GROVELLING BARSTURDS

Oliver Twist Manifesto

Get off your knees you grovelling bastards
This is Oliver twist pissing over Britannia
200 years of Tin Pan Alley
I learned good from a king thief mentor
Newgate, Broadstreet, Langdales Distillery
Papist threats and no popery
It's a beautiful night again
So paint the wall white again
Brutality for the kids
Oliver Twist

There was this gang who I used to run with
Ragamuffins, urchin scum, spivs
Looking good comes in handy
When you're dipping in the pockets of a dandy
And there's treason in the air, it's just a leap of faith
There's murder in the air at Rillington Place
A Christie lives in Soho
This is the Oliver Twist Manifesto
Totality for the kids
Oliver Twist
_

Neoliberalism? Neocons? These are the fraudulent names, $hame Fein operate under, while still claiming the Republican tag, as they administer the merger of state and corporate power, from a still sectarian Stormont in Occupied Ireland.. Mussolini called it "Fascism." It is now impossible to know in either parts of Ireland, where the corporations end or the government begins, with privatization and if people believe voting for Provisional $inn Fein will change that, the proof that they are in reality, old wine in new bottles, can be seen in their Stormont Administration. They have lost every shred of republican ideology and enforced Nazism, with street gangs and mafia law of the Baggot/Kray Twin variety, in collaboration, with British, political policing of the RUC/psni. The German Nazi party lived the high life and so do $inn Fein, with their padded, expense accounts. Their opulent lifestyle, is supported by British menial labour, that results in deprivation, in most of their scum state. Twenty years after they grovelled to the Bad Friday Agreement, on the backs of dead Freedom Fighters, it is time we stopped using obscure terms, like Neocon, Neoliberal, for these collaborators and their Blueshirt cousins in the south, and use the commonly understood name of Nazis.


The proof of their Mafia Law of street gangs, can be found in the graveyards of Belfast, Derry and South Armagh. The proof of their political policing and internment of Community Activists in Maghaberry, and their censorship of alternative voices in their manipulation and dirty tricks of social media and murdered victims of their mafia. Once again we have another Stormont ragime, sowing another bitter harvest. Their mantra of claiming to be forced to adminster Tory cuts, will simply not wash. Their predecessors the SDLP, had the politcal principles to boycott the monstrosity of Stormont, on these issues, along with political internment. You will find no principles, among the fat cats of unprincipled $hame Fein, who simply pad their bank accounts and blame dissident tactical voting, for their decline and loss of seats. If these dissident voices are as a scarce, as they claimed a few months ago, how come the SDLP, now have almost the same number or that they failed in North Belfast and Fermanagh/South Tyrone, where they campaigned, on a sectarian majority headcount and sectarian politics, that violate every non-sectraian traditional Irish Republican Principle. In so doing so, they have demonstrated in plain view, their opportunist, unprincipled, populist, self-serving, grovelling nature, in their lust for power at all costs, with a sociopathic zeal, that puts Hitler in the shade.


Almost fifty yeara ago, the Civil Rights Movement, exercised their right to march on Irish Occupied streets, along with exercising their right to Free Speech. Even those two Civil rights have now been removed from the people by the $inn Fein Administration. The people marched for equality and against Internment. Almost fifty years later, those demands have not been met. They were shot off the streets of Derry and Ballymurphy and as result, Freedom Fighters fought for the freedom of Irish citizens, who still remain British commoners, at her Majesty's service, courtesy of $inn Fein collaboration with the Orange Order. The ideals of freedom loving people, have been betrayed by collaborators, fascists with their mafia goons of enforccement. People of no property, will be forced to march again, to restore their birthright, Power to the People. The $inn Fein Stormont Junta excuses, of blaming the Tories or the Dissidents, will simply not wash anymore. They have utterly failed, to take the responsibilities of elected office, and in so doing enabled the rape of Irish children and the material rape of their communities. They are now, once again failing, with their blame games in the face of draconian cuts of basic services of any civilized society. 

The dire conditions of deprivation, almost thirty years after election, in their constiuencies of West Belfast, Derry and Newry, are testament, to their utter failure in elected office. Neither have the grovelling bastards, inpressed the Unionist tradition, as the recent election demonstrates. Their justifcation of persuasion, for Bad Friday, has no credibilty, whatsoever with Unioniosts, who watch their mix of grovelling brown nosing, coupled with sectarian headcounts, in utter disgust . Whether one calls it the Stocholm Syndrome, Gombeenism or Slave Mentality, they exhibit all the qualities of inter-generational paedophillia or poacher turned game-keeper. They are neither Republican or Socialist b
+y any measure. They are in reality Nazi, who blindly follow their Fuerher. Irish people will soon be confronted with this monster. We must call out it's activites for what they actually are, before it is too late, and get back on the street for our Civil Rights and Birth Rights!

The Inhuman Failure of ‘Austerity’ By David William Pear May 09, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "Consortium News" -  Close your eyes and imagine an affluent society with subsonic trains crisscrossing the continent. One that produces unlimited clean energy. Provides basic healthcare for everyone. Values education for its own sake. Cultivates the arts and research to discover beauty and the unknown. An affluent society that responds with compassion to natural disaster. Conserves natural resources and protects the environment. And enjoys more leisure time. Cares about eliminating poverty and illiteracy. That ends racism and prejudice.Does the affluent society seem like a dream? Is it an impossible goal? The neoliberals think it is. They imagine a world of austerity and a new Gilded Age. The neoliberals are prisoners of the Eighteenth Century. They have not advanced since the neo-feudal teachings of Adam Smith (1723-1790). Smith is the godfather of economics and wrote the “bible” of capitalism, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith was among the first to give much thought about economics. In Eighteenth Century Great Britain, half the population lived in poverty. They survived, if they did, with disease, famine, illiteracy, lack of sanitation and in slums. It was normal then. Things had always been that way. They thought the poor, starving and ignorant mass of people would always be among them.  They thought their society was according to the law of nature. Smith was a charitable man. He fretted about poverty, and gave a great deal of thought about wages. With a large pool of the unemployed, the new industrial class only had to pay subsistence wages. Smith tried to tell the industrialists that people were like cattle. He said if one gave their cows more grass, then they would produce more milk. The industrialists said that if they gave their workers higher wages, then it would come out of profits, and the workers would just produce more children with mouths to feed, leading to greater starvation. The neoliberals still think this way. Every progressive social project the neoliberals call it socialism, as if that is an obscene word. The only government projects they like are those that benefit the private sector, corporations and the wealthy. Almost every modern democracy has done better than the US at providing good government for its people. All the evidence proves it. The US consistently ranks far below more progressive countries on the United Nations Human Development Index that measures health, education and equality of income. On the Social Progress Index, which measures “Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellness, and Opportunity” (see interactive map); the US is ranked sixteenth, and well behind other developed democratic nations. Those countries doing better have not degenerated into totalitarianism, as the neoliberals predict. The neoliberals see Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin behind every government social program. In the 1940s the neoliberal’s idol, Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) wrote a thesis called The Road to Serfdom. It is a simple book in its Eighteenth Century theories about government and freedom. There is a comic book version, courtesy of General Motors. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for it. John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and Hayek were colleagues at the London School of Economics. They had a long-running debate for years over the role of government. Keynes realized that government was important, that it has an active role in the economy. He said the government could do “good” and manage the economy well. Hayek said it was the road to serfdom. Keynes was an economic advisor for the British government during World War I. He also advised the British during the Treaty of Versailles to negotiate Germany’s surrender. Keynes resigned from his position at Versailles in disgust, saying the harsh austerity the Allies were demanding of Germany and Austria would cause massive poverty and starvation. He said it was inhumane and would result in the rise of fascism and war. He proved to be right. He was not awarded the Nobel Prize. In the Twenty-first Century, the European Union is imposing harsh austerity on its weaker members. The neoliberals are dismantling Europe’s progressive social programs. We are seeing the rise of fascism again too. So which is more likely to cause fascism and war: Austerity for the people, or progressive government social programs? Hayek said he did not mind a dictatorship, as long as it is neoliberal. The neoliberals like right-wing dictators. During the Great Depression (1929-1939), President Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned to Keynes for advice about the Great Depression. Keynes wrote a letter to Roosevelt advising him on the need for government social programs to stimulate the economy. Keynes further warned FDR that lowering interest rates and increasing the money supply alone would only bailout speculators, but would not sustain economic recovery. By contrast, President Barack Obama took the neoliberal advice in the Great Recession and bailed out the speculators. Keynes would have predicted that the result would be anemic economic recovery. He would have been right. Keynes gave worthy advice that would do the American people well in the Twenty-first Century. The neoliberals keep sabotaging good advice from past sages. Their sabotage is well-funded by corporations, foundations, foreign governments and the wealthy. John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was a genius with Twenty-first Century ideas. Galbraith served as an economic advisor to both FDR and John F. Kennedy.  His most famous book isThe Affluent Society (1958), a popular book during the 1960s. During the Stagflation of the 1970s, the neoliberals allied with the religious-right and racists to purge Keynes’s and Galbraith’s teachings. In the 1980s, the Reagan-Thatcher revolution established neoliberals, corporate hegemony and right-wing extremists in the halls of power. The first experiment of the neoliberals was in Chile during the 1970s. It led to the rise of Pinochet, fascism and crimes against humanity. Hayek said in a 1978 letter to the Times of London that he personally approved of Pinochet, preferring a dictator to a democratic government without neoliberalism. Hayek made one excuse after another for Pinochet. He was not even faithful to his own principles, and said Pinochet’s firing squads would transition to democracy. Those on the wrong end of Pinochet’s firing squads would not live to see that miracle. The neoliberals never take responsibility, admit they are wrong, or say they are sorry. (See example, here.) Galbraith’s discarded ideas had some excellent questions and answers to ponder in the Twenty-first Century. What is our obsession with economic growth and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), when an affluent society already produces all the private goods and services needed, Galbraith asked? And, shouldn’t we be more concerned about what is produced instead of how much? He said there is a “problem with social balance … private affluence and public squalor … as well as related environmental, aesthetic, and cultural concerns.” He was a man for the Twenty-first Century. Neoliberals are not against fascist and corporate planning of the economy. Fascists use the firing squad as their economic planning tool. Corporations use monopoly power, public relations departments and political graft. Corporations are hierarchical organizations that meet in secret to decide what to produce and the price people will pay. They spend billions of dollars on advertising to change consumer preferences and move their products off the shelves. Their propaganda has created a privatized culture of consumerism, materialism and gluttony. The corporations are dictating government programs too. Their oligarchies have taken over governments globally at all levels. They plan the government and the economy for their own profit and greed. Corporate oligarchies and neoliberals attack every social program for the public. They impose austerity on the public sector and the people. The impoverished public sector is in dire need of investment. Education could use a tsunami of new investment. The lack of investment for education, especially in poor neighborhoods, is glaring. The neoliberals blame “bad teachers.” They want to privatize public schools and hire proctors that will work for the minimum wage, so their hedge funds can make billions of dollars in profits that should be going to education. Higher education is failing too. Students are condemned to indentured servitude to payoff student loans. Young people have been indoctrinated that the value of education is to learn how to work for corporations and the military. College graduates discover that there are no jobs for their qualifications. Neoliberals stuck in the Eighteenth Century say the answer is that not everybody needs an education to be a widget or carry a gun. They want other people’s students to enroll in online schools pushed by their hedge funds, while their kids go to Harvard, Yale and MIT. An affluent society needs educated people. There is a cadre of potential teachers, healthcare workers, nutritionists, scientists, sociologists, historians, artists, engineers and administrators now working at meaningless minimum wage jobs. There is an abundance of opportunity for college graduates in an affluent society. New community centers could staff professionals to enrich the lives of seniors, teens and children. With people living longer, retired seniors could improve their lives and social activity by taking courses and enjoying the arts. Teens could have tutoring, learn to play chess, take music lessons, cooking classes, creative writing, languages, and have supervised sports. The possibilities for public investments and to improve the quality of life, and provide meaningful jobs are endless. Neoliberals want everybody to sit alone at home and watch TV. Malnourished and neglected children are unacceptable in an affluent society. The problem is not a lack of resources. It is because of unequal distribution. There is a shameful lack of prenatal care. As a result, infant mortality in the US is higher than every developed nation. It is 30 percent higher than even Cuba, which the neoliberals constantly chastise about its human rights. New parents could get healthcare, infant care and education in an affluent society. Instead, Eighteenth Century neoliberals want to kill Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid; and they want to privatize the Veterans Administration. Their greed is insatiable. Obama promised single-payer healthcare. The public got excited and wanted it. The Eighteenth Century neoliberals killed it in the womb. Long-term health care and homecare goes uncovered by any public insurance. Neoliberals let the old and disabled go without and die, as if those people are just useless eaters. Instead an affluent society would treat the old and disabled humanely; and single-payer healthcare would create more careers and professional jobs. Twice a day every workday the highways are in gridlock with automobiles idling, burning fossil fuel and polluting the air. Clean, fast and comfortable light-rail and motor coaches would be quicker, more comfortable and use less energy. Building and operating a Twenty-first Century mass transportation industry would make commuting time productive and leisurely; and create more skilled jobs. An affluent society should not neglect the unemployed. The public sector has the responsibility of full-employment and providing for those unemployed. Employees did not volunteer to be the risk-takers of capitalism. They should not be condemned to their fate because they were unlucky and chose the wrong industry or employer years ago. Society must also face the reality that some people are permanently unable to work because of social, emotional and health reasons. The unemployed need treatment, counseling, education and care; which would also create more jobs. These are just a few ideas, some from Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. As Galbraith said in 1958, the private sector is a king; the public sector is a pauper. They can both be royalty. The neoliberals and their alter-ego, the neocons, do not have any good ideas for the Twenty-first Century. They have caused financial disasters and endless wars, and they tell us not to expect better. Part of the public sector that is not a pauper but should be is the military. The military-industrial complex is wasting vast resources making machines of death. Society is spending trillions of dollars to send armies to invade other countries. We spend trillions of dollars in order to protect us from imaginary enemies and those that our wars have created. It does not make us any safer. The jobs that it creates do not add any value. The Eighteen Century neoliberals and the neoconservatives say that government economic planning will destroy our freedom, while they plan the economy for war and financial speculation. The neocons say the American people must give up the Bill of Rights in exchange for safety. The neoliberals say that austerity will bring prosperity. Instead we are less free and more poor. They are leading us down the road to fascism and serfdom. Let’s open our eyes and stop listening to the neoliberals.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS : Liberation Belfast

HO CHI MINH CITY - Vietnam marked the 40th anniversary of Saigon's fall Thursday with a huge military parade celebrating the moment Liberation forces ended a decades-long conflict and delivered a painful blow to American moral and military prestige.

The centre of Vietnam's usually bustling southern business hub was sealed off so that regiments of Liberated women in dress uniform could march past all the country's flag-waving citizens as a marching band played.

Elaborate floats, including one bearing a giant portrait of founding president Ho Chi Minh, made their way slowly through the city streets, celebrating the moment 40 years ago when tanks smashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in the then southern capital of Saigon, now named Ho Chi Minh City.

"The April 30 victory was a golden turning point for the Vietnamese people," army Lt Gen Nguyen Quoc Khanh told the crowds at the event, which is being broadcast live nationwide.The victory is a symbol of the country's hard-won independence, he said, adding that the army "is ready to sacrifice" anything to defend this.

The northern victors reunited the country under a citizen government, after a war which eviscerated much of Vietnam, killing millions of its people as well as 58,000 American servicemen.


Insanity Grips The Western WorldBy Paul Craig Roberts

April 28, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - Just as Karl Marx claimed that History had chosen the proletariat, neoconservatives claim that History has chosen America. Just as the Nazis proclaimed “Deutschland uber alles,” neoconservatives proclaim “America uber alles.” In September 2013 President Obama actually stood before the United Nations and declared, “I believe America is exceptional.”

Germany’s political leaders and those in Great Britain, France, and throughout Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan also believe that America is exceptional, which means better than they are. That’s why these countries are Washington’s vassals. They accept their inferiority to the Exceptional Country — the USA — and follow its leadership.

It is unlikely that the Chinese think that a handful of White People are exceptional in anything except their diminutive numbers. The populations of Asia, Africa, and South America dwarf those that comprise Washington’s Empire.

Neither do the Russians believe that the US is exceptional. Putin’s response to Obama’s claim of American superiority was: “God created us equal.” Putin added: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

If all countries are exceptional, the word loses its meaning. If America is exceptional, it means others are inferior for lacking this designation. Inferiors have less rights and can be bullied into submission or bombed into oblivion.

The Exceptional Country is above all the others and, therefore, doesn’t have to be concerned about how it treats them. Obviously, Americans and their vassals think America is exceptional as the millions of people murdered, maimed, and dislocated by Washington’s wars in eight countries in the 21st century has not resulted in condemnation of Washington. Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the puppets in Canada, Australia, and Japan still suck up, holding tight to Washington.

Instead, Russia and Iran, countries that, unlike the US, are not militarily aggressive, are portrayed in the White People’s Media as threats and are condemned.

The White Media claims, and has claimed since February 2014, that there are Russian tanks and troops in Ukraine. Putin has pointed out that if this indeed was the case, Kiev and Western Ukraine would have fallen to the Russian invasion early last year. Kiev has been unable to defeat the small breakaway republics in eastern and southern Ukraine and would stand no chance against the Russian military.

Recently a brave news organization made fun of the White Media’s claim that Russian tanks have been pouring into Ukraine for 14 months. The parody pictured Ukraine at a standstill. All traffic on all roads and residential streets is blocked by Russian tanks. All parking places, including sidewalks and people’s front and rear gardens have tanks piled upon tanks. The entire country is immobilized in gridlock.

Although a few have fun making fun of the gullible people who believe the White Media, the situation is nevertheless serious as it concerns life on planet Earth.

There is little sign that Washington and its vassals care about life on Earth. Recently, the largest political group in the European Parliament–the European People’s Party–expressed a cavalier opinion about life on Earth. We know this, because, if we can trust Euractive, an online EU news source, the majority EU party believes that declaring the EU’s readiness for nuclear war is one of the best steps to deter Russia from further aggression. http://www.unian.info/politics/1070675-meps-believe-eu-should-be-ready-for-nuclear-war.html The aggression to be stopped by Europe’s declaration of its readiness for armageddon is the alleged Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the “further aggression” is Putin’s alleged intention of reestablishing the Soviet Empire.

It must be disappointing to the Russian government to see that leaders of the European Union prefer to endorse nuclear war than to challenge Washington’s propaganda.

When I read that the governing party in the European Parliament thought non-existent aggression had to be stopped by a declaration of readiness for nuclear war, I realized that money could buy any and every thing, even the life of the planet. The European People’s Party was speaking in behalf of Washington’s propaganda, not in behalf of Europe. Europe’s nuclear war with Russia would end instantly with the destruction of every European capital.

The crazed vice-president of the European People’s Party, Jacek Saryusz-Wolski revealed who the real aggressor is when he declared: “Time of talk and persuasion with Russia is over. Now it’s time for a tough policy.”

Clearly, the European Parliament is a great danger to life on the planet. Is it realistic to think that Russia will allow herself to become a concubine of Washington?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

CUNTSTABLE BIGOT

The prestigious Order of Orange-Nassau has been awarded in the birthday honours list of the king of the Netherlands to a spoof nominee from a television consumer affairs show with a fictional CV and references – for his work with a nonexistent charity.


The programme’s nominee was approved without a single check by his local mayor in Utrecht, by the king’s commissioner in the province, by a national committee or by a government minister – and was, finally and most embarrassingly, signed by King Willem-Alexander.

The spoofer was nominated for his work with a fictitious charity that looks after dachshunds – the canine choice of royal courts all over Europe – and was also described as having an abiding interest in ecological gardens; issues the producers believed would ensure him the royal seal of approval.

Nominations require five references, three of which were false. The other two were in the names of real people to see if either would be contacted – which neither was.

‘Social issues’

“The two who did exist were never phoned or emailed, just not contacted at all, which is quite unbelievable,” said Jelte Sondij, presenter of the programme, Rambam, which describes itself as using “unconventional methods” to investigate social issues.

“If any of the projects with which our nominee was allegedly involved had even been Googled, those responsible for vetting the nominations would have discovered in three minutes that it was all nonsense. It was so easy, we were amazed.”

Sondij went to Utrecht last Friday evening at the start of Koninginnedag weekend – the king’s annual birthday celebration – and had the Orange-Nassau medal pinned to his lapel by Utrecht mayor Jan van Zanen.

Sondij wore a wig and a false beard, gave the name of the show’s nominee to the security staff, and was given free rein behind the scenes.

The programme has already returned the medal.

Rise of the New Black Radicals

By Chris Hedges

April 28, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - The almost daily murders of young black men and women by police in the United States—a crisis undiminished by the protests of groups such as Black Lives Matter and by the empty rhetoric of black political elites—have given birth to a new young black militant.

This militant, rising off the bloody streets of cities such as Ferguson, Mo., understands that the beast is not simply white supremacy, chronic poverty and the many faces of racism but the destructive energy of corporate capitalism. This militant has given up on electoral politics, the courts and legislative reform, loathes the corporate press and rejects established black leaders such as Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Michael Eric Dyson. This militant believes it is only in the streets and in acts of civil disobedience that change is possible. And given the refusal of the corporate state to address the mounting suffering of the poor and working poor, draconian state repression and indiscriminate use of lethal state violence against unarmed people of color, I think the new black radical is right. It will be a long, hot and violent summer.

The world’s hundreds of millions of disenfranchised youths—in America this group is dominated by the black and brown underclass—come out of the surplus labor created by our system of corporate neofeudalism. These young men and women have been discarded as human refuse and are preyed upon by a legal system that criminalizes poverty. In the United States they constitute the bulk of the 2.3 million human beings locked in jails and prisons. The discontent in Ferguson, Athens, Cairo, Madrid and Ayotzinapa is one discontent. And the emerging revolt, although it comes in many colors, speaks many languages and has many belief systems, is united around a common enemy. Bonds of solidarity and consciousness are swiftly uniting the wretched of the earth against our corporate masters.

Corporate power, which knows what is coming, has put in place sophisticated systems of control that include militarized police, elaborate propaganda campaigns that seek to make us fearful and therefore passive, wholesale surveillance of every citizen and a court system that has stripped legal protection from the poor and any who dissent. The masses are to be kept in bondage. But the masses, especially the young, understand the game. There is a word for what is bubbling up from below—revolution. It can’t begin soon enough.

The global leadership for this revolt comes not from the institutions of privilege, elite universities where ambitious and self-centered young men and women jockey to become part of the ruling 1 percent, but from the squalid internal colonies that house the poor and usually people of color. The next great revolutionary in America won’t look like Thomas Jefferson. He or she will look like Lupe Fiasco.

T-Dubb-O is a hip-hop artist from St. Louis. He is one of the founders, along withTef Poe, Tory Russell, Tara Thompson and Rika Tyler, of Hands Up United. The organization was formed in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. It has built close alliances with radical organizations in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin American, in Europe and in Palestine.

“I honestly think it’s going to be worse than last year, this summer,” T-Dubb-O said when I met with him and Tyler at Princeton University, where they had gone to speak to students. “People have become more radical,” he said. “They’ve realized the power that they have. They’re no longer afraid of the police, the state, but also you have a police and a military force that’s been training for a year to deal with this type of circumstance. So I honestly think this summer is gonna be worse. More violence from the police, and this time you won’t have a group of people who is just gonna sit there and let it happen to ’em—you’re gonna have people that are actually gonna fight back instead of just continue to be peaceful protesters. Right now everybody is just on edge. I mean, it’s the same situation we was in before Mike Brown. People that don’t have jobs, there’s crime everywhere, there’s drugs everywhere, there’s predator policing. It’s the same circumstances, it’s just no cameras.”

“In my city every day, police is pulling somebody over, harassing them, extorting them,” he said. “Because that’s what it is—it’s legal extortion. When a government is making 30 to 40 percent of their yearly budget off of tickets, fines and imprisonment, it’s extortion. It’s the same thing the mob did in the ’20s. So we fight. We can’t go back to normal lives. We get followed, harassed, death threats, phones tapped, social media watched, they hack into our emails, hack into our social media account, we all got FBI files. They know we here right now. So I mean it’s not a game, but it’s either continue to deal with not being able to just live like a regular person, and dream, and have an opportunity, or get up and do something about it. And we decided to do something.”

Tyler said she was propelled into the movement by seeing the body of Michael Brown, which the Ferguson police left lying in the street for more than four hours.

“I went to Canfield [Drive, where Brown was killed],” she said when we spoke. “I saw the body. I saw the blood. I just broke down. And ever since then I’ve just been out there [as an activist] every day.”

“They left [Brown] in the street for four and a half hours in the hot sun on concrete, just for display,” she said. “That reminded me of a modern-day lynching. Because you know, they used to lynch slaves and then have it displayed. And that’s basically showing us that this system is not built for us. It made me wake up a little bit more.”

“Just envision a debtor’s prison being run by a collusion between city officials, police and court judges, who treated our community like an ATM machine,” Tyler said. “Because that’s all they did. Ferguson is in St. Louis County. It’s 21,000 people living in 8,100 households. So it’s a small town. Sixty-seven percent of the residents are African-American. Twenty-two percent live below poverty level. A total of $2.6 million [were paid in fines to city officials, the courts and the police] in 2013. The Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases. That’s about three warrants per household. One and a half cases for each household. You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and three warrants per household from an average crime rate. You get numbers like this from racist bullshit, arrests from jaywalking, and constant low-level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”

“For an example,” she went on, “I got pulled over. I turned a left [illegally] and my car was searched. I was met with three different officers, two detectives. I got a traffic ticket. I had a ticket because I didn’t have my license on me. So I had a ticket for not having my license, and then I got a ticket from turning the wrong way. I did not go to court because I was out of town. However, I called them and told them I will not appear to court and my lawyer would handle it from there. I got a letter in the mail that said failure to appear to court, and they have a warrant out for my arrest. They’re threatening to take my license and suspend it because I didn’t appear to court. So these are just the things that had happened in St. Louis right now. You can get a ticket from walking across the street, or a ticket from not cutting your grass, and then you’re stuck in this system that they put us in, that is oppressed, and keeps us oppressed.”

“I was arrested when I was pregnant, I was 37 weeks and I was arrested in St. Charles County by four white officers,” she said. “They took me into custody when I had this big-ass stomach. And I’m like, I’m pregnant. I had a traffic ticket for parking in the wrong meter. And they wrote me a ticket and I never paid it, so they took me. I had a warrant out for my arrest. I sat in jail, pregnant, had my baby a week early because I was stressed out and crying my eyes out in jail.”

“No person should have to go through this,” T-Dubb-O said, “whether it’s in America, Palestine, Mexico, Brazil, Canada. Nobody should have to go through this. You look at a bunch of young people [in Ferguson], their age ranges anywhere from 12 to 28 or 29, that went against the most powerful military force in this world. That’s pretty much what happened. … That’s not what’s explained, but that’s what it was. It was tanks on every corner, our phones tapped, they follow us. Every day we was out there we thought we were gonna die. At one point in time they said they were gonna kill us. ‘We’re not shooting rubber bullets tonight, we’re shooting live ammunition.’ And these are the things that you don’t see on the news. It was just because we was tired of being treated as less than people. Just for opportunity to be able to walk the streets and live and breath and do what everybody else does. And that’s pretty much what we was fighting for. I mean, the level of oppression, it’s kind of hard to fathom, and believe that it’s actually true in America, especially the middle of America. But it’s real, where you have people that are judged off the neighborhoods they come from and the color of their skin and they’re denied certain opportunities.”

“In St. Louis if you’ve been arrested and you’re facing a misdemeanor or felony charges, you’re not allowed a Pell Grant to go to college,” he said. “So if you can’t afford to pay to go to college you’re just stuck. If you’re on probation and you’re trying to get a job, it’s a right-to-work state, they have the right to deny you employment because of your past. They don’t have to give you an opportunity to work. Where do they leave you, back in the same system that puts you in the same position where you made the first mistake. It’s all set up like this.”

“I’ve been tear-gassed six times,” Tyler said. “I’ve been put on the car, had different guns to my head. I’ve been shot at with rubber bullets, live ammo, wooden bullets, bean bag bullets, sound cannons, everything you can think of. I’ve went up against militarized police, and they did different things like a five-second rule, like I would get arrested if I stood still for longer than five seconds. I would get arrested if I didn’t walk longer than five seconds. It was just different things. They don’t wear their name badges. They don’t tell us who they are. They’re not transparent at all. They harass us. Women have been hogtied, beaten. I got arrested for standing on the sidewalk, just recording them.”

T-Dubb-O after the murder of Brown and the unrest in Ferguson was invited with other community leaders to meet with President Barack Obama in the White House. The president, he said, spoke “in clichés” about black-on-black crime, the necessity of staying in school, working hard and the importance of voting.

“He asked me did I vote for him,” he said, “I told him no. I didn’t vote for him either time, because I didn’t want to vote for him just because he was black. I felt like that would have been shallow on my end. Because he’s never honestly spoken and touched and said he was going to do anything for my community or the issues that we face on a daily basis, so why would I vote for somebody like that, whether you white, black, male, female, so on and so forth?”

As president he is proof that the system works, Obama told T-Dubb-O. The hip-hop artist said this statement shows how out of touch Obama is with the reality faced by poor people of color.

“When you have an 11-year-old boy whose mother is single, or has a single father who’s working two or three jobs just to put food on the table, he has to wake up at 5:30 in the morning, catch public transportation to school,” T-Dubb-O said. “Everything around him is damnation. You can’t expect an 11-year-old to have the mental capacity of an adult, to say I’m going to make the mature decisions and not get into trouble. So I don’t care about black-on-black crime. I don’t care about the normal cliché of working hard, you can do anything, you can accomplish, because that’s bullshit. And excuse my language, but I can’t tell a little boy up the street in my neighborhood, where over a hundred murders happened last year, that he can be an astronaut if he wants to be, because that’s not possible.”

“I think D.C. is a perfect example of what America is,” he said. “You have this big white house representing the government, that was built by slaves, that’s beautiful, excellent manicured lawns, and right outside the gate you have 50 homeless people sleeping in a park. Right outside of the gate of the White House. That perfectly describes America.”

“The difference between us and those leaders is that we aren’t doing it for fame, we aren’t doing it for political gain, we aren’t doing it for money,” he said, speaking of Obama, Sharpton, Jackson, Dyson and the other establishment black leaders. “We’re doing it because every day that we’ve lived we’ve been denied normal human rights, and we could have lost our life. We don’t believe those leaders are properly representing our community. Because they are no longer a part of the community, they don’t speak for the community, and honestly they don’t do much for it. They do some things, because they have to, being 501(c)3s, but they don’t speak for the people.”

Jackson and Sharpton have been heckled by crowds in Ferguson and told to leave, along with crews from CNN. Tyler described CNN and other major news outlets, which steadfastly parrot back the official narrative, as “worse than politicians, worse than police.”

“So people in Ferguson is basically like, fuck Al Sharpton, and fuck Jesse Jackson, for real,” Tyler said. “And that’s the best way I can put it, for real, because they are co-opted, first off. They had their own movement. They were co-opted. Their movement got destroyed. Now they want to come to the new leaders and try to come in our movement and give guidance and stuff, but it’s a totally different generation. They marched with suits and ties and sung ‘Kumbaya’ and stuff. It’s people out there that look like him,” she said, motioning to T-Dubb-O, “shirtless, tattoos, like Bloods, Crips, whatever, out there just mad, because they was pissed off and they was passionate about it.”

“Jesse Jackson came, actually we were in the middle of a prayer for Michael Brown’s mother, and we were at the memorial site in Canfield Apartments, where he was killed and laid down in the street for four and a half hours,” Tyler said. “Everyone has their heads bowed and he comes over and starts shouting ‘No justice, no peace’ in the middle of a prayer. So instantly the community is pissed the fuck off—like who the hell is this? I finally recognized his face. I went over to him, because the guys were ready to fight him. Like, you don’t come over here and, this mother’s grieving, we’re all upset, and break up our prayer. And he’s all like ‘No justice, no peace!’ He has his bullhorn, and his sign and everything, just for a photo op. So I went over and I said to him, you probably should leave, because they’re really angry and they’re gonna get you out of here. And he was like ‘No justice, no peace!’ and he just kept chanting. So I moved out of the way, and the dudes told him, like ‘Hey bro, if you don’t back the fuck up we’re gonna make you leave.’ And he’s like, ‘This is what’s wrong with us!’ and ‘generational divide!’ and everything like that. And you know the community wasn’t taking for it, so he got scared, and him and the people he came with, like his best-dressed suit on and everything, and everybody was out there shirtless, or tank tops, or just in their normal clothes. And he came out there with a cameraman and everything, like this is just a frenzy or a freaking parade or something to film. So people were pissed off and he instantly left, and he hasn’t really been back since.”

“Every national organization you can think of is in St. Louis, Mo.,” T-Dubb-O said. “We have Urban League. We have the NAACP. We have all these different organizations. But yet for the last two decades we’ve always had one of the three top murder rates, one of the three highest crime rates. Poverty level is crazy, unemployment, you have all these mission statements on your website saying you do this and you do that, yet those programs aren’t available in our city. But you have offices here. You’re getting grants. But you’re not doing anything. And the community sees that now. So it’s gonna come a point in time to where all 501(c)3s, and all organizations, have to actually be active in the communities that they’re representing.”

The young Ferguson activists respect only the few national black leaders who do not try to speak for the movement or use the unrest as a media backdrop to promote themselves. Among those they admire is Cornel West.

“He was kind of like a big brother or father of the movement,” Tyler said of West. “Instead of stepping up, he always brought me with him. He always uplifted us. They’ll try to put him in front of the camera, he’d always bring somebody with him. He would say, ‘These are the people, these are the new leaders of the world, and you guys need to talk to them.’ He’s very transparent. He always voices and uplifts our name.”

The activists are preparing for increased unrest. And they are preparing for increased state repression and violence.

“As far as politics,” T-Dubb-O said, “it’s going to go either one of two ways. Right now we have a window that’s closing pretty fast, to where we can either re-create this system for something that’s going to actually be equal for all people, or they’re going to re-create the system to where we’ll never be able to punch it in the mouth like we did in Ferguson again.”

“We don’t know what it’s gonna look like, honestly,” he said of the coming unrest. “It’s been legal to kill a black man in this country. Just since Mike Brown, 11 more people has been killed by police in St. Louis alone, one being a woman who was raped then hung in jail. But none of the other murders got national coverage. It was just two standoffs with police yesterday. So I mean, we don’t know what that’s going to look like. We know we’re dedicated. We’re going to continue to fight. It’s going to take full-fledged revolution to make a change. The worst of the worst would be civil war. That’s just where my mind is.”

“I don’t see them pulling back,” he said of the state and its security forces. “They have no problem killing people. They have no problem shooting gas at babies, pregnant people, old people. They don’t have an issue with it. And our politicians are just standing around with their arms folded.”

“As long as the powers that be are in control, the oppression isn’t going to go anywhere,” he said. “It’s really going to take people to unite worldwide, not just in America, not just in St. Louis, not just in one particular city or state. It’s gonna have to be people identifying their struggles with each other worldwide, internationally, and say enough is enough. That’s the only way oppression will ever leave.”

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, has written twelve books, including the New York Times best seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. Hedges previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. http://www.truthdig.com/

http://worldtruth.tv/suppressed-scientific-evidence-proves-free-energy-source-dating-back-25000-years/

DEATH THREAT TO IRISH AMERICAN HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST

Irish Blog has been receiving considerable solidarity in the US, with many supporters of Irish Freedom, re-sharing this Blog and carrying the censored message, about what is really happening in Ireland, to fellow Americans. One Human Rights Activist in particular, called Darius Koltuniak, has been successful, in highlighting and organizing solidarity against British repression in Occupied Ireland, particularly with regard to the Political Internment of Irish activists. Unfortunately since he started highlighting Political Internment in Ireland, he has been receiving abuse, particularly insidious in three instances, using Irish names for cover and a death threat in another incident.

This type of fascist intimidation of Americans by British agents, coupled with censorship and political internment, is part of the course of any genuine activist, for the Irish Cause of Freedom. It is part of what the British call, Low Intensity Operations, from their manual on Dirty War, which is partly psychological, along with dividing and discrediting the Irish Cause for Freedom. Solidarity is critical in this struggle, as Dariusz, who's own father, was politically interned in Poland for years, knows all to well.

I am calling on all supporters of the Irish Cause, to bring this matter to the attention of their respective, elected political, representatives, for their immediate attention, both in Ireland and in the United States. I also call on you, to bring the matter of Political Internment by remand in Occupied Ireland, for their immediate attention, which will require persistence. For further details you can contact Darius Koltuniak on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/dariusz.koltuniak?fref=ts

beir bua, brionOcleirigh

PEDO & GOAT REPTILES

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Disabled and elderly to suffer as community transport budget slashed by a third in £60m DRD cuts

Community transport is to have its budget slashed with Danny Kennedy told to make £60m savings

BY ADRIAN RUTHERFORD – 18 APRIL 2015
Funding for community transport schemes across Northern Ireland is being slashed because of cutbacks, it has been revealed.

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Up to a third could be wiped from budgets as a result of financial pressures, groups have been told.

Transport Minister Danny Kennedy needs to make savings of £60m this year, leading to reductions in spending across the board.

The move is likely to affect the most vulnerable in society, including the disabled and the elderly.

One community transport scheme based in Co Down said it had seen its funding sliced from £428,303 to £323,542 - a drop of 25%.

Another group in the Causeway area said funding for schemes there could be reduced by a third.

Ukip MLA David McNarry, a member of Stormont's regional development committee, has vowed to fight the cutbacks. "This is striking right at the heart of very vulnerable people in their communities," he said.

Community transport partnerships provide accessible door-to-door and group travel services to older people and people with disabilities.

The services are run by a wide range of community operators.

However, the Department for Regional Development (DRD), which helps to finance community transport, is cutting back on funding. Among the groups affected is Compass Advocacy Network, which helps people with learning disabilities, autism and mental health issues throughout the Causeway area.

Its director Janet Schofield said the group had been told that a third of all provision has been cut across the board. "We recognise that the current financial situation means sacrifices have to be made," she said.

"However, this is another example of the most vulnerable in our society being hit and the lack of respect for the services provided by the voluntary and community sector." One of the group's users attends a 'Base' project three times a week.

She said: "I live in a tiny village outside Ballymena. I can't drive, there are no buses where I live and my mum works from home so it's impossible for her to take me in to the Base in the morning.

"Community transport is a lifeline as it means I can get to my work and to the Base."

The cutbacks are due to be discussed when DRD officials appear before the regional development committee next week.

Mr Kennedy said that since becoming minister in 2011, he had protected the baseline budget for community transport year on year and, where possible, supplemented it with in-year funding.

He added: "My department will be working closely with the service providers to explore ways of delivering the service in a more cost-efficient manner and will seek to minimise the impact on the end user."

DRD said the grant to rural community transport had been cut from £2.75m to £2.4m.

Additional money made available last year, raising the grant to £3.6m, is unlikely to be available this time.

My View: Most vulnerable in society are hit again

By Janet Schofield

Our group works with people with learning disabilities, autism and mental health issues throughout the Causeway area.

In the last two days we have had a steady stream of service users, parents and carers concerned about the cuts to community transport.

Community transport is provided for some of the most vulnerable people in our society including people with learning disabilities and physical disabilities. The vast majority of our service users are unable to drive and, as a rural area, many public transport links are inaccessible or individuals are not able to travel on public transport independently.

If the people who depend on community transport could use public transport, they would.

More often than not, the community transport provision makes the difference between someone being at home and someone being at their job, at college, at one of the projects we run or training for work.

The knock-on effect of these cuts will be devastating to individuals, parents and carers at a time when welfare reform is already causing significant worry.

This isn't a free service - our members contribute towards their fare but it is subsidised, making it an affordable alternative to private taxis.

We have been told that a third of all provision has been cut across the board.

Further cuts to community transport will mean that many of our service users will be unable to avail of services, education, work placements, training placements, jobs, and social and leisure opportunities.

We recognise that the current financial situation means sacrifices have to be made.

However, this is another example of the most vulnerable in our society being hit and the lack of respect for the services provided by the voluntary and community sector.
Janet Schofield is director of Compass Advocacy Network (CAN), a charitable user-led organisation that provides services to more than 250 people

Chomsky Says US, Irish Blog says UK is World’s Biggest Terrorist

By Euro News

April 18, 2015 "ICH" - "Euronews" - Isabelle Kumar: “The world in 2015 seems a very unsettled place but if we take a big picture view do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about the general state of play?”

Noam Chomsky: “In the global scene we are racing towards a precipice which we are determined to fall over which will sharply reduce the prospects for decent survival.”

Isabelle Kumar: “What precipice is that?”

Noam Chomsky: “There are actually two, one is environmental catastrophe which is imminent and we don’t have a lot of time to deal with it and we are going the wrong way, and the other has been around for 70 years, the threat of nuclear war, which is in fact increasing. If you look at the record it is a miracle we have survived.”

Isabelle Kumar: “Let’s look at the environmental issues, we have asked our social media audience to send in questions and we have hordes of questions. We received this question from Enoa Agoli who asks, when you look at this issue of the environment and you look at it through a philosopher’s lens, what do you think about climate change?”

Noam Chomsky: “The human species has been around for maybe a 100,000 years and it is now facing a unique moment in its history. This species is now in a position where it will decide very soon, in the next few generations, whether the experiment in so-called intelligent life will proceed or are we determined to destroy it? I mean scientists overwhelmingly recognise that most of the fossil fuels have to be left in the ground if our grandchildren are going to have decent prospects. But the institutional structures of our society are pressuring to try to extract every drop. The effects, the human consequences, of the predicted effects of climate change in the not very distant future, are catastrophic and we are racing toward that precipice.”

Isabelle Kumar: “In terms of nuclear war we see the prospect of this Iran deal has reached a preliminary agreement. Does that provide you with a glimmer of hope that the world could potentially be a safer place?”

Noam Chomsky: “I’m in favour of the Iran negotiations but they are profoundly flawed. There are two states that rampage in the middle east carrying out aggressions, violence, terrorist acts, illegal acts, constantly. They’re both huge nuclear weapon states and their nuclear armorments. And their nuclear weapons are not being considered.”

Isabelle Kumar: “And who exactly are you referring to?”

Noam Chomsky: “The United States and Israel. The two major nuclear states in the world. I mean there’s a reason why, in international polls, run by US polling agencies, the United States is regarded as the greatest threat to world peace by an overwhelming margin. No other country is even close. It’s kind of interesting that the US media refused to publish this. But it doesn’t go away.”

Isabelle Kumar: “You don’t hold US President Obama in very high esteem. But does this deal make you think of him in slightly better terms? The fact that he is trying to reduce the threat of nuclear war?”

Noam Chomsky: “ Well, actually he isn’t. He’s just initiated a trillion dollar programme of modernisation of the US nuclear weapon system, which means expanding the nuclear weapon system. That’s one the reasons why the famous doomsday clock, established by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has, just a couple of weeks ago, been pushed two minutes closer to midnight. Midnight is the end. It’s now three minutes from midnight. That’s the closest it’s been in thirty years. Since the early Regan years when there was a major war scare.”

Isabelle Kumar: “You mentioned the US and Israel in terms of Iran. Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obviously doesn’t want the Iran nuclear deal to work, and he says…”

Noam Chomsky: “That’s interesting. We should ask why.”

Isabelle Kumar: “Why?

Noam Chomsky: “We know why. Iran has very low military expenditures, even by the standards of the region, let alone the United States. Iran’s strategic doctrine is defensive, it’s designed to hold off an attack long enough for diplomacy to start, and the United States and Israel, the two rogue states, do not want to tolerate a deterrent. No strategic analyst with a brain function thinks that Iran would ever use a nuclear weapon. Even if it were prepared to do so the country would simply be vaporised and there’s no indication that the ruling clerics, whatever you think about the, want to see everything they have destroyed.”

Isabelle Kumar: “Just one more question on this issue and it’s via social media, from Morten A. Andersen. He asks, “Do you believe that the US would ever strike a deal that would be dangerous to Israel in the first place?”

Noam Chomsky: “The United States is carrying out constant actions which are dangerous to Israel, very seriously. Namely supporting Israeli policy. For the last 40 years the greatest threat to Israel has been its own policies. If you look back 40 years, say to 1970, Israel was one of the most respected and admired countries in the world. There were lots of favorable attitudes to it. Now, it’s one of the most disliked and feared countries in the world. In the early 70s Israel made a decision. They had a choice and they made a decision to prefer expansion to security and that carries with it dangerous consequences. Consequences which were obvious at the time – I wrote about them and other people did – if you prefer expansion to security it is going to lead to internal degeneration, anger, opposition, isolation and possibly ultimate destruction. And by supporting those policies, the United States is contributing to the threats that Israel faces.”

Isabelle Kumar: “That’s brings me to the subject of terrorism then. Because that is really a global blight and some people, I think including yourself, will say that this is blowback for US terrorist policy around the world. How far is the US and its allies responsible for what we’re seeing now in terms of the terrorist attacks around the world?”

Noam Chomsky: “Remember the worst terrorist campaign in the world by far is the one that’s being orchestrated in Washington. That’s the global assassination campaign. There’s never been a terrorist campaign of that scale.”

Isabelle Kumar: “When you say global assassination campaign…?”

Noam Chomsky: “The drone campaign – that’s exactly what it is. Over large parts of the world, the United States is systematically, publically, openly – there’s nothing secret about what I’m saying, we all know it – it’s carrying out regular campaigns to assassinated people who the US government suspects of intending to harm it someday. And indeed it is, as you mentioned, a terror generated campaign, and when you bomb a village in Yemen, say, and you kill somebody – maybe the person you were aiming at maybe not – and other people who happened to be in the neighbourhood – how do you think they are going to react? They’re going to take revenge.”

Isabelle Kumar: “You describe the US as the leading terrorist state. Where does Europe fit into that picture then?”

Noam Chomsky: “Well, that’s an interesting question. So for example there was recently a study. I think it was done by the Open Society Foundation… the worst form of torture is rendition. Rendition means you take somebody you suspect of something, and you send them off to your favourite dictator, maybe Assad or Gadaffi or Mubarak, to be tortured, hoping that maybe something will come out of it. That’s extraordinary rendition. The study reviewed the countries that participated in this, well obviously the Middle East dictatorships because that’s where they were sent to be tortured, and Europe. Most of Europe participated; England, Sweden, other countries. In fact, there’s only one region in the world where nobody participated: Latin America. Which is pretty dramatic. And first of all Latin America has now become pretty much out of US control. When it was controlled by the United States, not very long ago, it was the world’s centre of torture. Now, it didn’t participate in the worst form of torture, which is rendition. Europe participated. If the master roars, the servants cower.”

Isabelle Kumar: “So Europe is the servant of the United States?”

Noam Chomsky: “ Definitely. They are too cowardly to take an independent position.”

Isabelle Kumar: “Where does Vladimir Putin fit into this picture? He’s painted as one of the greatest threats to security. Is he?”

Noam Chomsky: “Like most leaders, he’s a threat to his own population. He’s taken illegal actions, obviously. But to depict him as a crazed monster who is suffering from brain disease and has Alzheimer’s, and is a rat-faced evil creature, that’s standard Orwellian fanaticism. I mean, whatever you think about his policies, they are understandable. The idea that Ukraine might join a Western military alliance would be quite unacceptable to any Russian leader. This goes back to 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed. There was a question about what would happen with NATO. Now Gorbachov agreed to allow Germany to be unified and to join NATO. It was a pretty remarkable concession with a quid pro quo: that NATO would not expand one inch to the east. That was the phrase that was used.”

Isabelle Kumar: “So Russia has been provoked?”

Noam Chomsky: “Well, what happened? NATO instantly moved into East Germany and then Clinton came along and expanded NATO right to the borders of Russia. Now, the new Ukrainian government, the government established after the overthrow of the preceding one, now the parliament voted 300 to 8 or something like that, to move to join NATO.”

Isabelle Kumar: “But you can understand why they would want to join NATO, you can see why Petro Porochenko’s government would probably see it as protecting their country?”

Noam Chomsky: “No, no, no, no. That’s not protecting. Crimea was taken away after the overthrow of the government, right. And this is not protecting Ukraine, it is threatening Ukraine with major war. Now that’s not protection. The point is, this is a serious strategic threat to Russia, which any Russian leader would have to react to. That’s well understood.”

Isabelle Kumar: “If we look at the situation in Europe though, there’s also another interesting phenomenon that’s taking place. We’re seeing Greece moving towards the East, potentially, with the Syriza government. We’re also seeing Podemos, which is gaining power in Spain, also in Hungary. Do you see that there is a potential for Europe to start shirting and aligning itself more with Russian interests?”

Noam Chomsky: “Take a look at what’s happening. Hungary is a different situation entirely. Syriza came into office on the basis of a popular wave which said that Greece should no longer subject itself to policies from Brussels and the German banks which are destroying the country. The effect of these policies has been actually to increase Greece’s debt relative to its wealth production; probably a half of young people are unemployed, probably 40% of the population is living under the poverty line, Greece is being destroyed.”

Isabelle Kumar: “So should their debt be written off?”

Noam Chomsky: “Yes, just like Germany’s was. In 1953, when Europe wrote off most of Germany’s debt. Just like that, so that Germany would be able to reconstruct from wartime damage.”

Isabelle Kumar: “But then what about all the other European countries…?”

Noam Chomsky: “ Same story.”

Isabelle Kumar: “So Portugal should have its debt written off, Spain should have its debt written off…?”

Noam Chomsky: “Who incurred this debt? And who is the debt owed to? In part, the debt was incurred by dictators. So in Greece it was the fascist dictatorship, which the US supported, that incurred a large part of the debt. The debt I think was more brutal than the dictatorship, and that’s what’s called in international law, “odious debt” which need not be paid, and that’s a principal introduced into international law by the United States, when it was in their interest to do so. Much of the rest of the debt, what is called payments to Greece are in fact payments to banks, German and French banks, which had decided to make extremely risky loans with not very high interest and are now being faced with the fact that they can’t be paid back.”

Isabelle Kumar: “I’d like to ask this question now, from Gil Gribaudo, who asks, “How will Europe transform then, versus the existential challenges it’s facing?” Because yes there’s the economic crisis, and there’s also a rise in nationalism, and you’ve also described some cultural fault lines which have been created across Europe. How do you see Europe transforming itself?” ‏

Noam Chomsky: “ Europe has serious problems. Some of the problems are the result of economic policies designed by the bureaucrats in Brussels, the European Commission and so on, under the pressure of NATO and the big banks, mostly German ones. These policies make some sense from the point of view of the designers. For one thing they want to be paid back for their risky and hazardous loans and investments, and the other thing is that these policies are eroding the welfare state, which they’ve never liked. But the welfare state is one of Europe’s major contributions to modern society, but the rich and powerful have never liked it and the fact that these policies are eroding it is good from their point of view. There’s another problem in Europe, it’s extremely racist. I’ve always felt that Europe is probably more racist than the United States. It wasn’t as visible in Europe because the European populations in the past tended to be pretty homogeneous. So if everybody is blonde and blue-eyed, then you don’t seem racist, but as soon as the population begins to change racism comes out of the woodwork. Very fast. And that’s a serious cultural problem in Europe.”

Isabelle Kumar: “I’d like to end, because we’re very short of time, with a question from Robert Light on a more positive note. He asks, “What gives you hope?”

Noam Chomsky: “ What gives me hope is a couple of things we’ve talked about. Latin American independence for example. That’s of historic significance. We’re going to see it right now, in the Summit of Americas meeting in Panama. In the recent hemispheric meetings, the United States has been completely isolated. It’s a radical change from 10 or 20 years ago, when the United States ran [Latin American affairs]. In fact the reason why Obama made his gestures towards Cuba was to try to overcome American, US isolation. It’s the US that’s isolated, not Cuba. And probably it will fail. We will see. The signs for optimism in Europe are Syriza and Podemos. Hopefully there is finally a popular uprising against the the crushing, destructive economic and social policies that come from the bureaucracy and the banks, and that’s very hopeful. Should be.”

Isabelle Kumar: “Noam Chomsky, many thanks for being with us.”

DISSIDENT JOE BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT

"Say It Ain't So, Joe, Again, and Again, and Again ..."

Joe Biden the American vice-President, stated from the Presidential Podium on St Patrick's Day,"If you're Orange, you're not welcome round here."

Most political analysts in Ireland, believe this is fallout, from the abusive treatment of the American Presidential Diplomat to Ireland, Richard Haass, sent packing, back to the USA, by the Orange Order, who destroyed the Irish Peace Process.

Irish Blog endorses Joe Biden, for the Presidency of the United States, in the next Presidential election and calls on the 80 million Irish Diaspora, to support him.The following poem, which is meant to be a joke, gives you an insight into the diaspora of the Orange Order. 

Susie Lee fell in love.
She planned to marry Joe.
She was so happy' bout it all,
she told her Pappy so.
Pappy told her, "Susie Gal,
you'll have to find another.
I'd just as soon yo' maw don't know,
but Joe is yo' half-brother."
So Susie forgot about her Joe
and planned to marry Will.
But, after telling Pappy this,
he said, "There's trouble still.
You can't marry Will, my gal,
and please don't tell yo' mother,
cause Will and Joe and several mo'
I know is yo' half-brother."
But Mama knew and said "Honey Child,
Do what makes yo' happy.
Marry Will or marry Joe,
you ain't no kin of Orange Pappy!"

Check Site Below for Details. 

Censored by Britain in certain countries.

irishholocaust.org

IRELAND GUINEA PIG FOR UK DIRTY WAR EUROPE

DIRTY WAR IRELAND

Britain's Kitsonian counter gangs, eliminated all serious opposition to their mentored astroturf political leadership, British Sinn Fein, with their dirty war in Occupied Ireland. They shot Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Miriam Daly, Eddie Fullerton, Seamus Costello, Dominic McGlinchey, his wife Mary McGlinchey and wiped out Irish republican, middle management, in a massacre at Loughall. Their Frank Kitson doctrine, of counter gangs and false flag operations, have now been exported to Europe as part of Britain's contribution to the EU. 

Above is a video example and below an analysis by American expert Craig Roberts. None of the mainstream corporate media are asking the appropriate questions about out all of this and like the Dirt War in Ireland, where the journalists sat in the lounge bar of the Europa Hotel in Belfast, accepting Britsh Army briefings and reports, reporting them verbatim. 

Britain's Dirty War in Ireland started on January 30, 1972, which is featured in the video below. British Sinn Fein's chief enforcer of the Pseudo Peace Process in Ireland, Gerry Kelly, has called on all Irish people, to become informers to British forces, on the activity of all Irish freedom activists in Ireland, while they are on the cusp of taking power, in all of the Island, with British mentoring.

DIRTY WAR EUROPE

As the metal screen rises, police fire into the deli. There seems to be no return fire, and
it is unclear who the police are shooting at. Perhaps it was the heavy firing by the police that killed the hostages.

Police enter and turn to the right. Then Coulibaly appears from the same direction as the police entered. He is in a running stumble as if he has been pushed into the line of fire. There is no weapon in his hands, which appear to be tied together. He falls or is shot down at the door in front of the police, who then fire more bullets into the downed man.
It looks like an execution. It most certainly is not a gun fight. Coulibaly was down and could easily have been captured and questioned. Instead, we have reports of pre-recorded confessions to take the place of capture and questioning.

The connection between Muslim murderous ire against French cartoonists and Coulibaly’s alleged attack on a Kosher deli is asserted but not explained. If Coulibaly was incensed over cartoons drawn by French persons, why wasn’t he with the killers in the cartoonists’ office? Why pick on random patrons of a deli unrelated to the reason for the attack?
Once you look at this independently of the official news presentation, there are problems everywhere.

The terrorist attacks, if that is what they are, are extremely convenient for Washington and Israel. France had just voted with Palestine against the US/Israeli position. French President Hollande had just stated that the sanctions against Russia must end. Among Europeans sympathy was rising for the Palestinians, and support for Washington’s and Israel’s Middle East wars was declining. Now France is back under Washington’s foreign policy umbrella, and European sympathy has shifted from the Palestinians to Israel.

In my day in order to qualify for the Ph.D. degree, the candidate had to demonstrate French and German reading skill. Time and scant use have taken their toll of my skill, so I cannot state with any assurance the conclusions of these reports. I can only report what the videos show visually.

Also, the videos have come to me in forms that I do not know how to post. Those of you adept at Internet search possibly can find them.

I would welcome for this website a report from Europe. I believe that a report from a knowledgeable and aware European about the official news reporting and public reaction to it, and the extent to which inconsistencies and loose ends of the official story are recognized and challenged, would be welcomed by readers of this site.

I have been left with the impression that informed Europeans are uncomfortable about
diverging publicly from accepted opinion. As long as you let me know who you are, you can remain anonymous. We in America would just like to know if your reporting is different from ours and if the European public, except for the anti-immigrationists, buys the official story.

The wars into which Europeans have been thrust by ambitious and deceptive leaders have been more devastating for European populations than the wars thrust upon gullible Americans. Perhaps Europeans are less willing to believe government assertions.
If not, more war is a certainty.
See also - 
Charlie Hebdo Update: The terrorist attacks, if that is what they are, are extremely convenient for Washington and Israel. France had just voted with Palestine against the US/Israeli position. French President Hollande had just stated that the sanctions against Russia must end. Among Europeans sympathy was rising for the Palestinians, and support for Washington’s and Israel’s Middle East wars was declining. Now France is back under Washington’s foreign policy umbrella, and European sympathy has shifted from the Palestinians to Israel.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

Ireland Guinea Pigs for Dirty Wars in Europe

Ryan McChrystal 

Over the weekend I attended the UK premier of Jeremy Scahill’s provocative documentary Dirty Wars at the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton. It’s about America’s covert foreign policy operations in the Middle East and Africa. These are wars in which military units operate with direct orders from the White House to hunt down, capture or kill – without trial – those deemed as enemies in the ‘War on Terror’.

The documentary focuses on the rogue atrocities of America’s paramilitary special force Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), launching drone attacks, killing insurgents and large numbers of innocent civilians – often in countries with which the US is not officially at war. They are the force responsible for the killing of Osama bin Laden.

JSOC has long existed in an underworld of deniability. Formed in 1980, it represented a break in American counterinsurgency tactics of, say, Vietnam, and a move towards low intensity conflict.

Scahill’s film begins with a night-time raid which left several Afghans dead, including a pregnant woman. Ostensibly the targets were terrorists, but one survivor tells of how he was handcuffed as he watched bearded American soldiers dig bullets out of his dead wife’s body to remove forensic evidence, before arresting him on charges of being a member of the Taliban. As it turns out he was in fact pro-American invasion of Afghanistan and anti-Taliban. He was later released without charge.

During a Q&A session with Scahill at the Ritzy an audience member suggested the beginnings of the type of conflict America is waging are in its conduct in Latin America.

This is incorrect. What we’re seeing with America and the War on Terror is a typically British strategy.

In Scahill’s book of the same name, he talks about the influence for JSOC with only a quick quote from Colonel Walter Patrick Lang. Lang had spent much of his military career in dark ops. Early in his army service he helped coordinate the operation which led the capture and killing of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.

Lang described Special Forces like the Green Berets as like “armed anthropologists”. In contrast, he said JSOC was envisioned as “a counterterrorist commando outfit modelled on the British SAS. And the SAS does not do ‘let’s get happy with the natives’ stuff. They don’t do that. They’re commandos, they kill the natives. These people are not very well educated about the larger picture of the effect that [their operations] have on the position of the United States in the world.”

I think we can take this point further.

A Very British War

Sure, the British Army pioneered many of what are now regarded as standard operating procedures for the United States. But JSOC is a direct result of the pioneering low intensity conflict/pseudo-gang tactics of Brigadier Sir Frank Kitson and his grisly military experiment, the Military Reaction Force (MRF) – a secretive branch of the British SAS who went on a rampage on the streets of Belfast and Derry over a 14-month period between 1971-3.

In a publication released earlier this year by the Pat Finucane Centre, they said:

Kitson did not invent concepts of counter or pseudo-gangs and pseudo operations, but he and Brigadier Richard Clutterbuck undoubtedly brought the issues to a wider audience through their academic publications on low-intensity techniques and methods.

While similar ideas appear throughout history in some form or other, he literally wrote the book on the type of dirty war America is waging called Low Intensity Operations (1971) with funding from Oxford University. In it he describes the necessity to regard the law as malleable and encouraged members of the military to shield their counter-insurgency actions behind a veneer of legality so that the courts can’t prosecute.

The ideas and techniques in the book were developed through his brutal treatment of Mau Mau in Kenya.  In a previous book Kitson describes stabbing an unarmed man to death with a bayonet because he suspected him to be Mau Mau. The very same brutality is seen throughout the Panorama episode ‘Britain’s Secret Terror Force’ aired on November 21^st this year, where suspects are gunned down without any evidence of wrong-doing. In the episode we hear Kitson himself saying: “In order to put an insurgency campaign down, one must use a mix of measures – not just military measures – and it’s sometimes necessary to do unpleasant things.”

By spring of 1971, the British authorities were so desperate to penetrate the IRA that they adopted Kitson’s strategy, and ‘more aggressive tactics’ such as the formation of Q squads, the kind of mobile undercover units used by the British colonial Palestine Police Force.

By the end of the year there were plain-clothes officers driving around in an unmarked vehicle, with the objective of drawing the IRA into a shooting battle with loyalists. In the process they targeted suspected IRA members, but the majority of their victims were innocent.

Kitson essentially used Northern Ireland as a guinea-pig to hone his military philosophy of super-legal tactics. Much like with America today, these dirty tricks and running of pseudo enemy gangs crossed moral lines and resulted in a type of warfare with no rules or consequences.

His influence was so strong that General Mike Jackson describes him as “the sun around which the planets revolved, and he very much set the tone for the operational style”. His brutality was evident when he berated Col Derek Wilford after Bloody Sunday for not being aggressive enough.

The British Army got their green light from the Government Cabinet table to go the proposed Frank Kitson route to provoke and fight a low intensity war. Today it is the American president who sanctions provoking attacks and no target is off limits for Obama’s “kill list,” including, it emerges, US citizens.

The ‘kill list’ has grown from the size of a deck of cards to thousands of names. The list changes because the definition of the enemy also changes. And as events like Bloody Sunday increased IRA membership, America is employing tactics which, while designed to crush an insurgency, inevitably serve only to swell its ranks.

The 3 F’s

Later in JSOC’s life, during the disaster of Eagle Claw in Iran, it was reinvigorated with a Special Mission Units that would train and prepare for what were called “F” operations: Find, Fix, and Finish. In plain English, that meant tracking a target, fixing their location and finishing them off.

This is straight out of the MRF handbook. In 1978, a former soldier who had served with MRF detailed his experiences in Belfast:

One day in April 1972 I was on plain-clothes surveillance duties with two other soldiers. We drove along the Whiterock Road, Upper Falls. We had a death list with names and photos, with the orders ‘shoot on sight’. One of the soldiers saw James [Bryson], a man on the list, and another man whose name I forget [Thomas Tolan]. We swerved our car in front of them and leapt out, drawing our pistols, and opened fire. They tried to run down an alley. We ran after them and the patrol commander gave the order ‘bullets’. I scored several hits myself – both men were severely wounded. We radioed for a uniformed patrol. When it turned up, their commander said to ours, ‘You stupid bastards, you’ve shot the wrong fuckers’. The army issued a statement alleging that the men had shot at us and that the army had a pistol to prove it. This was a lie.

Such mistakes and cover-ups are rife among American forces too – such as the story above about JSOC digging bullets out of bodies.

Signature Strike

In the Panorama episode, we are told the story of the MRF shooting of Eugene Devlin and Aidan McAloon on May 12, 1972 while getting out of a taxi after a night at A disco. These men weren’t known to the shooters, but the decision was made that as they were walking by an IRA-manned barracade they therefore must be IRA members. They were not.

This is the same grotesque form of pre-crime Obama inaugurated called ‘signature strikes’. This is a euphemism for pre-emptively killing unidentified men who fit the profile of someone that might commit acts of ‘terrorism’ in the future because of their age, gender and other vague characteristics. It’s the blatant murder of military aged men, who may or may not be associated with people or groups the government condemns.

With ‘low intensity’ warfare, the question is ‘for whom?’ because for indigenous/local populations it’s not so low and there are many instances of human rights violations, torture, disappearances and massacres. Kitson’s tactics were at work in Kenya during the Lari Massacre of Mau Mau. They were at work at Ballymurphy and on Bloody Sunday, and when the innocent victims were found guilty at the Saville Inquiry. They were present in state collusion with paramilitaries. And they are at work today in America’s full-blooded dirty wars.