The Real War On Christmas

Christmas has been under assault for years here in America only not by those devilish forces that are so often conjured up by highly paid establishment talking heads seeking to mobilize their political bases by conjuring up as H.L. Mencken once put it "an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary". The terrible liberals were hellbent on 'taking the Christ out of Christmas' shrilly shrieked the attack dogs for the elite primarily from their Fox News studios. While the on the flip side an enormous amount time and money was wasted on some of those very liberals waging war against nativity scenes on government property. Much sound and fury expended over a stockingful of nothing that only served to poison what remains of the holiday spirit in this star spangled land of exceptionalism. What has always gone largely unsaid (most certainly by the millionaire talking heads whose jobs are to sow the seeds of disunity) is that the real war against Christmas has been waged by nothing more complicated than good old American greed and the need to exact maximum profit with no concern of the consequences.

Christmas in America is in and of itself the ultimate triumph of corporate propaganda as it is far more geared towards getting consumers out to the malls and big box stores to participate in the gross annual pagan festival of rampant consumerism that is the holiday shopping season than in celebrating any religious aspects. In America Jesus Christ was long ago banished to playing second banana to Santa Claus in a land where the ultimate holiday season currency is not frankincense and muir but Visa and Mastercard. Stress and spending overkill, maxing out the plastic and indulging the need for more bling bling and foreign made electronic gadgetry has become a seasonal ritual as the sheeple continue to contribute to their own demise, playing with their toys in steerage as the national ship of fools sets course towards the iceberg of collapse and increases speed. Big banks, already grossly subsidized by a clueless and corrupt central bank to the tune of 85 billion a month and likely more when Janet Yellen takes over the Fed are singing Joy to the World as they lavish themselves with holiday bonuses, the ill-gotten spoils from the crony capitalist winners of the class war. Christ has indeed been banished from Christmas but long before he was run out of the temple by the moneychangers. Perhaps this is a bit overly religious in nature and I am personally not a religious man but such analogies are needed for many to see the extent to which all that was once good about the holiday season has been squeezed out of it by the same greedy bastards who have strip-mined the national workforce with their plague of offshoring which is like crack cocaine to CEOs and their short term focus on profit above all.

I remember the days past when the holiday season truly was about family, togetherness, good tidings and the bonds that were once sacred in simpler times before all was hijacked by the pigs. Greed and systemic corruption have succeeded in tainting this as well, painfully made ever the more evident with spreading of the Black Friday virus into Thanksgiving Day itself like some particularly malignant form of herpes. It is a social ill though and as the simultaneously heartrending and gut wrenching reports from the front lines of retail store skirmishes continue to pour in, some sardonically amusing and others just plain tragic there is very little to be festive about as the darkest instincts of many Americans are laid bare for all to see in the age of the smartphone camera. It is the dark underbelly of the corruption of capitalism, a system that made this country great yet has been destroyed courtesy of the cheats, swindlers, liars and criminals who have rigged the game and now use the polluted government that has been purchased to ensure that it will always be that way until the day when it collapses under its own weight. Free enterprise has left the building, the same massive retailers who have this year defiled Thanksgiving with their disgusting "Door Buster" orgies of greed have broken the backs of the traditional small businessmen and women and turned the American Dream into a perverse feverish nightmare. Predictably it is all encouraged by a corrupt state-corporate media that hypes and contributes to the sense of frenzy by their seductive imagery as well as incessant advertising  just as it serves the establishment in selling ruinous and bankrupting wars.

None of it is going to end well nor should it given the relative ease that the forces of greed and corruption were able to successfully hijack this country used and the apathy and willful ignorance that allowed it to.

Door Busters: Shoppers Throw Down for Cheap Crap

Black Friday has become permanently attached to the sick American psyche to the extent that is as much a cultural rite as it is a glimpse at the now thoroughly mutated form of capitalism that exists in this country today.  Combining the needs for instant gratification, foreign manufactured electronic devices and shallowness of the current national character with the insatiable greed of retail giants seeking to hit it big on the biggest shopping day of the year at all costs the annual post-Thanksgiving melees are a window into the very soul of a collapsing empire.  This year retailers escalated their assault on basic human decency and planted their flags in the middle of Thanksgiving itself with the majority throwing open their doors to bargain hunters looking for that holy grail of a deal at 8 pm about when the annual ritual of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys game was wrapping up. That was just when the doors opened, there are normally people who begin camping out in front of their big box stores at least the day before, often braving not only assault by their fellow losers and freaks but in some parts of the country with harsh weather conditions frostbite and hypothermia.  Some I imagine imbibe of alcoholic beverages to deal with the boredom and take the edge off of the cold.

The biggest difference this year is that the traditional ugly stories began to pour in earlier than normal. I have to admit that one thing which really fascinates me is watching the You Tube videos of the in store carnage.  The glimpses of wanton savagery span the country from a Wal-Mart in Fort Worth, Texas to Knoxville, Tennessee with a pack of obese women going after the Rachel Ray cookware to this throwdown from an undisclosed Target location. The poor Target “team members” should be eligible for hazardous duty pay. I wonder how long it is going to be until some lunatic gets so pissed off over being beaten to the door buster spectacular of the day pulls out a gun and just starts shooting people. There was a shooting last night at a Romeoville, Illinois Kohl’s location, this one by local police where a shoplifter was taken out while dragging a cop from a moving vehicle. There was also a Virginia man stabbed over a parking spot dispute and a Las Vegas man was shot by a thief to steal the television he had just purchased at his local Target and pepper spray was used on a man arguing with a Wal-Mart manager over a television in New Jersey. These are but a few of the grotesque tableaus this year. Big Blue Smiley apparently is reeling from negative publicity over their stores being ground zero for a good deal of the assaults, the poster of this You Tube video was allegedly kicked out for recording it. Notably today is the day when Wal-Mart workers are set to engage in a wave of protests against the heirs of the Walton family fortune and the slave labor conditions in their chain of plantations. 

The mob scenes and early sales reports encouraged the parasitic looters on Wall Street with the markets already up this morning as the retail brutality contributed to the gambling spree further inflating the unsustainable stock bubble. I have a growing dread in the pit of my stomach that the day when the 85 billion dollar per month Federal Reserve subsidizing of the house of cards finally does collapse – which is inevitable – that the mentality that drives Black Friday will spill into the streets the day that the ATM’s no longer have cash and the debit and credit cards no longer work. The scenes from the big box retailers should scare the living hell out of anyone with the ability to think critically. It is one thing to stomp each other into pulp over a $98 HDTV doorbuster deal but it goes to the next level when the object is food. I would venture to bet that millions of Americans probably have no more than a day or two of food on hand and when the shit finally hits the fan the day that the rigged markets can no longer be preserved and the mother of all economic crashes hits not even the full might of the police state will be able to contain it.  Think of The Road Warrior only with iPads.

It Was Inevitable: The NSA is Trolling for Porn Too

With the ever-expanding list of NSA abuses piling up by the week was there ever truly any doubt that it wouldn’t come to light that the American Stasi has been involved in the perusal of pornography?  In the latest revelation to be gleaned from the documents of former Booz Allen contractor Edward Snowden a story has broken that Commandant Keith Alexander’s finest have been trolling through the porn habits of suspected “radicalizers” to accumulate potentially embarrassing information.  While the usual sanctimonious horse crap is spewed by big government mouthpieces that the rogue agency "uses all of the lawful tools at our disposal to impede the efforts of valid terrorist targets who seek to harm the nation and radicalize others to violence" rest assured that this is in no way limited to a handful of Muslim rabble rousers.  I have maintained that the really bad information on NSA surveillance are yet to break and involve a number of other sordid uses of the high tech surveillance machine, one of which would be the sexual blackmail of public officials.

The article that outed the taxpayer funded porno surfing is written by former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and other contributors and offers up the historical context that is so often missing from any other form of reportage in the lamentable state-corporate media. I excerpt from the piece which was published by the liberal website Huffington Post:

Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI harassed activists and compiled secret files on political leaders, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. The extent of the FBI's surveillance of political figures is still being revealed to this day, as the bureau releases the long dossiers it compiled on certain people in response to Freedom of Information Act requests following their deaths. The information collected by the FBI often centered on sex -- homosexuality was an ongoing obsession on Hoover's watch -- and information about extramarital affairs was reportedly used to blackmail politicians into fulfilling the bureau's needs.

Current FBI Director James Comey recently ordered new FBI agents to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington to understand "the dangers in becoming untethered to oversight and accountability."

James Bamford, a journalist who has been covering the NSA since the early 1980s, said the use of surveillance to exploit embarrassing private behavior is precisely what led to past U.S. surveillance scandals. "The NSA's operation is eerily similar to the FBI's operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to 'neutralize' their targets," he said. "Back then, the idea was developed by the longest serving FBI chief in U.S. history, today it was suggested by the longest serving NSA chief in U.S. history."

That controversy, Bamford said, also involved the NSA. "And back then, the NSA was also used to do the eavesdropping on King and others through its Operation Minaret. A later review declared the NSA’s program 'disreputable if not outright illegal,'" he said.

History, which most Americans have neither the time nor respect for unless it is wrapped up in tired and fallacious regurgitating of World War II aka ‘the good war’ analogies contains much precedent when it comes to the myriad abuses against that citizenry by intelligence agencies.  In the past, back when we still had a somewhat functional system of checks and balance and a populace that was better informed instead of the intellectually bereft collection of television watching thumb-suckers that exist today there were at times serious attempts to reign in abuses. For example there was  The  Church Committee which in the aftermath of the twin debacles of Watergate and Vietnam responded to the fiendish actions of the administration of the paranoid Richard M. Nixon sought to institute control over the CIA, NSA and FBI’s cowboy activities. Mr. Church, a Democratic party senator from Idaho on a 1975 episode of a pre-David Gregory Meet the Press stated that:

In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

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It is an earlier variation of Edward Snowden’s statement about why he was leaking all of the insider information that he took from the NSA and "turnkey tyranny":

And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse, until eventually there will be a time where policies will change, because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law. And because of that, a new leader will be elected, they’ll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it, and it’ll be turnkey tyranny.

It should be noted that another member of the Church Committee was Mr. Conservative himself Barry Goldwater which shows that in the past there used to be legitimate bipartisan concern in Congress about protecting the Constitutional rights and civil liberties of Americans. Today we have scum the likes of Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein who abuse their committee chairperson positions to further cement the fascist infrastructure of the surveillance/police state in place. This is by no means limited to the revealed “radicalizers” rest assured that the internet browsing of adult sites (porn) are being compiled and catalogued in Bluffdale, Utah for some yet to be defined future purpose.  Hey, as a libertarian I personally believe that the sexual activities and fantasies of ALL Americans are not a matter that the government should be snooping into.  The only sexual activities and internet activity that should be subject to monitoring is that of child molesters/sexual predators as these filthy degenerates  have no place in any sort of decent society and even this should be subject to warrants and courts other than the secret ones that currently exists.

This latest revelation opens the door to sexual blackmail of elected officials as well as honey traps that would put such individuals in a position of compromise.  For a few examples look at Elliot Spitzer or Anthony Weiner or Louisiana Senator David Vitter the diaper wearing client of the D.C. Madame who unlike the others is still an influential member of the Senate which given his exposure as a pervert should have relegated him to a career outside of where his potential blackmail would affect policy. Blackmail and extortion have always been instrumental to politics but never in history has the might of a high-tech surveillance machine the likes of which has never been seen on earth been allowed to operate with the complete degree of impunity that this monstrosity does.

It would be wise to take very seriously the ongoing revelations of the NSA Stasi as well as to think very seriously about how Mr. Snowden and decades earlier Senator Church have effectively put this into the context necessary so as to illustrate the danger to all of us.

Does Snowden Have a Dead Man’s Switch?

While the Obama administration and the establishment scramble to protect their evil surveillance state and build a firewall around the NSA Stasi the resistance continues. Today the European Union called for safeguards against NSA surveillance to be implemented, the ACLU has been taking the matter to the corrupt courts in The Homeland and American business interests finally realizing that they are going to be huge financial losers are implementing their own controls to protect user data. While there has been a bipartisan circling of the wagons by our now fully run amok government, led by the virulently fascist House Intelligence Committee Chairman and former FBI goon Mike Rogers and his porcine partner in crime in the Senate Dianne Feinstein (DiFi) the peasants are revolting.  The beltway elite and their now thoroughly rotten institutions of power continue to man the walls to fight off the rabble but the very ongoing nature of the pushback has them somewhat aback and in a rare defensive crouch. With much of the energy of the defenders of the dark kingdom of Mordor (to borrow a Lord of the Rings analogy) now mustering for an take no prisoners attack on this weekend’s breakthrough deal with Iran on nuclear proliferation, the flanks of the surveillance state are left somewhat exposed. Despite the unexpected breach in the defenses the propaganda mills continue to churn.

The story that I find particularly of interest is this Reuters piece by longtime establishment writer Mark Hosenball entitled “Spies worry over “doomsday” cache stashed by ex-NSA contractor Snowden”. The piece features a plethora of the usual anonymous sourcing quotes that have come to be more common in protecting the rogue state rather than actual whistle blowers and real sources. It is an excellent trick in the way that it allows government and affiliated mouthpieces to funnel information through a state media cutout (in this case Mr. Hosenball) to sow seeds of deception, propagate disinformation or engage in the standard smear tactics. Notable is that just last week the washed up Washington insider, a man that used to be a serious journalist who goes by the name of Bob Woodward gave an interview to the nations grand inquisitioner of celebrity Larry King Show to bemoan the fact that Snowden did not go to him first and to engage in some not too subtle character assassination of former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald and the others who he did. Mr. Greenwald righteously slammed the haughty old dog down in this tweet and the Washington Post came out in defense of Barton Gellman who has worked the Snowden leaks for the paper.  Folks over at the Stasi command center at Fort Meade must be getting restive.  I have no doubt though that had he gone to Woodward that he would currently be getting waterboarded at some secret CIA black site.

Anyway, the Hosenball piece goes on to describe how the professional spooks are worried that Snowden has created what is referred to as a “doomsday cache” in the event that he is murdered or apprehended by the same criminal government goons that he has blown the whistle on. This is commonly known as a “dead man’s switch” which is a contingent device/plan etc. that is intended to be activated on the death or incapacitation of the human operator, say as an override device in a locomotive or in this context a mass of information that will be released. It is a very smart thing to do for one who has challenged the rogue usurpers of the legitimate power structure and through their carelessness, greed and hubris have allowed for a reportedly yet unknown amount of incriminating information to be purloined. The piece seems to be both an attempt to tie Snowden to Chinese and Russian operatives as well as a limited hang out that the man has some really serious stuff on the bastards.

I excerpt from the Reuters piece:

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British and U.S. intelligence officials say they are worried about a "doomsday" cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud.

The cache contains documents generated by the NSA and other agencies and includes names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel, seven current and former U.S. officials and other sources briefed on the matter said.

The data is protected with sophisticated encryption, and multiple passwords are needed to open it, said two of the sources, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The passwords are in the possession of at least three different people and are valid for only a brief time window each day, they said. The identities of persons who might have the passwords are unknown.

Spokespeople for both NSA and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

One source described the cache of still unpublished material as Snowden's "insurance policy" against arrest or physical harm. 

U.S. officials and other sources said only a small proportion of the classified material Snowden downloaded during stints as a contract systems administrator for NSA has been made public. Some Obama Administration officials have said privately that Snowden downloaded enough material to fuel two more years of news stories.

"The worst is yet to come," said one former U.S. official who follows the investigation closely.

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I would hope that the anonymous “one former U.S. official who follows the investigation closely” is correct and that a day is coming when the light will be shined on that nest of cockroaches who have placed themselves above the law. I rather doubt that the stated fear of outing of intelligence operatives (which could be cribbed directly from the plot of the latest James Bond flick Skyfall) is true. After all, the NSA (as well as CIA etc.) are rogue agencies that have for too long operated outside of the realm of any sort of accountability as they conducted their siege against the U.S. Constitution and the American people in general.  The agencies are run by sociopaths, pathological liars and outright lunatics who have zero respect for either the truth or the law of the land.

What I do believe is that what they are really terrified by is the prospect of exactly what else that the information taken by Snowden would reveal were it to be made public and God willing that day is coming. What remains in play is the question of what else that this information obtained by the mass surveillance/data mining is being used for and by whom. The proverbial million dollar question is where does this information go or who is it given or sold to for purposes other than the bullshit rationale of preventing terrorism.  Some possibilities come to mind in: drug trafficking, blackmail, assassinations, money laundering, industrial espionage, sale to the highest bidder of secrets gleaned to provide an illicitly gained competitive business advantage, political fixing, intercepts of conversations that would destroy attorney/client privilege, monitoring of journalists, monitoring of activists, general snooping for personal purposes and Christ only knows what else. The depth of this cesspool of corruption, abuse of power and the accompanying rape of the Constitution is limitless.

Dead man’s switch or not, it is imperative that Snowden and those in possession of the documents that he took uncork the bottle and let the genie out on what is really being done by the NSA Stasi and the sooner the better. It is time for the surveillance monster to be permanently and irreversibly exposed as the menace to freedom that it has become and to as the assassinated John F. Kennedy once reportedly said of the equally rogue CIA - splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds.

Warmongers Caterwauling Over Iran Deal

In the aftermath of Saturday’s landmark deal over restricting Iran’s nuclear program in return for an easing of crushing economic sanctions there has predictably much weeping and gnashing of teeth amongst the crusading Neocon war-mongers. Senators and other congressional swine of dubious loyalty were already calling for even more sanctions before Saturday and the accord reached in Geneva will only reinforce their recalcitrance in acting against the national interest and working desperately to sabotage the deal. Right-wing Israeli strongman Benjamin Netanyahu naturally was bitching the loudest, the deal according to Bibi, a man who is rapidly becoming a cartoon figure  is a “historic mistake” although in the humble opinion of this writer nowhere near the historic mistakes that old Harry Truman made in 1947-48 that started this Middle East madness with the creation of the National Security State or the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh that effectively set off the chain of events leading up to the 1979 Islamic revolution to overthrow the U.S. friendly torturing Shah of Iran. Not to mention the "historic mistake" of the electorate in his own country that despite a progressive and rational citizenry continues to vote against their own self interests by not replacing his regime at the ballot box before he completely destroys the relationship with the U.S. due to his paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies. The state-corporate media is bereft of any outside perspective or historical reference other than the flogged to death WW II metaphors were the head of state of any target on the list is dubbed the "new Hitler", any efforts at diplomacy are "Munich" again and those who seek to settle problems through negotiation rather than bombs are "Neville Chamberlain". It is all hogwash and were television lobotomized Americans better informed as a populace it would called out as such.

While extremists in the Israeli government as well as their buddies in the House of Saud were as outraged as their domestic operatives at the deal, especially after the serpent that is Prince Bander (aka Bandar Bush) had coaxed the socialist French into torpedoing the negotiations two weeks ago one aspect had to really rub salt into the wound. It has been reported that the U.S. had been engaged in secret talks since March which would come to nicely serve to circumvent attempts by the usual suspects to scuttle it all and just dial up the airstrikes on Tehran. It was almost as though the old war criminal Henry Kissinger was back in the saddle with his Realpolitick. The revelation of the secret meetings is setting off shockwaves and the charlatans and opportunists are working themselves into a feeding frenzy. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has slithered out from under his rock again and Israeli lickspittle Mark Kirk will be the likely point men for the coming congressional frontal assault that will be used to rouse the rabble and renew the at least temporary derailing of the American war machine. As it is with all of the gutless chickenhawks, they are always eager to send the sons and daughters of others off to die in the asinine wars of their own creation.

There is going to be hell to pay though because Bibi just got punked. In his best interests I would hope that he has been put under suicide watch for the next several days.  The hydra will very quickly reconfigure and no expense will be spared as the warmongers begin to mobilize their media plants, embedded fifth columnists and religious zealot shock troops to besiege fence sitters in D.C. and go all in so that Jesus can come back when the Middle East erupts in flames. There will be much of the same fear-mongering to pander to the "low information voters" (God I love that term) as 2014 is an election year and there is no better sucker bait to harvest the low-hanging fruit than nationalist demagoguery.  To use a WW II analogy of my own it is as  Hermann Göring once said - "the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country". Getting this very basic concept down is a certain recipe for electoral success here in The Homeland.

Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry is basking in the limelight after his successful weekend that is when he wasn't out buying expensive gourmet chocolates for his ketchup heiress wife which resulted in a security staff lock down of the candy shop. An employee of the famous Auer Chocolatier spoke of Kerry that he was “very nice” and spoke “perfect French.”.  The entire thing did not go over well with Senator Lindsey "thank God for France"  Graham who despite the preempting of this week's Meet the Press for a NASCAR race wasted no time in getting together a gaggle of corporate-state media for his inevitable denouncing of the deal and calling for more sanctions. Joining the Palmetto State princess in parroting Neocon talking points was of course Senator John McCain and NRA terrorist supporter Peter King, a trifecta of seasoned media whores always on call to the lazy, career suckups that have so polluted the national press. I expect that by the time that the grease is congealing on the turkey gravy later this week that the aforementioned blood sucking war freaks will be joined by hundreds of others seeking to wave the bloody flag engage in their self-serving blather to get a leg up on next year's mid-terms. The ghoulish thug John Bolton has even emerged from the skeleton's closet of the Bush-Cheney administration to bitch and moan about the "abject surrender" to Iran and to once again psychotically rattle the saber as he is so accustomed to do as  a veteran shill for the war machine.

I do have to give one thing to Graham and McCain in that they both actually served in the military in comparison to the cowardly douchebags who are their colleagues and associates who will never cease to send Americans marching into a foreign meat grinder to score cheap political points or remain relevant on the talk show circuit. The propaganda mills are revving up right now and the lies will soon be as thick as a proverbial biblical plague of locusts as the warmongers desperately work to salvage their feverish wet dream of reducing Iran to ashes while leaving it's citizens with nothing but their eyes to cry with.

The Coming Militarization of the Arctic

On Friday Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel rolled out the latest expansion of U.S. militarism, this time in the Arctic which is sure to be a 'plum' duty assignment for military personnel whose job is bad enough without having to deal with freezing their asses off. While there may be a good amount of ideological squabbling regarding climate change as it is yet another of the idiotic political footballs that get kicked around in this country it does in fact exist. Because as we now see with this news the energy cartels and the U.S. Military are planning for it and have been for years now, big money does not deny pertinent information when there are profits to be reaped and new territories to be exploited. There are untold billions of dollars of oil wealth in the Arctic as the ice continues to melt facilitating exploration and Uncle Sam fully intends to plant Old Glory in the snow. 

Once again it is perfectly evident where our national priorities lie under the current leadership and the hegemonic era of full spectrum dominance. Our national credit card has been maxed out paying for the expenditures necessary to fund the warfare state that has eviscerated the country. Our streets are filled with the impoverished victims of a system on the verge of collapse, our infrastructure is obsolete and crumbling and our economy is a fraud, only kept afloat by the 85 billion dollar a month heroin fix of free gambling money from the Federal Reserve. There is always money for increased military endeavors, costly and unnecessary weapons systems and the armies of overpaid contractors that feed on it all like blood-sucking vampires.

Such a move was inevitable, not only for the obvious monetary value to big U.S. business but to offset Russia which has already announced the reopening of a military installation in the Arctic with President Vladimir Putin making no secret of the importance to Russian economic interests. So we now once again have another hot area of potential exploitation by a war-crazed establishment and as global geopolitics are currently in an area of flux due to the breakthrough deal with Iran on the sanctions/nuclear program over the weekend and the coming blitzkrieg from the obvious saboteurs whose lives are dedicated to attacking Tehran. Depending on the ability of the warmongers and a large number of treacherous rats of dubious loyalty in congress to sink the deal by pushing for stronger sanctions the region could soon end up being another front of what would be World War III. Oh, and China also has an eye on an increased presence in the region.

While Mr.  Hagel may now be talking about an avoidance of "conflict" as the rush to the riches ensues he also continues to talk the talk of the new American century: "We will remain prepared to detect, deter, prevent and defeat threats to our homeland and we will continue to exercise U.S. sovereignty in and around Alaska". It's always that "Homeland" reference that is so truly offensive and illustrative that what was once theoretically a free country can never be again as long as the invocations of the ever present and always vague "threats" are a part of the establishment lexicon.  The same type of rhetoric was used to justify the expansion of the U.S. military into the country itself despite the Posse Comitatus Act with NORTHCOM a few years ago with the purpose of providing actual military support to paramilitary police and domestic surveillance.

While the Arctic expansion of the military mission should be no surprise to anyone who pays attention it is notable and relevant as the formal pronouncement from the Secretary of Defense on Friday in Nova Scotia is newsworthy although you won't read much about it in the corrupt state-corporate media. The official Arctic strategy paper can be found here in .pdf format.

Was 60 Minutes Fake Benghazi Story Planted?

While not wholly unexpected CBS has failed to hold any of those involved with the now thoroughly discredited Benghazi fantasy story by their ‘ace’ reporter Lara Logan which despite being worked on for around a year was nothing but a massive lie. While CBS executives and Logan rushed to apologize and retract the story after it was exposed that the primary source, a British mercenary goon named Dylan Davies who wrote a book under the pseudonym of Sgt. Morgan Jones entire story was fabricated. One could understand why corporate media titan CBS would have a vested interest in pushing the book, entitled The Embassy House (now withdrawn by the publisher) as it was a product of one of their publishing subsidiaries but to taint the reputation of their hallowed Sunday night McNews program 60 Minutes was risky and stupid. Not that the show holds up to any sort of scrutiny anyway, these days it is nothing but a vacuous zombie money machine that is a shell of the program that it was long ago when the reputation was built. 60 Minutes more often than not serves up the sleazy celebrity swill that the state-corporate media is already awash in as well as puff pieces that burnish the image of war criminals like Dick Cheney but to air such a blatant bit of propaganda as the Logan story is really so over the top that questions need to be asked about whether the story was intentionally planted.

It is not that planted stories, manipulated facts and outright lies are not commonplace given the dismal quality of what passes for media in this country in the waning days of 2013. There are conflicts of interest aplenty, for example the trotting out of former military and establish figures as “experts” on the wars and rumors of wars that have come to permeate our increasingly militarized society. It was certainly not disclosed that many of those trotted out on as “expert” talking heads babbling on about the necessity to attack Syria a few months back worked for firms that would have profited lavishly from an attack. This is actually fairly commonplace, it wasn’t that long ago when former Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff was afforded the credibility that he did not deserve when his firm The Chertoff Group was pimping those naked body scanning machines to the TSA after the bizarre Christmas Day “Underwear Bomber” plot was foiled.  The mainstream media has long been used by elements of the government to sell wars, sow disinformation and trick Americans into blindly accepting their own enslavement to the state. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird being a prototype program that has come to evolve over time and the advent of technology into an all-encompassing propaganda machine.

The 60 Minutes story has been a strange one from the first day that it ran sending the notorious crank Palmetto State Senator Lindsey Graham into one of his standard bitch fits, holding a press conference and threatening to block all of Obama’s nominees. Graham refused to back off after the Logan piece was identified as total bullshit and she was forced to issue an on air apology. The Graham tantrum blew up in his gerbil cheeked face this week when the ongoing abuse of the filibuster (which is incidentally not included anywhere in the Constitution) when former Nevada Gaming Commissioner and current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option”. While the entire Senate silliness is yet another blatant indictment at how the entire legislative body has been effectively hijacked by wealthy special interests waving fistfuls of campaign donations at the prostitutes in Congress it only came to head because of chronic abusers the likes of Senator Graham who in any functional democracy would have long ago been voted out of office for his flagrant abuses of the public trust.

But I digress…

The disturbing lack of accountability over the 60 Minutes hoax indicates the presence of something far more nefarious than a simple matter of a parent company pushing the books of a publishing division. In a Newsweek piece that just came out entitled “Lara Logan’s Mystery Man” by Jeff Stein examines the potential role of Logan’s husband, Joseph W. Burkett in the scandal. It seems that Mr. Burkett has quite the history as a professional propagandist and at one time worked for a government contracting firm named The Lincoln Group that specialized in planting stories during the Iraq war.  I excerpt the following from the piece:

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Nobody at 60 Minutes has been fired or even publicly disciplined for its odd, inflammatory and dead-wrong October 27 story on the Islamist assault in Benghazi that killed U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. But it has apologized. That mea culpa, however, left some large and troubling questions unanswered; the most important one is how CBS's superstar correspondent, Lara Logan, her producer and other network news executives let security contractor Dylan Davies on the air with his explosive tale about what he did and saw during that attack.

While Davies was the central on-camera personality in that report, the most interesting figure in this mystery was never on screen, nor listed as a contributor to the piece. It is Logan's husband, Joseph W. Burkett, a former Army sergeant and onetime employee of a private intelligence outfit hired by the Pentagon to plant pro-U.S. stories in the Iraqi media in 2005.

One recent account implied that Burkett, 42, was the Svengali behind the now infamous story that pinned responsibility for the Benghazi attack on al Qaeda, without citing any sources.

"He was an employee of the Lincoln Group, a now-shuttered 'strategic communications and public relations firm' hired by the Department of Defense in 2005 to plant positive stories written by American soldiers in Baghdad newspapers during the Iraq War," the website Gawker reported.

The Gawker account also implied Burkett was a key operator in the covert action. A source intimately familiar with Burkett's family told Newsweek that he regularly suggested he was some sort of super-spook.

According to an internal company document obtained by Newsweek, the Lincoln Group specialized in producing films, news clips, and print stories in Baghdad that would be fed to the media through cutouts on an unattributed basis, making them appear as originating from legitimate news organizations.

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If this is indeed the case it calls into question the very essence of Logan’s journalistic integrity. She has no objectivity and as is the case when she went off on Michael Hastings the now deceased journalist for his Rolling Stone magazine piece "The Runaway General" that eventually led to the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal could herself be an embedded disinformation artist. She has been on record with comments extremely critical of Obama's Benghazi response which should have triggered some form of oversight by the CBS management over the segment in question, she also has the distinction of having been on the spot in the Baghdad square when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down. It was the war's iconic image until it was replaced by the horrific image of Army private Lynddie England with a man on a leash among other gruesome pics from Abu Ghraib prison where U.S. troops were sexually humiliating and torturing Iraqis. The pulling down of Saddam's statute has subsequently been revealed to have been a psy-op, staged and packaged by image masters to bolster public support for the war and it happens to make for an interesting bit of coincidence that the future wife of a paid government disinformation operative would be the one covering it. I have yet to see that question asked but now that Mr. Burkett has been brought up in a story in a national publication it should merit at least some degree of follow-up considering the magnitude of the 60 Minutes false (planted?) story.

Americans should never underestimate just how much of their own taxpayer money is used to brainwash them into an acceptance of a disastrous foreign policy. The business of managing the news is an enormously expensive ongoing effort and the military in the digital age is particularly savvy in the utilization of technology to expand beyond the broadcast and print media into the internet and social networking. The bloated Pentagon budget, one that continues to be hidden from the American public has plenty socked away to hire firms such as the defunct Lincoln Group as well as the Rendon Group, another prominent public relations firm that shills for foreign U.S. military interventions.

According to remarks reportedly made by John  Rendon in a 1996 address to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy:

“‘I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician. I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.’ He reminded the Air Force cadets that when victorious troops rolled into Kuwait City at the end of the first war in the Persian Gulf, they were greeted by hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags. The scene, flashed around the world on television screens, sent the message that U.S. Marines were being welcomed in Kuwait as liberating heroes.

“‘Did you ever stop to wonder,’ Rendon asked, ‘how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?’ He paused for effect. ‘Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then.’”

It has now become virtually impossible for average Americans to be able to come to any serious idea of what actually constitutes the truth in the corrupt state-corporate media. This is precisely the objective of the professionals who use psychology, boatloads of money, slick imagery and paid shills within the networks to manage perception and promote the continuing flow of dollars that could be far better utilized on projects that are desperately needed at home. Money that would be better spent on repairing a decaying and obsolete infrastructure, science and research projects to actually develop things that enhance society instead of blowing things up and making defense industry insiders and investors rich or even paying down the debt. It takes one hell of an effort to be informed these days and a daily intake of numerous news sources including non-domestic as well as a monitoring of state-corporate media to identify the daily spin.

In the words of the late CIA director William Casey: "We will know that we have succeeded when everything the public believes is false."  He never lived long enough to see this come to fruition but we are all living in a world based on this philosophy now.

Yet Another Obama Lie: U.S. Not Leaving Afghanistan

Not that another Obama fib should surprise anyone, along with "war criminal" another must for the top job is "liar" but all of that stuff about exiting Afghanistan... it's just like everyone can keep their insurance policies under Obamacare and the NSA isn't spying on you.  The ugly truth is that we live in an empire and Afghanistan has always been the apple of the eye of colonies throughout history. The harsh land and the often brutal tribal inhabitants have chewed up and spat out those with imperial designs in the past, the British, the Soviets, hell even Alexander the Great but we are an exceptional people and it will be different this time. The strutting Neocons long ago declared "the end of history" after the fall of the Berlin Wall and as the world's remaining superpower the by God United States of America would conquer the world for McDonalds and our other gleaming examples of our national greatness. Or not. The Neocons have been exposed as the loons that they always were with first the debacle of Iraq as well as the ongoing Afghanistan quagmire, a costly and futile occupation to which there is no end in sight save the inevitable bankruptcy and collapse of an overstretched and maxed out America. We are NEVER going to truly leave Afghanistan, it is just like Korea and Germany among other countries in which there were military actions, once the imperial footprint has been established it is there forever, more often than not kicking in the heads of the locals. 

With Iran on the burner, Iraq still a smoldering mess, military forces peppered throughout the most volatile regions on the planet and a rapidly deteriorating Homeland increasingly transforming into a fascist police state on the way to full blown banana republic the last thing that we need is to stay in Afghanistan. Granted that if anything has been proven to be true under the lamentable reign of Barry and the boys it is that Wall Street and the mega-speculators entrenched with impunity in their government subsidized casinos reign supreme. And there is a certain very profitable crop in the area that in a rarely whispered and forbidden secret provides a very lucrative revenue source to the money changers. That of course would be opium, a substance of which production at least according to this New York Times story is rising big time in 2013.  The laundering of drug profits has been an unspoken function of the big banks, probably for decades although such statistics are never truly made available but occasionally something slips out like this 2009 piece from The Observer entitled "Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor" and this from respected mainstream source Bloomberg from this very year entitled "Money-Laundering Banks Still Get a Pass From U.S.". Again, such crass revelations are never mentioned lest they risk rousing some of the sheeple but hard core researchers, for example Peter Dale Scott have been on the beat for years when it comes to big banks and drug money laundering. Hell, I more than half expect that such things are facilitated by agencies such as the NSA and the CIA has had the reputation for dabbling in the narcotics trade for quite some time now.

But Obama himself is but a transitory figure as are all U.S. presidents, soon he will be picking up his golden briefcase and retiring to the same lucrative afterlife as Bill Clinton and the Bushes, if Poppy lives long enough they can probably strike up a good foursome on some gated and exclusive golf resort on the taxpayer dime. This just the way that it works these days and probably has always worked at least since  John F. Kennedy had his brains blown out in Dallas fifty years ago this afternoon.  While he doesn't get into the drug business angle Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com was dropping his payload right on target again this morning with his column simply entitled "We're Never Leaving Afghanistan" from which I excerpt: 

This was supposed to be the "good" war, the "bad" war – Iraq – being bad because it was started by a Republican president. This was the war everybody – except for the most dedicated peaceniks (and, of course, us libertarians) – was for: it was a good war, a just war, a defensive war. They attacked us first, right? So we went in there and – twelve years later we’re still there, with no sign we’re leaving anytime soon.

Back in 2001, we warned against nation-building, and explicitly said: "Kill ‘em – and get out!" With Osama bin Laden dead, and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan practically extinct, Washington could’ve done exactly that many months ago – but the real aims of the "war on terrorism" have nothing to do with al-Qaeda, if they ever did.

In 2001, the US government decided to move in on the Middle East and effectively establish military control over the entire region. The invasion of Afghanistan, ostensibly in hot pursuit of al-Qaeda, was just a way to get our foot in the door, so to speak. The subsequent history of the region – the invasion of Iraq and Libya, military pressure applied to Syria and Iran – highlights the US battle plan for the region.

Obama said we’re withdrawing from Afghanistan, but he also said "If you like your insurance you can keep your insurance" – and we know how that turned out.

Indeed we do.  Despite all of the media hyperbole and weeping and gnashing of the teeth over former Nevada Gaming Commissioner Harry Reid's invocation of the "Nuclear Option" (a term I believe that was coined by his predecessor, Bill Frist of the HCA family healthcare colossus) to limit the filibuster it will soon become obvious that this too is a scam. It is only a matter of time until the bipartisan show of unity to ram more economic sanctions up the ass of Iran and all of the trivialities and playing possum can be done away with to do what we in twenty first century American does best, start wars at the expense of the long term stability of our once honored society in the days before the pigs hijacked it. 

Here's an Innovative Idea: Cut off Water to NSA Utah Facility

While I have not idea whether it is practical or not an innovative idea of how to fight back against the NSA Stasi is being floated in Utah home of the huge NSA surveillance center that will soon be open for business. Courtesy of an op ed piece in the Salt Lake Tribune entitled Utahns should deny water to NSA center written by a Connor Boyack advocates for the people of the state to deny critical resources to this blight upon the state and the nation as a whole. In tossing in Lord of the Rings references the facility is referred to by the author in a metaphoric sense as the eye of Sauron, the all-seeing orb of the dark kingdom of Mordor. Cultural references aside the specs for the facility are cited as:

When fully operational, the NSA facility is expected to require a staggering 1.7 million gallons of water every day to cool down the computers harvesting information on people worldwide. That water is supplied by the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District, a political subdivision of the state. Without it, the facility cannot function.

The original necessity for the remote NSA complex - which will come to allow the rogue government to one day when the order is given to retroactively haul in Americans and convict them for past statements and affiliations critical of the police state - came when it was no longer feasible to operate solely at Fort Meade due to the huge drain on the local power grid. In the SLT op ed piece it is stated that:

In 2006, the NSA faced major challenges at its facility at Fort Meade, Md. The energy consumption required by the computers at that complex maxed out the electric capacity of the Baltimore area power grid. The NSA, as Baltimore Gas & Electric’s largest customer, was using as much power as the entire city of Annapolis. Unable to use some of their costly and sophisticated new equipment, the agency knew it needed to look elsewhere.

The costs of operating in Utah would be far cheaper and the political climate would be friendly, longtime Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, a fixture on the Senate Intelligence Committee could be counted on to grease the rails. While at the time of its conception the NSA did not face the scrutiny that has been brought upon it by the revelations of former government contractor Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden that has portrayed the agency as exactly what it truly is, a menace to any concept of liberty and privacy and a blight upon the land that would effectively nullify good chunks of what remains of the Constitution. More detail on the Bluffdale spy center is provided by writer James Bamford in a 2012 piece that he did for Wired Magazine entitled The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say). This is a very dangerous facility but that it is at least now receiving some attention is good, such a thing would have been inconceivable in the early years of the decade of 9/11.

It is incumbent upon the people to find a way to reign in this travesty. There will be nothing done by a corrupt, craven and on the payroll Congress. The NSA and multi-billion dollar surveillance industry has powerful embeds within the government, notably the ultra-fascist Congressman Mike Rogers and the bursting at the seams sack of hypocrisy and amorality Diane Feinstein (DiFi) who are both pushing legislation in the House and Senate respectively to further immunize the American Stasi and cement it's power into place. The Supreme Court is in the bag as well and as far as Obama goes he has done nothing but defend the unconstitutional actions of the surveillance monstrosity. Perhaps the people of Utah can somehow mobilize against this facility by denying it the water/electricity it needs to function but that is doubtful given the state of TV addled lethargy that exists on the world's biggest sheep ranch that is The Homeland. Were they to be successful in any way it would likely trigger some sort of heavy handed paramilitary action of the sort that the fascist state always uses to put down resistance to its criminality. But that this sort of idea is even being floated is an encouraging sign that there are at least some patriotic souls who abhor what has been done to this once great country and are fighting back.