003, the 2006 push to move Turkey toward a more Islamist governing structure, and even the Occupy movement in the United States among a great many others – none of which brought anything other than greater misery, impoverishment, and police state mechanisms to bear on the general public. The Occupy movement, being the only exception, still brought nothing to its participants except the opportunity to burn off excess anger and energy along with a few cracked protester skulls. It was otherwise an incredible waste of time.
Regardless, the methods being used by the Soros machine in terms of the #blacklivesmatter and other related campaigns across the country are much the same as those used in Europe to usher in greater austerity, police states, and fascism through government-coup and social protest – i.e. a coordinated media campaign to provide the general public with a false perception of events as well as a false narrative, the use of social media and slogans, and the deployment of “swarming adolescents” in the streets.
When media campaigns alone are not enough, there are other methods that are able to be implemented if need be. For instance, a Mother Jones report revealed the fact that in some areas where rioting began, there appears to have been a concerted effort on the part of the authorities to create an environment in which riots would be inevitable. For example, in an instance where it was reported that teens in Baltimore attacked police by throwing rocks, it was never mentioned that police had corralled these teens – who should have been on their way home – off the bus and into an area in between the mall and the high school. According to onlookers, it appeared that both the teens and the police were surprised at the situation – the police surprised at the lack of violence and the teens surprised that they were kept from going home. Eventually, rocks and bottles were reportedly thrown at police and the situation deteriorated from there. Of course, the entire story was never fully reported in the mainstream press. Still, while the rocks and bottles may have started from those in the crowd, others may justifiably wonder if there were not provocateurs already placed simply waiting to cause violence as soon as the tension had reached a boiling point. As it is, it is very likely that protesters and police alike were dupes in a devious game.
Consider also the fact that the Baltimore authorities, despite implementing heavy-handed tactics against high schoolers on their way home, allowed criminals, thieves, and violent thugs to prey upon innocent people, private property, and communities for quite some time without a serious effort to stop them. In fact, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake even openly admitted that the looters were allowed to riot when she stated that “We also gave those who wish to destroy space to do that as well.” The police were prevented from actually stopping the riots and were kept largely unequipped as well. In other words, the riots were both allowed and encouraged until they had reached a boiling point and the National Guard was called in.
Of course, the color revolution and destabilization is not merely some communiqué presented to a small group of people that organically takes on a life of its own. There is an entire science behind the application of a movement of destabilization both when it takes place overseas as well as when it takes place domestically. As Pottenger and Frieson of Color Revolutions and Geopolitics write,
Many are the professions that utilize this type of understanding, including (but not limited to) marketing, advertising, public relations, politics and law-making, radio, television, journalism and news, film, music, general business and salesmanship; each of them selling, branding, promoting, entertaining, sloganeering, framing, explaining, creating friends and enemies, arguing likes and dislikes, setting the boundaries of good and evil: in many cases using their talents to circumvent their audiences’ intellect, the real target being emotional, oftentimes even subconscious.
Looking beneath the facade of the color revolutionary movement we also find a desire-based behavioral structure, in particular one that has been built upon historical lessons offered by social movements and periods of political upheaval.
It then makes sense that the personnel of such operations include perception managers, PR firms, pollsters and opinion-makers in the social media. Through the operational infrastructure, these entities work in close coordination with intelligence agents, local and foreign activists, strategists and tacticians, tax-exempt foundations, governmental agencies, and a host of non- governmental organizations.
Collectively, their job is to make a palace coup (of their sponsorship) seem like a social revolution; to help fill the streets with fearless demonstrators advocating on behalf of a government of their choosing, which then legitimizes the sham governments with the authenticity of popular democracy and revolutionary fervor.
Because the operatives perform much of their craft in the open, their effectiveness is heavily predicated upon their ability to veil the influence backing them, and the long-term intentions guiding their work.
Their effectiveness is predicated on their ability to deceive, targeting both local populations and foreign audiences with highly-misleading interpretations of the underlying causes provoking these events.
With this explanation in mind, consider the description provided by Ian Traynor of the Guardian regarding the “revolutions” and “mass movements” which was taking place in Ukraine, Serbia, Belarus, and Georgia in 2004 and the time of the writing of his article. Indeed, Traynor’s depiction of the methodology used by the Foundations, NGOs, and government agencies stirring up dissent and popular revolt is equally illuminating. Traynor writes,
In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.
They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 – the two words “gotov je”, meaning “he’s finished”, a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.
In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime’s days are numbered.
Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists’ weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.
These slogans and symbols are the product of mass marketers employed by State Departments and intelligence agencies for the sole purpose of destabilizing and/or overthrowing a democratically elected or unfavorable (to the oligarchy)government.
The details and techniques of the manipulation of mass numbers of people have only continued to become more and more advanced and sophisticated, particularly with the advent of social media.
As Jonathan Mowat wrote,
As in the case of the new communication technologies, the potential effectiveness of angry youth in postmodern coups has long been under study. As far back as 1967, Dr. Fred Emery, then director of the Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the “hypnotic effects” of television, specified that the then new phenomenon of “swarming adolescents” found at rock concerts could be effectively used to bring down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s. This was particularly the case, as Dr. Emery reported in “The next thirty years: concepts, methods and anticipations,” in the group’s “Human Relations,” because the phenomena was associated with “rebellious hysteria.” The British military created the Tavistock Institute as its psychological warfare arm following World War I; it has been the forerunner of such strategic planning ever since. Dr. Emery’s concept saw immediate application in NATO’s use of “swarming adolescents” in toppling French President Charles De Gaulle in 1967.[1]
[…]
In November 1989, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, under the aegis of that university’s “Program for Social Innovations in Global Management,” began a series of conferences to review progress towards that strategic objective, which was reported on in “Human Relations” in 1991. There, Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a professor of “Social Architecture” at the Wharton School, and a follower of Dr. Emery, stressed that “rock video in Kathmandu,” was an appropriate image of how states with traditional cultures could be destabilized, thereby creating the possibility of a “global civilization.” There are two requirements for such a transformation, he added, “building internationally committed networks of international and locally committed organizations,” and “creating global events” through “the transformation of a local event into one having virtually instantaneous international implications through mass-media.”[2]
The American people must quickly learn the formula behind color revolutions, destabilizations, and the agendas of the world oligarchy before it becomes too late for us all. They must learn that simply because “leaders” appear to them, attempt to speak the same language and articulate rage does not mean that these leaders are men of the people.
Protests are necessary. Directed rage may also be necessary. But the wanton destruction of communities belonging to you or your neighbors is not only counterproductive, it produces rage that will be aimed back at you, and justifiably so. The entire country is being played like a fiddle. Baltimore is not an isolated collection of dupes, it is a microcosm. It is time the American people wise up and become street smart before it is too late.
“We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders. The ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets.”
Hillary Clinton 1994
The Economic Backdrop
American politics is the realm of Immaculate Conception where actual policies and accumulated history disappear behind a veil of personal characteristics and unrelated acts. The (mis)leadership class pretends that ruling class machinations— trade agreements, financial deregulation, imperial wars, surveillance and policing have no bearing on social outcomes. American cities bear the imprint of these policies plus the residuals of slavery, genocide and the particulars of Western capitalism that have embedded history into current social relations. This is to argue that the individualist explanation of Western history may be interesting for those so-inclined, but it fails as description in every conceivable dimension.
Freddie Gray. Original Image source: cnn.com
Political explanations of public policies like trade agreements and financial deregulation put a political face on fundamentally economic arrangements. When Bill and Hillary Clinton instituted the ‘tough-on-crime’ policies that so exacerbated mass incarceration there was a political explanation— pandering to White suburban voters’ manufactured fears of a Black urban underclass to garner votes, but the policies tied closely to American economic history as well. From slavery to convict leasing to urban dispossession, racial repression has produced economic value that has been expropriated. The Clinton’s neoliberal trade policies exacerbated the urban industrial exodus while deregulation of finance ‘monetized’ Black wealth for the taking. Seemingly unrelated ‘political’ policies often have economic explanations.
Economic history ties America’s cities to political and economic hierarchy through the dimensions of this hierarchy. Washington to Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York was the land route North for Southern Blacks fleeing slavery. This was also one of the routes to industrial jobs following WWII. Sequential (engineered) oil crises in the 1970s roiled industrial America. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Federal Reserve policies decimated the industrial economy by increasing the value of the U.S. dollar. Bill Clinton passed NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and his deregulation of Wall Street provided the money needed to finance the relocation of a large portion of the U.S. industrial base overseas. None of these policies were crafted by the inner-city residents.
Modern day Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago have neighborhoods left behind by policy decisions that decimated the economic bases that once supported them. When there were jobs people worked. When the jobs left people either stopped working or found other, less remunerative work in the service sector. The housing boom and bust monetized inner-city houses until the bubble burst. Rather than forcing Wall Street to clean up the mess inner city residents were left with their former wealth in the hands of bankers and an economy that imploded in the Great Recession. While this story is full of malefactors, Bill Clinton has major policy responsibility for mass incarceration, for neoliberal trade deals and for bank deregulation.
The bankers who destroyed Baltimore discuss their bonuses with Congress. Image source: google images.
The Murder of Freddie Gray
The wholly implausible storyline that Freddie Gray severed his own spine being put out by the Baltimore police is a Rorschach test for social accountability. The political strategy of officialdom is to peel away those who will accept any explanation in favor of police actions, no matter how implausible, to marginalize protestors. That a significant portion of the population, both Black and White, wants to believe that the police always act in good faith illustrates a preconception that will only be effectively challenged through political estrangement. The fabrication adds insult to Freddie Gray’s murder and as such, to the conduct that the Baltimore police department needs to be held to account for. Freddie Gray was murdered in police custody. Technocratic explanations of the particulars only serve to obscure this basic truth.
When videotape revealed the brutal beating the Los Angeles police inflicted on Rodney King the defense was able to convince a jury and a substantial portion of America that Mr. King had assaulted the police ‘batons’ with his head. One might wonder how graphic footage of a group of cops beating Rodney King within an inch of his life in plain public view could be construed otherwise. The tactic used was similar to the comments from officialdom, including the Black (mis)leadership class, toward protestors in Baltimore. Mr. King was alleged to have been in an angel dust rage that made him impervious to pain and to rational thought— he was an ‘out-of-control’ Black man. Likewise the protestors in Baltimore were deemed irrational ‘thugs,’ criminals with no legitimate right to political action.
Graph (1) above: the official storyline has unknown forces producing intractable poverty in American cities when many of the forces are quite visible. Mass incarceration is racially targeted and causes wholesale immiseration by precluding meaningful employment. Wall Street’s subprime lending fiasco racially targeted neighborhoods and emptied them of residents as local wealth was transferred to the bank accounts of the already wealthy. It is paradoxical that public discussion of ‘looting’ in Baltimore has focused on angry citizens without deep discussion of what they are angry about. Home foreclosures in Baltimore (Graph (1) above) have followed the national housing boom – bust because Wall Street made predatory mortgage loans targeting neighborhoods of color. Rather than charging bankers with making fraudulent, predatory loans the citizens of Baltimore were forced to bear the consequences of banker malfeasance. Source: Baltimore Homeownership Preservation Coalition. In telling form, officialdom’s concern for property overshadowed care for the life of Freddie Gray and the many other Black, Brown and poor White youth and men murdered by the police. These misplaced priorities are thinly veiled socio-cide, concern with what can be replaced in place of what can’t be. The rapid vilification of protestors was accompanied by Immaculate Conception politics, denial of responsibility for the circumstances being protested. However, made apparent by events in Baltimore is that police murders only enter the American consciousness when buildings and police cars burn. Assertions that peaceful protests are the only legitimate form face the burden of history and official hypocrisy. Moral suasion through peaceful protest assumes a capacity that divergent class interests render improbable. Democracy Now! illustrated one such experiential divide when a Baltimore mother refused to join local youth who had volunteered to clean a burned CVS store because, as she put it, the police need to be made to understand that they can’t murder Black youth with impunity. Left unexplored, and apparently unconsidered by the youth who saw the local CVS outlet as ‘their’ store, is that through direct purchase and their Caremark consulting business CVS has put hundreds of locally owned pharmacies in inner city neighborhoods out of business and replaced them with minimum wage jobs and extractive economic practices. Likewise, the Ace Cash Express that was burned is a payday lender whose business model is to make usurious loans in poorly banked communities under terms that lead to permanent debt servitude.
State police or police state? Original image source: spaulforrest.com. National Mis-Leadership Meets Local Mis-Leadership When President Obama called protesters in Baltimore ‘criminals and thugs’ he neglected to mention the class divisions that have as his major campaign contributors the Wall Street bankers who engineered the housing boom – bust still devastating Baltimore and whose subsidiaries are the payday lenders who destroy lives and neighborhoods there. Some fair portion of these campaign contributors would have been ‘criminals’ if Mr. Obama’s Justice Department had not shielded them from prosecution for their crimes. The term ‘thugs’ is widely used as racist code for Black and Brown youth and could be more appropriately applied to American drone operators so regularly slaughtering wedding parties across the Middle East. And the term most certainly applies to the police who murder Black and Brown youth with alarming regularity and officially sanctioned impunity. Much of the reaction to events in Baltimore harkens to the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s quip that “justice is incidental to law and order.” Implied is that justice may be set to the side if order can be maintained through systematic injustice. The conceptual problem is that, as with President Obama’s and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s slander of protestors as ‘thugs,’ class interests lie behind class-based policing. Heavily armed, militarized police could storm Wall Street (as metaphor for geographically dispersed finance) and corporate executive suites kicking in doors, handcuffing everyone they meet and opening fire on those who aren’t immediately compliant under the same theorized justification they have for doing so in Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia or Los Angeles. That they don’t is evidence that neither law nor justice is behind police actions in poor communities.
If peaceful change is possible, why have the police been militarized to prevent it? The Department of Homeland Security calls protestors ‘terrorists’ and the Ferguson, MO police department calls them ‘the enemy.’ Original image source: google images. The economic crises affecting communities of color in Baltimore and elsewhere tie directly to government policies like trade agreements that benefit financiers, upper class ‘professionals,’ industrialists and the owners of capital. Official indifference to the social consequences of industrial relocation has produced economic dead zones in major cities since the 1960s. Wall Street’s predatory mortgages decimated black wealth in cities like Baltimore and with it the capacity for economic investment. Elite chides that citizens are destroying their future prospects through rebellion provide cover for the economic forces they control for their own benefit. In the last decade Wall Street has destroyed more of urban America than citizen rebellions ever could. The problem of the economic capture of the mis-leadership class suggests that political resolution is unlikely to come through the ballot box. Blacks have joined this mis-leadership class with co-optation being the singular result. American political economy is set up to perpetuate existing class relations with the racial residual of history as a component. Martin King began addressing economic justice with the understanding that it is a prerequisite to social justice. He was murdered shortly thereafter. The interest in ‘property’ in the face of the loss of life at police hands is clear indication of what drives official concerns. Therein lies the political paradox— economics is the more dangerous dimension of social injustice to address but it is also the most necessary. The U.S. has subverted democratic movements and invaded countries to prevent implementation of a minimum wage. But how is life possible without a living wage?Rob Urieis an artist and political economist. Weekend Edition May 1-3, 2015 Pasted from <http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/01/altimore-police-violence-and-economic-justice/>
In reality, when folks are connected to that which is around them, they are less likely to tear it up. But when you have disenfranchised people who are neither cared about or engaged and encouraged to be apart of what is around them in their environment, but instead are told to walk here, be there, leave this and don’t interfere with that, they are alienated. How many of those who riot are gainfully employed by the establishments that surround them? How many of them own the property? How many of them are even co-owners? How many of them care and how many of them are “unaware” that these establishments have insurance to cover damages.
“The Los Angeles Police Department’s response to the Rodney King riots 22 years ago could provide a blueprint for what happens in the coming months and years in Ferguson, Missouri, as police work to repair their reputation in the wake of Michael Brown’s fatal shooting, according to experts on the LAPD’s transformation.” READ MORE
When people are policed and restrained, ordered and separated, they will not feel attached to their environment. They will see the environment as much of the enemy as they will see the Police or the so-called “Authority that Polices them”. They will not see or feel a connection to their environment but will feel caged and imprisoned by it.
Systemic racism and re-gentrification alienates the inhabitants of the community, particularly as business and corporations set up shop in the communities they do not live in. They are more representative of the oppressors than they are considered neighbors. The businesses set up in these communities have an ingrained attitude about the inhabitants of the communities that they are financially benefited by. They do not see them as humans but more as commodities. They are as alienated from those whom they depend on to support them financially as those who spend their money there.
EXCERPT: “There was an uprising on social media calling for a violent protest to take place, and resultantly things exploded yesterday afternoon in northwestern Baltimore around the area where Gray’s funeral had taken place that morning. Images of looting, destruction, arson, and violence have since streamed from the area as the city was placed under a state of emergency.”
It may appear reckless to riot but rioting is a deeper sign of an even deeper chasm between the haves and the have-nots. When people are actively involved in their own communities that they feel an ownership of and an ability to control, they are less likely to be destructive. It’s simply human nature, and to expect what happened in Baltimore to fall outside of the confines of human nature is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is denial of what is truly the cause of what is happening when people riot.
Black Time Travel | Rioting isn’t new. In fact, America was founded on rioting By Evette D. Champion EXCERPT: In the midst of the rioting that is going on in Baltimore, many people are thinking that rioting and looting is something that has only been done within the past 50 years to show civil unrest. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Did you know that this country was founded on looting and riots? During the 1760s in Boston, Massachusetts, there was a lot of political activity going on that rose a lot of eyebrows and ruffled a few feathers. The early settlers were in the midst of constant and violent protests against the British. A lot of the credit for the Revolution belongs to Sam Adams and the group called “Sons of Liberty.” READ MORE
EXCERPT: “A local militia, believed to be a terrorist organization, attacked the property of private citizens today at our nation’s busiest port,” the part of the curriculum pertaining to the Boston Tea Party reads, according to CBS Houston. “Although no one was injured in the attack, a large quantity of merchandise, considered to be valuable to its owners and loathsome to the perpetrators, was destroyed. The terrorists, dressed in disguise and apparently intoxicated, were able to escape into the night with the help of local citizens who harbor these fugitives and conceal their identities from the authorities.” READ MORE
“There have been a lot of responses to the Cosby “Rape” Allegations but I think this one speak so succinctly to the mind of the rape “victim” and how it’s possible to keep it unreported for years.” NB
The Bill Cosby rape allegations really started getting to me right around the time Philadelphia magazine’s Victor Fiorillo announced he was writing a theater piece about them. As a theater critic, I found myself one step deeper insidethe widening circle of accusations. But it wasn’t just that. I was raped in high school, or, more accurately, during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years.
With each new woman who stepped forward to accuse Cosby, with Rolling Stone’s UVA story falling to pieces and potentially damaging the credibility of a new generation of victims, my own story felt perpetually pressed against my throat,forcing its way out. Though more than 20 women have now come forward, when my husband, an attorney with an almost unfailingly steady moral compass, watched a CNN special with me about the case, he said, “I didn’t know what to believe until I saw their faces and heard them speak.” I was shocked. To me, from the first, their accounts held ironclad key words and themes. I knew implicitly why regular women held back for decades, even when reporting the incident wouldn’t result in bringing down any institutions, academic or cultural. I knew I was obligated to tell my story, one that also went unreported.
A high-school sleepover
The night I was raped, a friend whose parents were out of town hosted a sleepover. It wasn’t much as far as high school parties go — just a few girls, even fewer guys, and later, someone’s older brother and his friend, both men in their mid-20s. There was white wine, which we drank, and much discussion of the older brother, whom the girls all liked, but who wasn’t really my type — bulldog body, cheesy mustache, slicked-back hair, his friend a shorter, stockier version pulled from the same mold.
Still, I was enough of an alpha girl to feel flattered when the older brother asked me to go upstairs with him, and insecure enough to follow. He led me into a bedroom, and whatever I imagined, a makeout session, some conversation, dissipated when he asked what I was waiting for, and roughly told me to get on the bed. Again, I did what he asked. Though it wasn’t my first time, I was disgusted, not with him, a grown man who should have known better, but with myself, for letting it happen, for being so needy, so slutty.
Afterward, I told my friends I felt sick and went to bed. I awoke to find a man on top of me. The room was dark, and, confused, I asked if it was the older brother. He answered, “Yeah, that’s who it is. Go back to sleep.” It wasn’t; it was his friend. I didn’t fight back, because if my own friends hadn’t protected me, hadn’t told him to leave me alone, what was the point? Instead, I waited for it to end, and when it did, he left and again, I listened; I went back to sleep.
What could they do?
In the morning, furious, I asked my friends why they let him come upstairs. They said they didn’t know what was happening, but even if they did, what could they have done? These were men; we were girls. We let them in and flirted with them and got what we deserved. I called my mother to pick me up. Later, rumors spread throughout our school about what I did that night. I told some of the girls I was talking to a lawyer about pressing charges, but I wasn’t. I just wanted them to know that what happened was wrong.
I got on with my life, and the decades slid past. Occasionally, some news story or Facebook post would trigger my memories, and I’d be right back in that room, waiting for it to end, but mostly, I shoved them away. Except now, the memories shoved back. I frightened my teen daughter with warnings about serial killers, drugged drinks at parties, and the importance of traveling in groups. I indoctrinated my teen son about rape culture and the necessity of stepping forward if he saw intoxicated friends or strangers at a party and the situation didn’t look or feel right. It was all good advice, but delivered with a shrill sense of panic. My internal struggles were leaking into my parenting, and for the first time, I told my husband of 20 years what happened, in detail.
Saying nothing then . . .
I didn’t report my rape when it happened 30 years ago, and here’s why: I was embarrassed. The rapist was connected to friends. I was certain my own friends knew what was happening, and no one stopped it. I was so young. I didn’t know his last name. I didn’t want my friend to get in trouble for hosting the party. Within the course of that year, both of my grandmothers passed away, my parents separated, and a classmate who was there that evening was killed in a car crash. I was dealing with enough. I thought I brought it on myself. I thought it would be expensive and difficult. I was afraid my dad and brother might try to settle the issue on their own. I wanted to forget it happened. I thought I was fine.
A few years ago, I visited a therapist and mentioned the incident in a cavalier manner. “But,” she said, “you know that was rape.”
“Yeah, I know,” I answered, “but I’m fine. I’m over it.” I’m not.
If I was unwilling to report the nobody who raped me, when I had a supportive family, access to an attorney, witnesses, proof, and people who could find him, why would anyone imagine that these women, with their own lives and struggles, would report Bill Cosby at the height of his powers? Sometimes it takes a while to gain back that inner fortitude. Sometimes it takes 30 years.
. . . but now?
I’m now faced with a dilemma. Learning there are five years left on the statute of limitations is a gift because it puts power I never knew I had squarely into my hands. Recently, my daughter and I watched an episode of The Sopranos in which Dr. Melfi, Tony’s therapist, holds onto the knowledge that if she wanted, she could ask Tony to do away with her rapist at any time. Just owning that knowledge was enough power for her. My daughter couldn’t understand why she didn’t use it, but I could.
The night after learning I could still press charges, I lay in bed, thrilled and terrified. I kept second-guessing my age at the time, until I remembered a box in our basement that held all my old diaries. I rummaged around until I found an electric blue one decorated with hearts and song lyrics and boyfriends’ names. Sure enough, there was a dated entry referring specifically to the men involved and what they did.
“Well, anyway,” I concluded, “that happened.” Even then, in my own diary, I tried to erase it away, and yet it remains all these years later, tangible evidence that rape refuses to disappear, no matter how hard you try to suppress it. Khaled Hosseini wrote in The Kite Runner, “The past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last 26 years.”
Where is he now?
Still, I wonder if the man who raped me cleaned up his act. Maybe he has a wife and children and a job, and I feel protective of them, even as I try to protect myself. Statutory sexual assault is a second-degree felony and can carry with it a ten-year sentence. Maybe I should leave him alone and assume karma had its way with him. After all, he didn’t seem to be headed for greatness. And then I read the statistics: nine out of ten campus rapes are committed by serial rapists. My circumstances were different, but I wonder if I’m his only victim, who else he attacked after I didn’t report him, or if he’s still attacking.
I still don’t know what I’ll do with this new information, but I’m grateful to the brave women who came forward en masse to hold Bill Cosby accountable for his alleged crimes. I know why they waited so long and why they stopped waiting, and I also know that if it weren’t for their strength, I might never have found mine.
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