Stockholm Syndrome on Steroids? - 2

In the first post of this series, we pointed out that most Americans polled in an annual Gallup Poll think that the military is the most competent institution in America.

In that post we perused Gallup Poll figures from 2009, as shown on the graphic to the left (red lines added).

Today in 2011, the military is still seen as the most competent American institution, according to this year's Gallup Poll, even though the wars they are prosecuting are not at all popular.

Let's take a look for reasons and realities as to how it is that the military, once considered the lackey for the tyranny of the tyrants, has come full circle to invade and occupy the hearts of a once freedom loving people.

The words from December 23, 1776 should ring a few bells, since they are the words from a span of time when the 99% were pregnant with revolution in the air, and ready to give birth to a new nation by dispensing with the 1% control over them:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

(The Crisis, by Thomas Paine, 1776, emphasis added). Mr. Paine was not playing the race card of any race when he used the word "slavery", nor did he try to hide the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, the military, which he considered to be an adjunct to that tyranny.

The notion that the military is a free-people's worst enemy, rather than the most competent democratic institution, is a truth that was well known and well established in the early America of our founders:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied: and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Those truths are well established.

(Greatest Source of Power Toxins, quoting James Madison, emphasis added). Yet here we are some 235 years later, yes, here we are back into the same tyrannical scenario, a scenario Dredd Blog set forth in a fairly recent post:

... the direction our nation is headed is to become a Big Brother Plutonomy at home, with a national foreign policy of Wartocracy, and a large domestic Police-Secretocracy to put down any resistance or rebellion within the homeland itself ... this end-game is already in place, but at this time somewhat hidden in the corporate media generated shadows, with the full backing of militant forces within and without, all eager and willing to make themselves known, by coming out of the closet ... the phrase "9/11 changed everything" means a departure, in terms of direction, from controlling the populace primarily via propaganda, which has been the model since about World War I, to a model of controlling the public once again primarily by force.

(The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy). That post quotes military sources and the main stream media, not left or right wing blogs, to prove the point.

The "slavery" or "involuntary servitude" Thomas Paine spoke of above is one of those unspoken Stockholm Syndrome conditions, unrelated to race.

But whether such conditions are race based or ideologically based, they are commonly hidden in plain sight within our culture from time to time:

"I wonder, John Lomax asked Blind Willie McTell, "I wonder if, if you know any songs about colored people havin' hard times here in the South" ... "Any complainin' songs, complainin' about the hard times and sometimes mistreatment [by] the whites? Have you got any songs that talk about that?" ... No, McTell said at once, he had no such songs, "not at the present time." Those were the songs of another era, but now "the white peoples is mighty good to the southern people, as far as I know" ... Read one way, Lomax's conversation with McTell is a tense social transcript from the Jim Crow South. Lomax, the overbearing if well intentioned white visitor, wants musical documents of poverty and racial oppression. The request may connote obliviousness on his part, as well as a condescending sympathy for blacks, but it is nevertheless rude and insulting, demanding that the singer violate basic, unspoken southern norms that should have been familiar to anyone reared in Texas. McTell knows better than to say anything against white people, let alone sing it, to a white man with even the hint of a southern accent and his wife, especially if ... a recorder is running ... McTell makes it clear that he knows songs that Lomax wants to hear ... he would never play them ... but to say as much and explain why would also violate the Jim Crow norms by making them explicit.

(Bob Dylan In America, Chap. 6, by Sean Wilentz, emphasis added). Are there any journalistic, unspeakable, and publicly known "words" in America today, words or ideas that would be considered to be "unspeakably rude" by our "free press", our main stream media?

Of course, because many subjects are considered to be taboo, and must remain unspoken lest the journalist be blacklisted and banned (recent examples are Keith Olbermann, Cenk Uygar, and David Shuster of MSNBC).

Or take for another example Independent Party member, Governor Jesse Ventura, who says he is protesting by no longer standing when the National Anthem is played, saying he is protesting, among other things, media censorship of his even mentioning his views (which criticize the military) as to the 9/11 story.

On Dredd Blog we use "Blind Willie McTell" as a metaphor or caricature of the American Mainstream Media, which is comprised of a few for-profit corporations.

That is why Chapter 6 of the Sean Wilentz book (ibid), concerning the actual Blind Willie McTell, struck me:

John Lomax, the archivist and collector, certainly wants what he wants, but ... McTell simply doesn't have it. The music that McTell knows best and prefers to perform carries no overt or even hidden social or political meaning. There are no old-fashioned sorrow songs about the black man's plight in his regular repertoire (and certainly not in his records, even though they are intended for the black "race record" market). His songs are up-to-date, and they are about sadness in love and gladness in love, drinking too much, benign nonsense, God, gambling, violence (much of it involving blacks attacking or killing other blacks), honoring life and death ... McTell is not a sharecropper or big-city laborer; he is a professional performer in a growing southern city. He lives within the iron structures of segregation ... and now he is making a very decent living playing music for whites as well as blacks and getting recorded commercially. For a black Atlantan in 1940, this amounted to a comparatively easy experience with white people -- while taking their money ...

(ibid). McTell is the consummate caricature for representing the for-profit, money oriented, corporate press, who make their living from selective news, like McTell made from his selective music.

If becoming more well to do, compared to his fellow blacks, required McTell to hold his tongue or to become a denier, lest he suffer (if he broke the unspoken, but totally binding, Jim Crow norms required for "black speech") he, like other southern blacks and like the U.S. press (newspeak), did it.

In this "Stockholm Syndrome on Steroids?" series Dredd Blog has pointed out that the military is now held in a mysteriously high regard, which is at odds with our American traditions written about above.

In fact, the military has by now been virtually made into a religion that cannot be negatively spoken of, lest those unspoken MOMCOM norms be violated.

This is clearly the work of an incessant propaganda campaign that has turned the disease of war into the art of deception, and has turned yet another hidden slavery or involuntary servitude into something to not be spoken of by the press.

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." --Albert Einstein

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Sarcastic ode to the main stream media:



Lyrics to this song are here.

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Oil's Well That Ends Well - 2

In the first post of this series Dredd Blog pulled no punches when commenting on the real foreign policy reasons for the "war on terror".

In the post yesterday about Iraqi oil, Dredd Blog shows that the foreign policy is "fair", in the sense that U.S. policy calls for the invasion of any nation (no discrimination) that meets the criteria of having an inadvisably tempting supply of the low-hanging fruit type of oil.

The blindest of the blind, or the ultimate cover up masters, are those in the main stream media who do not realize that the current oil wars are products of consistent U.S. foreign policy going back a century.

Yes, the foreign policy that fundamentally supports oil barons has never been a big secret: "One of our greatest helpers has been the State Department" - John D. Rockefeller (1909).

In the book The Control of Oil (1976), in a discussion of Oil Imperialism (1977), and in an Energy Bulletin article (2008), writers and other observers have pointed out that Iraqi and other mid-east oil has always been a twinkle in the eye of the western oil barons (see also Global Research and Global Policy Forum).

The strategy of control was mapped out in the book The Grand Chessboard (1997), by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski:

"How America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources."

(ibid, p. 31). The game becomes more difficult when "populism" raises its head:

"Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."

(ibid, p. 35). These problems can appear to be on steroids as pressures mount:

"The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea."

(ibid, p. 125). The status quo will creak, groan, and even break in places, as the pressure continues to mount:

"In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last."

(ibid, p. 209). Finally, there will have to be some unusual pressures brought to bear to keep the status quo foreign policy in place:

"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

(ibid, p. 211). Looking back we can see that an event like Pearl Harbor, which was 9/11, was that "external threat" which kicked off the "war on terror", a threat that Dredd Blog calls the oil wars.

We hear that 9/11 made the oil wars all the more palatable to that "multi-cultural society", that is, at least it was more palatable until those policies broke The Bank of Jekyll.

Iraq: World's Number One Oil Producer? - 5

One of the first things Dick Cheney did as Vice President, was to call a meeting in 2001 of the oil barons of MOMCOM, who got together in what was called an "Energy Task Force".

It was to be expected that the press and/or the public would be interested in what their federal government was doing, so a problem arose when the Vice President declared that he wanted to keep it all entirely secret.

So lawsuits arose under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and those cases went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Cheney substantially prevailed.

Thus began the ignorance of the public about what was really going on under the Energy Task Force's secret shadow, with secret plans, secret deliberations, and secret decisions.

There is little wonder why some observers in the press and in the public concluded that those meetings were held to discuss the new offshore oil rig of the new American foreign policy.

The map of Iraqi oil fields at the top of this post, which was discussed in the secret meetings of the Energy Task Force, eventually became public, as did the subject matter of those secrets:

The Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow - Dick Cheney (1999)
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What people need to hear, loud and clear, is that we're running out of energy in America - George W Bush (2001)
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The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil - Paul Wolfowitz (2003)
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I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil - Alan Greenspan (2007)
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Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that - General John Abizaid (2007)

People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs - Republican Senator Charles Hagel (2007)

(Iraq's Oil: The Greatest Prize Of All?). Later during times when the public and press were wondering how much oil Iraq really had, this was asserted:

Iraq may have oil reserves of 350 billion barrels, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said on Monday, a massive figure that is triple the country's proven reserves and which even exceeds the oil in Saudi Arabia.

(Reuters, 2008). The Dredd Blog series, which today's post belongs to, has quoted various sources from various nations, businesses, and disciplines to make it perfectly clear to those who want to know, that The Peak of Oil means an eventual Peak of the Oil Wars in the fairly near future.

The previous post in this series is here, the next post in this series is here.

Newsy On Karzai Karzai Klan - 2

On this date two years ago Dredd Blog did the first post in this series.

Not much has changed since then, except that the President of Afghanistan declared in public that he would side with Pakistan if the United States were to go to war with Pakistan.

So we spend $2,500,000,000 a week over there for what, as millions of citizens here lose work, homes, savings, and all hope.

The post of two years ago follows:

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The Afghanistan debacle is back in the news in terms of fraudulent elections a la Stalin.

Stalin is reported to have said "the voters decide nothing, the vote counters decide everything" or something close to that.

The Toxins of Power blog has a post that theorizes that this form of corruption emanates from a sort of national "Id" of the Freudian type.

We discussed the purple finger of fake elections in a previous post some months ago.

The Ascent of Chaos For Civilized Order

"Chaos theory tries to find some underlying order in what appears to be random events or data" (Physics Planet).

The proper order in which things should be done would, at first blush, seem to the casual observer to be a methodology involving a logical sequence of events.

That is, proceeding from the most logical thing to do first, sequencing through a reasoned "next" list, finally terminating with the logically last thing to be done.

Chaos theory seems to be an increasingly popular technique, used by officials in civilized society, to explain events done in a seemingly disordered sequence.

This resort to chaos theory is generally done when there is a need to explain that a logical sequence is actually happening behind the scenes, it is just that the logic within it can't be detected by a casual observer, because it takes an expert in chaos theory to detect that logic.

Thus, this chaos theory gets around folks, I mean it is replicating itself quite well:

Chaos theory is applied in many scientific disciplines: geology, mathematics, programming, microbiology, biology, computer science, economics, engineering, finance, meteorology, philosophy, physics, politics, population dynamics, psychology, and robotics.

(Wikipedia, emphasis added). Politics is listed as a "science", probably because of its nickname "political science", as one field where chaos theory is utilized.

Also in that list of sciences, where chaos theory is used, we find "economics" and "finance" listed, realms that do much of their research in the laboratories of Wall Street.

Those vast laboratories have been talked about a lot lately, yes, the economic "science" has received a lot of press, especially to the extent that it has mixed with "political science" in the past decade.

The wonderful and good results of these experiments in these great American laboratories is difficult for a casual observer to fathom, without of course, the assistance of chaos theory experts.

Especially in the sense that "the 1%" control far more wealth and power (~90%) than "the 99%" do, at least in the American Republic, the American Democracy, or whatever it is.

These experimental results from the laboratories of "economic science" and "political science" do not, at first blush, seem to follow a logical sequence of events.

Especially if the casual observer notes that the sequence began with "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ... and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" (Preamble), but ends up now with the infamous 1% - 99% split.

The only way that turns out to be logical is if "We the People" means "the 1%" who are scientifically gathering everything involved in "economics" and "finance" for their "Posterity" to inherit, and "the 99%" are chaff to be cast to the winds and ignored.

Enter the chaos theory experts to explain how it only appears to be that way, when in reality, this status quo is the only way things can be done in our civilized America.

It would seem, then, that we must not leave out the science of "psychology", a science listed as yet another one where chaos theory is applied.

Otherwise the casual observer may misinterpret the psychological response of "the 99%" to these experimental results of the "science" of economics, finance, and politics:

With Election Day just over a year away, a deep sense of economic anxiety and doubt about the future hangs over the nation, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, with Americans’ distrust of government at its highest level ever.

(Bad Economy ..., quoting NYT/CBS poll). The highly esteemed expert in chaos theory, replying to the minds of "the 99%" using psychology, would explain:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.

(Ways of Bernays, quoting Edward Bernays). That our thinking must be done for us is "a logical result", says this chaos theory expert.

The treatment from that "invisible government" (using their favorite medicine "spin") tells us that we live in the best country on Earth, but sometimes things get difficult for "the 99%" (but not for "the 1%") because our markets are free, unfettered, and full of liberty, just as the founders intended.

Booyah, I feel better now?