woensdag 16 april 2014

De Mainstream Pers 192



The CIA director was sent to Kiev to launch a military suppression of the Russian separatists in the eastern and southern portions of Ukraine, former Russian territories for the most part that were foolishly attached to the Ukraine in the early years of Soviet rule. 

Washington’s plan to grab Ukraine overlooked that the Russian and Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine were not likely to go along with their insertion into the EU and NATO while submitting to the persecution of Russian speaking peoples. Washington has lost Crimea, from which Washington intended to eject Russia from its Black Sea naval base. Instead of admitting that its plan for grabbing Ukraine has gone amiss, Washington is unable to admit a mistake and, therefore, is pushing the crisis to more dangerous levels.

If Ukraine dissolves into secession with the former Russian territories reverting to Russia, Washington will be embarrassed that the result of its coup in Kiev was to restore the Russian provinces of Ukraine to Russia.  To avoid this embarrassment, Washington is pushing the crisis toward war.
Paul Craig Roberts. Washington Drives The World To War. 14 april 2014

The propaganda on Iraq has often been so crude that many, perhaps most, people have been able to see through it. It is far from the case that all, or even most, propaganda works. Much government propaganda is directed towards opinion-formers, such as journalists and academics; these people, in my experience, are usually more deeply indoctrinated than 'ordinary people.' Essentially, it is the function of opinion-formers within the ideological system to convey, often totally uncritically, the policies and proclamations of the state to the public -- but the latter are increasingly failing to play their assigned role... 

State propaganda operations are increasing and the mainstream sources of information remain heavily indoctrinated in their coverage.
Mark Curtis. Unpeople. 2004

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of ultimately destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in 'The Collapse of Complex Societies,' Charles L. Redman in 'Human Impact on Ancient Environments' and Ronald Wright in 'A Short History of Progress' have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed, hubris and idolatry.
Collapse comes throughout human history to complex societies not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity.
'One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,' Reinhold Niebuhr wrote.
That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what Ronald Wright in 'A Short History of Progress' calls the 'progress trap.' We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion, Wright notes, that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature.
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we, like past societies in distress, will retreat into what anthropologists call 'crisis cults.' The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist beliefs in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us. The Christian right provides a haven for this escapism. These cults perform absurd rituals to make it all go away, giving rise to a religiosity that peddles collective self-delusion and magical thinking. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the later part of the 19th century as the buffalo herds and the last remaining tribes were slaughtered. The Ghost Dance held out the hope that all the horrors of white civilization—the railroads, the murderous cavalry units, the timber merchants, the mine speculators, the hated tribal agencies, the barbed wire, the machine guns, even the white man himself—would disappear. And our psychological hard wiring is no different.

In our decline, hatred becomes our primary lust, our highest form of patriotism. We deploy vast resources to hunt down jihadists and terrorists, real and phantom. We destroy our civil society in the name of a war on terror. We persecute those, from Julian Assange to [Chelsea] Manning to Edward Snowden, who expose the dark machinations of power. We believe, because we have externalized evil, that we can purify the earth. And we are blind to the evil within us.

Melville’s description of Ahab is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities and generals who through the power of propaganda fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation.

'All my means are sane,' Ahab says, 'my motive and my object mad.' Ahab, as the historian Richard Slotkin points out in his book 'Regeneration Through Violence,' is 'the true American hero, worthy to be captain of a ship whose "wood could only be American."' Melville offers us a vision, one that D.H. Lawrence later understood, of the inevitable fatality of white civilization brought about by our ceaseless lust for material progress, imperial expansion, white supremacy and exploitation of nature.

Melville, who had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers, was keenly aware that the wealth of industrialized societies was stolen by force from the wretched of the earth. All the authority figures on the ship are white men—Ahab, Starbuck, Flask and Stubb. The hard, dirty work, from harpooning to gutting the carcasses of the whales, is the task of the poor, mostly men of color. Melville saw how European plundering of indigenous cultures from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives, was the engine that enriched Europe and the United States. The Spaniards’ easy seizure of the Aztec and Inca gold following the massive die-off from smallpox and [other diseases] among native populations set in motion five centuries of unchecked economic and environmental plunder. Karl Marx and Adam Smith pointed to the huge influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the industrialized state with technologically advanced weapons systems, turning us into the most efficient killers on the planet.
Chris Hedges.  The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies. 13 april 2014


De VS is voortgekomen uit grootscheeps geweld, en overleeft door grootscheeps geweld. Geweld tegenover zowel de mens als tegen de natuur. De VS wordt gedreven door een parasitaire cultuur, die nu geglobaliseerd is, door een beschaving die geen weg terug kent en in doodsdrift vooruit snelt. Bijna een eeuw geleden voorzag de Amerikaanse dichter Robinson Jeffers deze desastreuze zelfmoord:


Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he walked on earth.
  
Het 'haast maken met het verval,' omdat de rijkdommen oneindig leken, en het materiële 'leven goed is.'  Maar zoals te verwachten was zagen de meesten niet 'the trap' waar zelfs de 'noblest spirits' in vallen. De onverzadigbaarheid mag dan wel onveranderlijk zijn, maar al het andere niet. Panta Rhei, alles stroomt, is in beweging. De mens is niet opgewassen tegen de onverbiddelijke wetten van de natuur. Niets is onuitputtelijk, alles kent zijn eigen levensloop. Alleen een kind kan leven alsof er geen einde aan de dag komt, dat maakt hem zo gelukkig.  Maar, zoals het hooglied van de liefde stelt:

Toen ik een kind was, sprak ik als een kind, voelde ik als een kind, dacht ik als een kind; nu ik man geworden ben, heb ik het kinderlijke afgelegd,

en wat ons rest zijn

geloof, hoop en liefde, de grote drie, maar de liefde is de grootste.

Om precies te zijn: de liefde voor wat is en in zijn eigen taal met ons spreekt. Wanneer de journalist en domineeszoon Geert Mak, verwijzend naar de Verenigde Staten, stelt dat 'als je invloed en macht wilt hebben, moet je groots zijn. Dat is iets wat we in Europa van ze kunnen leren,’ dan zijn dit de woorden van een kind, dat geïmponeerd en geïntimideerd is geraakt door geweld. Het wezenlijke probleem van de mainstream-opiniemakers werd al in het interbellum haarscherp beschreven door de historicus Johan Huizinga:

De gemiddelde man met weinig tijd krijgt zijn noties aanhoudend en op velerlei wijzen aangepraat, en praat ze na. Indien men kon vergelijken, wat in het geestelijk leven van de enkele, in een minder ontwikkelde beschavingsperiode dan de onze, de rol is geweest van eigen nadenken, eigen keuze, eigen uitdrukking, dan is het zeer de vraag, of onze tijd met zijn veelzijdige en steeds overvloede belangstelling de prijs zou behalen. Het is niet, zoals de stormlopers tegen het intellect menen, de kennis, die schaadt, maar de intellectuele digestie, die hopeloos in de war is, alweer niet uitsluitend door de schuld van hen, die het geestelijk voedsel hebben op te dissen, maar ook door de omstandigheden die teweegbrengen, dat het te haastig en te heet verzwolgen wordt. De werkelijke belangstelling van het grote publiek is niet meer bij de werken des geestes, althans in veel mindere mate dan bij voorbeeld in de achttiende eeuw, toen het publiek veel kleiner, maar zijn gerichtheid veel intellectueler was. De ernst der massa's wordt tegenwoordig in toenemende mate besteed aan dingen, die een onvooringenomen cultuurwetenschap slechts als lagere spelvormen (er zijn ook zeer hoge) zou kunnen kwalificeren. Er heerst in de huidige wereld een georganiseerd puerilisme van mateloze omvang... Het kan soms schijnen, alsof de hedendaagse mensheid geen hogere gemeenschappelijke cultuurfunctie meer kent, dan met blijde of toornige blik in de pas te lopen.


De grote Europese en Amerikaanse geesten waarschuwen al sinds de negentiende eeuw voor het verval van wat de Europese en daaruit voortvloeiende Amerikaanse cultuur. Zo schreef de vooraanstaande Spaanse filosoof Ortega Y Gasset in zijn in 1930 verschenen boek De Opstand Der Horden:

De Europese beschaving — wij hebben het reeds verscheidene malen gezegd — heeft op automatische wijze de opstand der horden teweeggebracht… Sinds de zestiende eeuw is de hele mensheid in een reusachtig proces van unificatie gekomen, dat in onze tijd zijn toppunt heeft bereikt. Er is nu geen enkel deel van de mensheid meer dat afgescheiden leeft van het geheel — er zijn geen eilanden meer in haar. Men kan dus zeggen dat wie er sinds de zestiende eeuw in de wereld gebiedt, de invloed van zijn gezag over het geheel ervan laat gelden. Europa heeft sindsdien bevolen, en onder de eenheid van haar gezag leefde de wereld in unitarische stijl, of  of ging tenminste voort op de weg der unificatie.

Deze periode noemt men gewoonlijk 'de Moderne Tijd,' een vale, weinig zeggende naam, waaronder deze werkelijkheid ligt verscholen: de tijd van de   hegemonie van Europa. 


De kracht van Gasset's betoog ligt in de wijze waarop hij de ondermijning van de Europese cultuur beschreef. Al in 1930 (!) zag de Spaanse denker hoe het Avondland, na eeuwenlang de hegemonie in de wereld te hebben uitgeoefend, 'niet meer zeker' was van de vanzelfsprekendheid van deze overheersing. De westerse cultuur begon aan zichzelf te twijfelen. Maar omdat juist het geloof in de eigen superioriteit de kern is van de Europese aanspraak op de alleenheerschappij, tasten de consequenties van die almaar groeiende twijfel de basis aan waarop de macht van het Westen is gefundeerd. En wanneer de macht begint te wankelen, begint de machteloze te rebelleren. Ortega Y Gasset schreef daarover:

De wereld van vandaag de dag heeft wel een zeer kinderlijk voorkomen. Op school komen de bengels in beroering en gaan zij zich wanordelijk gedragen, als men merkt dat de meester is weggegaan. Iedereen schept er behagen in om aan de druk, die de aanwezigheid van de meester op hem uitoefende, te ontsnappen, de knellende banden van de voorschriften van zich af te werpen, op zijn hoofd te gaan staan en zich heer en meester van zichzelf te voelen. Maar omdat het wegnemen van de voorschriften die de bezigheden regelden en aan een ieder zijn taak gaven… is het gevolg dat hij maar één ding kan doen: herrie maken… 

Ortega Y Gasset wees er op dat 'er een nieuw soort mens,' was ontstaan, 'dat nu in de wereld overheersend is,' en dat hij 'de massa-mens' noemde, van wie de 'voornaamste karaktertrek is dat, aangezien hij voelt vulgair te zijn, het recht op vulgariteit proclameert, en weigert instanties boven zich te erkennen.' Die houding is niet verwonderlijk, ze is het logische resultaat van een kapitalistische consumptiemaatschappij, die haar heil in het materialisme zoekt. Ortega Y Gasset:

De Wereld waarin deze nieuwe mens van zijn geboorte af geplaatst is, noopt hem op geen enkele manier zichzelf te beperken, zij legt hem geen enkel verbod op en dwingt hem tot geen enkele onthouding. Integendeel, zij zweept zijn begeerten op, die in beginsel tot in het oneindige kunnen toenemen. Want een feit is, en dit is van groot belang, dat deze wereld van de negentiende en het begin van de twintigste eeuw niet alleen de volmaaktheden en wijdten heeft die ze inderdaad bezit, maar bovendien nog haar inwoners de waan geeft dat zij morgen nog rijker, nog volmaakter en nog wijder zal zijn, alsof zij plotseling was gaan groeien en er aan haar uitzettingsmogelijkheden geen grenzen waren gesteld…

Hierdoor kunnen wij dus al twee eigenschappen aanwijzen in de huidige horde-mens van onze tijd: één trek van zijn wezen is de vrije ontplooiing van zijn begeerten en driften, dit wil dus zeggen van zichzelf, en een tweede kenmerkende eigenschap is zijn ingeboren ondankbaarheid ten opzichte van al hetgeen dat zijn bestaan zo heeft vergemakkelijkt… Hierdoor is ook de verdwaasde gemoedstoestand van deze horden te verklaren: zij hebben alleen maar oog en hart voor stoffelijk welzijn, en tegelijk keren zij zich tegen de grondslagen waarop dit gemeenschappelijk welzijn berust. Aangezien zij niet inzien dat de beschaving en haar voordelen voortkomen uit het scheppend vernuft en de ontzagwekkende creatie is van mensenhanden, en alleen gemaakt kunnen worden door onafgebroken zwoegen en spieden, menen deze horden dat het enige dat zij te doen hebben, is dringend eisen alsof wat hun gegeven wordt hun geboorterecht was. 

Voor alle duidelijkheid: deze houding vinden we in alle maatschappelijk geledingen terug, van arm tot rijk, van geschoold tot ongeschoold, en dat maakt haar ook zo desastreus. Wanneer het vooraanstaande lid van de zelfbenoemde 'politiek-literaire elite' in Nederland, Henk Hofland, 81 jaar na het verschijnen van De Opstand der Horden, op 11 oktober 2011, nota bene in het 'populistische' amusementsprogramma De Wereld Draait Door zijn boek Platter & Dikker komt aanprijzen, dan stuit hij onmiddellijk op het onbegrip van de interviewer, die niets begrijpt van Hoflands klacht over de  hedendaagse 'agressieve hufterigheid' van de massa. Over de alledaagse schaamteloosheid zegt Matthijs van Nieuwkerk: 'Wat is er mis mee?' Zichtbaar verbijsterd, zelfs uit het veld geslagen, hoorde Hofland als de meest vooraanstaande opiniemaker van de polderpers de presentator verklaren: 'Wie ben ik eigenlijk dat ik dit veroordeel? Misschien zijn ze wel hartstikke gelukkig.' Intussen ziet de kijker een foto van een getatoeëerde man die zijn penis uit zijn broek haalt om die publiekelijk te tonen. Tja, 'wat is daar mis mee?' Hoewel Hofland in al zijn simplisme beweert dat het ‘consumentisme’ als ‘ideologie’ ineens ‘spontaan is ontkiemd,’ liet Ortega Y Gasset de ideologische bronnen van deze cultuur zien, het bewust gekweekte egoïsme, noodzakelijk om de vrije ontplooiing  van het kapitalisme mogelijk te maken.  Maar als propagandist van de neoliberale macht kan H.J.A. Hofland onmogelijk deze relatie benoemen, en is hij tevens de belangrijkste pleitbezorger van de 'agressieve hufterigheid' die de politieke en economische elite dagelijks laat zien, in zowel haar binnenlandse als vooral ook haar buitenlandse politiek. De westerse cultuur is na Auschwitz en Hiroshima zo massaal en zo diep 'verhufterd' dat de mainstream-opiniemakers het niet eens meer kunnen zien. De 'agressieve hufterigheid' op mega-schaal, is de raison d'être geworden van de 'politiek-literaire elite.' Men hoeft maar een westers dagblad open te slaan, ook de zogeheten 'kwaliteitskranten,' en men krijgt het bewijs ervan elke dag weer geleverd. Om de terminologie van Matthijs van Nieuwkerk te gebruiken: 'Dat is mode. Het is een kwestie van smaak.' Ik zou de tijdgeest niet treffender hebben kunnen samenvatten. En ondertussen dendert de trein voort. Waar zijn we nu? Chris Hedges omschreef het in een verwijzing naar één van de allergrootste Amerikaanse auteurs, de man die ondermeer Moby Dick schreef:

Melville knew that physical courage and moral courage are distinct. One can be brave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called on to stand up to human evil. Starbuck elucidates this peculiar division. The first mate is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab’s 'impious end.' Starbuck, 'while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.'

And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going too often lack the fortitude to actually rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages.

I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt. Lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising, a professional, disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral constraints and, like Marx, in the inevitable emergence of the worker’s state. [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the proletariat. [Mikhail] Bakunin predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order, something we are likely to witness in our lifetimes, and new autonomous worker federations rising up out of the chaos. [Peter] Kropotkin, like Proudhon, believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society. Emma Goldman, along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. 'The mass,' Goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life in echoing Marx, 'clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!'

The revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers. The building blocks of revolt, they believed, relied on the tool of the general strike, the ability of workers to cripple the mechanisms of production. Strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties, strike funds and union halls. Workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state. But now, with the decimation of the U.S. manufacturing base, along with the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties, we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion.

We must develop a revolutionary theory that is not reliant on the industrial or agrarian muscle of workers. Most manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and, of those that remain, few are unionized. Our family farms have been destroyed by agro-businesses. Monsanto and its Faustian counterparts on Wall Street rule. They are steadily poisoning our lives and rendering us powerless. The corporate leviathan, which is global, is freed from the constraints of a single nation-state or government. Corporations are beyond regulation or control. Politicians are too anemic, or more often too corrupt, to stand in the way of the accelerating corporate destruction. This makes our struggle different from revolutionary struggles in industrial societies in the past. Our revolt will look more like what erupted in the less industrialized Slavic republics, Russia, Spain and China and uprisings led by a disenfranchised rural and urban working class and peasantry in the liberation movements that swept through Africa and Latin America. The dispossessed working poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed journalists, artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement. This is why the fight for a higher minimum wage is crucial to uniting service workers with the alienated college-educated sons and daughters of the old middle class. Bakunin, unlike Marx, considered déclassé intellectuals essential for successful revolt.

It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast-food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us. 'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,' Anatole France commented acidly.


Meer Later.



comments_image 13 COMMENTS

Matt Taibbi: The SuperRich in America Have Become 'Untouchables' Who Don't Go to Prison

Taibbi discusses his new book, "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap."
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, attorney James Kidney, who was retiring from the Securities and Exchange Commission, gave a widely reported speech at his retirement party. He said that his bosses were too, quote, "tentative and fearful" to hold Wall Street accountable for the 2008 economic meltdown. Kidney, who joined the SEC in 1986, had tried and failed to bring charges against more executives in the agency’s 2010 case against Goldman Sachs. He said the SEC has become, quote, "an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors. ... Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening," he said.
Well, for more, we turn to our guest, Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist, formerly with Rolling Stone magazine, now with First Look Media. His new book is called  The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.
Matt, we welcome you back to Democracy Now! It’s a remarkable, important, certainly needed book in this day and age. Talk about the thesis. What is the divide?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, this book grew out of my experience covering Wall Street. I’ve obviously been doing it since the crash in 2008. And over and over again, I would cover these very complex and often very socially destructive capers committed by white-collar criminals. And the punchline to all of the stories were basically the same: Nobody would get indicted; nobody went to jail. And after a while, I started to become interested specifically in that phenomenon. Why was there no enforcement of any of this? And around the time of the Occupy protest, I decided to write this book, and then I shifted my focus to try to learn a lot more for myself about who does go to jail in this country, because I thought you really can’t make this comparison accurately until you learn about both sides of the equation, because it’s actually much more grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white-collar criminals when you do consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everybody else.
AARON MATÉ: Now, you spent time with the—with the poor and vulnerable and people of color, who have been targeted by this system. There was one case of a man in New York, who lives in Bed-Stuy, standing outside of his home who was arrested. Can you take it from there?
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, sure. I was in a law office in Brooklyn, and I was actually waiting to speak to a lawyer about another case, when I met this 35-year-old African-American man, a bus driver. And I asked him what he was there for, and he told me that he had been arrested for, quote-unquote, "obstructing pedestrian traffic." And I thought he was kidding. You know, I didn’t know what that meant. And I asked him to show me his summons, and he pulled out a little—little piece of pink paper, and there it was. It was written, you know, "obstructing pedestrian traffic," which it turns out it meant that he was standing in front of his own house at 1:00 in the morning, and the police just didn’t like the way he looked and arrested him.
And this is part of the disorderly conduct statute here in New York, but this is one of these offenses that people get roped in for. It’s part of what a city councilman in another city called an "epidemic of false arrests," basically these new stats-based police strategies. The whole idea is to rope in as many people as you can, see how many of them have guns or warrants, and then basically throw back the innocent ones. But the problem is they don’t throw back everybody. They end up sweeping up a lot of innocent people and charging them with really pointless crimes.

http://www.alternet.org/books/matt-taibbi-superrich-america-have-become-untouchables-america-who-dont-go-prison?akid=11721.56814.7kWcFC&rd=1&src=newsletter982158&t=7
En ondertussen gaat de westerse mainstream propaganda onweersproken voort, terwijl het neoliberale Washington en Wall Street de neoliberale macht in Brussel dreigt mee te trekken in nog meer grootscheeps zinloos geweld. 

UKRAINE ON THE BRINK




The Dollar  
Vigilante
Wednesday,April 16, 2014
Even The US Government Will Abandon The Dollar

[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Berwick]

For millions it is already too late.
They won't realize the geopolitical winds which are now blowing.  Off in their own lala land, the average American will be focused on sports, celebrities, what the right amount of stealing (taxes) in society is, gay rights, which foreign countries "we" should bomb next, the first woman president, and so on and so forth, while their livelihoods are sacrificed in the name of the US government.
They will wake up one morning, and their prospects will be gloomier than they are now. Don't think such a thing happens? This exact thing just happened in the Ukraine. Devastation. People wake up one morning and all the sudden everything they had worked so hard for is gone. "Oh, but that's Ukraine!" you might say. "Not here in the US."
Well, when you realize that a lot of the policies now being instituted in Ukraine were supported by the US government and the International Monetary Fund, which is largely funded by the US government, then maybe, just maybe you will start to see things differently. If not, I understand. Public schools are not kind institutions to reason. If that's not reason enough just consider the growing police state.
Jim Rogers recently discussed with Yahoo! Finance how all western governments are bankrupt, which we cover regularly, stating "There is no sound currency anymore...There's no paper money in 2014 and 2015 that's going to be worth much of anything."
Bloomberg recently reported that the US dollar reached a two-year low, it's weakest level since November 2011. Furthermore, the US dollar has lost 38.5% of its value since 2002.  Rogers predicted the US will soon abandon the dollar for another currency! 
"For the first time in recorded history we have all major banks and central governments around the world printing huge amounts of money," Rogers said. "This has never happened in world history and so the world is floating on an artificial ocean... of lots and lots of printed money," said Rogers.
"The debt is going higher and higher. The money printing is going higher and higher.  We've had 50 or 60 years of success in America," he said. "You've got to pay the price someday whether you like it or not. The longer you delay the day of reckoning, the worse the day of reckoning is going to be.  This is not going to be fun."
THE SOLUTION
"Abolish the Federal Reserve," Rogers stated. "The world has gotten along quite famously and well without central banks for most of world history."
"America has had three central banks in our history, the first two disappeared," he said. "This one's going to disappear too because they keep taking on huge amounts of debt... they keep leveraging up the balance sheet... they keep making mistake after mistake... they're printing money, it's going to self-destruct before it's over...We'd be better off with no central bank than this central bank."
EVERY LAST PENNY
It's no wonder why the IRS, Social Security and Treasury are going after hardworking ordinary Americans. The government is flat out broke! They must simply get their hands on as much cash as possible, as quickly as possible, to delay the inevitable - US dollar abandonment and inevitable collapse.
We reported last week how the Bureau of Land Management invaded Nevada in order to ready the land to be passed onto the Chinese. As you see, the US government is in so much debt, it is selling off parcels of land to creditors. But before it does that, it will have to go to war with the American people... Many government officials have confirmed the standoff there is not over and Ron Paul has warned against a WACO style siege.
Then, just yesterday, we reported how Social Security and Treasury are stealing tax refunds to satisfy decade old debts...oftentimes parents' debts. (it turns out this recently was ceased until further investigation, a testament to how getting the word out can change things for the better)
The feds are so desperate they are pondering taxing employee perks like free food at lavish cafeterias, laundry and even yoga.
We here at The Dollar Vigilante know this information can be overwhelming. The sad thing is, we are not being hyperbolic. We cannot underscore in a daily blog the severity of the situation in which we find ourselves.
CONCLUSION
Something big is going on behind the scenes. Bankers are committing suicide or being murdered, and the finance minister of Canada just died. We are turning a corner and all of the debts and money printing is going to have a massive effect possibly as soon as this year, as Jim Rogers notes.  Precious metals have been in a consolidation period for years now, and TDV anticipated this and told our premium readers to go long cash, but now I personally am turning hyperbullish on precious metals, precious metals stocks and aggressive on shorting the overall stock market and I will write more about this in the April issue of TDV.  (For more information on our subscriber area,  click here.) 
Capital controls have been ratcheted up across the entire world. We've been covering the slow progression here, and with Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act coming into full effect July 1st, 2014, we believe we are in the final months when Americans can easily get their money outside of the US. If you have assets in the US, you're on the precipice of being too late! You should be running, not walking, to the lifeboats. Remember, even the US government will be forced to abandon the dollar.  
At the TDV Wealth Management Crisis Conference the experts at TDV Wealth Management will set you on the right footing to survive The End Of The Monetary System As We Know It. (TEOTMSAWKI)  If you are unsure if the conference meets your needs feel free to email or call us for a free consultation on your affairs. You can email us at crisisconference@tdvwealthmanagement.com or call +1-646-568-5518 Ext. 516.
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Anarcho-Capitalist.  Libertarian.  Freedom fighter against mankind’s two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks.  Jeff Berwick is the founder of The Dollar Vigilante, CEO of TDV Media & Services and host of the popular video podcast,Anarchast.  Jeff is a prominent speaker at many of the world’s freedom, investment and gold conferences as well as regularly in the media including CNBC, CNN and Fox Business.



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