Toward a Paradigm Change for Mother Earth - Understanding the Empire Domination Model of Christianity: A Way of Liberation
Steven Newcomb Delivers Keynote on Original Free Nations and Peoples
Spotlight of Indigenous Peoples Plenary, 8,000 People Attending
2015 Parliament of the World’s Religions, 19 Oct 2015
This is an annotated hypertext transcript of the presentation Steven Newcomb gave in 2015. Its endnotes provide significant details and sources for what Mr. Newcomb has been researching and writing about for four decades.
WATCH FILM / SEE COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT.
excerpts:
I want to acknowledge the ancestors who have loved the land through ceremonial conduct and prayers, based on their insight about the need for sacred relations with Mother Earth, with pristine Waters, and with Life in all its forms and manifestations. I want to acknowledge the original free and independent existence of our Nations and Peoples extending back to the beginning of time through our oral histories and our oral traditions.
Yesterday I listened with interest to the plenary session on climate change. It occurred to me that working on climate change without working on Paradigm Change would be a grave mistake. We need a mental and behavioral shift away from the prevailing paradigm of domination, dehumanization, and greed, the symptoms of which are everywhere on planet Earth, our Mother.
More than five centuries ago, various popes in Rome, on behalf of Christendom, unleashed the paradigm I’m talking about. It may surprise you to learn that the Empire Domination Model of Christianity was woven by jurists into the laws and policies of the United States, and into the laws and policies of many other countries, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. That hidden code of Christian Empire has worked for more than five centuries toward the dissolution of our Original Nations and Peoples here on Great Turtle Island and Abya Yala to the south.
The idea patterns of domination and so-called Christian Discovery have been incorporated into U.S. federal Indian law, where they remain to this day. Those ideas are traced to Vatican documents called papal bulls of the fifteenth century[2] and to royal charters of England which declared the right of Christian people to discover the lands of heathens and infidels and to assume a right of domination or subjugation against the nations and peoples of those places, “which before this time have been unknown to all Christian people.” In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall, on behalf of the United States Supreme Court, wrote that doctrine of Christian discovery and domination into U.S. case law, where it remains to this day.[3]
We can trace the pattern back to 1452 and the papal bull Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicolas V to King Alphonse of Portugal. It instructed the King to go to the Western coast of Africa, and to non-Christian lands everywhere, and “to invade, capture, vanquish, subdue,” “all Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ,” “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery,” and “to take away all their possessions and property.”[4]
That was repeated in 1493 shortly after Cristóbal Colón sailed across the ocean to what is now called the Caribbean and claimed possession of our Original Lands on behalf of the Spanish Crown. Several Papal bulls or decrees of 1493, were issued by Pope Alexander VI, which called for the propagation of the Christian empire, imperii Christiani in Latin, and called for “barbarous nations” to be reduced and subjected to the Catholic faith and Christian religion.[5]....
We invite you to walk with us on the Sacred Path, in honor of the first principle of our Original Nations: “Respect the Earth as our Mother and have a Sacred Regard for All Living Things.” End the domination. All Our Relations. Wanishi.
Sir! No Sir! The G.I. Revolt
The suppressed story of the GI movement to end the War in Vietnam
“We truly believed what would stop that war was when soldiers stopped fighting it.”
Sir! No Sir! 12 Minute Trailer
During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon documented 550,000 “incidents of desertion”.
In the 1960’s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.
Sir No Sir (2005) Complete Documentary Film (49:27)
Excerpts from the complete documentary (above):
“They were finally listening to us man. That’s the first time I can ever remember anybody listening to us while I was in the military.” (13:21)
13:30: “The commanding general of the 6th army—which was the jurisdiction—he said that they thought that the revolution was about to start and that they really had to set an example, you know, come down hard. And we were the guys that they decided to do that with. And they did. I mean we were on trial for our life. I kind of came in as an AWOL and within two days of hitting the [San Francisco Presidio] Stockade I was I was facing the death sentence for singing We Shall Overcome.”
35:24:“But then people decided to change it to Armed Farces Day because you know we thought making fun of your enemy was as valuable as yelling.”
This feature-length documentary focuses on the efforts by troops in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War to oppose the war effort by peaceful demonstration and subversion. It speaks mainly to veterans, but serves as a ready reminder to civilians that soldiers may oppose war as stridently as any civilian, and at greater personal peril.
Buy the movie, more information at: <http://www.displacedfilms.com/films/sir-no-sir/>
The Sir! No Sir! GI Movement Archives: <http://displacedfilms.com/sir-no-sir-archive/>
Losing Earth? Realign with Original Free Peoples’ Great Law and Find Her Again
A fundamental blindspot in U.S. society revolves around the question: Where did all this land we call the United States come from? European settlers began colonizing—read invading—North America in the early 17th century. This process of settler colonialism was and is based on a denial of the humanity of the Original Free Nations, Peoples and Communities that existed and developed their own multitudinous cultures and societal interrelations for millennia prior to the arrival of white people from across the Atlantic.
In “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Australian anthropologist and ethnographer Patrick Wolfe wrote “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.... Indigenous North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized, assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians.” (p.388)
The ongoing legacy of denial of how what is today called the United States came to be and how that has played out over 400-plus years into the 21st century postpones Life -nurturing and -respecting timelines from manifesting. Extraordinary possibilities exist for life after empire, provided we as the inheritors of the Empire Domination Model of Christianity are willing to redeem the consequences of the past evermore becoming present. Genocide, dispossession, colonization, forms the core of U.S. history, the very source of the country’s existence. Will it be the future as well? The choice is ours.
An analysis of the steadfast denial of the actual foundations and development of U.S. society and culture is explored here with regard to the catastrophic, accelerating changes to Earth’s climate reaching critical mass in recent decades. The way forward requires reestablishing adherence to the Great Law, of reawakening to the spiritual reality of Earth, of Life itself, and conducting ceremonies of Thanksgiving throughout the seasons for the Life-giving energies Mother Earth bestows upon all of Creation.
Gaeton Fonzi: Who Killed JFK?
The original ground-breaking article is now available in multiple formats:
KILLED
JFK?
November 1980, pp. 157-192.
Read complete Who Killed JFK? article.
The book this article was expanded into was aptly titled, The Last Investigation.
See Also: Original Manuscript of The Last Investigation.
The Occupation of the American Mind - Israel's Public Relations War in the United States
Despite receiving an overwhelmingly positive response from those who have actually seen it, The Occupation of the American Mind has been repeatedly attacked and misrepresented by right-wing pressure groups and outright ignored by virtually all mainstream media outlets and North American film festivals. To bypass this campaign of misrepresentation and suppression, we’ve decided to make the film available for FREE online so that people can make up their own minds about its analysis of U.S. media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Please watch and share widely!
WATCH THE FILM FOR FREE (at https://www.occupationmovie.org/)
FULL LENGTH FILM 21 MIN LENGTH FILM 45 MIN LENGTH FILM TRAILER BUY THE DVD
FILMMAKERS' STATEMENT
Over the past 25 years, the Media Education Foundation has produced dozens of educational films that examine how mainstream media narratives shape our understanding of the world. A number of these films have focused explicitly on mainstream news coverage of crucial policy issues. THE OCCUPATION OF THE AMERICAN MIND is the sixth film we’ve done to look specifically at mainstream media narratives about U.S. policy in the Middle East.
HIJACKING CATASTROPHE, 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire (2004) examined how mainstream media outlets uncritically disseminated false information from U.S. officials in the run-up to the war in Iraq. PEACE, PROPAGANDA & THE PROMISED LAND (2004), released the same year, revealed how U.S. news media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict downplayed the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli military occupation. REEL BAD ARABS (2006) explored how negative Arab stereotypes in U.S. American film and television shaped public attitudes about the Iraq war and other real-world events. WAR MADE EASY (2007) surveyed U.S. government war propaganda from Vietnam to Iraq, showing how U.S. news media have been complicit in disseminating it. And BLOOD AND OIL (2008) detailed how U.S. officials have used mainstream news media to conceal the role oil has played in multiple U.S. military interventions in the Middle East.
With THE OCCUPATION OF THE AMERICAN MIND, we decided to revisit news media narratives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, guided by polls that show the American people have far lower levels of sympathy for Palestinians than for Israelis. We began by poring through hundreds of hours of U.S. news reporting on the conflict, carefully examining stories about everything from Palestinian terrorism and Hamas extremism to Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian land, its illegal settlement expansion, and its siege, blockade, and successive military invasions of Gaza. When we started out, we fully expected to find pro-Israel bias in these stories given the U.S. alliance with Israel, U.S. American interests in the region, and how corporate news media tend to reproduce the official government line. But the level of imbalance we found was even more dramatic than we anticipated.
In story after story, Israeli spokespeople far outnumbered Palestinian spokespeople. U.S. political leaders of both parties uniformly and uncritically repeated official Israeli talking points. And U.S. American news media commentators repeatedly did the same, with very few exceptions failing to question the official line or provide even the most basic and uncontroversial rendering of Palestinian grievances. At the same time, we discovered that when Palestinian spokespeople did appear in mainstream news coverage, they were routinely subjected to harsh questioning and even vilification, treatment pro-Israel spokespeople rarely if ever experienced. When we compared what we were seeing in U.S. news media to coverage of identical events in Great Britain and other democratic countries, we saw nothing approaching this level of pro-Israel bias.
In an attempt to make sense of what we were seeing, we were led deep into the history of pro-Israel public relations efforts in the United States, a four-decade campaign to manage negative perceptions of Israeli human rights violations. THE OCCUPATION OF THE AMERICAN MIND tells the story of these PR and propaganda efforts – detailing how they work, how they developed, whose interests they serve, and why they have been so successful in shaping media coverage of the conflict here in the U.S.
We made this film for a very simple reason: because we believe government officials and mainstream media elites are denying the U.S. American people the basic information they need to make sense of one of the most consequential conflicts in the world. Regardless of where the people in the U.S. stand on this conflict, we believe they deserve better. We believe U.S. American democracy deserves better. And we believe in the democratic imperative of holding our political leaders — and our news media — accountable. Given the huge stakes in the region, and the sheer amount of military, economic, and diplomatic support the United States gives Israel, we believe people in the United States have a right and a responsibility to make up their own minds about this conflict.
Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, Co-Directors
Sut Jhally, Executive Producer
Gaeton Fonzi: Supremely Gifted Investigator, Journalist, Author
“Gaeton was a man of extraordinary courage, integrity and talent. In a significant and unique manner he has contributed to history. His journalistic and historical work will endure as the very finest. As an investigative reporter he had no peer.” —Vincent Salandria
“Gaeton was fearless, a warrior whose only weapons were eloquent words based on intensive, unbiased research. Throughout his career as a journalist, he exposed crooked union bosses, corrupt newsmen and politicians, deviant intelligence operatives, and cold-blooded killers, without any fear of possible retaliation. He was reminded of his dangerous path as neighbors familiar with his work expressed a hope that a bomber would find the right house. But neither the possibility of physical violence nor the reality of multi-million dollar lawsuits frightened him as he responded to critics with even more powerful words. Following publication of his Washingtonian article, this soft-spoken gentleman treated threats from both David Atlee Phillips and Bob Blakey as only a warrior would: He expanded the magazine article into a book, The Last Investigation.” —Marie Fonzi
An archive of some of Gaeton Fonzi’s work is now available at: <https://ratical.org/GaetonFonzi>.
Oren Lyons: On The Indigenous View of the World
Oren is Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Council of Chiefs, Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy). He has been active in international Indigenous rights and sovereignty issues for over four decades at the United Nations and other international forums. He is a State University of New York (SUNY) distinguished services[+] professor emeritus of the University at Buffalo. He serves on the board of Bioneers an environmental champion of the Earth. Oren is chairman of the board of directors of Plantagon International AB, the leader in urban agriculture, Plantagon is designed to meet challenges of compounding human population, finite resources and global warming.
This is an annotated hypertext transcript of the film made as part of The 11th Hour Research Tapes, as background for The 11th Hour film.
WATCH FILM / SEE COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT.
excerpts from OREN LYONS :
We always said that we have been told and understand that we’re relatives. Where our white brother will talk about water and trees and animals and fish as resources we talk about them as relatives. That’s a whole different perspective. If you think that they’re relatives and you understand that then you’re going to treat them differently.
[The Peacemaker] said that this Tree of Peace is a spiritual law and represents a spiritual law and the spiritual law is the law of Nature. He told us explicitly, Never challenge this law because you cannot prevail. You will not prevail; wrap your laws, your rules, and your conduct. He said, You, the leaders, when you’re weak as a human being, he said, this tree will give your spine strength. Wrap yourself around this tree because it’s powerful. Do not challenge the laws of Nature because you cannot, you will not, prevail.
There’s a great imbalance of humanity on this Earth and the natural laws don’t abide that. Just the quality of life that comes from all the beings that are here, they’ll be denied our grandchildren. We’re destroying their well-being. We’re really destroying the efforts that they can put forward if they have the respect and knowledge. This style of talking and observation, they tell me, it’s not realistic in today’s times. I suppose not if you’re thinking in terms of Wall Street and you’re thinking in terms of power and authority. But in the long run it is absolutely the law.
Mother Earth has laws and rules and one of them is balance. She will keep the balance regardless. If an element is out of balance, like the population of human beings on this Earth, She will balance it. How She does that we may not like. Most likely it’ll come with disease and this will be very democratic. It will go across people’s lives. It will go across leaders. It will go across everything because really there’s no mercy in Nature. There’s only the law and the rule. I think that’s where we fail and we’re way, way away from that.
This world has to understand the importance of sharing. I know that in the structure of the United States it’s very contrary to that as people are not instructed to share. They’re instructed to gain. They’re instructed to hold to themselves. They’re instructed to gather unto themselves. And they’re rewarded for that. So you have an instruction that’s contrary, very contrary, to this whole concept, if indeed this is what you think is right.
But this, I’m simply telling you what our instructions are. Operating under this, I’ve traveled to Indian Nations across North America and Central America. I’m invited to the ceremonies and I always know what’s going on. I may not understand the language and the dances may be different. But I know what is being said. It’s always the same: Thanksgiving to the Creation. Thanksgiving to the life-giving forces of the Earth.hanksgiving to the Creation. Thanksgiving to the life-giving forces of the Earth.
Amazon and the CIA: Corporate State Interlock - What is Our Responsibility as Human Beings?
Discovering isbn.nu last year prompted the urge to update a version of this story written in 2016 about Amazon getting into bed with the CIA. The previous work led off with the following summary:
With the advent of the partnership between the commercial world’s largest retailer and the Central Intelligence Agency, it is critical for every person to answer the question, ‘What is my responsibility as a human being, to support and participate with or resist and not cooperate with this association?’ Buckminster Fuller called the “invisibly operating CIA...Capitalism’s Invisible Army”.[Critical Path, pg.116] The brainchild of such Wall Street bankers as Allen Welsh Dulles, the CIA was established to ensure and further the control of corporate empire state interests over what are deemed “resources” throughout Mother Earth, for the benefit of the few over all Life.
The question posed above is more pressing than ever. Before expanding on the background of the Amazon-CIA corporate-state interlock, it is useful to highlight one area of information that is available beyond the Amazon straight-jacket: the field of books.
Discovering significant books to study as sources to cite in research about our collective history is an on-going process. While the subject matter is largely buried in a so called national security establishment classification system, there is a highly informative sphere of research by many dedicated people and communities providing coherent critical analysis with which to understand where we’ve come from and where we are going.
isbn.nu affords a quick way to compare the prices of books at over a dozen online bookstores. Initial use revealed that more often than not, other booksellers prices beat the costs at Amazon. In addition to this, one can also tap into worldcat.org, “the world’s largest network of library content and services” as well as lookup services like IndieBound.org providing a range of services dedicated to connecting with Independent Local Bookstores.
Beyond the book market, Amazon’s reach and increasing domination of virtually every dimension of the economic system that drives this society is disturbing far beyond the most compelling Hollywood thrillers such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Birds, Psycho, or The Silence of the Lambs. Background of this corporate-state interlock is a highly relevant “text-book” (pun intended) example to understand the dynamic of the expanding surveillance state and proceed with making choices based on this awareness.
Coming up on 4 years ago and beating out IBM and Microsoft, the $600 million contract Amazon Web Services (AWS) was awarded to provide secure cloud services to the Central Intelligence Agency positioned the dominant U.S. corporate flagship to merge domestic corporate (private) and state (public) economic and military hegemony. As reported on August 1, 2014:
Less than 10 months after a U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge ended a public battle between AWS and IBM for the CIA’s commercial cloud contract valued at up to $600 million, the AWS-built cloud for the intelligence community went online last week for the first time, according to a source familiar with the deal.
The cloud—best thought of as a public cloud computing environment built on private premises—is yet far from its peak operational capabilities when it will provide all 17 intelligence agencies unprecedented access to an untold number of computers for various on-demand computing, analytic, storage, collaboration and other services....
In time, the cloud’s full capabilities are expected to usher in a new era of intelligence sharing and cooperation even as the IC [Intelligence Community] collects ever-greater amounts of data from sensors, satellites, surveillance efforts and other sources.
Importantly, the CIA believes the IC cloud will be as safe as—or safer—than security on its current data centers, having met IC standards that govern the handling of classified information. Each intelligence agency has a say in the accreditation process, according to intelligence officials. The AWS-built cloud launch essentially means the entire IC has vouched for its security....
The massive effort, led by the CIA and the National Security Agency, which built its own private cloud, culminated in a CIA contract awarded to AWS in February 2013 that was held up in court until October 2013 by competitor IBM.
The IC’s decision to tap a commercial cloud provider allows it to only pay for services it uses as opposed to costly internal data centers. The IC will also benefit through private sector innovation. Amazon, for example, made 200 incremental improvements last year to its platform; the IC will be able to implement those kinds of improvements as it sees fit.
CIA’s Amazon-Built Cloud Just Went Live, Frank Konkel, DefenseOne.com, 1 Aug 2014
Prior to AWS-CIA secure cloud services going online at the beginning of August, Project Censored published a story in May titled, “Is Amazon About to Help Obama Assassinate an American Citizen?” The focus included the prospect that Amazon’s, “‘cloud’ computing services, which can be used even to launch drone attacks ... could make Amazon an accessory in the assassination....
Furthermore, the man whom President Obama suspects of terrorism overseas is the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the White House has confirmed the assassination. The assassination was ordered to take place no matter where the subject was found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.
But how can this be justified? The Executive Branch’s power to assassinate U.S citizens away from the battlefield allows no due process at all. The United States government believes that this is for the greater good, when in reality, it is violating American citizens’ constitutional right to due process as guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments; let alone using the web’s largest retail company to help it do so.
In January 2014, prior to the Project Censored article, Norman Solomon wrote about the unprecedented conflict of interest of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who also exercises sole ownership of the Washington Post (Why the Washington Post’s New Ties to the CIA Are So Ominous). Solomon pointed out how the $600 million contract with the CIA, “puts Bezos’ two entities at cross-purposes: The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. Amazon is under contract to keep them.... Both Amazon and the CIA enjoy digital prowess at collecting global data and keeping secrets, and the two institutions have only just begun to explore how to work together more effectively.”
Zooming ahead to November 2017 Business Insider writer Matt Weinberger reported in Amazon is launching a ‘Secret’ cloud service for the CIA leading off with the following points summarizing the deepening relationship between Amazon and the CIA:
- Amazon Web Services introduced Secret Region, a new service specifically for the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community.
- It’s not really a secret service: It’s name just indicates it can handle data that’s been classified at the “secret” level.
- Amazon has offered the CIA a Top Secret Region since 2014 as part of a $600 million deal.
- The extension of that older CIA deal with this new Secret service underlines the market dominance of AWS.
...A key difference is that the Secret Region will be available to non-intelligence government agencies, assuming they file the right paperwork. The government and Amazon are promoting the new service as a way for the US intelligence community to modernize its infrastructure and more quickly get more information to the appropriate people.
The synergistic integration of the 17 intelligence agencies comprising the U.S. Intelligence Community, with a new dimension of government agencies outside the IC, indicates the increasing “federal market share” corporate hegemon Amazon is accruing to itself. The most significant segment beyond the IC is the military as reported by Nextgov:
Amazon Web Services is the most profitable division of business giant Amazon, and it is recognized as the dominant private-sector commercial cloud services provider, serving major customers like Netflix. AWS further signaled its intent to corner the growing $8.5 billion federal cloud computing market in opening a new East Coast corporate headquarters in Fairfax County and unveiling a new computing region for government customers. The company also recently announced it can host the Defense Department’s most sensitive, unclassified data.
The AWS Secret Region strengthens AWS’ position as “a dominant player” in the federal cloud computing market, according to Katell Thielemann, research vice president at Gartner, Inc.
The Defense Department, which spends some $40 billion on IT each year, has the most unlocked potential in cloud computing spend[ing], and AWS, Microsoft and IBM each have early contracts in place to serve military agencies.
It is critical to recognize the alternatives to this centralizing model that offer the greatest creative prospects for the future of the human project.
Michael Shuman is the author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age (1998). Read the transcript of his talk, Going Local: New Opportunities for Community Economies, presented at the Community Land Trust of the Southern Berkshires January 2002 meeting.
As we consider the fate of the next generation on our planet, we can say with confidence that the future lies with a woman. The question is: Which one? There are two I’d like to introduce you to, one of whom will determine the future of our economy: TINA and LOIS. TINA comes from Maggie Thatcher, who said “There Is No Alternative” to global economy—T-I-N-A. Local elected officials, economic developers, and community planners have embraced TINA through two types of strategies. The first is to convince a company like Toyota to locate in your backyard; the second is to export your goods as far and wide as possible. But there is an alternative, and that alternative is LOIS, which stands for “Local Ownership and Import Substitution.”
This evening I would like to make four basic points: 1) LOIS is a better woman for economic development than TINA; 2) LOIS is more competitive than most of us think; 3) If we take LOIS seriously, she can help us make the term “economic development” worthy of the name; and 4) There are several practical steps you can and should take here and now, beyond the many groundbreaking activities you are already involved in.
Riane Eisler is a social and systems scientist, attorney, and author whose work on cultural transformation has inspired both scholars and social activists. Dr. Eisler is the only woman among 20 great thinkers including Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, and Toynbee selected for inclusion in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social and Civilizational Change (summary, analysis) in recognition of the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist. She has received many honors, including honorary Ph.D. degrees, the Alice Paul ERA Education Award, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2009 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award, and is included in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of 20 leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.
Success and Survival in the post industrial world requires an accelerated shift towards partnership. Each one of us can contribute to the partnership movement. We can change by example, education, and advocacy. We can shift our relations from domination to partnership -- starting with our day-to-day relations all the way to how we relate to our mother earth. Shifting from Domination to Partnership
US Settler Colonialism and Its Inseparable Offspring, Attempted Genocide
Annotated Transcript: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz speaking in October 2017
Historian and author, Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz presents a detailed critique of the historical roots of the United States. Complete text is here.
Excerpts:
Introduced by Nick Estes:
From the first time I met Roxanne we have talked about Amilkar Cabral’s concept of Return to the Source, the source of oppression and resistance. For these Settler States of America, it is settler colonialism. Those who have thwarted the finality of settlement in the United States have been Indigenous Peoples. Roxanne instructs us that history and resistance are two pillars of liberation. The terms of history, in this way, are not hashed out in dusty archives or in academic debate alone. As we see in St. Louis right now, or at Standing Rock, or right here in this colonial settlement called Santa Fe, history is an active element of our current moment being fought for in the streets and primarily led by Indigenous and Black People.
Roxanne has been a comrade in that struggle and we are the product of that work. People have given their lives or currently sit behind bars, such as Leonard Peltier, for us to be here today.
So what are the stakes of history? It is to say, as Roxanne and those like her have been saying for more than five centuries, colonialism and capitalism are not naturally occurring systems nor are the ills that they bring such as slavery, genocide, imperialism, racism, hetero-patriarchy and white supremacy. So we should be turning to those Indigenous Societies who have resisted colonialism and capitalism for centuries to imagine a world otherwise. Because the mandate is to return to the source as Roxanne constantly reminds me. We are the source. We are the past and we are the future.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz:
The Doctrine of Discovery
So what is the Doctrine of Discovery? According to this Medieval Canon Law, European Christian monarchies acquired title to the lands they discovered and Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Christian Europeans had arrived and claimed it. Under this legalistic cover for theft, European and Euro-American wars of conquest and settler colonialism in the Western hemisphere devastated Indigenous nations and communities, ripping their territories away from them, and transforming the land into private property, or real estate, along with another form of private property, enslaved African bodies.
In the United States most of that land ended up in the hands of land speculators who were also slavers and agribusiness operators called plantations, such as most of the US founding fathers, so-called, and most of the US Presidents and other government and military officials up to the Civil War. Arcane as it may seem, the Doctrine of Discovery remains the basis for US federal laws still in effect that control Indigenous peoples lives and destinies, maintaining a regimen of suffocating settler colonialism under the color of law.
From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery. This is the first principle of international law that Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize the investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to non-Christian peoples outside of Europe.
It originated in a Papal Bull, issued in 1455, that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa for slave raiding. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another Papal Bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the Papal initiated Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the Discovery Doctrine.
This Doctrine, on which all European states relied, originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized, and absorbed, usually explicitly, if not by common law, by Protestant, Christian, European monarchical colonizing projects as well....
Indicating the intentions of the newly independent United States, in 1792, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson asserted that the Doctrine of Discovery, developed by European States, was international law, applicable to the new US government as well. Codifying the Doctrine of Discovery as domestic law in 1823, the US Supreme Court issued a decision, actually a collection of decisions, three decisions, concerning the Cherokee Nation in Georgia. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European Law and an English Law in effect in British North American colonies, and was also the law of the United States....
Parallel to and enabled by this ethnic cleansing was the rise of a cotton kingdom in the Mississippi Valley, and the Industrial forced-breeding of enslaved Africans in the older slaver states. The foundation and birth of United States capitalism burrowed into and destroying Indigenous sacred land and African sacred bodies as exchange commodities, and the source of wealth that built the richest nation state and largest and deadliest military in human history, the United States of America.
So the Doctrine of Discovery, at least in the United States, is so taken for granted that very few people even know it exists as a fundamental element of the United States law. Although we do know that the US purports to be a nation of laws, we don’t iterate this particular one in law schools or in conversation. The Doctrine of Discovery is rarely mentioned in any historical or legal texts although the Marshall Court Cherokee decisions are regularly the introduction to US Constitutional Law, after Marbury. Yet the Doctrine of Discovery is the legal basis upon which the United States government controls Indigenous Nations whose territories it claims under a continuing colonial system....
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, along with the powerful Native, Chicano, Puerto Rican anti-war countercultural, Women’s Liberation, and Gay and Lesbian and Trans Movements, broke down the existing consensus and created a window of opportunity that institutionalized revisions through the bottom-up creation of Black, Native, Chicano, and Gender Studies. But that devolved into a kind of multiculturalism supporting the narrative of diversity and contributions to the greatness of the United States.
In achieving a new consensus the new narrative had to ignore Native issues of sovereignty and territorial rights and treaties. Rather, twisting the inclusion of indigeneity as a racial discrimination question rather than a question of sovereign Nations living under settler colonialism.
One of my favorite writers, late writers, William Burroughs, narrator in his 1984 novel which I highly recommend, The Place Of Dead Roads, observes that “people are not bribed to shut up about what they know. They are bribed not to find [it] out”. This is particularly true in the writing of US history, my profession. It’s not a free speech issue, but one of asking questions that challenge the core of the scripted narrative. Historians are validated to the extent that they remain guardians of the United States origin narrative with various tweaks to adjust to demands of the excluded, to prevent revolutions.
Even those flawed advances are currently in retreat and US gun violence, and endless wars are endemic. Various polls show that even the educated general public doesn’t know basic facts about the structure of the US government, the Constitution, the rights of states and the division of powers. Yet there is a widespread acceptance of the greatness and goodness of the United States along with the extreme mistrust of government. Except for the military.
Understanding Where the US Military Came From & What It Is
A recent tiny Associated Press story provided polling information of US American public regarding their confidence in federal government institutions. Reporting only six percent have confidence in Congress (probably zero in this [unintelligible]). Fourteen percent of people said they have confidence in the executive branch which includes the president and all of the cabinet agencies. Twenty-four percent say they have confidence in the Supreme Court. However eighty-four percent have confidence in the military.
The military is the only unifying government institution, the only one trusted. So we have to understand where that military has come from and what it is. Why is there so little information, analysis, or curiosity in the origins and development of the US military? In history and political science texts, it doesn’t exist. And teaching at any grade level [and] graduate school, the military history field, small as it is, is usually made up of war mongers and former military people and people who certainly never write about what actually happened to form that military.
The military isn’t even presented as a branch of government as we know there are only three branches of government. Rather it is placed under the formerly civilian, elected president and commander in chief of the armed forces. This is meant to scare you because Trump isn’t just president, he’s the commander in chief of the armed forces. And as he said, I heard him on TV tonight say, that he can do anything he wants, because he’s that.
However from the earliest settlements in the 1600s to the adhesion of the thirteen British colonies into an independent nation state and up to the present, the military has been the engine that drives US nationalism; that is, patriotism. Yet generations have little knowledge of interaction with the military. But the annals of military history reveal the architecture of its formation and function and dominance....
Deconstructing Consensus US History: Fort Bragg, CA
In fact, the majority of US Army Bases on the continent were initially outpost for wars against Indigenous Nations: Fort Snelling, Hayes, Kearney, Leavenworth, Sill, and Riley, the latter the base of George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, now the First Infantry Division. All named after US Army Officers who commanded genocidal wars.
For most of the period from the US war of independence to the 1890s, the sole function of the US military was to kill, roundup refugees, relocate and confine Native Americans and appropriate their land and resources to replace with Anglo American settlers, and sometimes from other countries like Scandinavians. Particularly, slave-owning planters involved in mono cash production got most of that land. The Army Officers of both the Confederacy and the Union had made their careers in genocidal campaigns against Native Nations and against the Indigenous and Mestizo peoples of Mexico, which included where we are now, annexing half its territory and including three major declared wars against the Seminole Nation before the Civil War.
Both Union and Confederate Armies posted regiments west of the Mississippi to invade territories of the Dakota, Cheyenne, Navajo, Apache, and Comanche Nations among others.
Wars against the native peoples did not miss a beat during the Civil War which saw the military rounding up and deporting the entire Navajo population, that Kit Carson could round up, to a desert concentration camp where one-third succumbed to starvation, exposure, and disease. And the ethnic cleansing of the Dakota people in their traditional territory of Minnesota to be replaced by Scandinavian settlers.
After the Civil War, when the US Army was supposed to prioritize occupation of the defeated Confederate States, forcing a reconstruction in which liberated African Americans could become participating and leading citizens, the commander in chief of the armed forces, the President, kept shifting armed forces from the South to the West where a twenty-five year total war was waged to destroy the Native Nations in the Northern Plains, the Intermountain West and Southwest.
US: A Thoroughly Militarized Culture - Dangerous Because We Don’t Know It
The United States is a thoroughly militarized culture, all the more dangerous because we don’t know it. It’s subliminal. And it has been since it’s bloody birth. The blood being mainly that of Indigenous peoples in the path of the colonist’s relentless expansion during their Revolutionary War. We see the signs of militarism all around us and in the media. (Just take the NFL thing in the last few weeks.)
But as military historian John Grenier notes, the cultural aspects of militarization are not new. They have deep historical roots reaching into the nation’s racist settler past and continuing through unrelenting wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing over three centuries. Grenier writes,
Beyond its sheer military utility, Americans also found a use for the first way of war in the construction of “American identity”.... the enduring appeal of the romanticized myth of the “settlement” (not [calling it] conquest) of the frontier, either by actual men like Robert Rogers or Daniel Boone or fictitious ones like Nathaniel Bumppo of James Fenimore Cooper’s creation, [Last of the Mohicans, it all] points to what D.H. Lawrence called the “myth of the essential white American.” [The First Way of War, p.222]
US nationalism, its national narrative and origin story is white nationalism and any historical analysis or current social crisis cannot be comprehended without acknowledging US settler colonialism and colonial violence centering on Indigenous America, historically and in the present.
LISTEN TO RECORDING / READ COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT
50 Reasons - Postscript 1968
50 Reasons - Postscript 1968
by Len Osanic
BlackOpRadio.com, Apr-May 2018
Episode 1 - Who Was Martin Luther King? (11:44)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g5duA9nvzc&feature=youtu.be
Black Op Radio continues to investigate the 1960s political assassinations in America on the occasion of their 50th anniversary. Martin Luther King was a remarkable source of inspiration and an articulate radical voice speaking for our better natures. Black Op Radio has hosted numerous shows over the years featuring discussion of Dr. King's life and legacy. This video program features: Judge Joe Brown, Jim DiEugenio, David Ratcliffe, William Pepper
blackopradio.com
kennedysandking.com
ratical.org
williampepper.com
Episode 2 - Ambush at the Lorraine Motel (9:04)
https://youtu.be/B8XrnIZLPjM
Martin King's unscheduled return to Memphis in April 1968 coincided with a number of covert activities which served to reduce his personal security. This episode features excerpts from Black Op Radio appearances by Jim DiEugenio, James Douglass, William Pepper, Judge Joe Brown, and David Ratcliffe.
blackopradio.com
kennedysandking.com
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/index.html#MLK
Episode 3 - Who Was James Earl Ray? (11:01)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpajV8whlFo
Martin King's convicted assassin was a career criminal, but not previously a murderer. He claimed he did not shoot King, rather was framed by a man who had served as his handler for the preceding year. The evidence against him was never convincing. This episode features excerpts from Black Op Radio appearances by William Pepper, James Douglass, Jim DiEugenio, Larry Hancock, Judge Joe Brown, and David Ratcliffe.
Episode 4 - MLK: Trial and Coverup (9:49)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuNHxXCO11A
Attempts at a new judicial hearing into Martin King's assassination were thwarted or compromised, forcing the King family to use a civil trial as a means to get all the information on record. Featured speakers, from the Black Op Radio archives, are: David Ratcliffe, William Pepper, Jim DiEugenio, James Douglass, and Judge Joe Brown.
http://www.thekingcenter.org/civil-case-king-family-versus-jowers
kennedysandking.com ratical.org
Episode 5 - Who Was Robert Kennedy? (8:39)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQGSEeK28Kw
Robert Kennedy did not have plans to run for President in 1968, but fast moving events put him in such position. It is now known that, had they both lived, Martin King would have endorsed RFK and a powerful nexus in support of peace and the well-being of all peoples almost certainly would have captured the White House. This episode features excerpts of Black Op Radio appearances from Lisa Pease, William Pepper, and Jim DiEugenio.
blackopradio.com
kennedysandking.com
Episode 6 - Ambush at the Ambassador Hotel (10:19)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnFihDSA27Y
The shooting of Robert Kennedy appeared an open and shut case: the witnesses clearly identified Sirhan Sirhan as the man who approached while firing a gun. The forensic evidence, however, told another story. This program features appearances from Black Op Radio by Paul Schrade, Scott Enyart, Lisa Pease, and Jim DiEugenio.
blackopradio.com
kennedysandking.com
Episode 7 - Who Was Sirhan Sirhan? (11:17)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8Uwn-9TmEc
Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted for the shooting of Robert Kennedy, has no memory of the event. His strange demeanor at the Ambassador Hotel seems to have been abetted by two companions, who were seen fleeing shortly after the shooting. This episode features excerpts from Black Op Radio appearances by Lisa Pease and Jim DiEugenio.
blackopradio.com
kennedysandking.com
Episode 8 - TRIAL and COVERUP: The RFK Assassination (11:54)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg-wysdDH2k&t=50s
Sirhan Sirhan went on trial in 1969, some eight months after the assassination. He ended up facing the death penalty, even as his experienced legal team knew the forensic evidence said otherwise. Distinguished forensic pathologist Dr Cyril Wecht discussed this issue with Black Op Radio.
Episode 9 - The Legacy of the Assassinations of the 1960s (16:12)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg-wysdDH2k&t=50s
Four slayings of prominent political figures in less than five years in America. This episode examines later historical consequences in terms of what was prevented from happening as well as what did happen. Featuring Black Op Radio contributors Jim DiEugenio, Lisa Pease, Larry Hancock, Cyril Wecht, William Pepper, David Ratcliffe, and James Douglass.
See/read Taking Back Our History - Key Element of The Big Picture an annotated transcript of Episode 9.
blackopradio.com
kennedysandking.com
ratical.org
The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction - Artificial Intelligence
This is the beginning of an annotated transcript of Part One of Eight in a radio program mini-series by TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) Radio focusing on the accelerating danger and likelihood of Artificial Intelligence and the Risk of Nuclear War.
The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction
Artificial Intelligence
by Maria Gilardin
TUC Radio Podcast Part One of Eight
15 April 2015
Broadcast quality mp3 of the 30 minute program is here: http://tucradio.org/DynamicOfExtinctionONE.mp3 (20.8 MB)
TUC aka Time of Useful Consciousness is an aeronautical term. The time between the onset of oxygen deficiency and the loss of consciousness, the brief moments in which a pilot may save the plane.
The anti nuclear campaigner and physician Dr. Helen Caldicott organized a two day symposium in February 2015. She had an international panel of leading experts in disarmament, political science, existential risk, anthropology, medicine, nuclear weapons, and artificial intelligence. MIT professor Noam Chomsky spoke on nuclear weapons as, “A Pathology That Could Yield to Catastrophe if Not Cured.” His presence—or absence at public events—usually makes a huge difference. Media, such as Democracy Now, came for his talk but did not stay for the other 20 plus speakers. It appears that the topic was just too scary for many.
What they missed was a huge offering of information and related questions on Artificial Intelligence and the Risk of Accidental Nuclear War, on recently proven facts about a global nuclear winter that can be caused by the unleashing of just a few nuclear weapons, the expanding Militarization of Space, the Power and Pathology of the US Military Industrial Complex, privatization of the US Nuclear Weapons Labs, nuclear war crimes in the Marshall Islands, as well as two of the vibrant movements to abolish nuclear weapons, a divestment effort under the title Don’t Bank on the Bomb as well as ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Efforts to abolish nuclear weapons and war began before the atom bombs were even built. A few of the scientists who went on to work on the Manhattan project recognized the unheard of explosive potential of atomic weapons and the risks of spreading radiation. In a TUC Radio program about the first nuclear chain reaction the historian Iain Boal mentioned Leo Szilard who witnessed the experiment by Enrico Fermi in an abandoned racquet court in Chicago on December second, 1942. Iain Boal:
Leo Szilard was on that balcony that day. It was very, very cold and they could see their breath. And they were standing there with a bottle of Chianti. And it was Szilard who in 1933 in London, as he walked across Southampton Road and the world cracked open, had been the first to consider at that moment how it might be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction and liberate energy on an industrial scale and to make a bomb. And he stayed behind on the racquets court. There was crowd there, he said later, and then Fermi and I stayed there alone. I shook hands with Fermi and I said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.
Leo Szilard later said that when he crossed Southampton Road in 1933 he suddenly knew in a flash of recognition that by his invention universal death might come into the world. The Hungarian American physicist was the first to conceive of the nuclear chain reaction and he patented the idea of a nuclear reactor along with Enrico Fermi.
Szilard participated in the Manhattan Project, but tried by all means available to him to convince US President Truman not to use atomic weapons on Japan. Szilard urged US policy-makers to demonstrate the power of these weapons to leaders of the world by exploding an atomic device in an uninhabited area.
READ/LISTEN TO COMPLETE PROGRAM
The Truth of The Children of Vietnam: A Way of Liberation
How Will We Challenge Militarism, Racism, and Extreme Materialism?
“The Children of Vietnam” provides an instance of truth force that is needed now more than ever to counter the fragmentation and doublethink being amplified by the demands of capital and its accumulation. Because, tragically and horrifically, what the United States caused to happen in Vietnam has not stopped. It continues to this day, magnified on a global scale within numerous theatres of U.S. military and covert operations including in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Yemen.
In denouncing the U.S. war in Vietnam at Riverside Church in 1967 Martin King posed the question on behalf of Vietnamese peasants: “What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?” And this was a war that ended up being broadcast on nightly news television in the United States as it became evermore hellish in its results. Said King at Riverside, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” His voice, love, compassion, and intelligence are as searingly relevant right now, half a century later, as in 1967.
This is an exposition of the photographic essay by William Pepper about the children of Vietnam that Martin King first saw on January l4, l967. Initially, while he hadn’t had a chance to read the text, it was the photographs that stopped him. As Bernard Lee who was present at the time said, “Martin had known about the [Vietnam] war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it.” Pepper’s essay contains the most powerful creative energy on earth: truth force. It is as relevant 50 years later as it was in 1967. Martin King steadfastly exhorted all to confront and grapple with the triple prong sickness—lurking within the U.S. body politic from its inception—of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. These evils require us to respond with life-giving intelligence, to change course away from the nightmare path we are pursuing, and towards, in Coretta King’s words, “a more excellent way, a more effective way, a creative rather than a destructive way.” All of us in the United States are the ones best positioned to challenge the destructiveness of the three prong sickness destroying our civilization and the Earth and change direction towards affirming life in all its variations and sacredness. We have choices and power here that the majority of humanity do not enjoy. The choice and the power resides within us. And the choice to recognize that power, and take responsibility for it to make this into a world where all of us can live together in peace and fellowship s i t s r i g h t h e r e.
the heart of the matter: Why President Kennedy Was Assassinated
22 November 2017
55 years ago today the world had just made it through its closest brush to date of nuclear annihilation and extinction of all Life on Earth with the peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
With all the bread and circuses being dished up concerning the current release dump of withheld government files on the assassination of the 35th President of the United States, it is exceedingly relevant to highlight a nonpareil exposition of this seminal event of our post-World War II world for those who want to understand what happened on November 22, 1963.
Michael Hudson on Junk Economics and Debt Cancellation
“How a society defines economic terms
and relationships will determine who controls it.”
I wanted to see how the economy worked [so in the 1960s] I went to work for banks on Wall Street as a statistician. I became Chase Manhattan’s balance of payments economist. I wanted to find out what is the deficit stemming from? The entire balance of payments deficit in the 1960s when I was working there came from the military spending abroad. So I found out it was really the Vietnam War and allied military spending.
I’ve been spending much of my effort for the last 30 years trying to see how the ancient near east and classical antiquity and medieval Europe all solved their debt crises, basically writing a history of debt crisis showing that every economy has had to cancel the debt. So you could say all my work in economics since the 1960s, more than 50 years, is spent on seeing how society handles its debt crisis.
The industrial economy in America is essentially being emptied out in order to pay the stockowners and about 75 percent of stocks are owned by the richest 5 percent of the population. So if you look at who owns the stock, it’s not the working class, it’s not the middle class, it’s the super rich. The super rich are saying, We’re willing to use all the corporate income to run it down. Basically, the 5 percent have decided that industrial capitalism is over and it’s time to take the money and run. And you take the money and run by just paying out all the income, just to yourselves, leaving the corporation an empty shell.
That’s how the Chicago Boys introduced free markets into Chile after 1974 when Pinochet took over from Allende. It’s the neoliberal model. It’s what happened in Russia after the neoliberals convinced Russia to go along. It’s what’s happening in Greece when you’re just emptying out the economy to pay the bond holders. It’s economic shrinkage. The trick is to get the middle class and the working class to think the stock market is them when the stock market isn’t themselves at all. It’s the five percent.
Greece is the future of where America is going now under the policies of Clinton and Obama and Trump. Either you’re going to have barbarism or you’re going to have a renovation of the economy which means the debt write-down, anti-monopoly legislation, and prosecution of crooks.
Now, it is clear the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes ... It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.... If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration ...
—George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
The Orwell quote above opens the Introduction of Michael Hudson’s new book, J Is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception, an A-to-Z guide that lays out how the world economy actually operates with more than 400 concise entries, several essays, and a full topic index. Expanding on Killing The Host: How Financial Parasites And Debt Destroy The Global Economy (2015), Prof. Hudson’s new book covers contemporary terms that are misleading or poorly understood as well as many important concepts that have been abandoned – many on purpose – from the long history of political economy.
Two key concepts are rent theory and debt, which explain how Unearned Income and the Financial Sector impoverish governments and populations the world over as power and riches flow upward into the hands of the few. These additional essays provide background for key points and explore today’s uncertain political and economic environment:
- The 22 Most Pervasive Economic Myths of Our Time
- Economics As Fraud
- Methodology is Ideology, and Dictates Policy
- Does Economics Deserve A Nobel Prize? Commonweal 1970
- Hudson Bubble Model: From Asset-Price Inflation to Debt-Strapped Austerity (Formulas and Charts)
- Author Interview: Killing The Host (Companion book)
Transcript of 2015 CounterPunch Radio interview with Michael Hudson
The major issues that guide healthy economies were known to the Ancients and were expanded upon by the classical economists of the 18th and 19th centuries, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, E. Peshine Smith, Simon Patten, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and others of many political stripes whose aim was to leave the brutal legacy of feudalism behind. Their ideas and principles are brought back into the spotlight here. This book deconstructs today’s “value-free,” inverted and deceptive economics that favor the wealthy, providing subsequent generations the opportunity to create a successful economy with proper checks and balances benefiting all.
Killing the Host [2015] is a more popular version of The Bubble and Beyond [2012]. It shows that when the financial sector takes over, it’s very much like a parasite in nature. People think of parasites simply as taking the life blood of the host and draining the energy. But in order to do that, the parasite has to have an enzyme to take over the host’s brain. They take over the brain and convince the host that the free luncher is actually part of the host’s own body, and even its baby to be protected. That’s what the financial sector has done.
Classical economics was all about separating the rent-extracting sectors—landlords, monopolies, and finance—from the rest of the economy. That was unearned income. It wasn’t necessary. The whole idea of classical economics from Quesnay’s Tableau Economique all the way through Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill was to look at the finance sector, the landlord sector and monopolies as unnecessary. You’re going to get rid of them. You’re going to tax away the land’s rent or else nationalize the land. And you are going to have public enterprises as basic infrastructure so that they couldn’t be monopolized.
Democracy at Work, April 3, 2017
The following excerpts are from the complete transcript at:
https://ratical.org/ratville/MichaelHudson-JunkEcon.html
[0:05:47]
Why did you choose to begin your introduction [to J Is For Junk Economics] with George Orwell and Confucius, particularly your reference to our need to “rectify our definitions of crucial economic terminology.” How does this relate to the theme of your overall book?
When I wrote it, I didn’t realize that the very month it came out, George Orwell’s 1984 was going to be on the bestseller list. And that’s because of his concept of doublethink. A vocabulary that you use shapes how you think about the economy around you. And it shapes how you think about politics. Doublethink, using words to mean the opposite of what they really mean, is a tool of deception. It’s a tool that persuades people to act against their interest....
[0:16:17]
... Explain the evolution of the term “free market” as a way of introducing what Junk Economics and the book is all about.
That’s the perfect example of doublethink—using a word to be the opposite. For Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and all the classical economists of the 19th century, their idea of a free market meant the free market from economic rent. To free it from the landlords. To free it from the monopolists and to free markets from the banks so that you’d really have, in effect, Say’s Law, you’d really have what people earned would be earned by producing goods and services not from just adding empty prices on. Not from property claims, not from credit. The idea was that everybody would earn what they produce and that would be a fair economy.
But after 1890, you had the rentier [pronounced ron’tee-ā] class—the rent recipients, the landlords, and the monopolists, and the banks—all fight back and for them a free market was one free for them from the government. Free from government regulation. Free to charge monopoly rent. Free for landlords to shift the taxes off themselves onto the economy and make the working class and the middle class pay. And to make sure that the bankers could continue to indulge in fraud and reckless lending and all get bailed out. So the idea of freedom and of the free market has been turned into the exact opposite: to un-freedom and neofeudalism.
Neofeudalism: Much as warlords seized land in the Norman Conquest and levied rent on subject populations (starting with the Domesday Book, the great land census of England and Wales ordered by William the Conqueror), so today’s financialized mode of warfare uses debt leverage and foreclosure to pry away land, natural resources and economic infrastructure. The commons are privatized by bondholders and bankers, gaining control of government and shifting taxes onto labor and small-scale industry. Household accounts, corporate balance sheets and public budgets are earmarked increasingly to pay real estate rent, monopoly rent, interest and financial fees, and to bear the taxes shifted off rentier wealth. The rentier oligarchy makes itself into a hereditary aristocracy lording it over the population at large from gated communities that are the modem counterpart to medieval castles with their moats and parapets.
—J Is For Junk Economics, p. 167
[0:27:59]
It’s reminiscent of what the Romania Dictator Ceaușescu did when his daughter got engaged to a mathematician who Ceaușescu didn’t like. So what did Ceaușescu do? He closed every economics department in Romania so that the daughter would be marrying somebody without a job. That’s the kind of thing that [shows how] the mainstream economists are totalitarian.
What the University of Chicago people realized is their definition of free market, which is one that I didn’t give before: they realized, You can’t have a free market in Chile, for instance, if you’re not willing to kill every one who disagrees with you. The first thing the Chicago Boys did in Chile, after assassinating the labor leaders, assassinating and having the assassination program of land reformers, they closed every economics department in Chile except for the Catholic University that taught Chicago School of Economics. Unless you have totalitarian censorship you cannot have the free market of the form that the mainstream economists talk about. Free only for the 1 percent and unfreedom for the 99 percent.
Chicago Boys: After the Kissinger-Pinochet 1973 military coup in Chile, University of Chicago economists were brought in to give away public enterprises to the junta’s supporters. To silence criticism of Chile’s privatization of social security, to let corporate owners loot pension plans, to end public subsidies and to break labor union power, they shut down every economics department in Chile except that of the Catholic University where the Chicago School had gained control. (See Labor Capitalism, Privatization and Washington Consensus).These anti-government ideologues recognized that their brand of “free markets” and giveaway of the public sector required that no economic alternative be permitted or even discussed, but could only be imposed at gunpoint with totalitarian political control. Their neoliberal version of “free markets” is akin to medieval conquerors appropriating the land and basic infrastructure by force of arms. The aim is to privatize economic rent, and weaken the power of communities by rolling back democracy. This is typically done by establishing client oligarchies and economic dukedoms.
—J Is For Junk Economics, p. 53
You can only have Junk Economics if you censor and block any discussion of how the economy is actually working. That’s why the Washington Post came out with the junk news list of sites. The junk news sites that they cite are things like counterpunch, nakedcapitalism, Paul Craig Roberts—all the sites that I write on. You have to go to what the fakers call junk news to get reality and if you to the mainstream you get junk economics and junk news. You can’t have more Orwellian doublethink than that....
[0:49:10]
Take the case of what’s happening in Greece right now: perfect example. Crooked banks were helped by the Greek government falsifying its statistics by hiring Goldman Sachs to give fake numbers and convince other banks in France, Germany, and elsewhere, to buy bonds. The problem was, by 2010, 2012, it’s obvious that Greece couldn’t pay the debt. The IMF said, We insist that you do pay the debt and it’s worth pushing you into the worst depression—Greece now is in a worse situation than the Great Depression was in in the 1930s. They’re cutting back pensions, they’re forcing huge emigration. (You’re having the same thing in Latvia.) If you don’t cut back the debts that have grown so exponentially—the miracle of compound interest—that they can’t be paid, then you’re going to absolutely devastate the Greek economy.
The IMF and the mainstream economics says, Devestation is actually good because the economy is so bankrupt that we’ll have to privatize it and privatization is what we want. Privatization means you’re going to sell the land, the ports, the railroads; the electric utilities have already been sold to German investors. Everything that the Greek economy owned is now being sold off to foreigners largely on credit because it can’t pay the debt. It’s like a family that falls further and further behind, loses the home, runs into debt, ends up homeless and is destroyed by having taken on too much debt.
That’s how entire economies are being run today by the IMF and the World Bank and by mainstream economics that says it’s unthinkable to write down debts. So I’ve written a number of books about the whole history of debt cancellation. Adam Smith said that no government has ever paid its debt, although some have pretended to, and the IMF and modern economists say, Maybe we can show that Adam Smith was wrong. Maybe we can show that governments can pay the debts even at the price of impoverishing the economy and making the U.S. economy look like Greece. Greece is the future of where America is going now under the policies of Clinton and Obama and Trump.
From February through July 2015 James K. Galbraith was advisor to the Greek Minister of Finance, Yanis Varoufakis. In the Introduction of J Is For Junk Economics, Michael Hudson writes, “Nowhere is the Doublethink vocabulary more blatant than in the financial conquest of Greece by the Eurozone ‘troika’ – the European Central Bank, European Commission and IMF.” When Galbraith was asked whether “the institutions (the IMF, the EC and the ECB) will have to rescue Greece indefinitely” he answered:
There is no “rescue” going on here. There is no “rescue,” there is no “bailout,” there is no “reform” going on. I really need to insist on this, because these words creep into our discourse. They are placed there by the creditors in order for unwary people to use them, but there is nothing of the kind taking place. What is going on is a seizure of the assets owned by the Greek state, by Greek businesses and by Greek households. There is no sense that this has anything to do with the recovery of the Greek economy or with the welfare of the Greek people. On the contrary, the policy is utterly indifferent to those considerations.
—James Galbraith and Luis Martíin, The Poisoned Chalice, Open Democracy, 1 Sep 2015
Greece is the future of where America is going now under the policies of Clinton and Obama and Trump.
[0:52:14]
For the American economy it’s a slow crash until people fight back. Until people think that there’s an alternative. Until they think, It doesn’t have to be this way, the economy is going to shrink and shrink and shrink and there are going to be more and more empty stores for rent on the big street. Wages will go down and people are going to have to borrow more and more on their credit cards just to get by, spend less and less eating out at restaurants, less and less on goods and services. And it will just shrink until there is a pushback. And the same thing in Europe....
You’re having the world outside the United States shrink more and more except for countries that are withdrawing from the neoliberal orbit: China, Russia, The Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Basically Eurasia is the only part of the world that’s withdrawing from all of this which is why the neocons wanted to back Hillary so much to try to force them—to de-stabilize them and try to overthrow their governments and make them as neoliberal as Greece or the United States or Europe.
[0:55:40]
Here’s the problem: once the financial managers have emptied out corporations, there’s nothing they’d rather do than turn these big corporations over to the workers. Because they’ll say, Okay, you operate a broke steel company or you operate the broke auto company and see what you can do—as long as they leave the debts in place. But as long as the existing corporate economy—as long as the car companies and the industrial companies and the manufacturing firms and the farms are all left as deeply in debt as they are, it doesn’t matter who owns them or what they can do as long as they have to repay the debt. So you do need a public option.
Back in 2008 when Citibank was broke, imagine what would have happened if the government would have said, Ok Citibank’s broke. We’re taking it over. We’re not paying the bond holders and the stock holders because they invested in a criminogenic organization. But we’re going to operate this as a public bank. So now that Citibank is a public bank, and Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, and the other banks that have paid tens of billions of dollars for fraud, now that they’re public banks, they can issue credit cards at cost; at 2 percent interest—what they borrow. They won’t make loans for corporate takeovers. They’ll make loans to actually help companies grow. You need a public option for this and you need public banking for this because the existing financial model is extractive, not productive.
What would be the basis for public banking? One way of getting away from the payday loans that people have is use the Post Offices as the germs of banks. When I worked on Wall Street, 3 percent of American bank deposits were in the Post Office for banks which is why the banks wanted to drive them under. Maybe 15 or 20 percent were in savings banks and savings and loans. They were mutual savings banks. They don’t exist anymore. They were looted by the commercial banks taking them over.
In order to change the ownership structure and the function of industry, you need a financial system that actually promotes industry. All of this is what Saint-Simon in France wrote about 200 years ago in the 1810s, 1820s. That was a basis for Saint-Simonian socialist reform, for French socialist reform. Marx accepted this later. He admired Saint-Simon. You had German banks in the late 19th century following this new public banking model with a unity between government, banks, and industry.
Everybody expected that this would become the basis for worker owned for socialist industrialization. World War I changed all of that and you had a retrogression and that’s what both Killing The Host and J Is For Junk Economics are really all about, to describe how history was turned into a detour, into a financial detour that’s leading to neoliberalism and to neofeudalism making the kind of world that you want to see—an economy run for the producers—impossible.
[0:59:07]
It has to be a political movement. And that requires meaning breaking up the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party now is the party of Wall Street and the neocons. You have to have some political party that’s going to work. If you’re a third party, as Ralph Nader found out, the media are just going to ignore you and you’re not going to have much effort. You have to say, What party can you take over? The Tea Party people tried to take over the Republicans and you see where they are. They are way out-voted by the Koch brothers and Donald Trump has just surrendered to Paul Ryan in the budget. Really the most demagogic, doublethink, Orwellian party is the Democratic Party and you’ve got to take it away from Wall Street. You’ve got to get rid of Hillary Clinton and her gang forever.
That requires a fight. If the fight means that the Bernie supporters and the socialists are expelled from the Democratic Party then you want to leave the remaining Wall Street as only the 1 percent. They’ll have the donors but they won’t have any voters at all and the Party that’s expelled, the Socialist Party, in effect, is going to become the Democratic Party, the real democratic party. And you’ve got to have a political fight. Without a political movement you’re not going to be able to achieve any change in the economic system.
COLD WAR: THE NEXT GENERATION - Antidote to Endless War Spawned by September 11: the Full Exercise of Our Imagination and Intelligence
The following is inspired by and dedicated to John Judge, a most uncommon common man who devoted his life and energies to urging this nation live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all and to caring for the Earth and all its kin. John lived his life, and gave everything he had, to honor and serve Life’s needs.
The protracted war envisioned by some in the White House, under the rubric of ending terrorism and “eradicating evil” will destabilize not only the oil-rich Arabic world, but potentially the various states of the former Soviet Union. These counties are similarly rich with the sort of resources and well-educated labor that the globalization agenda demands. It will also change economic relations here in the United States, throwing us back into the permanent war economy of the Cold War years, and a severe economic slump.
—John Judge, “A New War or a New World?,” 23 Sep 2001
I do these things because I’m hoping that a little bit of humor, a little bit of perspective, it’ll open up something for you that you’ll look at the paradigm in a different way. In fact I wanted to write a memoir, and thinking about a title of a memoir would be Brother Can You Paradigm? Because if you can’t paradigm you’re in trouble. It’s not that everything they’re telling you is a lie. But the focus, the lens, they’ve got is a little skewered so that you don’t see it straight when you look at it.
—John Judge, “What the 9/11 Commission Didn’t Report,” 21 Feb 2005
This is an invitation to explore the unknown possibilities of existence through the process of exercising our imagination and intelligence to visualize what an actual democracy would look like today. Not the centuries-old representative form fashioned in the 1700s where the only method of communication and travel was either a horse or a boat. In the present era of mass communication, participatory democracy is both feasible and of critical necessity if the human project is to survive, making it possible to mend the sacred hoop of Life’s creation to truly meet the needs of the seventh generation yet unborn.
In a letter earlier this year, author and researcher Graeme MacQueen wrote about the process he explored in writing “Beyond Their Wildest Dreams...” (see below). His motivation was “to understand how people come to know the world and how we can open up closed minds.” He explained some of this as his “imagination approach” in the following:
I adopted the word [imagination] from German philosopher Gunther Anders, whose little article, “Thesis for the Atomic Age” (published in 1962) had a big effect on me over the years as a peace and environmental activist. Anders said that in the nuclear age we are doomed if we don’t have imagination. He said,
The basic dilemma of our age is that “We are smaller than ourselves,” incapable of mentally realizing the realities which we ourselves have produced. Therefore we might call ourselves “inverted Utopians”: while ordinary Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing.
He also said that escapists of today do not hide in imagination, they hide in the ivory tower of perception, because the senses are “senselessly narrow.” So, he was giving a power to this word “imagination” that we don’t normally give it. “Imagination” is what we give ourselves to when we have the courage to face the world, to actually visualize what is going on. It is, he says, part of the courage to be afraid.
The following (at <ratical.org>) was composed to invite [re-]exploration of what has now entered the beginning of its SEVENTEEN YEAR: truly a global war of terror produced and executed by the United States. The rest of this invitation is at: <https://ratical.org/ratitorsCorner/10.05.17.html>.
Marking 16 Years of the US Global War Of Terror
Guy Debord: In 1967, in a book entitled The Society of the Spectacle, I showed what the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy, which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government that accompanied this reign....Spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical knowledge in general; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the most recent past.... With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning....All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance....Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.
“It is a sobering thought that better evidence is required to prosecute a shoplifter than is needed to commence a world war.”
—Anthony Scrivener QC, The Times, 5 Oct 2001“It is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.”
—Dick Cheney, 21 Oct 2001
Legend has it the Cold War was closed out in 1991. 10 years later, its Next Generation spawn was inaugurated. 16+ years into this war that will not end “in our lifetime”, it is our moral responsibility to reveal its covert and overt roots and, in doing so, end it given that it is being done in our name every single day.“Your loyalty belongs to the human race and not to a flag, not to a country that’s supposedly under attack from some mystical force that’s out there that you can’t even identify—I mean, these terrorists, the way they’re presented to us, it’s as if they dropped in from outer space. All you know about them is that they hate you and they want to kill you. You can’t negotiate with them. You can’t talk to them. You can’t understand them. All you can do is kill them. And you got to kill every last one except, you never know.... It’s like the pod people, you know, maybe it’s spread to somebody else and then you’ve got to start killing them.”
—John Judge, 21 Feb 2005
Ed Curtin:• Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore, Sep 2016• The Lies of 9/11 Miracle Workers - Review of Bush And Cheney: How They Ruined America And The World, 27 Aug 2017Graeme MacQueen:• Beyond Their Wildest Dreams: Sep 11 and the US Left, 31, Mar 2017• Sep 11: The Pentagon’s B-Movie, 31, Aug 2017John Judge:• September 11 Omission Report, 9 Sep 2004• Historical Framework: Deep Politics & Covert Operations, 9 Sep 2004Antidote to September 11 – Exercising Our Imagination:• September 11 Critical Analysis, 16 Feb 2002• What the 9/11 Commission Didn’t Report, 21 Feb 2005
John Judge was an unparalleled historian of the US National Security State.
An exemplar earthling, his loyalty was to the human race, not to a flag or a country.
