The
Media exists for the purposes of the corporate and government elites.
These purposes include preventing ordinary Americans from having any
say in their own government. The Media survives as a business only
because ordinary Americans give them their money. We are the base of
the pyramid, holding it all up.
We
pay them to destroy our country. We are like crack addicts. We pay them
for some vapid thrills, and our lives and the lives of our children are
forfeit. Think: 40 million cable subscribers at say $50 a month. 1
million people cutting the chains of cable times $50 a month times
12 months means a loss of $600 million a year to cable. With 2, 3, 5
million, we could force the breakup of the cable cartels in a very
short time.
Same goes for newspapers, magazines, network shows
(through advertisers), PBS, NPR, etc etc. Given the real purpose of
Media--to keep us out--can you think of anything more effective in
changing their policies than removing their income, and telling them we want a media that informs us?
If we had a free press we would have seen something like this weeks ago:
In
regards to what John Conyers over the weekend reportedly described as
"the smoking bullet in the smoking gun", a letter has just been sent to
Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, asking questions about the
recent reports that the U.S. and U.K. stepped up their air attacks in
the Iraqi "No-Fly-Zone" prior to the war in "an attempt to provoke
Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war."
A draft version of Conyers' letter was published over the holiday weekend by RAW STORY.
This
latest information on the covert way in which the Bush Administration
may have pushed the world towards war is based on a new report from
Rupert Murdoch's London Times which reported over the weekend that
"despite the lack of an Iraqi reaction, the air war began anyway in
September [of 2002] with a 100-plane raid."
In fact, the
original Downing Street Memo/Minutes mention that "The Defence
Secretary said that the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to
put pressure on the regime."
Concerning the latest report, Conyers writes in his letter to Rumsfeld today:
If
true, these assertions indicate that not only had the Administration
secretly and perhaps illegally agreed to go to war by the summer of
2002, but it also took specific and tangible military actions before
asking Congress or the United Nations for authority, and absent an
actual or imminent threat.
Thus, while there is considerable
doubt as to whether the U.S. had authority to invade Iraq, given, among
other things, the failure of the U.N. to issue a follow-up resolution
to the November 8, 2002, Resolution 1441, it would seem that the act of
engaging in military action via stepped up bombing raids that were not
in response to an actual or imminent threat before our government asked
for military authority would be even more problematic from a legal as
well as a moral perspective.
...He then goes on to ask Rumsfeld
for a response to the following questions, along with a request for
"any memorandum, notes, minutes, documents, phone and other records,
e-mails, computer files (including back-up records) or other material
of any kind or nature concerning or relating thereto which are in the
possession of or accessible by the Department of Defense."
Did
the RAF and the United States military increase the rate that they were
dropping bombs in Iraq in 2002? If so, what was the extent and timing
of the increase?
What was the
justification for any such increase in the rate of bombing in Iraq at
this time? Was this justification reviewed by legal authorities in the
U.S.?
To the best of your
knowledge, was there any agreement with any representative of the
British government to engage in military action in Iraq before
authority was sought from the Congress or the U.N.? If so, what was the
nature of the agreement?
Conyers, along with 88
members of Congress recently sent a letter to George W. Bush asking for
information concerning the now-infamous Downing Street Memo (actually
Minutes, not a Memo) which was also first reported by Murdoch's paper.
That document -- written a full eight months prior to the war --
revealed, amongst other things, that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and
WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
It
also goes on to say that "Bush had made up his mind to take military
action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin.
Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was
less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
The members of
Congress have yet to receive a response from the White House, though
neither the Bush nor Blair Administrations have disputed the
authenticity of the information contained within the minutes.
An
alliance of citizens groups has recently been formed at
AfterDowningStreet.org to petition congress to launch a "Resolution of
Inquiry" into the matter. A congressional "Resolution of Inquiry" is
considered the first step towards Presidential Impeachment. (Both The
BRAD BLOG and Velvet Revolution, which we helped to co-found, are
members of that alliance.)
Conyers also has asked citizens to
sign the same letter they sent to Bush, and has promised to
hand-deliver it to the White House once he receives at least 100,000
signature.
Sign the letter here.Write to your Congresspeople here.
With
the rapid decline of global oil supplies, the United States is heading
for an economic crash unlike anything since the 1930s. And the collapse
of the dollar will affect every nation on earth.
This
is the chilling warning from academic Richard Heinberg of the New
College of California. Heinberg is in Cape Town, South Africa, this
week to share his views on what governments and societies need to do to
mitigate the imminent global crisis after world oil production peaks.
"It's
too late to maintain a 'business as usual' attitude. What is required
is to manage the change that peak oil will bring in a way that causes
the fewest casualties. This must be done at an economic and
geopolitical level, to fend off resource wars. The US invasion of Iraq
is clearly a resource war," Heinberg said on Monday.
Global oil discovery peaked in the 1960s and oil production is likely to peak as soon as 2007. With a world economy based on fossil fuel, the economic and social consequences will be dire.
In his most recent book, Power Down: options and actions for a post-carbon world, Heinberg describes the options available to avoid catastrophe.
Wearing
a T-shirt that read: "Wake up! You are here," with an arrow pointing to
a graph of a peak in oil production, Heinberg said world governments
were aware of the pending crisis. The United States department of
energy had commissioned a report on the probable impacts of "peak oil",
the point at which global oil production will no longer meet demand,
which was released in February.
"The report was compiled
mainly by ex-CIA people. The CIA has always kept a close watch on
resources. They found that peak oil would provide the US and the world
with an 'unprecedented risk and management problem'.
"They say if they have 10 years to prepare, the economic and social chaos could be minimised. But
if it's less, the US will face a serious problem and the government
will have to manage it without public input. For that, read martial law. The report found oil price volatility will increase to unprecedented levels," Heinberg said.
The
US response is not to cut oil consumption by making major lifestyle
changes, and scale back on economic activity, but to use the military
to maintain control over oil in the Middle East.
"The long-range plan is for the West to control the Middle East by the military so it can control the price of oil."
This
was formalised as far back as 1979 by former US president Jimmy Carter,
in what became known as the Carter Doctrine, which stated that America
would use the military to maintain access to the oil reserves in the
Middle East.
Clearly we need to find substitutes for oil, says Heinberg, but the available energy alternatives are not reassuring.
Natural
gas extraction will peak a few years after oil, extraction rates for
coal will peak in decades, nuclear energy is dogged by unresolved
problems of waste disposal and solar and wind energy will have to
undergo rapid expansion if they are to replace even a fraction of the
energy shortfall from oil. And the enthusiasm about a hydrogen economy
comes from politics rather than science, he said.
"Our real problem is that we are trapped in a perpetual growth machine.
As long as modern societies need economic growth to stave off collapse
(given existing debt-and-interest-based national currencies), we will
continue to require ever more resources yearly. But the Earth has limited resources.
"The
energy conundrum is thus intimately tied to the fact that we anticipate
perpetual growth within a finite system," Heinberg said.
He sketches four main options available in response:
Following the US leadership in competing for remaining resources through wars;
Wishful thinking that the market or science will come to the rescue;
Assuming that we are already in the early
stages of disintegration, devoting our energies to preserving the most
worthwhile cultural achievements of the past few centuries.
"Powering down" - reducing
energy resource use drastically through economic sacrifice, reducing
the population size and developing alternative energy sources.
"The sooner we choose wisely, the better off we and our descendants will be," Heinberg said.
The
Media exists for the purposes of the corporate and government elites.
These purposes include preventing ordinary Americans from having any
say in their own government. The Media survives as a business only
because ordinary Americans give them their money. We are the base of
the pyramid, holding it all up.
With
the rapid decline of global oil supplies, the United States is heading
for an economic crash unlike anything since the 1930s. And the collapse
of the dollar will affect every nation on earth. 
