What's Left to Say?

Like everyone else, I was horrified at the massacre that took place in a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school December 14th. That morning, I had just returned from yet another anxiety-ridden visit to the vet’s with my Mother’s ‘bequest,’ her sick little calico, and I was attempting to finish up some errands before returning home. In line at CVS the patron behind me sheepishly asked, “What is this country coming to?” I turned to look at what I thought would be an elucidating scene unfolding nearby that had drawn his attention and condemnation, only to find him shaking his head while he was reading his smartphone. He looked up.
“The shooting. In Connecticut,” he explained, minimizing his screen. His eyes watered. “How could it be at an elementary school,” he stammered.

My heart thumped. “Right. Because they’re supposed to happen in high schools. And colleges. And schools for the gifted,” I thought.

“How did it ever come to this,” the man asked again. I didn’t know what to say. We inched further toward the cashier.

“When did it happen,” I asked.

“Nine-thirty, this morning,” he replied. “They’re just evacuating the kids now.” It was about 11:30. I began stacking my purchases on the counter after the woman in front of me finished her transaction. “Morning,” I replied to the clerk, when she greeted me. Silence from my interlocutor. Advil, Benadryl, bacterial wipes – a quick purchase this day, if not an awkward one. “Thanks,” the clerk said, handing me my bag. What to say to the despondent man now? I turned, hoping whatever came out of my mouth wasn’t too trite, or somehow inadequate. But then I realized – not only was I not equal to an eloquence required of this moment, I didn’t have anything to say, because, I knew, so many other talented, sincere, driven, intelligent people had, for years, been saying everything that needed to be said about children exposed to a steady stream of violence in the media they consume, and gun violence, and the public health threat of both. Just then, I didn’t think anyone had anything else particularly relevant to say either, a fear that was confirmed not hours later, when I was listening to a supposed expert on gun violence tell the newscaster interviewing him that “inner-city” gun violence statistics were actually steady, or falling, in most areas of the country. “This didn’t happen in South Central,” I screamed at the TV – so forcefully that I scared even myself.

“They’ve got to do something about all these crazy people with guns now. These things can’t keep up, or we’re all done for,” the man opined.

“Yeah, but will they,” I responded half-heartedly. The man glanced away. “Take care,” I heard myself saying, and I started for the door. Then, it hit me. “Of course they won’t,” I thought. “If there had been any will on the part of politicians, or whomever it is that controls them, to make America safe for all its inhabitants, there’d be a whole lot of things that would be different about our country today, never mind regulating the ownership and possession of firearms more carefully. Firstly, there’d be no such thing as a Vaccine Injury Compensation Act – especially, not one that had to be refunded two years after its initial funding because so many people have been ‘injured’ by contaminated vaccines that all the money intended to reimbursement them for lives they’ll have to live in pain, debilitation, and as non-contributing members of society ran out. Instead, there’d be 24/7 inspection by non-biased international health inspectors in every vaccine production facility in the country; the concept of dual-use technology isn’t limited to atomic weaponry/energy, after all, and our blatant disregard for even our own violated bioweapons prohibitions are both now well-known and well-established as the basis for industries such as biotechnology. Second, health care rationing vis-à-vis ‘health’ maintenance organizations? Are you kidding, in the world’s most technologically advanced and expensive medical infrastructure in the world? If we really wanted every person in America to have the health care they need to make them healthy, productive citizens, we’d pay our doctors the way politicians the last 20 years have been demanding we pay our teachers – by the results they get. After all, if you don’t have your health, you’ve got no life. That’s the only way we’re ever going to get rid of cancer (after the lucrative cancer advocacy and research industries have depleted their sizeable endowments, of course). No – there’d be a whole lot of things different here, if the health and well-being of America’s citizens were the primary interest of the politicians purportedly representing us. And we’ve known that for quite some time – just like we’ve known the reasons children and others with access to firearms choose to kill to solve problems for which they cannot foresee any other solution.” I turned on my heels just as I reached the automatic doors. I saw the man weaving toward them, through the lines of customers at the checkout counter.

“Excuse me,” I started. I had no idea what I was going to say to him, this wretch in so much shock he could hardly finish the simple task of checking out at a store without being overcome by emotion. Looking back, I’m frankly surprised at how coherently I managed to engage him. The passion still lives, I suppose. That’s a good thing.

“You know, there are – and have been – lots and lots of people, working intensively around the issue of violence and how it affects children in this country for many decades, and they’ve researched and told us that things like this are both foreseeable and preventable for almost as long. The problem isn’t that we don’t know why things like these happen; we know all too well. Children exposed to violence will use violence to solve their problems. And the problem doesn’t have one particular factor, the altering of which would stop such things from happening, like gun control. The problem is the political will to change what’s become a preference for a brutal society – and your representative not representing you, if you don’t want that type of society.”

I could have stopped there, but I didn’t. I barely paused to take a breath as the man nodded, before I continued.

“When I was in college I was fortunate enough to study with an expert in the violence that’s pedaled to children in their media and the damage it does to them. She lives right here, in the so-called world’s smartest zip code. I remember her asking me, after I began my teaching practicum in one of the city’s more progressive kindergartens, how I found it, and my trying to explain the perplexing phenomena I was witnessing in some of the children’s dramatic play. ‘I don’t think I was exceptional when I was in kindergarten, but I do remember being able to make up a story that had a beginning, middle and an end,’ I told her. I didn’t know at the time her life’s work was demonstrating how children’s cognitive abilities are undermined when they are routinely bombarded by gratuitous acts of violence – violence that makes no sense, contextually, to stories they watch in their cartoons and programs on TV and video games – and that that diminished capacity for logical thought precludes their ability to posit outcomes other than violence when negotiating challenging situations and encounters with others.”

You’d think I would have said enough by then and would have taken pity on the man, whose face now began to transform into a mask of bewilderment, but, for once, I was able to reach that point of global awareness, that ‘ah-ha’ logical conclusion that puts it altogether in the narrative I was creating extemporaneously.

“And the best way to teach children how to think constructively in logical ways – to teach them to problem solve by positing many alternatives – is in an environment that supports constructive thought, not in the type of classroom that Bill Clinton’s so-called No Child Left Behind drive for standards created, where teachers only teach children how to answer inquires posed to them in a particular way, instead of teaching them to think through possible solutions, if they teach them at all. Information and indoctrination – not education. When you’ve got industry demanding the right to corrupt children’s minds through the media they consume, and you’ve got no outlet for them to learn to think on their own, and they’re bombarded with images of violence, of course, they’re going to choose violence as a solution to their problems. And if it’s not violence with a gun, it’s violence with their words and violence with their fists. It’s bullying. It’s gang activity. It’s what the warmongers running our country want – beasts to do their empire-building bidding when they grow up.  Remember - Ronald Reagan was ecstatic when he learned kids were dumbing themselves down in front of video games because they were learning how to become proficient using joy sticks and would one day be as proficient at remote warfare.”

"Well, it is a complex issue,” the man offered.

“Only because we choose to see it as such,” I replied. “We solved the mysteries of atomic fission and DNA. We could solve both community and domestic violence issues – and world hunger and peace – if we wanted to. But we don’t. Because wealthy people profit from violence. And profit is all that matters to our representatives.”

We had drifted out into the parking lot by then, and I was as anxious to extract myself from what had turned into a soliloquy I had not intended as I believed the man was to be relieved of me. But he just stood there with me, in silence. I relaxed and fished my sunglasses out of my bag.
“I suppose there’s some truth to that,” he mumbled. “It’s undeniable now.”

I ought to have felt elated for the seldom-experienced validation he was giving me, but instead, I just felt deflated. Hollow. Not much of a victory, when you so want to be wrong.
“I don’t want to leave you as depressed as I am about the sorry state of our Congress,” I said. “The woman I was telling you about? She’s got several good books you can get on amazon.com about what I was telling you. I think it’s helpful to focus on the hopeful, and her work offers very practical guidance to counteract all of the negative influences that bear on our children these days. You should read them, and share them, and talk with your social circle about demanding a complex answer to the complex issue of violence perpetrated against and then by children.” I gave him her name, and the title of the book most relevant to our discussion, Who’s Calling the Shots, wished him a better day, and left him.

Later that day, I watched coverage of the shooting on network news. It was the first time I watched network news in I couldn’t say how long; it’s always the same five, largely irrelevant and increasingly inaccurate sound bites interspersed with infotainment garbage, so I don’t ingest it, ordinarily. That’s when I lost it and screamed at the TV, and then I started reading accounts of the shooting on the web, instead of watching the boob tube. And, as I had predicted, I soon discovered that there really wasn’t much different in the content, tone, or volume of pundits’ disquisitions on the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre than there was in that of the reporting on the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting – the reasons for them, or how to prevent future horrors of a similar nature. It’s always gun control, ‘experts’ tell us.

I casually surveyed HuffPost and Common Dreams over the next few days, and learned that the shooter, Adam Lanza, was a former mild special needs student who had long harbored resentments toward his mother over the time she had spent volunteering in the kindergarten at the school and that it was, ironically, her weapons he used to murder her in her bed before heading off to Sandy Hook.  Among the outcries and finger pointing and excuses I found only two essays worth the time and energy to read – only two essays that had anything of worth to say, or could demonstrate just how intractable the courage deficit is in our leaders. No more poignant essay was penned last month demonstrating this than Simon’s Rock College shooting victim parent and former gun control activist Gregory Gibson’s New York Times piece, “Why America Lets the Killings Continue.”  If anyone should know why, it’s this man.
“My wife and I learned about the Connecticut school shootings on our way home from the cemetery, where we had just finished observing the 20th anniversary of our son’s murder. Our son, Galen, who was 18, and a teacher were killed on December 14, 1992, by a deranged student who went on a shooting rampage at Simon’s Rock College in western Massachusetts.” Gibson tells us how his son, a gifted kid, had thrived at the college, unlike the student who would take his life, and how the event changed his own life by turning him into an avid gun control activist. He wrote a book about the shooting that took his son from him. He attended gun control rallies. He spoke about how he believed we should treat gun violence as a public health issue. He signed petitions and wrote letters. And when he saw that none of it had any impact on the will of politicians to do practical things to curb gun violence – when he saw the massacres get bigger and become more frequent – he gave up. “I came to realize that, in essence, this is the way we in America want things to be. We want our freedom, and we want our firearms, and if we have to endure the occasional school shooting, so be it.” Though I disagree with Gibson about who it is that ‘we’ to whom he refers are, and though I know it is people who kill people, not guns, and that we should look at the way we’ve indoctrinated people to believe they need to use violence to manage their relationships, I do believe he has a point, and that it’s the only point worth remembering: whoever it is that’s in control of America wants America to be a place where gun violence becomes the first and most prolific response to settling our differences. A nation of George Zimmermans – that’s what they want. I became convinced of this fact reading the second essay that piqued my interest that week – this one, by a former politician.

Former Michigan governor and TV commentator Jennifer M. Granholm lays the blame for the proliferation of gun violence at the feet of a weak-willed and greedy Congress: “This gun debate, the fiscal cliff, and frankly all important and difficult issues demand leaders willing to be uncomfortable. Willing to lean into an oncoming storm rather than be blown along with it. The men at Normandy risked their lives for what was right. Our politicians could at least risk their campaign donations.” Our politicians, she wants us to believe, are too intimidated by the gun and defense lobbies. I’m sure she has a point – all politicians pander to those who will keep them seated. But I strongly suggest that there is a much larger power than simple self-interest at work here.

There can be no question that the first name on that registry of mentally ill people Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association has called for the creation of as a way of preventing future Sandy Hook Elementary School-type shootings should be his very own for suggesting this Nazi-esque proposal and also suggesting that we turn our schools into battlefields by stationing armed soldiers in them, but the fact this monster is given prominent airtime a week to the day of the massacre to make these proposals, when funerals and memorials were being held, and people haven’t even had time to grieve properly, speaks volumes about who has the privilege of freedom of expression in our country. Activists, who for decades have tried to warn us that violence-prone children would be the natural result of letting corporations and others who derive a benefit from our children becoming warriors shape their minds and characters have systematically been removed from positions of influence and prominence through intimidation and the type of covert warfare documented on this website. That’s where those leaders Gov. Granholm decries the dearth of have gone. Followers of Peggy Charren’s Action for Children’s Television were dismayed – to say the least – when she declared an end in 1992 to the advocacy work for which the non-profit group was once famous, after coming out in support of the V chip, the technology that makes parent controls possible in, at the time, future television designs, disappointing supporters who, for years, had been advocating for the regulation of children’s television, understanding that many children – particularly, those whose parents had no choice but to use the TV as a babysitter for their children while they were at work – didn’t have parents with the time or knowledge to program these then-high-tech televisions their parents likely wouldn’t be able to afford so as not to harm them. I remember being in that lecture hall at Harvard Divinity School the day she made that announcement, and there far more audible gasps and whipsawing of heads and alarmed faces than there was the smattering of applause she received that day.  I don’t have to imagine the pressures she likely endured before she exited children’s advocacy – and then received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, interestingly. I’ve heard plenty of tales of the type of harassment and intimidation those activists experienced and experienced it myself.
And, really, what more is there to say? Every aspect of our society is shaped by the values of the warmongers that control our government. Every aspect. Because they have the power to eliminate anyone who isn’t a warmonger. Duh. Warriors. It’s what they do. And it’s easy to see, how we’re all being indoctrinated to live not by humanity’s highest ideals but by our most base instincts, if we just look around: mass media gives us parking, storage, yard, wedding, house, dance, and umpteen other types of ‘war,’ and the most popular video game of all time is World of Warcraft. And those of our religious communities that are wholly complacent are a disgrace. Homophobia that’s reached an insane level of intolerance, with things such as Michigan’s License to Bully law. How anyone with half a brain cannot see the degree to which we are being entreated to become what, incidentally, the Nazis prized as the model citizen, is really quite astounding to me.

When a healthy childhood for every child in America is made improbable, and no one in a position of authority and power bats an eye at the clear violation of human rights represented by the offending customs, institutions, and so-called values that no longer make childhood inviolable and sacred, you know hope is lost – because all of those people in positions of authority and power, all of those so-called tribunes and representatives and leaders, have actually been working to create the state in which we live. There isn’t any other explanation possible for this dearth of courage and leadership than that our leaders aren’t. They don’t care about our children; if they did, Sandy Hook wouldn’t have happened. They get paid to pander to the NRA by crafting legislation that makes it happy, and to look the other way when things such as the Assault Rifle ban expire. And if Jennifer Granholm has a hard time trying to find leaders to fill this void, all she need do is read the pages of this blog to see that those leaders are the ones that the warmongers in control of our country have been systematically eliminating from American society for decades.

Before I finally sat down to write this essay I had no intention of posting another missive to this blog. Every day, like countless millions across the globe, I’m tortured with sleep deprivation, food contamination, bioassaults that leave me with one bout of bronchitis after another for months at a time, and various PSYOP, and every day, I get up, try to go about the business of living and face the day and the minions around me with a measure of equanimity. I know perfectly well that those in charge took to heart industrialist Jay Gould’s observation, “I can always pay one-half of the poor to kill the other half,” and that the people engaged in covert warfare against me and those like me are no different than the Nazi underling, trying to survive the endless nightmare created by Hitler’s cabal of monsters. Though things never change for me in and around my 386 square-foot prison, and radiation weapons fry my head, chest and torso, making me feel as though I’ve just come back from a day at the beach without sunscreen and as though I’ve run a marathon, and causing my intestines to bleed, I know they’re not likely to change because war against decent, caring people is what this country has been about for a long, long time. But then I remembered that even though my lack of freedom means not being able to associate freely with others, and even though I’m not allowed commerce with whomever it is that reads my blog, it’s still worthwhile to remind whomever I can that there was a time when things were not as bad as they are right now in this country – when children didn’t take assault rifles into elementary schools and movie theaters and shoot other children and people. That that time could be resurrected – if they were only willing to use their own freedom to do so, come what may. To remind them that that country doesn’t exist because that country’s leaders no longer exist; they’ve been eliminated - the Paul Wellstones and Ray Carnahans and Paul Tsongases and the Kennedys - and that it is up to them to choose to become the next leaders willing to confront the military dictatorship that has evolved as our country’s premiere agent, remember that people like me are still here, still working as best they can, and still supportive of them even if they can’t see, or hear, or feel our impact. I promise you, if this liberal target of the U.S. war machine had been allowed to create the type of learning environment in which all children felt safe, respected and valued and could learn in peace, instead of being made a bioslave of it, there would be plenty more Paul Wellstones, Ray Carnahans and Paul Tsongases thriving today, no matter how long or short their lives and careers.

And that’s rather the point. The fact I’m not allowed to say things in an impactful context is as much the reason I have nothing left to say as is the fact that it’s all been said before. Now, it’s up to you.

Happy New Year. It's Time to Clean Out the Closets.

New Year’s eve we found ourselves trying to make room for the new clothes Santa had brought us. It snowed all day long, which always cheers us up, living in the city as we do; the blanket of bright, white powder we can see from the seven windows in our 360 s.f., fourth-floor, walk-up on the rooftops of adjacent buildings, the stone façade of St. James’s Episcopal church and the brick fire station across Mass Ave. never fails to make everything look crisp, clean and tidy. Though I’m behind in my writing, it felt right to be inside, pruning our humble belongings and enjoying the occasional game of Whist, or Casino, watching the winter storm gather and fade. I even had some time to think about my New Year’s resolutions, and about the custom of resolution-making at the beginning of a new year. Aside from birthdays, this one day seems the perfect time to resolve to give up the things that no longer serve our spiritual, emotional and physical growth, and just as we’ve made room in our closets for the new clothes that will keep us warm and presentable in the coming year, we happily sacrifice those less tangible things we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe we can’t live without, too, trusting that doing so will enable us to live richer, more fulfilling lives, and enable us to continue to build lives of dignity, if not rectitude.

When I was a child and I began reading the Bible I was astounded by the way in which people in Biblical times treated their animals. I’m still astounded by the way people treat animals, but back then, before I had ever heard about factory farming and Confined Animal Feeding Operations, the occasional references in scripture to animal sacrifice seemed to me to be hugely at odds with the stories of G_d’s entreaty to Adam that Adam care for all the animals in his domain and Noah’s subsequent Herculean attempts to preserve the lives of even (what some would consider) repugnant creatures, such as cockroaches, through the flood in the anthropocentric tale that attempts to explain the ice age meltdown. Eating meat began to bother me a lot when I was about four, and though vegetarianism had been around for as long as there had been people, when I was a child, my parents simply didn’t understand the principles of it, or how important a non-flesh diet was to their daughter’s well-being. I thought about not eating animals, though – perhaps not a lot, but I thought about it enough, and even began a mostly life-long habit of thanking any animal I’m about to eat for its sacrifice, promising to use the nutrition their bodies give mine to make the world a better place. One of my resolutions this year is to finally give up eating animal flesh. It’s long overdue. I don’t want any more life needlessly sacrificed for my thoughtless consumption. I recognize that I live in a land of abundant nutritional options, unlike the ancient Israelites in the Sinai desert. It will be a big sacrifice but one I’ve thought about carefully. With life-long hypothyroidism and an intolerance for synthetic thyroid hormones I will have to work diligently to supplement my diet to support my thyroid without the animal-derivative thyroid hormone replacement that makes it at all possible for me to get out of bed in the morning. But isn’t that the meaning of sacrifice – to give up something, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you, to improve your life? My integrity is more important than the convenience of hormone replacement. Now that I’ve made the commitment, I realize I’ve been thinking about the nature of sacrifice for almost as long as I’ve been thinking about not eating animal flesh.

One day, while my brother and I and some of our friends were playing chicken in the street on our bikes, I realized that the animal sacrifices I had read about in scripture were really just the ultimate game of chicken. Once upon a time, somebody in Biblical times who ate meat probably less than two times a year because animals were expensive to keep and raise, especially in a desert, said, “If I give up this luxury – my one festival meal of lamb during the holiday – and pay for the slaughter of one animal not to preserve my viability but simply to kill to prove to ‘God’ and the people around me that I am willing to sacrifice the very thing that may well ensure my health and the health of my family, then surely ‘God’ will appreciate my sacrifice and show it by making sure nothing bad, at the very least, happens to me in the coming year. I just have to have the guts to stick out the unpleasant, violent waste of life.” Then, as in any game of chicken, the bluff began, and everybody started sacrificing animals – and more and more animals – to gain the favor of ‘God.’ You know -- ‘My sacrifice is bigger than your sacrifice.’ That type of thing.

Today, we’d call such one-upmanship, ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ but the sacrifices these people were making weren’t made with the reasonable belief that their lives would be improved because of them; they couldn’t possibly have been since there’s no other direct connection between themselves and their helpless victims of terror, torture and murder except victimization – through literal ‘scape-goating’ of the innocent whose lives are taken in obeisance to the perverted notion of a deity which can be appeased by such violence. These people weren’t giving up cigarettes to prevent lung cancer, or takeout dinners three times a week to save money for their rainy day funds. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Though many people – even entire societies, such as Buddhists – choose to be vegetarians, it’s not an easy diet to maintain simply because Homo sapiens are omnivores that benefit, under certain circumstances, from the consumption of animal flesh. While we are not obligate carnivores, like cats, eating the flesh of other animals will never go out of style for us the way a Members Only jacket does. Where diet is naturally or artificially restricted – such as in desert-dwelling cultures, or among itinerant peoples, such as Jesus's patriarchal clan – giving up animal flesh consumption truly is an act of insanity since eating animal flesh is necessary for adequate nutrition under those circumstances. Think about that for a minute. The sacrifice of animals in Biblical times was nonsensical to the point of being dangerous because animals didn't, well, grow on trees, and not everyone could afford to keep, buy and/or eat them. For most people, animal sacrifice served no other purpose except to make the person paying for the sacrifice look like the BMOC. It was all just a vain waste of life. Doesn’t it make your stomach turn – all that violence simply for vanity’s sake -- simply to look better, more favored by ‘God,’ and, therefore, more powerful than everyone else?

Things haven’t changed much since the time of Moses regarding our capacity for vanity. We sacrifice innocent lives for our national vanity all the time. A tiny sidebar paragraph on page B3 in the January 3^rd, 2010, Sunday Boston Globe, which was submitted by the Associated Press, reported, “the Massachusetts National Guard is preparing a send-off ceremony [that very morning] for about 650 troops being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.” Gov. Deval Patrick was expected to appear at the event, which was held at the TD BankNorth Garden. In the interest of full disclosure – and as yet more evidence that proves the way in which war is actually waged is over huge distances, like a video game, just as Ronald Reagan openly hoped one day it would be – I share with you the contents of the remaining two sentences. They detail the constituency of the year-long deployment: (1) members of the 101^st field artillery, (2) as well as the Regional Corps Assistance Group, who will assist and mentor Afghan police, and (3) the 164^th Transportation Battalion, who will provide heavy equipment transport for military operations in Iraq, which, as anyone who was alive and conscious on May 1^st, 2003, when George W. Bush declared the two month-old ‘war’ in Iraq won, can see means heavy equipment transport for the American and allied corporations rebuilding and colonizing Iraq. When you do the gazinta, it works out to less than 152 soldiers per squad. In a stadium that ordinarily holds 19,580 rich bourgeoisie and their families, who regularly enjoy expensive distractions such as hockey and basketball games (and the vast majority of which wouldn’t in a million years join the military), our lambs must have been a pitiful spectacle. Cowards proclaiming bravado over their meager sacrifices in similar ways in my childhood games of chicken would have been knocked to the ground because of their timid commitments, their efforts wasted in bluff and their reputations fixed as cocksure -- just bullies, full of only arrogance. I mean, when you’re the lone superpower, how much effort does it take to kill people you already oppress with well-considered public polices that ensure poverty and disease? I think our military service personnel deserve better treatment.

Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not arguing for a bigger troop surge, or a larger send-off party. I’m not campaigning for more military in places around the globe where we’ve got no business going in the first place, places we go only to create more business by creating chaos our multinationals profit from by cleaning up. So much has been written by others about the lack of a sound exit strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so many have declared the ludicrous “mission accomplished” statement made by Bush to have been ill-considered, even if I were a war monger or one of their toadies in the allegedly popular press I wouldn’t feel the need to add to the dreck. That’s not the reason I choose not to waste my energy writing about issues such as the fact that National Guardsmen are, by policy, reservists whose primary function is to protect our homeland and by rights shouldn’t be deployed anywhere but here. Those issues are moot. The more time passes, and the more political graft, insider trading, kick-back, pay-off and misappropriated appropriations scandals involving corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel are exposed, and the more we see a distinct pattern of government funding of what are essentially fascist excursions, the more we can see that America’s invasion of Iraq was all just to make a few elites more wealthy. That’s the point. That’s the reason every other condemnation of our government’s intervention in the world is superfluous. Our government is run by fascists, and we should be sending no one into combat anywhere today on their behalf. The Christmas day almost-plane-bombing that had our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president enacting with curious alacrity even more oppressive travel restrictions, as fast as he sent more troops to Afghanistan before he even cashed his million-dollar prize? Well, if our government was capable of blowing up the Twin Towers on 9/11, as scientific evidence and first-hand accounts tell us they did, a near-miss is nothing for them to pull off. No terrorists = no reason for continuing the war on terror, which means less reason for our military to destroy other countries so our corporations can fix them. If we don’t own the truth that our government has been as active in creating the terrorists it claims it is fighting, and if we don’t stop the insanity now, endless war is precisely what we will get.

Ah – the truth! Another thing I wish to [continue to] leave behind in 2009 are my delusions. I encourage you all to do the same, and to get you started, here are some things upon which you may wish to reflect – because reflection is what truth requires. You have to think about a situation to uncover truth; taking without question the limited information and carefully crafted prejudices given you by news anchors and celebrities will never get you closer to it.

I’m so suspicious of my president now, I’m even doubtful of the reason this particular one signed the new discrimination law subsequent to Lilly Ledbetter’s successful pay discrimination suit against Goodyear in January of 2009, his first official act as president. Apparently, the success of Ms. Ledbetter’s suit hinged on her convincing multiple judges and juries at state and federal courts that the statute of limitations for pay discrimination should not apply since she didn’t find out about the discrepancy in her pay until the end of her 19-year career with Goodyear. The new law says explicitly that the statute starts tolling (and continues tolling anew, over and over again), with each subsequent paycheck that is discriminatory, and efforts by Congress to enact it in the previous Republican-controlled Congress and White House Administration were considered ill-advised because of the improbability of success. It’s good that Obama signed the law, and I’m happy for Ms. Ledbetter, but whether or not Obama’s position on true gender equality will change when the stakes become more dear as has, say, his stance on the Palestinian genocide, which he campaigned against in the beginning of his run for the White House and then backed away from condemning once he became the Democratic Party candidate, is unclear. No one’s talking about ERA, even after Obama followed George W. Bush in propping up industries merely threatened by the recession by giving them our tax dollars, even though their corporate peerage received massive paychecks and bonuses while the companies they headed, like AIG, went bankrupt, despite the bailout. If the White House can engineer the no-longer-free market this way, why can’t it make pay equity a top priority? Bush stipulated that car manufacturers had to pledge to limit union involvement in their reorganizations in order to qualify for TARP money, which is union busting plain and simple, and no one in Obama’s administration has batted an eyelid at this reprehensible undermining of the civil right to organize. If ever women needed pay equity and the ERA, it’s now. But no one seems to willing to even acknowledge this patent fact.

I’m unwilling to sacrifice the lives of any more children (brainwashed and deluded though they and their parents may be) just to make the elites on whose behalf Barack Obama (and all the presidents before him since Roosevelt, except, perhaps, Jimmy Carter) acts rich. I don’t need for the lives of these children to be taken in roadside bombing incidents, or sniper attacks, or even accidents (whether “friendly fire,” or other), to prove that my government is capable of the most awesomely wicked evil imaginable – just to appease the god all we Americans now worship, the god of mindless, violent destruction perpetrated for the wealth of a very small minority. I was unwilling to do it in March, 2003, and I’m still unwilling to do it. I was never the kid on the bike who swerved, or faltered, or fell. So, along with meat, TV and sloth, goes my mute complicity. Those are sacrifices I’m willing to make to help create a better life for myself and a better world for everyone. I think we all, especially our military, deserve no less.

After all, if our government was really the proponent of freedom, justice and peace it assiduously assails the world it is, we wouldn’t even have a standing army. The founding fathers deplored the notion of such a thing, and it takes a lot more guts to wage peace than it does to kill others and take what belonged to them, starting with their sovereignty. Americans today act as though they believe that the superpower came into being magically in 1993 when George H.W. Bush declared the new world order here and America’s supreme role in it when, in fact, it has been carefully crafted for more than a century. We’ve got the biggest and the most deadly armament in the world, and we don’t hesitate to use any of it, whenever and wherever we please, including right here. That’s why the majority of the world goes along with whatever idiotic notion the U.S. government proffers to it. If we Americans truly valued freedom we wouldn’t have been doing all of the things all over the world we’ve done to pacify countries opposed to our government’s mission to create oppressive, enslaving laissez faire economic systems throughout them. And we’d have a Department of Peace with a budget as big as – or bigger than – the Pentagon’s. We’d have true peace soldiers, working for the same pay and benefits as conventional soldiers, and they’d be required to know how to work their brains and mouths before they were taught how to use a gun. There’s a market I could get behind.

One final word about our president. It’s about race-baiting. There can be no doubt that if you voted for Barack Obama because of the color of his skin, you’re a racist. When Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children,” he wasn’t speaking merely about a brown- or a black-skinned child. He knew the truth about what Marian Anderson so brilliantly articulated when she said, “As long as you keep a person [emph. add.] down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.” Injustice for one, or some, means short-changing us all. King was speaking in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech about all children – regardless of the color of their skin. “Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring – when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children – black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics – will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'" Skin pigmentation – no matter the tone, shade or color – is not what makes a person of integrity, a person whose character is noble. White, or black, we’re all capable of being sinners, or saints. If you voted for Barack Obama because of the color of his skin, you are no different than the millions of bigots who wouldn't consider viable the presidential campaign of the brilliant, self-sacrificing visionary, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, in 1972. Moreover, if you allow yourself to be used by people who would manipulate you to do their evil work persecuting others because of the racial hatred you nurture for those others – to be manipulated by race-baiters – I beg you to put your prejudices aside and look truly carefully at all of your leaders and judge them by the only criteria that matters when we judge our leaders: their service to our country. If you don’t, then you have no sense of self-respect, and you are part of the problem, not the solution. One day, you may find yourself needlessly sacrificing your own lives and ideals to the whims of these monsters, believing that to do so confers upon you status as a “player,” a “hero,” when, in actuality, you’re just played. Barack Obama may be every bit fascism-light as was Bill Clinton.

I hope, as this new year begins and you find yourself cleaning out your own closet, that your ignorance, prejudices, hypocrisies and willingness to be played go the way of your outdated myspace accounts, iPod nanos and other out-of-fashion accoutrement. Now that would be a sacrifice worth celebrating.'

“Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.”

This Boy’s Life

Tobias Wolff, Grove Press, 1989

Happy New Year.

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Barack Obama is the Commander-in-Chief of a Military that has for Decades Persecuted American Political Dissidents, Declassified Gov't. Documents Show

Awarding the Nobel Prize for Peace to him when so many Americans languish in wall-less prisons designed to isolate them and prevent them from influencing society is an hypocrisy of the worst type.

Millions of American -- and, indeed, world -- citizens live in the once merely prophesied Orwellian condition of continuous state-sponsored monitoring, tracking and repression. The tracking and undermining of political dissidents began in American in the 1950s, with the CIAs now well-known development of mind-control technologies, code-named COINTELPRO, which centered on the social extermination of legitimate activists through sophisticated slander campaigns, and MK-ULTRA, which technologies now include the use of electromagnetic, radar and microwave radiation to adversely affect human behavior, causing, among other effects, false diagnoses of mental illness. Attorney Brian Glick details the FBI’s use of these tactics and technologies on American political activists from the once diverse field of political activism that included the American Indian Movement, the Women’s movement, the nuclear disarmament movement (all now dead or so impotent they may as well be) in his 1989 pamphlet, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It (South End Press). American industry, sponsored by the American government and working collaboratively with the Department of Defense, has, for decades, developed these technologies to aid governments in tracking those the state fears will oppose its policies. They represent the world’s leaders in surreptitious, freedom-crushing, wall-less prison technology.

Legacy consumer products of these technologies include Ambient Technology’s “voiceless” telephone, which allows persons paralyzed by diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to send brain waves to a computer to record their “speech,” or even make a telephone call. Though the device used in Ambient’s demonstration uses a neck collar, smaller, “nanotech” devices that do the same thing can be implanted anywhere in the body near nerve centers, including surreptitiously during routine dental work, should the state wish to implant a dissident. All that is required is a sufficiently incentivized dentist. No thought of the recipient of such an implant can be private.

Dr. Caroline Lucas, MEP for Southeast England, warned in Parliament of the dangers inherent in electromagnetic weapons, one of which is designed to subtly influence human behavior using inaudible speech above range of hearing. “Silent Sound” works as a Pavlovian trigger, suggesting to the receiver whatever behavior the entity controlling the technology wishes to embed. “Electro-magnetic (EM) weapons are one of the newest and most serious military developments in the world today. Enormous secrecy surrounds their development. . . . Unless this development is stopped, we are entering an Orwellian ‘1984’ type scenario, which could potentially permanently transfer enormous power to those in control of the technology.”

The U.S. leads the world in another industry critical to its promotion of U.S. business interests throughout the world: public relations. Anyone reading this post will rightly be skeptical of even the most obvious and provable fact related above supporting the thesis that the U.S. government is the leading terrorist organization in the world simply because his or her government has likely been roped into its “war on terror,” believing in good faith exactly what the U.S. has told them about the threat of terrorists to itself and its allies. ‘Why,’ they might reasonably wonder, ‘have we such a problem with terrorists if this spy and mind control technology exists? Surely, if it is being used to control political dissidents, can’t it be used to control terrorists as well?’

Yes. Those are the questions. And their answers lie in the many, many, many charges and exposés of empire building and cupidity leveled at conservative-run benefactors of the invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. From pre-invasion security analysis widely published in the New York Times and elsewhere, to documentaries such as those produced by Michael Moore, 9/11truth.org and David Earnhardt, to the more recent documentation provided by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, the world has had a steady diet of facts proving factually, anecdotally and circumstantially that the U.S. government has, indeed, undertaken a mission to conquer the world for corrupt business interests, and to do it militarily. One such military weapon they have had at their disposal is the ability to create many “Manchurian candidates,” assassins programmed to commit whatever act of terrorism enables the U.S. government to initiate its “war on terror” using Silent Sound technology. The power to create America’s own Reichstag Fire incident is one the U.S. government has had for a long time.

There is no doubt that the flying of commercial airplanes into the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon and tragically, a field in Pennsylvania, was a military operation. But exactly whose military operation it was remains as much a mystery to the world today as it was that bright Tuesday morning in September of 2001. The world has been told that the terrorists who hijacked these planes had no other objective except a “symbolic” attack on the United States. Does that sound reasonable? The alleged mastermind behind the attacks is still free, roaming the world, and menacing no other similarly fortified American dominion or American-allied country; the few furtive attacks in places such as Mumbai attributed to terrorists alleged to be loosely connected with him have been equally as futile, though just as devastating and evocative of terror, and this is a man whose personal fortune, never mind the religious zeal by which we’ve been told he is motivated, is so great he could personally fund the establishment of conventional, not guerilla, armies in every alleged terrorist backwater in the Middle East, North Africa and Indonesia. Even so, these attacks do not a war make -- certainly not a war that anyone with the power to evade the terrorist surveillance matrix that was already well-established on 9/11 would wage, were he serious about waging any war. The citizens of Spain understood that and quickly rejected their government’s calls for the same type of security state in which Americans now live after the ETA attacks in Madrid in 2004. Why not Americans? If Silent Sound can be used to condition individuals and discrete groups of people, why not large swaths of the population for whom panem et circenses is ineffective, too? All they need is the airwaves.

The further and further history travels from the events of 9/11 and its aftermath, the easier and easier it becomes to see that the “war on terror” is really just a “war for terror,” sponsored by the very people who claimed to be its first victims: the U.S. government. That’s what good PR does -- it manipulates the perceptions of its targets and then offers explanations for those perceptions. Almost nothing about the official U.S. government explanation of the 9/11 attacks has been demonstrated to be reasonable, verifiable, complete, or accurate, supporting the claim by many that those attacks were, if not orchestrated by the U.S. government, then permitted for its use as an opportunity to promote U.S. business expansion in crucial middle eastern regions.

These facts are without doubt: (1) the U.S. government has turned from a country of, by and for the people, to one in which “law and order” is indiscriminately applied by an increasingly repressive state mechanism operating throughout the federal, state and local levels, who apply their law and order more brutally and injudiciously to opponents of their empire-building raison d’étre; and (2) the people who have engineered this turn are the same types of people who have done the same things in other countries: they are fascists. They’re not corporatists. They’re not free marketeers. They’re not conservatives. They’re fascists. Those industrialists who were proved through Congressional investigation to have been behind the failed fascist coup in 1933 that General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, refused to lead against Roosevelt’s administration have finally succeeded.

The bottom line? The fascist battle cry is, ‘Markets must be protected.’ They oppress all those who interfere with their mission to use the world and its resources -- natural, human or other -- to make themselves rich through unjust “laissez-faire” economic policies in creating and developing these markets. Their policies create destruction and misery for the most vulnerable people in the world, misery so unfathomable legions of other human beings devote their lives to trying to negotiate with these fascists to get them to change those policies, and they do whatever they can to dominate those legions, their opponents. Whatever they can. Today’s award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama was just another one of their ploys to make you believe all is right with the current world order. But the Nobel Prize for Peace Committee has long distinguished itself as a pawn of these fascists, and so their ludicrous ceremony today should surprise no one. They are rightly subject to suspicion. Henry Kissinger, the man who, as investigative reporter Christopher Hitchins demonstrated, prolonged the Vietnam war only to surrender eventually under the same terms as had been proposed in Versailles four years previous to the surrender, was a recipient of their esteem, and there have been others just as, or more, dubious -- while legitimate peacemakers such as Oasis of Peace, the planned Jewish-Arab community in Israel, has been nominated more than a dozen times in the last 25 years and routinely rebuffed.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to the head of America’s fascist government is yet one more example of that government’s overweening influence in a world too terrified to confront it, the biggest and worst terrorist organization the world has ever seen. It’s time to stop cowering, open our eyes and see it for what it is: Hitler’s wet dream. Those who continue to implore us not to do so -- to deify the very warmongers who’ve ushered in the destruction of humanity through the destruction of the human mind and the ideals it alone can conceive, ideals such as freedom -- should be shunned, no matter the color of their skin, or the depth of their pockets. Conciliation didn’t work in World War II to make anyone either more secure or more free, it hasn’t worked since then. It won’t work now.

I know these things because I am one such targeted dissident of the U.S. government, an “uppity” bioslave of the Pentagon’s programs to create the many forms of AIDS decimating and enslaving large portions of resource-rich countries -- just exactly according to the widely published plans they made in the 1960s to do so, and because I choose not to ignore the obvious. Finally, I can only repeat the words of Elie Wiesel’s Moshe, the Beadle, from his autobiographical story, Night, when the Beadle pleaded with his fellow villagers for their attention after being taken to a concentration camp and escaping:

“ . . . listen to me. It’s all I ask of you. I don’t want money or pity.
Only listen to me.”

The Beadle perished, along with most of the rest of his villagers, in the Holocaust.

www.multistalkervictims.org

www.thehiddenevil.com

www.freedomfchs.org

www.mobbing-usa.com
www.artificialtelepathy.blogspot.com

World AIDS Day

Ah, another World AIDS Day, another day living in Dante's 7th level of hell.

But first, for those of you who are wondering how Kristallnacht was in my neighborhood -- two! Two non-street-legal vehicles racing up and down Mass. Ave. (in front of the fire station, no less) just before midnight (as well as other vehicles), which raises the question, "How many fascists should we entertain?"

World AIDS Day. That reminds me of the time I went to get my vaccinations updated and then got, over the course of 7 or so years, the type of AIDS no one is allowed to talk about, non-HIV/AIDS, also known as "Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome," (so named because, in addition to it being a cover for this type of AIDS, just as "bad blood" was a cover for the syphilis the U.S. government gave black residents of Macon County, Alabama in the 1940s, the cancer, Burkitt's lymphoma, which researchers have turned into AIDS make you extremely 'fatigued;' no wonder David Baltimore and Jerome Groopman's research careers began in cancer and ended up in AIDS). See my prior posts, particularly the one about bioslavery, for more about non-HIV/AIDS.

Today also reminds me about the time I went away for the weekend and was bioassaulted in the motel in which I was staying at night, while I slept, and awoke with a localized vaccination injury -- and then never needed the antiviral that saved my life (that's right -- you read that correctly -- the ANTIVIRAL, because, as we all know, retroviruses, such as the HTLV-II with which I have lived all my life as well as the group of retroviruses dubbed 'HIV,' must have another virus in order to propagate, such as the herpes virus (HHV-6) seen in all persons with non-HIV/AIDS and the HHV-8 that causes Kaposi's sarcoma in gay men, and the hepatitis virus that works the same way in Africans and African-Americans). But all you hear people talk about is, 'We need more money for research for a vaccine.' Can't ride an MBTA train in Cambridge without seeing pleas by Harvard/Mass General for healthy, HIV- gay men to test the vaccines -- which, of course, promise they won't get AIDS. Go figure that one out.

Well, this day reminds me of a bunch of other things, too, but, as you can see from my last post, it's dangerous to talk about these things, even though the truth would save a lot of lives. But lives are not what the U.S. government, or any of its minions, cares to save, after all. It just wants to kill populations that get in the way of its rapacious quest for world empire.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

I wonder why she doesn't call it what it is -- fascism? (Nah -- just kidding. I know why. If she calls the practice 'corporatism,' no one will fight it, but if she calls it fascism, probably everyone will, and we can't have that, now can we?)

What a world, what a world.

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Kristallnacht and American Fascism

Next Monday is the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when Hitler Youth, the Gestapo, the SS and the SA waged an anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany and Austria. I'm a little apprehensive about the day since the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland, September 3rd, was celebrated in my neighborhood of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, with midnight drag racing up and down Mass. Ave. I knew about this celebration, as anyone in my neighborhood would, because the vehicles participating in it were clearly not "street legal" -- that is to say, they had been modified to make the loudest noise possible, as though they were competing in a monster truck rally at the Worcester Centrum. And the local police just let them have their fun, as they always have.

I know you don’t want to hear this about your community.
And I don’t want to be the one to tell you (just so you know) -- because it’s dangerous

to do so.

But if no one tells you now about what is happening to your neighbors,

to people like me,

soon it will be happening to you.

This is not a joke. I wish it were.

Your fellow Americans are being stalked by gangs sanctioned by the local police, the FBI and the Pentagon according to insiders who wish to remain anonymous. And your city's agents know about this terror and do nothing about it. So does the ACLU. Nine years ago -- long before the Iraq invasion and the passage of the so-called Patriot Act -- I was assaulted in the Cambridge Savings Bank, in front of a Cambridge police officer and bank security guard. The man who assaulted me leisurely conducted his bank business and when he was finished, I asked the teller who waited on him for his name and address. With this information, I sought the help of the police officer, a woman, who lied about having witnessed the very loud and long fracas. She asked me to step outside the bank and then told me there was nothing she could do; that I should call the Cambridge Women’s Commission the following week (this happened on a Saturday morning). When I called the Women’s Commission as she suggested, and asked to speak with the person she told me to speak with, I was told there was nothing the Women’s Commission could do for me since I hadn’t filed a police report. I hadn’t told her I hadn’t filed a police report on the incident, but somehow, she knew I hadn’t. I tried to get help from the ACLU for this and other things done to me by Cambridge police officers and others employed by the city of Cambridge, but the ACLU told me they couldn’t assist individuals, though their website is replete with case histories of individuals they’ve assisted.

Most disturbing of all was the fact that when I sought the help of the police officer in the bank that day, I overheard her telling the security guard, “It’s just not worth it to get involved; they only come after you.”

New York University Professor and Attorney Brian Glick uncovered these gangs’ practices when he represented American citizens and organizations such as The American Friends Service Committee, after they had been terrorized by the FBI for protesting our military’s involvement in the wars in Central America in the 1980s and were subsequently denied their civil rights to protection against unwarranted search and seizure, security of person, free speech and free association. Like Glick’s clients, I, too, am a law-abiding activist, trying to dispel myths about the type of AIDS I have been given and cured of. I am not an elder/child/animal abuser; a thief; a drug dealer or user; a prostitute; or any other type of antisocial person, including a terrorist or a “witch.” Whether you want to hear or learn about my activism or not, my right to speak freely has been taken away from me, and if you believe you live in a country where that doesn’t happen frequently, you are badly misinformed. Congress assured Americans that the secret surveillance and social extermination practices developed by the CIA in programs called COINTELPRO and MK-Utra, which the FBI has used against activists since the 1960s, had been decommissioned in the 1970s, but Glick found they had lied. Evidence of their widespread use of COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra on American citizens was in the FBI files he obtained through FOIA requests in the late 1980s.

Glick published his findings in the 1989 book, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It. In it are reproductions of the declassified FBI documents he received. Agents -- and their subcontractors, such as today’s Neighborhood Watch groups and those recruited in the FBI’s TIPS program -- used these tactics extensively to discredit and isolate legitimate activists, and to make them unemployable and ruin them.

Many of the “vigilantes” who conduct today’s terror campaigns were recruited by the FBI on their website, for three months, in their TIPS program. These “Special Surveillance Groups,” ordinary individuals from all walks of life who work together in teams, were profiled in a National Public Radio Weekend Edition report on July 5th, 2008. They work for the MBTA, the Post Office, your grocery store. They work in your schools and, yes, your local government agencies. They work with undercover agents long embedded in the community who pose as homeless people and peace activists disabled by mental illnesses because these profiles are the ones most accepted by members of the community as harmless. You would never suspect their true identities. This trust gives them maximum effectiveness to destroy legitimate activists. All of them are this country’s Stazzi, employed to create “wall-less prisons,” today’s concentration camps, around FBI targets.

Glick’s book is one every activist should read and use with his or her fellow activists in order to be certain we are all working together, but curiously, no Boston-area peace or justice group uses it. It is the first defense against government coopting of a group and the only tool available to liberate an activist community from these state-sponsored terrorists.

Not convinced yet your society is a closed one?

Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America (2007), claims everything is in place for the closing of American society, which can happen in any federal emergency where Blackwater is called in, though Blackwater is clearly unnecessary. Did you know that President Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno, gave advanced technology developed by the CIA, FBI and Pentagon to local law enforcement agencies in 1993 for “crowd control,” including handheld microwave guns such as the dazzler, currently in use in Iraq? Deaths of innocent civilians through excessive force by police and FBI have increased in the last 16 years and include the death of Emerson College student Victoria Snelgrove, who was shot in the eye with a pepper spray bullet by a Boston police officer after the Red Sox 2004 pennant victory. Brattleboro, VT, police were exonerated in 2002 by then Gov. Howard Dean’s attorney general of the cold-blooded murder of peace activist Robert "Woody" Woodward, shot in the back 5 times – once, as he lay unarmed, face down on the floor of a church -- Sunday, 12/02/02, after seeking sanctuary there from the FBI. Ronald Reagan gave all of the branches of the military the power to conduct intelligence work and now that the military controls local law enforcement, it is easy to see how COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra have become widespread in all our communities. Woodward claimed to have been a target of the FBI, yet, the local police in their control used deadly force on this unarmed man instead of the less-than-lethal weapons they had at their disposal.

On 10/18/07 at a book signing at the Harvard Coop Ms. Wolf suggested the idea of the FBI using tradesmen as informants was ludicrous. Could it be that Ms. Wolf was just unaware of the FBI’s use of COINTELPRO and MKULTRA to suppress activists? She’s a Yale graduate and an award-winning journalist. You’d think she’d be able to do a little better research. Anne Frank and millions like her are dead because of government informants. Governments always use informants to oppress their opponents -- even the American government. Ever heard of Watergate? Informants, spies and state-sponsored terrorism are real and they’re here. But Ms. Wolf’s job with this opus is to give you the most irrelevant bit of truth embedded into an entire fiction that's designed to make you merely suspicious something might happen in America in the future to its citizens' freedoms, when, in fact, those freedoms quite literally don't exist today -- because she's a disinformation specialist.  Her mission is to make you believe that if you question whether your society is open or closed now, it’s really still open though “everything is in place” for the government to close it.  It’s also the job of those of your leaders who deny these things, those who make you think that because you can talk about what’s troubling you about your country by walking into a carefully planned, sporadic meeting sponsored by a very insulated, closely monitored and tightly controlled group, or blogging in an online community like facebook, that you’re free. DO NOT ASSIGN your responsibility to be diligent about your freedom to Naomi Wolf, or others like her -- especially those of your leaders who limit the scope of topics that are permissible to discuss and who refuse to talk about this fascist government in which we all now live. 

Howard Zinn is right when he says this government, like every other government, is not on your side.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Disinformation works. When the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq, many liberals called for impeachment -- not of the Congresspersons who voted for it, the actual ones that put us in Iraq, but of Dick Cheney, whom liberals were told had to be removed first before anyone would consider removing Bush since to remove Bust would have made Cheney the actual leader of the “free world” and not just the titular one. The campaign was doomed from the start as ineffectual and unrealistic. Massive recalls of Congress should have taken place instead. Security advisors and others were publishing in The New York Times and elsewhere their findings that Iraq was not a threat and Bush was merely beating the war drums because his father, sitting in the Oval Office for only one term, hadn’t finished colonizing that country. Congress had access to the same information as these advisers and we, their readers, did, but they voted for invasion anyway. Recalls didn’t happen. No one has stood up to these tools, toadies and functionaries before. That’s why we live in Stazzi-controlled communities today.

What you can do

Since COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra programs have never been decommissioned, and since much of what Glick writes about is happening to scores of citizens across the country today, thanks to laws passed by every administration since Reagan’s, it is past the time we talk about them. Those laws need to be repealed. Since our City’s government allows COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra programs to be conducted here, and since some of its agents even participate in them, it is past the time we do something about them here. Any rhetoric about change is not going to do anything because it’s just that – rhetoric – so long as you have no place to turn for help when you need it, no Congress, no city council, no state rep. If your “progressive” or peace organization is not equipping its members with information on and tactics to oppose these fascists and the terrorists they create, they’ve been co-opted. If you’re terrorized in your own community, your own home, because you speak out and you look around and find the only people talking about what’s happening are those that have been marginalized in similar fashion, you know your marginalization, your inability to operate freely as a “partner” with any government administration, is not a myth, or a coincidence. www.thehiddenevil.com. www.multistalkervictims.org. www.stopspying.us. www.mobbing-usa.com. If your peace/justice organization, or Barack Obama group, or church’s social concerns committee, or temple’s outreach program, or school’s community service initiatives are not talking and learning about and planning ways to de-institutionalize gangstalking, and decommission the FBI, the NSA, the new secret surveillance organizations, and defund these Pentagon programs, they are not serving your best interests because you are not fighting the true terrorists -- the fascists among us. I don’t care if you belong to the AFSC; they probably feel exactly the way that Cambridge police officer who refused to help me in the Cambridge Savings Bank felt, having once been targets themselves. They do nothing to help targets, and if they’re not working on this issue -- the issue of “informants” among us and a government that subsidizes them -- they are part of the problem, not the solution. You need to create your own groups and do whatever it takes to make sure they remain free of government interference and free to associate so we can protect each other. And then you need to pressure your local, state and federal representatives to defund secret agency work in our community and to criminalize gangstalking, COINTELPRO and MKULTRA, OR GET RID OF THE REPRESENTATIVES THAT ACT LIKE OBSTACLES TO YOUR FREEDOM. And you need to offer sanctuary to targets. Even though demanding your liberty may come with a price -- your temporary civil and human rights -- your silence is complicity, and those will be taken away from you soon anyway. No one else is going to do this work for you, and while you may not regret ignoring this warning today, when they come after you -- and they will come after you eventually -- you may find yourself saying,

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” (Attributed to Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, imprisoned in Moabit prison during the Holocaust for opposing the policies of the Third Reich.)

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