MUST READ !! Webster Tarpley on the Bailout (and the jackals bringing you The Plan hahahaha)

NO To The Paulson-Bernanke
Derivatives Scam Bailout
Bail Out the American People, Not Wall Street!

An Economic Recovery Strategy for Protectionists,
Dirigists, Mercantilists, and Populists

By Webster G. Tarpley
9-23-8

WASHINGTON DC -- The grand theft bailout now being rammed through Congress by Treasury Secretary Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, and other officials of the Bush regime with the help of accomplices Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and other parliamentarians is a monstrosity for the ages, combining every hideous feature of monetarism, elitism, oligarchism, and sheer feckless incompetence. It is to all intents and purposes a national suicide note of the United States of America, a contract with the devil that absolutely guarantees irrevocable national decline. For any person of goodwill there can be only one impulse at the present moment, and that is to stop this bailout -- to block it, to sabotage it, to bottle it up, to load it with killer amendments, and to do everything legally possible to stop this insane design from going through.

IF MCCAIN VOTES AGAINST THE BAILOUT, HE WILL WIN THE PRESIDENCY

In political terms, McCain is now running well to the left of Obama on this issue, with a much stronger populist profile. McCain has attacked the outrageous greed and corruption of Wall Street. Obama does not dare attack Wall Street, since these are his masters. Obama, sounding like Milton Friedman, only attacks Washington. Obama has said that he will support whatever Paulson demands. That is not a surprise, since Paulson represents Goldman Sachs, and Obama is a wholly owned property of Goldman Sachs, which is his single biggest source of campaign contributions. Obama is a creature of Brzezinski, Soros, and Rockefeller, and without them he has no existence; Obama is an abject Wall Street puppet, an agent of finance capital. This week, both senators will have to decide how they vote on the odious derivatives bailout. Obama will surely vote in favor of it, since this is what Wall Street demands. If McCain votes against it, he will most probably propel himself into the White House on the model of Give 'Em Hell Harry in 1948. Filthy corrupt Democrats like Schumer are already attacking McCain as the new Huey Long. Huey Long, the Louisiana populist of the 1930s, had many positive features, and we could certainly use a good dose of Huey Long in this country to counteract the elitism, oligarchism, condescension, and arrogant snobbery of foundation operatives like Obama. The bailout is already very unpopular ­ 72% of all voters are opposed to it ­ and it will become more and more hated when it becomes clear that it is also a failure. McCain's course is clear. Will he have the brains and guts to cross Obama's T on this vital issue?

PAULSON OF GOLDMAN SACHS, WOULD-BE FINANCE DICTATOR

Paulson is a ruthless and brutal eco-freak usurer who learned his trade at the Goldman Sachs stock-jobbing operation. He is now the leading member of the committee of public safety which rules in Washington, and which includes Gates, Rice, and Mullen. He now demands the astronomical sum of 700 billion dollars for the bailout of mortgage-backed derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and other poisonous derivatives. Make no mistake -- this is not a bailout of homeowners who are threatened with foreclosure; it is a bailout of the lunatic house of cards which desperate bankers have built on these mortgages using derivatives. The entire crisis is not a crisis of subprime mortgages, it is a crisis of the derivatives bubble which was launched by Wendy Gramm of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and Greenspan of the Fed with the connivance of Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs and Citibank, and others in the Clinton administration, some 15 years ago.

These derivatives now amount to a total worldwide notional value that can be estimated between 1 quadrillion and two quadrillion US dollars. [!!!!!!!!!!!] This sum is so large that it dwarfs the total value of the entire planet earth and all those who live here. Compared to the cancerous, bloated, and fictitious mass of derivatives which is at the root of this crisis, the $700 billion demanded by politicians, large as this may seem, is nothing but a drop in the bucket. And a drop in the bailout bucket is what it will be. The mass of world derivatives between $1 and $2 quadrillion represents an insatiable black hole which is capable of putting an end, not just to civilization, but the human life itself. The moral choice could not be clearer: humanity will either destroy the derivatives bubble in our time, or the derivatives bubble will surely destroy humanity. Those are the stakes in the current exercise.

Paulson and Bernanke, both lawyers for the Wall Street jackals, lampreys, vultures and hyenas, argue that the public interest demands a bailout of their cronies at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wachovia, and the other large money center institutions. Before the American public antes up $700 billion just for openers in the game of genocidal poker which run by the infernal croupiers Paulson and Bernanke, we would be very well advised to examine the veracity of this premise.

COMMERCIAL BANKS ARE INDISPENSABLE

It is of course true that the healthy functioning of the United States economy requires a viable and flexible system of commercial banks. No one should doubt the necessity of commercial banks.

Andrew Jackson was clinically insane on this point, and he still has not a few followers around today. But it ought to be clear that without the services of a well developed commercial banking system, it is impossible to organize business activities as essential as payments, deposits, checking, payrolls, and the discounting of short-term commercial paper, bills of exchange, bills of lading, and all the credit instruments that are intimately connected with real productive activity. Without a functioning commercial banking system, the economic heart of the United States would stop beating, as it briefly did at the end of the Hoover administration in March of 1933. Without commercial banks, no wheel of a factory or railroad can turn, and no commodities can move to show up in supermarkets.

JPM, CITI, BoA ARE DERIVATIVES MONSTERS, NOT COMMERCIAL BANKS

But when we look at institutions like J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America, we become aware that these large money center institutions have become detached from any conceivable connection to the world of production, wages, transportation, and all other useful and productive activities. These institutions are not commercial banks any more in any meaningful sense of the term. Ten years ago, in the midst of the Asian financial crisis and the aftermath of the Russian GKO state bankruptcy collapse, the boss of JP Morgan Chase went on television to announce that his bank was specialized in the "risk business." The risk business meant that JP Morgan Chase, had simply given up on the traditional activity of commercial banks, which was primarily to provide loans to corporations for productive investment in plant and equipment that would also create well-paid industrial jobs. J.P. Morgan Chase decided long ago that that activity was nowhere near profitable enough to be continued.

Instead, J.P. Morgan Chase devoted itself more and more to the issuance, sale, and purchase of derivatives. As early as 1992, the best definition of J.P. Morgan Chase was that it was no longer a commercial bank but rather a derivatives monster. In 2002, the J.P. Morgan Chase derivatives monster came very close to imploding, collapsing in on itself like the hopeless black hole that it still remains to the present day. According to the most recent report of the Comptroller of the Curreny of the US Treasury dated September 30, 2007, JP Morgan Chase today has between $90 trillion and $100 trillion of derivatives. In reality this is a very low-ball estimate, and the real derivatives exposure is some multiple of this figure ­ perhaps $300 or $400 trillion, especially now that Bear Stearns, a smaller black hole of derivatives has been absorbed. But even a mere $90 trillion is already six times the US GDP (currently estimated between $14 and $15 trillion).

DERIVATIVES ARE FINANCIAL AIDS

The question of the derivatives is once again the central issue of the crisis. Most people may not even know what derivatives are, although by now many have some idea that they are dangerous and toxic. French President Jacques Chirac once defined derivatives as financial aids, and he was right. A share of stock supposedly represents part ownership in a corporation. A corporate bond is a debt instrument issued by a corporation, with some claim to a part of the assets in case of bankruptcy liquidation. That means that the stocks and bonds are paper, but paper that is at only one remove from the real world of production, consumption, employment, and wages. The derivative is something radically different.

A derivative represents paper based on paper, no longer a stock or bond, but a future, option, or index that is based on some stock, bond, or other form of paper. Derivatives are therefore at least one step further removed from the world of tangible physical commodity production of useful items which humanity requires in order to survive and to conduct civilization as we know it. In addition to the options, futures, and indices, we have all the possible permutations and combinations of the above, with new variations that are almost infinite. Even to catalogue these would take a book. In addition to these exchange traded derivatives, there is a much larger class of derivative which does not appear on the Chicago Board Options Exchange or analogous institutions in all the money centers of the world. The second and larger class represents the counterparty derivatives, including such things as collateralized debt obligations, mortgage backed securities, structured notes, credit default swaps, and the myriad of other derivative products.

These derivatives were originally supposed to be used as a hedge against risk, but before too long they began to represent the biggest single source of risk and the entire lunatic edifice would finance. By now, to repeat this point yet again, the total world derivatives of in excess of one quadrillion dollars -- that is to say, 1000 billion dollars, and may be already approaching the neighborhood of $1.5 quadrillion or even more. One of the inherent problems of derivatives is that nobody knows this exact figure, since derivatives are not reportable in many countries and tend to escape regulation by the proper financial authorities.

DERIVATIVES ARE USELESS AND A THREAT TO CIVILIZATION

You cannot eat derivatives. You cannot live in a derivative. You cannot wear derivatives as clothing, nor can you drive a derivative work. You cannot sail in them or fly in them. They cannot be used as tools of any useful trade. They are not computers, not machine tools, not pharmaceutical equipment, not agricultural implements.

Derivatives are therefore totally outside the realm of capital goods production needs, no matter how these may be defined.

FOR RECOVERY, WIPE OUT, SHRED, DELETE ALL DERIVATIVES

J.P. Morgan Chase, therefore, performs no useful or productive social function, and there is absolutely no reason in the world why the people of the United States should want to bail out this pernicious and socially destructive institution. It has probably been several decades since J.P. Morgan Chase created a single modern productive job. J.P. Morgan Chase's strategic commitment in favor of the derivatives bubble means essentially that we can easily dispense with most of the functions of this self-styled "bank," really a casino. Instead of being bailed out, J.P. Morgan Chase ought therefore to be seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and put through chapter 11 bankruptcy. In the course of that bankruptcy reorganization, the entire derivatives book of J.P. Morgan Chase must be deleted, shredded, used as a Yule log, or employed to stoke a festive bonfire of the derivatives. The world did much better when there were no derivatives, and will get along just fine without them.

Derivatives were of very dubious legality in general and were illegal in some of their specific forms until the mid-1990s.

INSTRUMENTS MEANS DERIVATIVES

According to Paulson's pact with the devil published in the New York Times on September 20, 2008, the Secretary of the Treasury is supposed to be empowered by Congress to spend $700 billion on mortgage related securities, obligations, and instruments. That last word instruments is the favorite euphemism of television commentators and journalists who want to propose a derivatives bailout without using this word, which has now become to some degree unmentionable and taboo, presumably because of its highly negative connotations left over from the crises of more than a decade ago. Accordingly, one very good killer amendment that ought to be added to this pact with the devil should state that not one penny of taxpayer money should ever be used to finance the purchase of derivatives, no matter how they may be euphemistically referred to.

WHY BUY MORTGAGE BACKED SECURITIES THAT HAVE NO PRICE BID?

Paulson wants to buy up derivatives. But at what price? Derivatives have no intrinsic value. Like the rasbucknik in the old L'il Abner comic strip, derivatives have negative value, since somebody has to be paid to cart them away. Counterparty derivatives currently have no price, since there is no market where they are trading, and nobody would want to buy them if there were such a market. Collateralized debt obligations were selling at 5 cents on the dollar a few weeks ago, but that was well before the current crisis broke in its full fury. So how will Paulson know how much to pay for the derivatives he wants to purchase? Will he use the discredited Black-Sholes model, which led to the bankruptcy of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund ten years ago? Given all this, the only price which can be assigned to the mass of derivatives is not their notional value, but rather a big fat ZERO. Anything else is stealing from the government.

"INVESTMENT BANKS" DRIVE UP THE PUMP PRICE OF GASOLINE

Let us now leave behind the category of the commercial banks and move on to institutions like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the stock jobbing operations or counting houses that like to call themselves investment banks these days, even though they do not have the status of a commercial bank and are not members of the Federal Reserve. Why should any public money at all be used to prolong the noxious lives of these sociopathic and pernicious institutions? A short examination of what these so-called investment banks do will reveal that there is no public interest in keeping these creatures alive, and that, once again, touch better off without them.

Investment banks used to assist corporations and floating issues of stocks or bonds on the financial markets. Investment banks were supposed to function as the advisers of industrial corporations and other corporations as they sought to raise capital needed for new plant, equipment, and jobs. But today, these functions have virtually disappeared. The investment banks do a certain amount of work in initial public offerings for IPOs of new securities, but these are almost always of a financially speculative nature. The main thing is that investment banks now place bets on certain classes of assets in the hope of turning a purely speculative profit for themselves. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley maintain trading desks and engage in purely speculative trading of assets which they themselves own, and most of the time these assets represent derivatives of one kind or another. In recent times, the most important asset class which Goldman Sachs and MorganStanley have been trading is probably future indices on commodities, especially oil. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley between them have in the past year by various estimates accounted for about half of the speculative activity in the commodities markets of London, New York, and other money centers which brought about the doubling of the per barrel price of oil between July 2007 and July 2008, increasing the cost of gasoline to almost five dollars per gallon.

GOLDMAN SACHS, MORGAN STANLEY CREATE I.C.E. TO FLAY AMERICANS

In a very real sense, American motorists filling their gas tanks at the pump at exorbitant prices have been involuntarily subsidizing the speculative derivatives activity of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. [absolutely true! This is a hidden tax that discriminates against the poor and working class!] How bitterly ironic that the same American motorists should now be taxed in order to permit their tormentors to live on and to continue to mercilessly loot them. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley found that even the very weak regulatory regime maintained here in the United States under the auspices of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was too onerous for them because it slightly constrained their rapacious quest for speculative profits at the expense of the American people. These two investment banks therefore created a new speculative commodity exchange, the ICE or Intercontinental Exchange located in London, with a regulatory regime is virtually nonexistent. The ICE or Intercontinental Exchange in London is where about half of the world
futures contracts in oil have been trading in recent months.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, like their now-defunct brethren Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, have also made many speculative investments in the area of mortgage backed securities based on predatory subprime mortgages. The adjustable rate mortgages that underlie these derivatives should have been declared illegal long ago. But now let us imagine what will happen if a hapless victim of these predatory lending practices is forced into foreclosure in the current world economic great depression.

Goldman Sachs will send the bailiff to your door to throw you, your family, and your belongings out on the street, even though you have been taxed to permit Goldman Sachs to continue its sociopathic existence. You will in effect be robbed out of one pocket even as you are being pushed out the door and made homeless by the same institution which has been the beneficiary of your forced charity.

Surely any politician daring to come forward to suggest the public bailout of Goldman Sachs so that it can continue to enforce foreclosures against the American citizens who are paying the bill for the financial excesses of this bandit institution ought to be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. Yet this is exactly what Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, and Frank are proposing to force through the U.S. Congress in the coming week. This represents a new low in public morality.

With Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the situation is slightly different, but the same criteria ought to apply. Fanny and Freddie worked very well during the three decades after the formation of Fannie Mae in 1938 as an agency of the federal government -- a hillbilly cousin of the US treasury, as it used to be called.

Things began to go wrong in 1968 when Fannie Mae was privatized, under the pernicious influence of the doctrines of the monetarist Milton Friedman of the infamous Chicago school of pseudo-economics and obscurantism. Fanny and Freddie have now been placed under the control of conservators, but they ought to be nationalized as part of a permanent state sector of the US economy, and operated as the public utility that they were intended to be. The salaries of their officials ought to be determined by the government-wide GSA schedule. Fannie and Freddie have guaranteed mortgages, and ought to continue to do so. But they have no obligation to guarantee mortgage backed securities or any other form of newfangled derivatives which were never mentioned in their charter.

Accordingly, Fannie and Freddie thought to strip away the mortgage backed securities that have been used to package or bundle the mortgages that they now hold. The mortgages represent a valuable asset for the future, under conditions of economic recovery which we intend to organize. But that extra layer of derivatives paper represents a useless additional tax on the public treasury, which the US government has no obligation to maintain. In short, it is time to separate the socially useful core of actual mortgages representing residential and commercial properties from the harmful and speculative overlay of the mortgage-backed security. By this kind of financial engineering, speculators can receive condign punishment, even as the public treasury is believed of an extra layer useless payment which would only reward speculative crimes.

If anyone should inquire as to the ultimate philosophical causes of the current George Bush world economic depression, the answer is simple: this depression is a direct result of the influence of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school, who are themselves to kind of come down American version of the Viennese school of Friedrich von Hayek. Ludwig von Mises, and other charlatans masquerading as economists. The common denominator of the Chicago school is the Vienna school which is represented by the right-wing anarchist thesis that government is always bad and the private sector, especially speculators, are always good. This absurd thesis is now being consigned to the dustbin of history. Friedman and von Hayek, if they were alive today, would doubtless demand the full fury of the free market the unleashed against the American people. This would lead, not to a recovery, but merely to death on a large scale.

The implications of the Chicago school and the Vienna school under current circumstances are nothing short of genocidal, and even the financiers are hastily dumping the discredited doctrines of Friedman and from Hayek as they rush to get their hands into the public till through bigger and better bailouts in an endless series. There is nothing anywhere in the world left today that might resemble a free market, only an endless list of cartels, trusts, monopolies, oligopolies, duopolies, and other conspiracies in restraint of trade. In fact, there has been nothing even vaguely resembling a free market in most of the world in the past several centuries. What is collapsing today in September 2008 is the delusion that such a thing as a free market might exist in the modern world.

The same negative judgment applies to the lunatic doctrines of Joseph Schumpeter, who preached the madness of creative destruction as a way out of the world economic depression of the 1930s.

Schumpeter's doctrines today are nothing less than a public menace, and persons who demand a deflationary crash of the world economy by preaching the Andrew Mellon formula of liquidating labor, liquidating stocks, liquidating bonds, liquidating real estate, etc., are to be put in a padded cell. This is even worse than Herbert Hoover. It was tried in 1932-33, and it turned out to be a bottomless pit already then, so it does not need to be tried again.

BACK TO THE NEW DEAL: RESTORE THE GLASS-STEAGAL FIREWALL

Scribblers like Friedman and von Hayek were paid by finance oligarchs to wage a relentless war against that heritage of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal, the set of policies which allowed humanity to survive the Great Depression of the 1930s. The current crisis would not have been possible in the present form if the institutional safeguards enacted during the New Deal had been left in place, as they should have been. These safeguards represent permanent features of civilization, and they need to be restored. The best example is the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act under the Clinton administration in 1999. The Glass-Steagall Act was a classic piece of New Deal legislation which established that being a commercial bank and being a stockbroker are mutually exclusive activities that could not be legally combined in the same company.

Commercial banking was one thing, and stock brokerage was something completely separate. Naturally, the greedy financiers and their spokesmen clamored for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and they finally got their wish. Now less than 10 years later all of the Wall Street banks, seemingly without notable exceptions, are bankrupt and insolvent institutions that cannot not survive without a massive infusion of taxpayer money. We need to restore Glass- Steagal, which will mean among other things that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will not be eligible to become bank holding companies after all. If you don't like your tax bill next year, you should thank Newt Gingrich and others who made it their business to destroy and roll back the achievements of the New Deal in the name of the despicable ideology of monetarism as preached by Friedman and von Hayek. Newt, by the way, is now calling for an immediate deflationary crash to find out what the real prices of housing might be. This is like doing experiments on your own flesh, and Newt should go to the funny farm.

BACK TO THE NEW DEAL: RESTORE THE UPTICK RULE

Another example is the uptick rule. This New Deal measure meant that it was illegal to sell a stock short if it were continuously in decline. The speculator had to wait until there was an uptick, meaning a trade in which the stock in question increased in price; only then could a short sale be carried out. Another piece of bitter irony inherent in the present crisis is that this uptick rule was abolished by the feckless and incompetent Chairman Cox of the Securities and Exchange Commission at the beginning of last summer, just in time for the explosion of the world credit crisis which has led to the current world economic depression. Incredibly enough, Chairman Cox of the SEC has been unable to pull himself together long enough to permanently re-impose the uptick rule.

Instead, he has drawn up a list of 799 financial institutions and banks whose stock will now be illegal to sell short for at least 10 days, although one suspects that this prohibition will be prolonged indefinitely. This crackpot expedient reveals the true nature of the current monetarist regime. Shorting and destroying General Motors, which actually produces something useful, is fine, but no shorting of JP Morgan Chase, which is a public menace that produces nothing but toxic paper. The long-term roots of the current crisis go back to August 15, 1971, when Nixon, Kissinger, Arthur Burns and George Shultz wantonly destroyed the Bretton Woods system of fixed currency parities, ushering in the new world of financial risk which is now collapsing around us.

NATIONALIZE THE FEDERAL RESERVE AS A BUREAU OF THE TREASURY

The present crisis ought to provide the death warrant for the failed Federal Reserve System. When the Fed was created back under Woodrow Wilson, its Rockefeller and Morgan sponsors promised that the Fed would protect us against all future financial panics. The Fed failed once in 1929-1933, and now it is failing again for a second time. The Fed is worthless as a firewall against depression. We must therefore seize the Fed, audit it, nationalize it, and operate it in the future as a bureau of the US Treasury. From now on, we must go back to the Constitution, meaning that the size of the money supply and short-term interest rates will have to be determined by public laws of the United States, passed by the House and the Senate and signed by the president. Using this method, we can mandate new initial credit issues of $1 to $2 trillion to be used exclusively as low interest (.5% to 1%) and long-term (30 to 40 year maturities) credit for productive purposes only ­ manufacturing, farming, mining, commerce, energy production, infrastructure, and the other things we need. We should stop having the Fed lend money to Citibank at 2% and then having the Treasury borrow that same money back for 4% to 5% in the form of Treasury paper. Nationalize the Fed, and let the Treasury finance itself, cutting out the parasitical middlemen like JP Morgan Chase, Goldman, Citibank, and the rest. The taxpayers will be the big winners.

HOOVER'S RECONSTRUCTION FINANCE CORPORATION WAS A FAILURE

The Paulson-Bernanke $700 billion is roughly comparable (factoring in about 2000% inflation from 1932 to 2008) to the Herbert Hoover Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which started with $2 billion real 1932 dollars, but failed because it tried to prop up insolvent banks and shore up collapsing financial values. Under FDR, the RFC was put under Jesse Jones, who used it to create real plant and equipment with great success. Under Jones, the RFC contributed decisively to US economic recovery by building up the Metals Reserve Company, the Rubber Reserve Company, the Defense Plant Corporation, the Defense Supplies Corporation, the War Damage Corporation, the U.S. Commercial Company, the Rubber Development Corporation, and the Petroleum Reserve Corporation. In other words, the RFC under Jones rebuilt the industrial infrastructure which we have been using down to the present day. Most of these investments represented added physical commodity production.

Today, this could be repeated to produce infrastructure and energy plants for civilian use.

CLEARING THE DECKS FOR WORLD ECONOMIC RECOVERY

It is time to forget about paper and the price of paper, and to concentrate on production ­ securing the tangible physical commodities and hard commodity production which are necessary for human life and civilization. It is impossible to prop up financial values in a panic, and it is foolish to try. To secure a decent future, we must now enact the following measures. Any of these points, all of which seek to defend the general welfare and the public interest, can and should be used as killer amendments to be attached to the current bailout monstrosity as a means of bringing it down.

Stop all foreclosures on homes, farms, businesses, factories, mines, transport systems, for a period of at least five years or for the duration of the present world economic depression, whichever takes longer. If you throw a family out of their home or shut down a family farm, taxicab company, trucking firm, ferry, airline, railroad, or factory of any kind because of debt, you will be on your way to Leavenworth. All politicians now say that we have to keep families in their homes. Excellent! A uniform federal law with real teeth is the way to do it.

Seize bankrupt banks and financial institutions. Put them through Chapter XI bankruptcy, and cancel the hopelessly unpayable parts of their debts, starting with their derivatives book.

Wipe out all derivatives, whether exchange traded or counterparty, without compensation. They have always been illegal. They are now a threat to all of our lives. Not one penny of public money must go to buy derivatives.

Securities transfer tax or Tobin tax on all financial transactions, including stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, etc. This is a sales tax on finance oligarchs who need to start paying their fair share. This will take the life out of the booze for many speculators.

Stop oil, food and commodity speculation with comprehensive re- regulation including position limits, 50 to 100% margin requirements depending on market conditions, and by distinguishing between legitimate hedgers and predatory speculators.

No tax increases on households. Surtax for foundations like the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Annenberg, and Gates Foundations, who use their funds not for charity but for subversion and divide and conquer social engineering to divide and weaken the American people in defense of the financier interest.

Restore business confidence and credit with new credit issue through the nationalized Federal Reserve, operating under the legal auspices of the US Treasury. Use credit as a public utility. Provide cheap, long-term credit for productive purposes only, not parasitical speculation or financial services.

Institute an absolute guarantee for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, WIC, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and the other remaining elements of the social safety net. No "entitlement reform" under any circumstances. Austerity for bankers, not people. Use the proceeds from the Securities Transfer Tax to replenish the Social Security Trust Fund and preserve the other vital programs through the end of the twenty-first century.

Using New Deal methods, it is possible to stop a depression cold in a single day. We did it before, and we can do it again. Only 28% of the American people now support the monstrous derivatives bailout, with 37% opposed and 35% unsure, according to Rasmussen on Sept. 22. This is an issue powerful enough to crystallize the current party re-alignment in the same way that slavery in the territories did in 1860, or the last depression did in 1932. Within a month, the current empty husks of the gutted Democratic and Republican Parties could collapse, and be replaced by the pro-Wall Street Bailout Party led by Obama and his phalanx of rich elitists and Malthusian fanatics from both parties, and the pro-middle class and pro-worker Anti-Bailout Party with support from right-wing Republicans, libertarians, and working class Democrats. Who will have the brains and guts need to assert leadership over the Anti- Bailout Party? Will it be McCain? Or Hillary Clinton?

Or someone else? We will soon find out.

See also by Tarpley (he's real good on banking and the Federal Reserve):

http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2007/09/surviving_the_c.html

WAR CRIMES - ex-veep of Congo arrested on war crimes charges

Now this IS interesting !!

The US doesn't subscribe to the ICC (and PLENTY of people have complained about them overlooking US/UK/Israeli war crimes - amongst others).

BUT as the ICC gathers steam and comes up with the names involved in the GENOCIDE, I think we are going to see some big time US officials (and UK, too) get dragged down with the mess.

I saw the Hague come through this week and read my article about who invested in the CONGO.

This is maybe the first step in DOING something about the ongoing war crimes by the "coalition of the willing" cast of characters making huge buck$ off war profiteering. One can only hope, eh?

Veeger

May 24th, 2008

Ex-veep of Congo arrested on war crimes charges

Posted: 07:05 PM ET

(CNN) –An ex-rebel leader who served as a vice president of Congo was arrested near Brussels, Belgium on Saturday on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to International Criminal Court.

The independent high court — based in The Hague, Netherlands — issued an arrest warrant on Friday for Jean-Pierre Bemba. The court alleges that between October 2002 and March 2003, Bemba’s rebel group carried out a widespread attack against civilians in neighboring Central African Republic, primarily with rape — though the rebels also pillaged, tortured and committed “outrages upon personal dignity,” according to an ICC statement.

Bemba’s forces instigated the attack at the request of Ange-Felix Patasse, president of the republic, said Beatrice Le Fraper, deputy prosecutor with the ICC.

Some good AFRICAN BACKGROUND BELOW: (See also John Bredenkamp)

Darfurism, Uganda & US War in Africa: The Spectre of Continental Genocide

November 1, 2007
keith harmon snow / All Things Pass.com

President Bush meets with Uganda's President-for-life Yoweri Museveni on October 30, 2007. Meanwhile, a broad swath of Africa is engulfed in interrelated genocides and covert operations involving both the US and Uganda. There is a growing demand to probe the accounts of "Save Darfur" to find out how the tens of millions collected are being spent due to allegations of arms-deals and bribery. The SAVE DARFUR movement has become the false flag action of the West people who know little or nothing about what it is they are supporting.

http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-234DARFURISM%20UGANDA%20AND%20US%20WAR%20IN%20AFRICA%20%5B3%5D.htm

(October 29, 2007) —When President George Bush met with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni at the White House on October 30 they certainly discussed much more than “Uganda's leadership in Somalia, the Lord's Resistance Army, and President Museveni's development plan for northern Uganda” or their “strong partnership to combat malaria and HIV/AIDS in Uganda,” as announced by the White House Office of the Press Secretary.

The role of Yoweri Museveni and his “government” in service to the Western economic neoliberalism and the shock doctrine of deconstruction and chaos is greatly misunderstood and deeply camouflaged by simplified establishment narratives like those above. Bush and Museveni will discuss the U.S.-Uganda military relations and bilateral involvement in the ongoing wars in Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (“Congo” from here on refers only to DRC). The “partnership to combat malaria and HIV/AIDS” is camouflage language for military vaccination and bio-warfare programs involving pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer. (A vaccine for malaria was developed for the U.S. military some time ago and this is shared only with certain U.S. client state partners.)

The “development plan for northern Uganda” is euphemistic language for the ongoing depopulation and massive natural resource extraction (oil, gold, uranium) that today proceeds in northern Uganda in parallel with the genocide of the Acholi people and the militarization in Uganda’s border regions to support covert programs in Sudan and Congo. And they will discuss other things they don’t want the American public to be aware of.

The Darfur conflict rides along the fault line of continental warfare spread from Niger to through Chad to Djibouti and Somalia, and from eastern Congo and Rwanda, through Uganda and Sudan, to Eritrea and the Red Sea. Congo is at war with Uganda and Rwanda. Ethiopia is at war with Somalia, and poised to reinvade Eritrea. Ethiopia, Uganda and Chad are the three “frontline” states militarily destabilizing Sudan. Uganda is internally and externally at war.

Uganda has intervened secretly in Burundi and Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) and recently re-occupied towns in eastern Congo. Rwanda is internally at war, fighting in Eastern Congo, meddling in Burundi, and has some 2000 troops in Darfur. Khartoum backs guerrilla armies in Uganda, Chad and Congo.

The U.S. is all over the place, with both covert and overt military programs. All these conflicts are intertwined, and the targeted populations have allegiances and alliances dictated by the pre-colonial boundaries demarcated in 1885 by the imperial doctrine of divide and conquer.

Conflict involving U.S. covert forces and nomads in Niger and Nigeria, for example, impacts Sudan: the history of the Sahara revolves around the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, a Sudanese man who led the indigenous resistance against Britian in 1875. ‘Abdallah at-Ta‘ishi, the Mahdi’s “Khalifah” or successor, who took over as leader of the independent Sudan when the Mahdi died in June 1885, was a native of Darfur.

PEACE IS WAR IS PEACEKEEPING
On October 24, 2007, the United Nations awarded Lockheed-Martin subsidiary Pacific Architects and Engineers a $250 million no-bid contract to provide “infrastructure” for the United Nations “peacekeeping” missions now unfolding in Sudan (Darfur), Somalia, and Chad/Central Africa Republic. The newly announced contract is to build five new camps in Sudan's Darfur and Kordofan regions for 4,100 U.N. and African Union personnel. Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest and most secretive aerospace and defense corporation.

This is not Pacific Architects and Engineers’ first contract in Darfur, or in Africa’s “peacekeeping” missions. PAE won the contract for staffing the deeply compromised “Civilian Protection Monitoring Team” (CPMT) in Sudan under a U.S. State Department contract. In 2004 the CPMT office was being run by Brigadier General Frank Toney (retired), who was previously the commander of Special Forces for the United States Army; General Toney organized covert operations into Iraq and Kuwait in the first Gulf War.

Pratap Chaterjee reported in 2004 how “Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Bittrick, the deputy director of regional and security affairs for Africa at the State Department, flew to Ethiopia to hammer out an agreement to support African Union troops by committing to provide housing, office equipment, transport, and communications gear. This will be provided via an ‘indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity’ joint contract awarded to Dyncorp Corporation, and Pacific Architects & Engineers (PAE) worth $20.6 million.” PAE also set up MONUC operations in Congo.

Meanwhile, the “Save Darfur” advocates pressing military intervention in Darfur as a “humanitarian” gesture have escalated pressure in the face of mounting failures, including allegations that millions of “Save Darfur” dollars fundraised on a sympathy for victims platform have been misappropriated.

But the players, the private military companies, the arms dealers—and a handful of missing SRAM missiles armed with nuclear warheads dumped by an American B-52 before it crashed—are mostly unknown to the general public. These covert wars all involve different propaganda strategies to provide cover and deflect attention through “perception management”—managing the perceptions, stereotyping and creating false belief systems—of the North American and European public.

Ranking the humanitarian catastrophes, at the top by a long shot is Eastern Congo, followed by northern Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Chad, Central Africa Republic and—somewhere in the line but nowhere near Congo—Darfur, Sudan.

These humanitarian emergencies involve massive depopulation and death, internally displaced persons and trans-national refugees, all of which provide a lucrative business opportunity for Western “relief” and “development” organizations. Millions of people across the region are dying, while millions more are homeless, set adrift in a sea of nowhere, with no rights, no possessions, no protection and very little prospect for survival; their only hopes come from the false belief that the Western “humanitarian” AID enterprise is designed to rescue them.

The engagement of the world’s premier war-making industries—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Bechtel, SAIC—behind a so-called “peacekeeping” platform is not new, and something is seriously wrong with this picture.

THE 'SAVE DARFUR' NARRATIVE
“Save Darfur” is the predominant propaganda front running on Africa and it has overwhelmed the public consciousness with deceptions. In this establishment narrative Arabs on horseback, the Janjaweed, backed by the Sudan government seated in Khartoum, are the purveyors of genocide.

This mirrors the establishment narrative of Rwanda, 1994, which said that the Hutus and the nasty Interahamwe militias committed genocide against the Tutsis in 100 days of killing with machetes. The Rwanda genocide narrative—combined with the narrative about “humanitarian” intervention in Yugoslavia, where the final blow to dismember the country came with the NATO bombing campaign—set the stage for the Darfur genocide narrative.

All over the United States, Britain and Canada advocates and activists who claim to be concerned about human rights, and even those who otherwise would not get involved, have supported the “Save Darfur” movement, a political movement similar to the anti-Apartheid movement mobilized against South Africa in the 1980’s. The “Save Darfur” movement has resulted in a huge outpouring of funds, and it has mobilized support from people in all walks of life, and across the political spectrum, on the “never again” platform of “stopping genocide.”

Hollywood personalities dubbed “actorvists,” including Mia Farrow, Don Cheadle and George Clooney, have helped to whip up the “Save Darfur” hysteria. From Elie Wiesel to Barak Obama, people are “outraged” by genocide that the Bush Administration, we are told, is reluctant to stop. And it is hysteria, in the true definition of the word, but it did not simply rise out of a sudden concern for a bunch of Africans in some far off God-forsaken place (as it is portrayed).

At a “Voices for Darfur” fundraiser held on October 21, 2007 at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, for example, the local chapter of the Congregation B’Nai Israel Darfur Action coalition, raised over $14,000 for “humanitarian” aid to Darfur. The B’Nai Israel Save Darfur Coalition had a broad array of public and organizational support, including other Jewish organizations, Smith College, Northampton Mayor Claire Higgins, Massachusetts’ Senator Stan Rosenberg and Representative Peter Kocot.

The campaign organizers claim that “more than 90% goes to direct-on-the-ground AID.” Working with big humanitarian groups like Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children, it is impossible that 90% of funds will hit the ground in Darfur.

Behind the “Save Darfur” movement are fundamentalist organizations and think tanks with a deeply nationalistic, militaristic, religious fundamentalist agenda. One of these is the Center for Security Policy. The CSP, for example, supports the “star wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, Homeland Security—which is nothing more than expanding militarism and emasculated public rights—and the Biometric Security Project.

The BSP centers around emerging biological technologies that will be used to register, identify, monitor, track and control each and every U.S. citizen. They call it “identity assurance,” it involves state-of-the-art recognition equipment, sensors and security technologies, and it is a central component of the evolving national security and “counter-terrorism” apparatus.

The Center for Security Policy is part of the nerve center of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus, a deeply nationalist, neoliberal think-tank and flak organization promoting the all-out attack against non-cooperative governments—dubbed “rogue states”—peripheral to Western economic control.

These, of course, are primarily Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, North Korea and Cuba. Zimbabwe is a special case that has joined the list to some degree. What these states have in common is that they are all targeted for divestment by the Center for Security Policy brainchild, www.divestterror.org. Sudan is another of the “rogue states” targeted.

The establishment narrative on Darfur motivates U.S. citizens to take action to “Save Darfur,” thus facilitating popular support for heightened U.S. military involvement. The truth is that the United States military is already there, in its various incarnations, and it is involved in atrocities.

THE UGANDA NARRATIVE
In the northern Uganda region—involving South Sudan and northeastern Congo—another conflict has boiled for over 15 years between the government Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), led by Yoweri Museveni, and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony. This war offers yet another one-sided Western establishment narrative that says that Kony and the LRA—always described as a Christian fanatical cult that captures and drugs children—is the primary problem in northern Uganda. (Usually African savages are not Christian enough for America’s liking; here we find that they are too Christian.)

The establishment narrative has been furthered across the popular culture, in everything from Vanity Fair to the BBC to the journal The National Catholic Weekly (America). The newly established ENOUGH Project (ENOUGH “genocide” and “not on my watch” etc. etc.) picked up the mantle of LRA atrocities and, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, has supported the establishment narrative which shields the Museveni government from the kind of criticism and international action that is called for in keeping with the scale of the atrocities the Uganda government has committed.

In other words, Human Rights Watch has addressed torture in Uganda, and other problems, but they have not named names or corporations and they almost never link the conflict or the atrocities to Western interests. The net effect of these policy and human rights positions is genocide denial on Uganda.

The Museveni war machine and its state terror apparatus have perpetrated massive atrocities in the region and it has evolved into genocide against the Acholi people of the north. The indigenous Acholi people have been forced onto concentration camps over the past 15 years, and these camps have become places of death. In the establishment narrative, the people are the victims of Kony’s “rebellion.”

Yoweri Museveni and his business and military partners are responsible for millions of deaths, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Eastern Congo. The U.S. military invasion of Zaire (now Congo), involved U.S. covert forces, U.S. military communications, logistical and weapons support, and Ugandan and Rwandan forces. Humvees, C-130’s and black-skinned U.S. Special Forces entered South Sudan and northeastern Congo through the Gulu and Arua Districts of Uganda, the heart of Acholiland and the center of atrocities against the Acholi people.

Ugandan and British interests living mostly in Britain and aligned with the former dictator Idi Amin have always backed the Lord’s Resistance Army. Support also came from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The LRA stepped up its military actions in parallel with the UPDF invasion of Zaire (1996), and the subsequent years of warfare and plunder in Congo (1998-present).

According to the investigations of the United Nations and the humanitarian law work of lawyer Karen Parker, the war in Uganda involves massive rapes, killing, tortures, and extrajudicial executions as a policy by the Ugandan military. Some 1.3 million people have been displaced in the Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts of northern Uganda. There are over 73 camps with from 1000 to 50,000 people in them, all forcibly displaced by UPDF soldiers, with over 350,000 people out of some 400,000 people displaced from the Gulu district alone.

THE US-UGANDA INVASION OF ZAIRE
The forced displacements of Acholi people began with Museveni’s ascension to power in 1986, but major forced displacements occurred throughout the 1990’s and again in 2002-2003. However, there was a massive displacement operation in 1996 that appears to have been coordinated in part with the planned U.S. invasion of Zaire from Northern Uganda and Rwanda.

The UPDF Army barracks at Masindi and airstrip at Gulu, both in Northern Uganda, served as the staging grounds for the U.S. invasion of Zaire. The Museveni government organized the closure of northern Uganda in October 1996 ostensibly because of heightened LRA attacks. The UPDF, in chronological coincidence with the U.S. invasion, forced hundreds of thousands of Acholis into concentration camps in the fall of 1996, often by bombing and burning villages and murdering, beating, raping and threatening those who would not comply.

According to testimony from eyewitnesses, on Oct 26, 1996 the top Ugandan brass behind the invasion of Zaire met at the village of Paraa, in the Murchison Falls National Park, near Lake Albert, in the Gulu District. At the meeting were: [1] UPDF Brigadier General Moses Ali—Idi Amin’s right hand man who later became Minister of Internal Affairs, Minister for Disaster Preparedness, and Deputy Prime Minister in the Museveni administration; [2] Museveni’s half-brother Salim Saleh; [3] then Colonel James Kazini,; and [4] Dr. Eric Adroma—head of Uganda National Parks. Salim Saleh is perhaps the leading agent of terror in the UPDF Zaire/Congo wars, but both Saleh and commander James Kazini led UPDF troops involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against millions of people in Eastern Congo (1996-2007).

The meeting was ostensibly about security and it was announced that due to a recent LRA rebel attack at Paraa, the UPDF would be placing parts of Northern Uganda off limits to all non-military personnel. (There is some question of the perpetrators of the Paraa attack being LRA or UPDF disguised as LRA.) The main road from Karuma to the border town of Pakwach was closed. This road apparently served as a primary transport route for Ugandan and non-Ugandan military—including black U.S. special forces—who invaded Zaire.

On November 6, 1996, Bill Clinton was elected. Around 10 November 2007 an armored 4x4 Humvee (HUMMWV)—heavily rigged with sophisticated communications equipment inside and out—was encountered carrying two black U.S. special forces in the Murchison Falls region: the soldiers were wearing UPDF uniforms. Two busloads of black U.S. special forces were encountered at a UPDF checkpoint on the Karuma-Pakwach road; wearing civilian clothes, with duffel bags, the muscled and crew-cut “civilians” showed U.S. passports and claimed they were “doctors” heading to the tiny Gulu hospital.

From November 21-23 Boeing C-130 military aircraft passed over the region every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, heading both north and south. The C-130’s apparently landed at Gulu airstrip—closed by the Museveni government for a two-week period—and offloaded military equipment then moved by roads—closed by the UPDF—to the border. Some C-130’s were charted on a course believed to take them to Goma, Zaire.

From mid-November to February 1997 access to northwestern Uganda regions was highly restricted. On 1 March 1997 another wave of C-130’s passed over the region. The UPDF used the LRA threat as cover for massive military operations involving the invasion of Zaire for the United States of America.

The in-country U.S. Ambassador to Uganda at the time was E. Michael Southwick (October 1994-August 1997). Oil surveys began in 1998 and the entire Northwestern Uganda region is now designated as oil concessions controlled by Heritage Oil and Gas, Hardman Oil and Tullow Oil, three Anglo-American companies connected to British mercenary Tony Buckingham (founder of he mercenary firms Sandline International and Executive Outcomes) and his partners.

Nexant, a Bechtel subsidiary, is involved with the trans-Uganda-Kenya pipeline. South African firm Energem—tied to Tony Buckingham through Anthony Texeira, the brother-in-law of Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba—is also involved. Another Energem and Buckingham affiliated company tight with the Museveni regime is Branch Energy, involved with the oil pipeline and mining in Uganda.

On September 5, 2007, UPDF troops—and rebels reportedly aligned with Jean-Pierre Bemba—had occupied the DRC’s oil- and gold-rich Semliki Basin on the western shores of Lake Albert. Heavily armed foreign forces occupied the villages of Aru, Mahagi, Fataki, Irengeti and the Ruwenzori mountains. The international press and the United Nations Observers Mission in DRC (MONUC) remained completely silent about the Ugandan incursions.

By September 8, 2007, Ugandan troops were heavily massed on the DRC border while Kabila and Museveni were signing oil and gold sharing agreements in Tanzania. UPDF forces and “rebel” troops alleged to be Bemba’s remained in DRC as of October 25. The United Nations Observes Mission in Congo (MONUC) information offices were claiming by mid-October that UPDF had pulled out, but Congolese citizens in eastern Congo continued to report a huge UPDF military presence.

The China Petroleum Pipeline Engineering Company is also involved in the Uganda-Kenya pipeline, offering an interesting comparison for people concerned about China’s involvement in atrocities in the Darfur region. And, after much scrambling, Libya was cut out of the Kenya-Uganda pipeline deals.

Uganda’s representation at the International Criminal Court exploring war crimes in Congo has included at least two very high-profile lawyers from Foley Hoag LLP, an influential Washington law firm deeply entrenched in the proliferation of the mainstream narratives and the victor’s justice doled out—through the ICTY and ICTR tribunals—on Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Pentagon seconded its lawyers from the Judge Advocacy General’s (JAG) Corp to the ICTR to “try” those unfortunate “enemies” both arbitrarily and selectively accused of genocide.

The people most responsible for atrocities in the region—unprecedented human bloodletting, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide—are protected. These include Yoweri Museveni, Salim Saleh, Paul Kagame, James Kazini, Moses Ali, James Kabarebe, Taban Amin, Jean-Pierre Bemba, Laurent Nkunda, Meles Zenawi…a long list of people whose culpability is without question, many of whom have been named for atrocities again and again.

U.S. Special Operations forces know what happened and should be deposed under oath in a legitimate International Criminal Court, which at present does not exist, and is not in the making. Ditto for Madeleine Albright, Anthony Lake, Thomas Pickering, Susan Rice, John Prendergast, General William Wald, General Frank Toney, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Roger Winter, Andrew Young…another short list.

Foley Hoag LLP is also tied to the U.S.-Uganda Friendship Council. On May 6, 2002 in Washington D.C. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and wife Janet were special guests at U.S.-Uganda Friendship Council event sponsored by members Coke, Pfizer and Chevron-Texaco. Museveni also met with President Bush at the White House.

Coke director Kathleen Black is a principle in the Hearst media empire, while Coke directors Warren Buffet and Barry Diller are directors of the Washington Post Company, and these are the media institutions that whitewash client regimes, corporate plunder and Pentagon actions. Of course, Coca Cola covets the gum Arabic of Darfur, and Coke is a client of Andrew Young’s PR firm Goodworks International (see below).

Uganda’s image is sanitized by one of the world’s largest PR firms, London’s Hill & Knowlton. In 2005 Uganda spent some $700,000 on a Hill & Knowlton contract to facilitate and “encourage dialogue between the Ugandan government and people like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, Oxfam.”

THE RWANDA NARRATIVE
Museveni’s bush war began in 1980. Paul Kagame, current President of Rwanda, was Museveni’s Director of Military Intelligence in the mid-1980’s. Museveni and Kagame led the invasion of Rwanda in 1990. The two military commanders utilized terrorist tactics that assigned blame for atrocities they committed—against both their enemies and their own people—on their enemies. They used psychological operations, embedded international reporters, and fabrication of massacres. These tactics have continued to the present.

While Rwanda is billed as a major “success story” of recovery and development after a devastating genocide—see for example the PR “documentary” film Rwanda Rising produced by Andrew Young’s Goodworks International—the country is ruled with an iron-fist and a finely tuned intelligence and torture apparatus involved in political assassinations, suppression of information and disappearances. Huge areas of Rwanda were entirely depopulated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and UPDF as they hammered away at Rwanda beginning in October 1990. The invasion culminated in a coup d’etat that succeeded, with broad U.S. military support, in capturing Kigali in July of 1994.

From 1994 to the present President Paul Kagame has used the genocide card and the establishment narrative to institutionalize repression, criminalize or assassinate anyone who challenges the regime, and further depopulate rural areas for “development” benefiting corporate interests.

Another member of the U.S.-Uganda Friendship council is the Honorable Andrew Young, former Mayor of Atlanta and U.S. Ambassador. Andrew Young and his firm Goodworks International have helped whitewash the image of the Rwanda government and its state apparatus of terror.

Andrew Young, Quincy Jones and other wealthy Americans are building (have built) mansions on the shores of Rwanda’s Lake Mwazi in areas where peasants were driven off the land or killed by the Kagame terror machine before, during and after 1994. State terror and depopulation is ongoing along Lake Kivu and in the Volcanoes National Parks regions for methane and high-end tourism development.

Rwanda gains currency and good press through big HIV/AIDS projects run by Paul Farmer but funded by the Clinton AIDS foundation. Rwanda was overthrown by and for the Pentagon on Clinton’s watch. Hillary Clinton toured Uganda in July 1997, wore African clothes, danced African dances, and spoke about “democracy” and “development” and a “partnership” against HIV/AIDS.

The Kagame regime has recently awarded petroleum concessions to Canada’s Vangold Resources for the project titled “White Elephant” in northern Rwanda—2700 sq. kilometers of land depopulated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army between 1990 and 2007. Contracted to provide “feasibility studies” of petroleum infrastructural development in Rwanda is the San Diego firm Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

SAIC has ongoing collaborations with Bechtel—another of the world’s most secretive aerospace technology, energy infrastructure and defense contractors—both known for their involvement in U.S. beyond top-secret “black” programs. SAIC works closely with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Recent SAIC directors have included: U.S. Navy Admiral B.R. Inman (Ret.); U.S. Army General W.A. Downing (Ret.); and U.S. Air Force General J.A. Welch (Ret.).

SAIC also has an ongoing collaboration with the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS). Unsurprisingly, through shared directorships, BMS is economically and politically aligned with the New York Times Corporation. SAIC has also been flagged for involvement in highly questionable U.S. mercenary activities and human rights violations in Africa.

Petroleum, defense and mining interests connected to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International programs in “gorilla conservation” led to the production of high-tech satellite prospecting data, gathered by remote sensing over-flights (1994-2000), delivered to the Rwandan Ministry of Defense.

The Pentagon has been involved in building military bases in Rwanda, installing military and civilian communications infrastructure, and training Rwandan Defense Forces; a military-communications radar installation has been constructed with U.S. support on Mt. Karisimbi in Ruhengeri Province.

The installation is being built by the Rwanda Ministry of Defense in partnership with the “Rwandan” company Terracom SPRL and Rwandatel. Terracom is owned by U.S. businessman Greg Wyler; Rwandatel is 99%-owned subsidiary.

It is believed that Rwanda Defense Forces (RDF) sent to Darfur on the African Union “peacekeeping” mission include black U.S. Special Forces disguised as RDF—just as the black U.S. Special Forces were disguised as UPDF during the invasion of Zaire.

LOCKHEED MARTIN PEACEKEEPING
Lockheed Martin is a California-based aerospace and defense giant involved in classified black programs that are beyond “top-secret” and shielded from government oversight. In September 2003, CNN—a corporate-military “news” agency deeply embedded with the Pentagon—reported “[a]ccording to the U.S. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) classified or black programs account for about $23.2 billion or 17 percent of the 2004 budget request for the Department of Defense.”

According to United Nations spokeswoman Michele Montas the six-month Darfur contract with Lockheed-Martin subsidiary Pacific Architect Engineers, Inc. was awarded without competitive bidding “because of complex requirements and a short timeline.”

Reporting from the United Nations, Inner City Press said the terms of the contract will not be public and the United Nations has violated numerous UN charter laws in the tendering of this award.

The no-bid award process followed the United Nation’s issuance of an official “Expressions of Interest” notice on October 9, 2007. “The United Nations is seeking Expressions of Interest (EOI) from experienced Multi Functional Logistics Services (MFLS) contractors,” the UN’s EOI notice reads, “for the provision of a wide range of services at headquarters, logistic bases, military and police camps, airfields and water resources at various locations in any or all of the following: the Darfur Region of Sudan, Chad/Central African Republic (CAR), and Somalia.”

Inner City Press reported that the EOI solicitation, made after the rules had already been waived to allow the transfer of $250 million to Lockheed Martin for six months in Darfur, is intended to try to clean up the process after-the-fact.

Another multinational aerospace and defense corporation directly benefiting from this regional U.S. war is Boeing Aircraft Corporation. The U.S. military used Boeing Chinook helicopters in the U.S. invasion of Somalia in 2006. Tom Pickering, former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, is senior vice president for International Relations and a member of the Boeing Executive Council since January 2001.

Pickering played a decisive role in the Clinton Administration overthrow of Rwanda (1990-1994) and Congo (1996-1997). He is a leading advocate for the “Save Darfur” propaganda. He is also a member of the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa along with Ed Royce (R-CA), former U.S. Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker, Donald Payne (D-NJ), and Andrew Young.

While the New York Times reported in December 2006 that the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia began in late December, military involvement of U.S. covert forces had been ongoing, and was heightened significantly in the early spring of 2006 when the U.S. Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency openly complained about cross purposes in Somalia. Private military companies were all over Somalia, as were known international arms syndicates, including of course the criminal networks of John Bredenkamp, one of Britain’s fifty richest tycoons and one of the primary financial backers behind the rise and fall of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

John Bredenkamp reportedly acquired three SRAM missiles with nuclear warheads jettisoned in shallow water off the coast of Somalia by a U.S.A.F. B-52 that soon after crashed into the Indian Ocean near the U.S. military base on the island of Diego Garcia. The U.S. invasion of Somalia is believed to have been partly an aborted attempt to recover the lost nukes—called “broken arrows” in Pentagon speak. While the story of the dumped nukes “lost” by Dick Cheney has received some attention, no one has publicly identified John Bredenkamp as the likely weapons dealer involved.

COVERT OPS IN SOMALIA
The war in Somalia dates back to deep U.S. involvement in the 1980’s, where major oil concessions were awarded to four Western multinational petroleum giants: Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Philips petroleum. The infusion of Western “AID” provoked destabilization of Somalia, leading to the U.S. military invasion that culminated in the October 3, 1993 mission where scores of U.S. Special Operations Forces were killed when their Blackhawk helicopter was shot down over the capital city, Mogadishu.

The mythology of U.S. involvement was indelibly inscribed in the popular consciousness through the Hollywood/Pentagon film Blackhawk Down. Part of the consistent propaganda on Africa is that “the U.S. does not want to get involved and potentially face another Somalia.” But the U.S. pullout of Somalia occurred in perfect synchronicity with the heightened military involvement in Rwanda (1994).

U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) did not cease Special Ops deployments in Somalia with the U.S. withdrawal and covert operations have proceeded on and off, with heightened activity through the late 1990’s. The Pentagon confirmed in November 2006 that SOCOM forces were in Somalia as of October “providing military advice to Ethiopian and Somali forces on the ground.” The U.S. Navy moved “additional forces” into waters off the Somali coast, where the Pentagon said they “conducted security missions, monitoring maritime traffic and intercepting and interrogating crew on suspicious ships.”

These included the USS Ramage guided missile destroyer, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier, the USS Bunker Hill and USS Anzio guided missile cruisers, and the USS Ashland amphibious landing ship. On June 2, 2007, a U.S. Navy destroyer shelled northern Somalia. Somali media reported that News media reported that the strikes destroyed farms, flattened hilltops and killed or injured an unknown number of villagers.

The British Navy’s newest warship HMS Bulwark was also stationed off the Somali coast in early 2006. The HMS Bulwark deployed to the Indian Ocean on 9 January 2006 for the first live operation of this “unique Commando Assault ship” (as it is described by the British Navy).

However, sources in Kenya and Eritrea reported “snatch and grab” terrorist operations involving massacres and torture that were run by SOCOM forces inside Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. There are at least 52,000 U.S. special operations forces on active duty and reserve military worldwide, including SEALs, Green Berets and commando-style troops from the 10th Mountain Division and others.

The establishment narrative was that Ethiopia invaded Somalia to displace Al-Qaeda terrorists and check the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, both of which are propaganda themes that misrepresent the reality of U.S. and allied military interventions. Ethiopia is considered an essential partner of the U.S. in its “War on Terrorism” and Ethiopian bases have been used for attacks on Somalia.

In 2003, the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division (SOCOM) completed a three-month program to train an Ethiopian army division in “counter-terrorism tactics”—code language for covert operations. Operations are coordinated through the Combined Joint Task Forces-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) base in Djibouti. In January 2004, SOCOM forces from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment replaced the 10th Mountain Division forces at a new base “Camp United” established at Hurso, northwest of Dire Dawa, near the border with Somalia.

Since 2003, under the U.S. State Department-sponsored Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program, CJTF-HOA provided instruction to thousands of Ethiopian soldiers at a base in Legedadi. CJTF-HOA forces from the U.S Army's 478th Civil Affairs Battalion also operated in Ethiopia (Somalia) in and around Dire Dawa, Galadi and Dolo Odo, among other areas.

Ethiopia seeks to control Somalia to gain access to a much-needed deepwater seaport. Ethiopia’s oil concessions are contiguous with the oil reserves in Sudan, Somalia, Kenya and Yemen. Hunt Oil, the Chinese National Petroleum Company and many others are active in Ethiopia.

The U.S. military used Ethiopian air bases modernized by infusions of millions of dollars of “AID” funds to launch attacks against Somalia. Ethiopia now has the largest standing army on the continent and this was achieved through the conversions of millions of dollars in “AID” to weapons and militarization; even “debt forgiveness”—where foreign “debt” was canceled—benefited the militarization of Ethiopia.

U.S. spy satellites were used provide intelligence to Ethiopian troops as they swept across the Oganden basin and Somalia. Presidents Bush and Zenawi both denied that the invasion was coordinated and well planned, and both denied the involvement of the U.S.

The Ethiopian government retained former U.S. Republican house majority leader Dick Armey as a lobbyist in Washington to whitewash the Ethiopian regimes’ crimes.

ETHIOPIA’S GENOCIDES
The Ogaden, Oromo and Anuak regions of Ethiopia have seen massive military occupation and state repression. The Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi has perpetrated mass starvation and scorched earth policy in the region. There has been very little international media coverage and most is favorable the Zenawi regime or pressing the upside-down stories about “relief” and “starvation” that serve the Western “humanitarian” business sector.

The Ogaden basin is a bloodbath today. Applying the same legal standards as in Darfur, all three Ethiopian regions qualify as ongoing genocides against indigenous people. Failure to apply the genocide standards constitutes genocide denial.

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1778 (2007) on 25 September 2007 established the United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT). According to the UN’s October 2007 Expression Of Interest, “[i]n it’s Presidential Statement of 30 April 2007, the Security Council requested the Secretary General to ‘immediately begin appropriate contingency planning for a United Nations mission to Somalia’.

At this early stage it is planned to have a UN logistics base at Mombassa, Kenya to support the main supply line from Mombassa to Kismayo, Mogadishu and Hobyo, which will serve as secondary logistics bases in Somalia. At this early stage the number and location of these sites is unknown, but it is envisaged that approximately 24,000 personnel may be required.”

Ethiopia’s war in Somalia has taxed the government drawing widespread criticism. The U.S. is pressing for an African Union mission as a proxy force to replace the Ethiopian troops and further U.S. interests. Mombasa, Kenya is a U.S. military port. Kenya is also awash in oil development, poverty and destitute refugees. The U.S. war in Somalia is ongoing.

In March 2007 the Pentagon deployed an additional 150 SOCOM Forces in Uganda. The troops were part of the Combined Joint Task Force Horn-of-Africa, an “anti-terrorist naval force” deployed around the Horn of Africa with support points in Bahrain and Djibouti. Ugandan sources divulged that the SOCOM troops would be dispersed “around the country” to “support UPDF troops” and “provide support to distribute humanitarian aid.”

It was openly reported that the SOCOM are “possibly training the South Sudanese army, which has just signed an agreement for this with its Ugandan counterpart, strengthening Ugandan capacity to fight terrorism.” The U.S. military has also modernized the old Entebbe airport for UPDF operations, and the Entebbe airport supports a small but permanent U.S. military contingent.

It is believed that U.S. SOCOM troops are operating in blood-drenched Eastern Congo. Ugandan opposition sources have reported that SOCOM forces in UPDF uniforms have joined the more than 2000 Pentagon-trained UPDF forces sent by Museveni to Somalia. The UPDF troops operating in Ethiopia behind a “peacekeeping” propaganda front have been accused of widespread atrocities. More than 1000 people die daily in Eastern DRC where fighting since 1996 has claimed at least 7 million lives. The Democratic Republic of Congo has seen multiple genocide campaigns, and multiple genocide denials are ongoing.

SOCOM forces have been openly reported in Niger, where operations are billed as “humanitarian” and “human rights” training of Nigerienne troops. But the insurgency and “rebellion” by the Tuareg and Toubou nomads has always been about uranium and depopulation: Exxon (Esso) and French corporations have exploited the Agadez and Air regions for over 40 years, dumping radioactive sickness and social devastation on another indigenous population. Yet another genocide?

DARFURISM
The Darfur region of western Sudan has been a hotbed of clandestine activities, gunrunning and indiscriminate violence for decades. The Cold War era saw countless insurgencies launched from the remote deserts of Darfur. Throughout the 1990’s factions allied with or against Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Congo, Libya, Eritrea and the Central African Republic operated from bases in Darfur, and it was a regular landing strip for foreign military transport planes of mysterious origin.

In 1990, Chad's Idriss Deby launched a military blitzkrieg from Darfur and overthrew President Hissan Habre; Deby then allied with his own tribe against the Sudan government. Sudanese rebels today have bases in Chad, and Chadian rebels have bases in Darfur, with Khartoum’s backing.

When the regime of Ange-Félix Patassé collapsed in the Central African Republic in March 2003, soldiers fled to Darfur with their military equipment. Khartoum supported the West Nile Bank Front, a rebel army operating against Uganda from Eastern Congo, commanded by Taban Amin, the son of the infamous Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, who heads Uganda’s dreaded Internal Security Organization.

Darfur is another epicenter of the modern-day international geopolitical scramble for Africa’s resources. Conflict in Darfur escalated in 2003 in parallel with negotiations “ending” the south Sudan war.

The U.S.-backed insurgency by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the guerilla force that fought the northern Khartoum government for 20 years, shifted to Darfur, even as the G.W. Bush government allied with Khartoum in the U.S. led “War on Terrorism.” The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)—one of some 27 rebel factions mushrooming in Darfur—is allied with the SPLA and supported from Uganda.

Andrew Natsios, former USAID chief and now US envoy to Sudan, said on October 6, 2007 that the atmosphere between the governments of north and south Sudan “had become poisonous.” This is no surprise given the magnitude of the resource war in Sudan and the involvement of international interests, but the investigation should center on the involvement and activities of Andrew Natsios and Roger Winter.

Roger Winter, USAID chief in Khartoum today, is directly linked to the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army and U.S. military campaign that destabilized Rwanda and decapitated the leadership of Rwanda and Burundi. USAID’s affiliations with the Department of Defense are now openly advertised with the propaganda peddling AFRICOM—the Pentagon’s new Africa Command. AFRICOM combines U.S. CENTCOM, PACIFICOM and EUCOM operations in Africa; it is nothing new, merely the consolidation and expansion of widespread and ongoing involvement.

Darfur is reported to have the fourth largest copper and third largest uranium deposits in the world. Darfur produces two-thirds of the world’s best quality gum Arabic—a major ingredient in Coke and Pepsi. Contiguous petroleum reserves are driving warfare from the Red Sea, through Darfur, to the Great Lakes of Central Africa. Private military companies operate alongside petroleum contractors and “humanitarian” agencies. Sudan is China’s fourth biggest supplier of imported oil, and U.S. companies controlling the pipelines in Chad and Uganda seek to displace China through the US military alliance with “frontline” states hostile to Sudan: Uganda, Chad and Ethiopia.

Israel reportedly provides military training to Darfur rebels from bases in Eritrea, and has strengthened ties with the regime in Chad, from which more weapons and troops penetrate Darfur. The refugee camps have become increasingly militarized. There are reports that Israeli and U.S. military and intelligence operate from within refugee camps in Darfur. Israel is all over the Sahara, from Burkina Faso to Ethiopia and Uganda. Israel’s clandestine actions are partly funded by Israeli-American diamond magnates involved in Angola, Sierra Leone and Congo, especially Dan Gertler (G.W. Bush’s unofficial Ambassador to the DRC), Beny Steinmetz and Lev Leviev.

African Union (AU) forces in Darfur include Nigerian and Rwandan troops responsible for atrocities in their own countries. Ethiopia has committed 5000 troops for a UN force in Darfur. AU troops receive military-logistic support from NATO, and are widely hated. Early in October 2007, SLA rebels attacked an AU base killing ten troops. In a subsequent editorial sympathetic to rebel factions (“Darfur’s Bitter Ironies,” Guardian Online, 10/4/07)

Smith College English professor Eric Reeves espoused the tired rhetoric of “Khartoum’s genocidal counter-insurgency war in Darfur,” a position counterproductive to any peaceful settlement. To minimize the damage this rebel attack has done to their credibility Reeves and other “Save Darfur” advocates cast doubt about the rebels’ identities and mischaracterized the SLA attackers as “rogue commanders.” However, there is near unanimous agreement, internationally, that rebels are “out of control,” committing widespread rape and plundering with impunity, just as the SPLA did in South Sudan for over a decade.

Debunking the claims of a “genocide against blacks” or an “Islamic holy-war” against Christians, Darfur’s Arab and black African tribes have intermarried for centuries, and nearly everyone is Muslim. The “Save Darfur” campaign is deeply aligned with Jewish and Christian faith-based organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel. These groups have relentlessly campaigned for Western military action, demonizing both Sudan and China, but they have never addressed Western military involvement—backing factions on all sides.

Christian and Jewish involvement in the “Save Darfur” campaign centers on a long-running but deeply manipulative narrative about slavery and genocide in South Sudan. The Holocaust Memorial Museum furthered the establishment narrative about Darfur in keeping with the genocide theme; no one ever examines the interests behind the Holocaust Memorial Museum, it is merely some apolitical institution with the championing of supposed “universal” human rights of all people everywhere as its raison d’etre.

The new political and propaganda doctrine that uses “genocide” as a political tool is morally ambiguous, it attacks the crimes of some and passes over the crimes of others. It uses as its universal principle the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its complementary covenants and proclamations. On the one hand, however, this involves genocide inflation, and on the other hand genocide denial. But the USA—with good Christian and Jewish foot soldiers—is always the final arbitrator: global cop, judge, jury and executioner all in one.

Christian organizations involved in Sudan for years include Servant’s Heart and Christian Solidarity International. On Servant’s Heart’s “Board of Reference” is British Baroness Caroline Cox, who is also closely affiliated with Christian Solidarity International (CSI)—one of the main Christian allies of the SPLM/A war in southern Sudan.

The propaganda system advocates in favor of the “rebels” in Darfur using a handful of techniques developed in their propaganda campaign behind the “rebels” in South Sudan. Rebels are supported partly by never mentioning them, partly by decrying abuses against them, partly by providing sympathetic one-sided accounts of Khartoum government attacks, and partly by defending their excesses if and when—infrequently—the rebel abuses come to light.

Christian Solidarity International (CSI) in 2006 issued press releases claiming that the Lebanese organization Hezbollah “is using Christian villages to shield its military operations in violation of international law.” These reports appear to be fabrications to begin with and the CSI accusation a projection of their own involvement with the SPLA in South Sudan, where the SPLA for over a decade used the civilian population as human shields, used the Western AID apparatus (Operation Lifeline Sudan) as cover for military support, and used food as a weapon.

If Hezbollah did this during the recent U.S.-Israeli invasion they [Hezbollah] certainly learned it by studying SPLA (CSI) tactics in Sudan. Thus we have twisted triple-standards where the establishment propaganda accuses Hezbollah of violating international law, but the SPLM/A—and the “rebel” groups in Darfur—while doing exactly the same thing, are never anything but poor, defenseless Christians under attack in a “genocidal counter-insurgency” run out of Khartoum government.

Who are the rebels in Darfur? Where do they get new uniforms and modern weapons? It was the same with the establishment propaganda on Rwanda and the invading Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army from 1990-1994: abuses were covered up, the government of Juvenal Habyarimana was blamed for everything, and the “rebels”—backed by Washington, partnered with the Pentagon—were never exposed for their nasty, outrageous abuses.

There is growing dissent within the “Save Darfur” movement as more supporters question its motivations and the Jewish/Israeli link. “Save Darfur” leaders have been replaced after complaints surfaced about expenditures of funds. Many rebel leaders reportedly receive tens of thousands of dollars monthly, and rebels emboldened by the “Save Darfur” movement commit crimes with impunity.

There is a growing demand to probe the accounts of “Save Darfur” to find out how the tens of millions collected are being spent due to allegations of arms-deals and bribery—rebel leaders provided with five-star hotel accommodations, prostitutes and sex parties.

“Save Darfur” is today the rallying cry for a broad coalition of special interests. Advocacy groups—from the local Massachusetts Congregation B’Nai Israel chapter to the International Crises Group and USAID—have fueled the conflict through a relentless, but selective, public relations campaign that disingenuously serves a narrow policy agenda. These interests offer no opportunity for corrective analyses, but stubbornly press their agenda, and they are widely criticized for inflaming tensions in Darfur. This is what we might call Darfurism.

The latest Lockheed Martin contract with the United Nations illustrates the final stage in the transformation of international conflict whereby military-industrial giants are openly engaged, rather than clandestinely, as has been previously the case. This development parallels the rise of Darfurism— a mass movement in the West designed to channel popular sympathy and agitate people to act on a cause they know nothing about, but think they do.

Darfurism is a pathological mix of fear, patriotism, social immaturity, opportunism and unconsciousness akin to fascism. Under the current climate of apathy, fear and public opinion, anything goes, and warfare involves humanitarian agencies as active players in the mix. Like the Holocaust Memorial Museum they are seen as neutral, described as apolitical, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The United Nations and African Union serve as pseudo-privatized military forces backing a hegemonic, corporate, political and economic agenda. The future has arrived, and it uses human rights institutions, the label of genocide and accusations of atrocities, and the ever-expanding international AID and charity industry—operating out of pure profit motives—as pivotal elements in the Western portfolio of soft and hard weapons used to further the prerogatives of Empire and clear the land for absolute corporate exploitation.

keith harmon snow—www.allthingspass.com—is an independent human rights investigator and war correspondent who worked with Survivors Rights International (2005-2006), Genocide Watch (2005-2006) and the United Nations (2006) to document and expose genocide and crimes against humanity in Sudan and Ethiopia. He has worked in 17 countries in Africa, heavily focused on the Great Lakes region, and he recently worked in Afghanistan.

Please take action today:

EXPOSE UGANDA’S GENOCIDE:
http://www.exposeugandasgenocide.blogspot.com/

Further info and resources:

• CEGUN: Campaign to Stop Genocide in Uganda Now
http://www.cegun.org/

• UNIGHT: FOR THE CHILDREN OF UGANDA
http://www.unight.org/

Footnotes
[1] Pratap Chatterjee, “Darfur Diplomacy: Enter the Contractors,” CorpWatch, 21 October 2004, < id="11598">.

[2] See: Michael Maren, The Road To Hell: The Ravaging Affects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, 1996.

[3] From the BSP web site: “As biometrics becomes an increasingly important component of physical and logical security systems there is a need for an authoritative and regularly updated reference and data base on virtually all aspects of biometrics and identity assurance.” .

[4] “Hezbollah is Using Christian Villages to Shield its Military Operations in Violation of International Law,” Christian Solidarity International, 1 August 2006, <>.

[5] Karen Parker, Forced Displacement in Northern Uganda, United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, .

[6] Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999.

[7] Private interview, eyewitness, October 2007.

[8] See: Tullow, Hardman and Heritage Oil concessions maps: .

[9] Angelo Izama, “How badly did Libya want the Kenya-Uganda oil pipeline deal?” Alexander’s Gas and Oil Connections, Vol. 11, Issue 12, November 24, 2006.

[10] Ralph G. Kershaw, “Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: International Justice According to Washington,” Covert Action Quarterly, No. 74, Fall 2002.

[11] Jeevan Vasagar, “Uganda hires PR agency to buff up its image,” The Guardian, May 21, 2005.

[12] The Rwandan Patriotic Army was renamed the Rwanda Defense Forces.

[13] “Uganda: Kampala-Kigali Oil Pipeline Estimated at $ 193.6 Million,” 16 October 2007, Rwanda News Agency, .

[14] keith harmon snow and Georgianne Nienaber: “Gorillas ‘Executed’ Stories front for Privatization and Militarization of Congo Parks, Truth of Depopulation Ignored,” ZNET, August 3, 2007; and “King Kong: The Map, The Mad Scientist, and the Mayor,” .

[15] Mathew Russel Lee, “At UN, Darfur No-Bid Contract Spun by UK, Chad and Somalia Preemptively Bid Out,” Inner City Press, October 24, 2007, .

[16] Mathew Russel Lee, “At UN, Darfur No-Bid Contract Spun by UK, Chad and Somalia Preemptively Bid Out,” Inner City Press, October 24, 2007, .

[17] See, e.g., Wayne Madsen, “The CIA's Counter-Proliferation Division (CPD) and British intelligence have evidence that then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney lost three nuclear weapons in 1991,” Madsen Report, May 2, 2007; Alexander Cockburn, “Broken Arrows and Iran,” Counterpunch, August 3, 2005.

[18] Pauline Jelenek, “U.S. special forces in Somalia,” Associated Press, November 1, 2007.

[19] Stephanie McCrummen, “U.S. Warship Fires Missiles at Fighters in Somalia,” Washington Post, June 3, 2007.

[20] “HMS Bulwark welcomed home after Lebanon operations,” defense news, 15 August 2006.

[21] See: keith harmon snow, Today is the Day of Killing Anuaks, Genocide Watch and Survivor’s Rights International Report, February 25, 2004.

[22] Xan Rice, “US military 'used Ethiopian base' to attack Somali militants,” Guardian Unlimited, February 23, 2007.

[23] See: Livelihoods and Vulnerabilities Study, Gambella Region of Ethiopia, UNICEF report, December 13, 2006.

[24] “Uganda: American Advisors Being Deployed,” Indian Ocean Newsletter, No. 1209, March 3, 2007.

[25] AFRICOM .

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October 5, 2007 at 18:08:22 FROM FASCISM TO FREEDOM: Stirring the Winds of Political Climate Change by Steve Bhaerman Page 1 of 3 page(s) http://www.opednews.com

There is a poignant passage in Kurt Vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse Five where he imagines a devastating bombing scene as a movie being run backward on a projector. The fires on the ground disappear as the bombs are sucked up into the bombers, which fly backward and land on a military base. There, the bombs are removed from the planes and taken to a factory, where they are dismantled. Perhaps this wishful fantasy was inspired by Vonnegut's own experience watching the fire bombing of Dresden.

If and when our bombs begin falling on Iran, given our current limitations in navigating space and time, we will not be able to run the movie backward. The dead will still be dead, the destroyed will still be destroyed, and among the casualties will be our own open society. The damage will be irreversible, and in fact will have reversed 230 years of forward progress towards a just society, and a sane world.

But there is something we can and must "run backward" at this time. We must stand together to face the dark forces that have taken us from freedom to fascism, and reverse the momentum back to sanity and freedom.

There are two common impulses at a crisis time like this. The first is, "Don't just stand there. Do something!" The other is, "Don't do something. Just stand there." So instead of futilely flailing about or hopelessly resigning, it makes sense to take a deep breath and fully assess the situation. The first piece of good news is, there are at least 50 million of us in accord that the reins of power have gotten out of our hands, and this illegitimate power must be reined in.

Three situations that have been in the news in recent weeks -- the tasering of the student by police in Florida and the "tasering" of MoveOn by the U.S. Senate; the momentum toward attacking Iran that the Democratic misleadership seems to have fallen in line with; the further exposure of Blackwater as "contractors" in the Mafia sense of "contract" -- have focused a sense of urgency. That's a good thing.

Perhaps finally those hundred thousand organizations Paul Hawken talks about as working for a healthier world can stop what they are doing and address the huge elephant in the living room -- the American empire that promotes torture and assassination abroad and fascism at home. We must face the obstacle right in front of us that stands in the way of all of the good things that are possible in this world. In other words, there will be no action on climate change until there is political climate change, and to have political climate change requires focus. As the Swami says, "If we want the political winds to change, we must all blow in the same direction at the same time."

Whoa Cowboy -- A Two-Step Plan to Rein in Illegitimate Power

We don't want to be wasting precious energy blowing against the wind or rowing against the flow, so it makes sense to look for the open channels that can flow us toward a concerted and effective movement. So first of all, let's establish two short-term intentions. If we accomplish these, we will be able to demonstrate to our "leaders," to ourselves and to the world that we are on our way to restoring legitimate rule to America. These are:

1. Preempt and prevent an attack on Iran.

2. Reverse the trend of fascism at home.

There are specific implications of these, including coming up with a workable Middle East strategy for peace, restoring habeas corpus and repealing the so-called Patriot Act, disempowering private fascist armies such as Blackwater, and launching a people's impeachment and truth and reconciliation movement. (I'd personally like to call the organization Citizens for Impeaching the Administration, CIA for short, but that's a conversation for later. We will earn that next level by mastering this one first.)

So let's look at our leverage points right now and see how we can begin applying that leverage. What do we have going for us?

1. The Ongoing Up-Wising. There is a growing awareness on the part of progressive left and libertarian right -- not to mention millions of other Americans -- that neither the neoconservatives nor the neoliberals have the interests of we the people at heart. As Ron Paul continues to gather support on the Republican side from disenfranchised conservative voters, more and more people on all sides are waking up to the sad truth that politics as usual means the usual lies. There is a great deal of emotional energy that is being aroused here, and so our task is to find a highly-effective way to focus it.

2. "Generally" Speaking, There is Unprecedented Opposition to War Policies. Those who are bearing the more immediate cost of empire, members of our military, are waking up as well. A recent article indicates that twenty recently-retired generals are speaking out against the Iraq War and the proposed attack on Iran. This includes the former U.S. Commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. The implications of this are huge. According to the aforementioned article ten days ago in the San Diego Union-Tribune (in the heart of military country), "What might be called The Revolt of the Generals has rarely happened in the nation's history. In op-ed pieces, interviews and TV ads, more than 20 retired U.S. generals have broken ranks with the culture of salute and keep it in the family. Instead, they are criticizing the commander in chief and other top civilian leaders who led the nation into what the generals believe is a misbegotten and tragic war."

Along those same lines comes the speculation that the recent transport of nuclear weapons from Minot Air Force Base -- and the leaking of that information -- could have been an attempt on the part of a faction in the military to thwart a nuclear attack on Iran.

Pay No Attention to the (Wo)Man IN FRONT of the Curtain

In spite of the fact that both the progressive left and the non-neocon right are waking up to this lowjacking of America, there has been virtually no transpartisan concerted action. From a contextual standpoint, our mission now is to remove our focus from the political puppet show of candidates telling the usual lies. (Swami's new slogan is "Pay no attention to the (wo)man IN FRONT OF the curtain".) Instead, we need to focus our attention and financial resources on the three truth-telling candidates: Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel and Ron Paul. What's important is that these three represent the functional wings of both left and right that need to come front and center for us to win. Show them you support truth and send them money. Send the "front-running" candidates empty envelopes with photo copies of your checks to the other three candidates to indicate you are no longer willing to fund lies. Seriously. This is an important discipline right now, particularly for those who identify as Democrats.

Think of the Democrats as the flawed lover who tells us they are going to leave their "spouse" (i.e., the powers of the American empire) but never do. When they need something from us, they tell us how much they love us -- but they always go home to the Empire. So ... now we have to be strong. We have to tell them we are no longer willing to get into bed with them without a commitment. It's either the empire or us! In other words, will they respect us the day after Election Day? The best way to make sure is to make them respect us now.

Speaking of Dempublicrats, the reason why they've painted themselves into such a pathetic corner is because they have failed to contextualize the war in Iraq for what it is -- a war for empire. What Chalmers Johnson said in his recent book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic is something wise patriots on both the left and the right have understood: Empire abroad is incompatible with freedom at home. Just as surely as the American Revolutionaries were up against the British Empire 230 years ago, American Evolutionaries today must understand today's challenge is the American Empire, a leviathan bigger than either King George.

So ... coming from that context, and recognizing the American people have to recapture the political conversation before we recapture our government, what do we do? The answer is ... I don't have the answer. But working together on the twofold intention of preventing the next war (and in the process, ending the current one) and restoring freedom in this country, I have complete confidence that we WILL prevail. What we have been lacking until now has been a unifying, drop-everything-else mission that proactively takes us forward. If fifty million of us blow in the same direction at once, there is no doubt we can bring down the wall of lies just as surely as the Berlin Wall came down.

Where There's a Willingness, There's a Way

The way has not showed up as yet because there hasn't been the collective, focused will. First the will, then the way. The will requires a willingness to stand and keep standing, understanding that standing is easier when we are standing together. Next comes the intention, the prize we have our eyes on. What does it look like and feel like to no longer have to be afraid of your own government, and know the world is in less danger because of it? What will we see in the world that will tell us we have momentum towards peace? That we've won back precious freedoms at home? That we are on our way to working together instead of being manipulated into fighting one another?

Once we have that focused intention -- and know it is shared by tens of millions of Americans, with more awakening every day -- and are strengthened in our willingness, the ways will be obvious and many. The nature of leadership in this context is that it will come from everywhere, and above all the shared intention and the willingness to persevere. As for what kinds of structures and campaigns will be needed, here are some ideas:

1. A High Profile Front and Center Movement. It's inevitable, and will hopefully happen sooner and not later. We need a high-profile, celebrity-laden, transpartisan council of well-known, well-respected, influential individuals and organizations to finally draw the line and JUST SAY NO to fascism at home and preemptive, undeclared warfare abroad. That means repeal of the Patriot Act, restoration of habeas corpus, repudiation of police state tactics and the end of the dictatorship by unitary executive.

Tactically, we are seeking to recapture the media, and at the same time -- just to make sure --put the media in its place. This means we need to launch a massive non-media campaign. We need to communicate outside the mainstream media, and preempt the media by speaking to people in the community directly -- by the each or by the bunch. Each of us holding this holistic context is an educator.

We use car banners, truck banners and if we can afford it, billboards. We wear arm bands. In so doing, we constantly remind ourselves of how many of us there are out there. Above all, we must go way beyond the obsolete distinctions of "Democrat" and "Republican." Clear-thinking and goodhearted people on both sides have been hoodwinked into gravitating to the neoliberal and neoconservative camps -- two-sides of the same worthless coin. The greatest political awakening of this new century will be this: Supporters of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich have more in common with each other than with the leaders of their respective political parties. The heart and soul of these campaigns are in the same place, even if the details and approaches (more government vs. less government) are different. As we allow ourselves to be politically educated -- i.e., as the patriot left and the patriot right compare notes -- those with their hearts in the right place will work together to develop creative policies that are impossible under the thumb of empire.

2. Massive Snail Mail Campaigns to March for Us, Even When We Stay Home. Meanwhile, we strategically use snail mail in great numbers focused on specific entities, to make it clear to politicians, media moguls, and newspeople that we're hip to the scam, and we're not buying it anymore. There's a lot of power in handwritten snail mail. First of all, the powers that be in power respect the numbers. Each piece of mail they receive represents thousands of e-mails, they figure. Secondly, it's an opportunity to "get personal," not in an insulting way but in a poignant way.

What could happen if those in power were repeatedly exposed to heartfelt messages from clear and courageous Americans, not angry but firm? With photos. That would mean a website where people could post their letters before sending, so even if Senators and media moguls didn't read them, everyone else would. It's easy to imagine people getting together with their twenty best friends and having an evening gathering to write letters together -- using art to appropriately focus emotion. It might even become habit-forming.

Meanwhile, the letters to news media can be focused and staggered -- one week for Fox, one for CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC and MSNBC. Some should specifically cultivate and support allies like Keith Olbermann and Bill Moyers, offering story ideas. The letters should focus on the media failing America and how to make up for it by balancing the coverage and putting those dissenting generals on the news shows. If not, then not putting them on becomes the issue, and the pressure intensifies. Various members of our board of notables begin making phone calls to the CEOs of these companies, and if nothing else, that gets in the papers.

3. A General Strike, or Something Even Better. There is even the suggestion in Harpers Magazine of using election day this year to declare a General Strike. This is an intriguing idea, but the Swami says, "Let's throw them a curve, and have a general ball instead!" In other words, instead of acting like we are a protesting minority, understand that we are in the majority, and use the day to celebrate awakened citizens from across the political spectrum coming together to proclaim government of, by and for the people where the government does our bidding, not the bidding of the highest bidder. We need to gather at every city hall and local public meeting place on this day and declare together that we the people are no longer willing to be divided and conquered by our misleaders.

Is this possible? Can we do it? We humans are usually pretty good responding to an emergency once we realize there is one. We've been shamelessly and shamefully manipulated into responding to the wrong emergency, and now we must "emerge 'n see" the truth that united we stand, and divided we fall. This means Americans with different opinions coming together to declare their support for rule by law, peace when possible, and freedom at home. These are the core values 75% to 90% of us stand for, and if we can't stand together and hold our own government to that -- well, maybe we humans deserve to flunk third dimension.

To reiterate what I think is the most important point, intention strengthens will, and will finds a way. If we can stop "politics as usual" long enough to gather "under one big intent" the organizations and structures needed will make themselves known. Believe me, this is in the works. Meanwhile, begin to hold the dual intentions of freedom at home and peace abroad, and add your energy and momentum to anything that moves that agenda along. For example, there is now a petition circulating -- inspired by a similar letter by retired air force Captain Robert Bowman. Afterdowningstreet.org now has a letter signed by various luminaries from Thom Hartmann to Willie Nelson "instructing" our troops not to participate in an attack against Iran. At the very, very least we can get behind this move and make sure it hits the major news outlets.

So ... your feedback and ideas are welcome. If there is a way you would like to participate, if there is an organization you have that would get behind this, please let me know. This is not a time to hang back and hope that a political savior will save us next November. We have met the savior, and it is us. The best way to insure retaking the country is to do it before the 2008 election. Right now, the powers that be in power have control over the two lame choices we get. It's up to us to let them know we're not buying those choices, and we have a different agenda, one that represents the true and awakening heart and soul of America.

www.wakeuplaughing.com

Steve Bhaerman is a writer, humorist and uncommontator who's been posing as cosmic comic Swami Beyondananda for the past 20 years. As the Swami, Steve is the author of four books including his latest, Swami for Precedent: A 7-Step Plan to Heal the Body Politic and Cure Electile Dysfunction. His website is www.wakeuplaughing.com.

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delia

a 50-million-strong blow-job? Or maybe if enough people blew in the opposite direction, the ruling class would sit up and take notice. Imagine if 50 million ''observers'' showed up at this convention: Second North American Secessionist Convention 3-4 October 2007 Chattanooga, Tennessee 16 Organizations, numerous observers registered as of 9/4/07 by delia (0 articles, 43 comments) on Saturday, October 6, 2007 at 3:40:37 PM

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ladybroadoak

GLOBAL movement, more grassrootz, more creative, more info Inclusive versus exclusive, creative versus same old, same old ... We are the change in the world we want to see!! "I'm crazy, you're crazy, they're crazier .." Simeon Toko One thing that has bothered me since the new "movement"'s inception is lack of GLOBAL focus - a movement is needed that is not so AMERICOCENTRIC, as that is part and parcel of the old meme. This does not mean going in and finding some token front person. Too much of the movement has been dedicated (and perhaps subconsciously) to handing over our power to organizations that are personality dominated. Hence it is easy to say that "leaders" are mic hogs or attention whores .. or whatever .. as the inevitable backlash comes back and then precious energy gets wasted propping up said leaders instead of broadening the base of support for our organizations. I think it is HIGH time for some of the leaders to step away from the mic .. it's holding people BACK. Instead, focus on creating new forms of media - OpEd News is certainly one of a new form of media, but we need radio stations, even a TV station beaming back REAL news from around the Globe, 24/7. In organizing terms, the energy has gone towards building what is know as "technocracies" - groups rallied around so-called experts. Ex CIA people, scholars (!!!), mothers of dead soldiers who devote full time attention to the "movement" has been The Movement's wont rather than focussing on grassroots methods of organizing that have been shown to work over time; these grasssrootz organizations cannot be shredded as easily. To a certain extent, the reason we are so fond of OpEd News is that this nearly as close to a grassroots organization as has arisen .... but the CONTENT is AMERICOCENTRIC continually. I know good hearted people who do nothing all day but read the Oh! Woe is me! opeds that crop up on the internet, never once pausing to read material being generating in a HOST of other countries. This is so totally imbalanced and impolitic these days. The more global types of organizations have faltered and fallen in my opinion for at least two identifiable reasons. First, they tend to be male dominated and women are regularly silenced or not taken seriously. Whenever I get some points made in a group, OUT I GO so that Mr. "enlightened" liberal stays ON TOP. (and that is why I continue to love Rob Kall and will support what he does; I am GRATEFUL. He is truly a GROWING individual. He has a lot to teach the HACKS out there, who are legion.) Two, they tend to be new agey and don't appeal to the main stream person who has other spiritual ideas. This is not ALWAYS the case, but then the exceptions tend to go back to the Americocentric model. We live in a world of TRANSNATIONALS, and a rapid concentration of capital "assets" ripped off indigneous peoples. These ripped off people's have PLENTY to say about fighting back and yet people tend to ignore what they have to show and teach us. The most excellent paper I have read during the last three years was written by Dr. Michael Yellowbird at the University of Kansas, a discussion paper to say native peoples should cease and desist from fighting in wars. I managed through a network to get this paper disseminated in Australia and New Zealand to every single major aborinal communities, WARRIOR communities as well as get it into the hands of every Parliamentarian in OZ and NZ. At the time I did, I wondered would anyone else do that? Make sure it didn't stay with America's shores? Our organizations stay only as healthy as WE ourselves focus on true service, service undertaken for the good of ALL so we can rise above pettiness and status considerations, which I see just rife in the groups I am in or have left. Anyone who reads OpEd News for a period of time knows that I push the use of art and creativity continually. That's what WE have and the choke hold of the fascists lacks. That's why we waste our efforts on things like debating Hilary Clinton's campaign, choosing between the lesser of evils!! (I don't, but other people who claim to be Ghadhi-ites do ..) We COULD be out there doing one little creative act a day, with dedication, until it just all mounts up -- that's what American Indian Injustice group does! And it WORKS. There are 700 individuals who get involved when an active alert is sounded. IMHO, we must reach out higher and FURTHER .. and include every brother and sister in our organizations. I am on one news group made up of Canada, US and Ontario citizens and I love the discussions because there is way more depth to them. The Canadian and UK contingents are more diverse (and I've asked at least one of them to come to OpEd and post his fantastic views, to share his unique insights.) For myself, the one single unifying issue is the use of low level radiation issue. It affects us ALL. The information on its effects is being SUPRESSED!! Last year the Low Level Radiation campaign released a minority report from a major study that is totally SHOCKING!! without this information NO ONE NO WHERE is operating from an informed position. So I put together a long (but not THAT long) chain letter and asked people to circulate it an important document to show others. One friend of mine put together important youtube videos on aspects of low level radiation that are MUST SEE and included them in my posting. Anyone reading this I implore you to take this information and put it in other people's hands!! Read it and have your feelings and get to work!! by then passing it on in anyway you can. Here's a postcard Eileen Danemann put out. I am personally hacking away every day on my blog which has a GLOBAL focus, and I also am building a website for earthlings anonymous. I live on disability and running a yahoo research group, doing my blog, writing for OpEd News (although I did some posts in New Zealand this year on interventionISM and recovery from trauma) and getting enough people together to start an INTERNATIONAL website is all I can personally do. But it is what I do ... My blog has over 1400 items devoted to planetary healing we are ALL suffering PTSD and TRAUMA. I cannot run the large a list of tags, so it must be accessed by putting topics in the blog search box - I direct my 5th chakra energies (100%!) into a daily effort and I Invite people to use at a resource continually - it gets read by right wingers constantly and I am aware of that and write accordingly. Spy agencies, foreign governments, the military - they ALL read it! But the progressives? Forget it! They don't want to re-educate themselves yet seems to me, because it takes finding what we all have in common, rather than focussing on our differences and getting with a DAILY Program of Recovery ... we've all been done in by counterintel pro, psyops, agitprop ... The focus must move to RECOVERY !! My blog is my attempt to create a HUGE POSTER for recovery .. and I still have another 3000 items to put on it!! The problem is, as it is for many thinking outside "the box" is I don't have resources to take things ever further and get some HELP! I think I have a plan .. I set up a google group to start a beehive of dialogue on the use of art to catapault the use of OUR propoganda. I announced it here at OpEd News. No one came! No one. I can say that I am "wrong" or I can say the time was NOT right, or . but I still think that massive GLOBAL art demos are the wave of the future . ones that bypass appealing to a deaf, insane, bought off, over lobbied CONGress. Target dates to do mass GLOBAL mails into DC are possible; days to make noise everywhere on the planet can be set. The old methods are truly the best - shout, scream, make noise, the things man did before Big Pharma and the deliberate creation of dysfunction and diseases ... Our PRESENCE must be felt and the best way to do this is to be totally present each and every single day, beaming our intentions and then DOING what we must do. But it AIN'T gonna change by creating a network of only "this" woman should be listened to, or only "That" guy has credentials to know what he is talking about ... and we must start paying attention to what indigenous people trying to leader us to .. a more fair society for ALL. Here's a link to inspiration from Evo Morales ... Now if we could just truly start thinking of ourselves as EARTHLNGS, living in a Milleium of the Living, we wouldn't be so easy to divide and conquer, although we must bear in mind the only way to achieve human rights/social justice is through national sovereigny . and the FASCISTS truly do want to take that away. Join up and start working against the North American Alliance ( NAU ), right now referred to as the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP ). They"'ll keep changing the letters as it suits them ... In North America the front lines are at Lake Sharbot and in Nevada .... and I hope at least ONE PERSON will read this, decide to sign up and help people stand the ground of sanity. Consider - More recently, Douglas Valentine, author of THE PHOENIX PROGRAM (CIA torture and assassination program in Vietnam), explained on Radio Liberty on October 18, 2006: "Democracy has been hijacked from us. It's been hijacked by these very powerful industrialists for whom the CIA really works. They don't work for you. They don't work for me. They don't work for the middle class. They don't work for the lower class. They work for a very elite group of Americans who control the wealth in this country. And their job is, through whatever means possible... to preserve the priviliges of this ruling one or two or three percent of the industrialists in this country. And, frankly, they do a very, very, very good job of it. and this is from my first OpEd News piece: The Information Age has been a useful tool for the gathering of the female tribes. Fed up with "finding themselves", women want to find a way to help others and themselves. Life has suddenly taken on new meaning and purpose. We no longer move down the streets in isolation. There is no "glass ceiling" in the streets. We are all equal. All voices are heard. All banners are read and celebrated. We can vote with our feet to say that "Enough is enough." And we know the angels are at our side. We move fearless and forward to a day when we wake up unafraid. "Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages." - Thomas Edison -