How the CIA made Google: Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet— part 2 of 2

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed who is supported by crowdfunding--people like you and I. (Commentary updated at 6 PM Seattle time.)

In this series he explores the new field of information and surveillance policies and programs of this corporate-military nexus by focusing mainly on Google corporation and its government counterparts. Although not the focus of the series, there is occasional references to ruling class forces that lie in major banking institutions which sponsor these policies and programs. For example, this summary statement from Part 1:

...the investment firm [Goldman Sachs] responsible for creating the billion dollar fortunes of the tech sensations of the 21st century, from Google to Facebook, is intimately linked to the US military intelligence community; with Venables, Lee and Friedman [all top executives associated with Goldman Sachs] either directly connected to the Pentagon Highlands Forum, or to senior members of the Forum.

This lengthy article provides more information about the close linkage of the Pentagon with major corporations. By outsourcing questionable and nefarious policies and programs to corporations, this partnership provides cover from government regulations that require public access to what the ruling class's government is actually doing. Also, corporations employ vast numbers of highly skilled scientists and technicians needed by the ruling class's Pentagon to wage both covert and overt wars, to develop methods of subversion to topple unfriendly governments, and even to help organize terrorist armies in pursuit of Empire goals. To top this all off, they outsource the selling of these policies to private public relations firms.

This close collaboration between--one could argue integration of--government, corporations, and military is the very essence of what is referred to as a fascist form of rule. Thus, I differ with Pete Dolack who has argued that we don't have a fascist rule in the US because it doesn't look exactly like what existed in German and Italy in the 1930s.

Militarism, extreme nationalism, the creation of enemies and scapegoats, and, perhaps the most critical component, a rabid propaganda that intentionally raises panic and hate while disguising its true nature and intentions under the cover of a phony populism, are among the necessary elements. 

Aren't Muslims, usually depicted as terrorists, scapegoats? Don't we view daily TV news which is packed with incidents of crime which causes many to fear their fellow Americans? Don't we have rabid propaganda spewed daily from corporate media that evokes hatred, panic, and fear? Don't we have a militarized police force and a huge prison industry? We don't see many flagrant acts to suppress dissent--yet: the exceptions being that of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, and Julian Assange. But, our masters have a legal structure in place (the Patriot Acts) ready to be used when many citizens can no longer be bamboozled by the corporate propaganda apparatus.

Embarrassment as US and ISIS tributes to King Abdullah almost identical

Click here to access article from The Pan-Arabia Enquirer. (humorous satire)

There were red faces in both the corridors of the White House and across the Islamic State last night....

The Rich are funding GM research to protect their babies

Click here if you wish to access information about the cartoonist, Fearguth, from his blog. (humorous satire)

 


Believing that the womb is a dangerous place, the rich are "investing" in protection for their "unborn" children.

How the CIA made Google: Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet— part 1

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed from Insurge Intelligence. (I'll try to comment on Part 2 tomorrow.)

This lengthy article Ahmed, who refused to be censored by The Guardian, offers a bonanza of information about a section of our shadow government and ties together so many details of the relatively recent Total Information Awareness project (mostly focusing on Google corporation) that it might become overwhelming to the average informed reader. 

For me, it offers an excellent illustration of the current stage in the evolution of US capitalism that really took off around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries after the capitalist class in the US inflicted major defeats on worker and farmer movements, reversed most of the gains by African-Americans after the Civil War, made fake attempts to reign in monopolies, and co-opted other sections of society--essentially bringing under control all the working people of the US. At this time the capitalist class had obtained uncontested control of industry, finance, and money issuance (the Federal Reserve). In turn, this control enabled them to consolidate their control over every other institution: education, media, entertainment, etc.

The next significant stage in this evolution began after WWII when the US ruling class reigned supreme with their intact industrial establishment and a huge military. The capitalist democratic form of government that they had inherited from their earlier predecessors presented obstacles to the exploitative opportunities now abundant in this post-WWII world. 

They had always used some agencies such as the FBI, private agencies such as Pinkerton, various front organizations such as the American Legion, sub rosa groups like the Ku Klux Klan to enforce their will upon American society, but now there was a need to accelerate the construction of covert agencies of rule which would function out of sight and in control of the official agencies (Congress, Supreme Court and legal system, and the Executive branch). This task was undertaken most prominently by Wall Street lawyers such as Allan Dulles who built the CIA, but there were many others who participated in the construction of all the secret agencies. 

This brings us to where we are now in US society which is a society ruled by a covert "deep state" or "shadow government" that functions behind the scenes of official government. Along with this covert apparatus has seen the recent development of the Total Information Awareness project. This article focuses on mainly Google corporation as an illustration of the key role that corporations, which are an integral part of the ruling class, play in our current society and world. 

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.

The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet. 

Our Renewable Future or What I’ve Learned in 12 Years Writing about Energy

Click here to access article by Richard Heinberg from Post Carbon Institute.

Ignore the current glut of oil on the market today. It's the long term, at least two decades ahead, that is of concern in this article about energy. 

Heinberg has been warning us of the diminishing supplies of economically extracted fossil fuels for many decades, while advocating more reliance on renewable energy. This lengthy article is a kind of summary of all that he has learned over these many years. What I think is really significant about this article, and many others like it especially among people who get published at this website, is the strange avoidance of pursuing a well-developed logic to its logical conclusion. Earlier in the article he made this prescient statement: 

What are the right questions? The first, already noted, is: What kind of society can up-to-date renewable energy sources power? The second, which is just as important: How do we go about becoming that sort of society?

As we’ll see, once we begin to frame the picture this way, it turns out to be anything but bleak.

Unfortunately, he eventually arrives at only a very timid answer to his very important questions:

...it’s fair to assume that this overall shift would constitute the end of consumerism (i.e., our current economic model that depends on ever-increasing consumption of consumer goods and services).  Here again, there are more than a few people who believe that advanced industrial nations consume excessively, and that some simplification of rich- and middle-class lifestyles would be a good thing.

This same, strange phenomenon is also found in another article posted on Resilience, an associated website, entitled "A New Theory of Energy and The Economy - Part 1 - Generating Economic Growth" authored by another long-tine expert on issues of energy--Gail Tverberg. This is another overly complicated essay exploring the relationship between energy and the economy in which the economic system is a given, sort of a natural fact of history, instead of a system created by a class of people who imposed it on others. She writes:

The economy is a self-organized system. In other words, it grew up gradually over time, one piece at a time. New businesses were added and old ones disappeared. New customers were added and others left. The products sold gradually changed. Governments gradually added new laws and removed old ones. As changes were made, the system automatically re-optimized for the changes.

This strange avoidance of recognizing the actual economic system by both authors suggests to me that they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in capitalist controlled academia that they cannot see the obvious. In college sociology courses I learned that this was due to "trained incapacity". Herman Kahn gives a lengthier explanation of this phenomenon. Of course, there is another possible explanation--self censorship to protect their careers.

This does not bode well for social change that can lead to real solutions to the crises now facing all capitalist societies. Prof. Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre put this well when he remarked:

It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.” [quoted in The Guardian]

PBS-TV’s Frontline Misrepresents Russia’s Vladimir Putin

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from RINF Alternative News. 

I watched the first part of this program and was shocked by the blatant Empire propaganda that the program used to attack Putin. In the past I have been impressed by the quality of Frontline's investigative reporting, but it seems that this program also has come under the direct control of Empire directors. If Joseph Goebbels were alive today, I'm sure he would be envious of this and many other propaganda efforts of the Empire that we are subject to today.  

I had my first experience with this type of propaganda when I witnessed the gross distortion of facts spewed by corporate media shortly after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. I had a fair awareness of US-Cuban history from a friend I had in the Army from which I had just been discharged. During my Army service I had befriended a former Cuban citizen who had immigrated to the US with his parents earlier in the decade. From him I learned how Cuba had been used and abused as a whorehouse and a mafia-controlled gambling paradise, US corporate domination of the Cuban economy, and the record of US interventions in the government of Cuba to insure that it served US interests. Subsequently this awareness of corporate propaganda was further reinforced by my experiences in the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War movement. 

However the decline in anything like objective reporting has astonished me since 9/11, and it seems that this deterioration is accelerating. Just when I think things couldn't get any worse, news reporting gets worse. Just this morning I witnessed CBS News using a former CIA director as a source of information on Yemen. Upon viewing this last program, Goebbels would be reminded of his use of former SS officers giving news reports over German radio about how German troops liberated France.

I'm sure that Putin is no paragon of virtue, but Zuesse points to many outright lies that were presented as facts in this program.

America Is Open for Business in Iraq (Psst… Wanna Buy an M1 Tank?)

Click here to access article by Peter Van Buren from Veterans News Now.

The current American war in Iraq is a struggle in search of a goal. It began in August as a humanitarian intervention, morphed into a campaign to protect Americans in-country, became a plan to defend the Kurds, followed by a full-on crusade to defeat the new Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS, aka ISIL), and then… well, something in Syria to be determined at a later date.

Although I think there is plenty of evidence that the Empire directorate has goals such as control over the oil-rich Middle East, still this author recognizes how the beast of corporate profits is being well fed in this region.

State of the Union Address: An Annual Monarchist Ritual To Acclaim U.S. Hypocrisy

Click here to access article by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama.

Why Bernhard continues to attribute ownership of US policies to Obama is a mystery to me, especially when his argument, as in this article, shows plainly that Obama is not the agency of US policies. Like most US president, a major exception being H.W. Bush, Obama was appointed president because of his excellent public relations skills.

...Obama's foreign policy is not really different from the one Bush and Carter followed and the next president will likely try the same foolish hypocritical paths.

The self-delusion of U.S. allmightiness has deep roots and it will take some near catastrophic events to rip it apart. 

Yes, indeed, US policies have deep roots, and they lie embedded in a deep shadow state under the control of core members of the ruling capitalist class who are situated in major banking institutions, military, major corporations, key government agencies (especially the Treasury Department and secret services) and Wall Street.

An Idiot’s Guide to Quantitative Easing (Warning: Likely to Make You Laugh and Cry in Equal Measure)

Click here if you wish to access this post directly from Raging Bull-Shit.

As Europe readies itself for its first ever dose of quantitative easing, here’s probably the most honest and certainly funniest explanation you’ll ever find of the QE phenomenon, courtesy of the ever-irreverent Australian comic duo Clarke & Dawe.

 

Old ice in Arctic vanishingly rare

Click here if you wish to access the introductory article associated with this video from NOAA Climate.gov. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) 

This animation tracks the relative amount of ice of different ages from 1987 through early November 2014. The first age class on the scale (1, darkest blue) means "first-year ice,” which formed in the most recent winter. (In other words, it’s in its first year of growth.) The oldest ice (>9, white) is ice that is more than nine years old. Dark gray areas indicate open water or coastal regions where the spatial resolution of the data is coarser than the land map.

Racism, Islamophobia and the Capitalist Crisis in Europe: Manipulation in Paris

Click here to access article by Horace Campbell from Libya 360°.

Prof. Campbell at Syracuse U.

...[Campbell joins] in the condemnation of the assault on Charlie Hebdo and the killing of journalists. It should be stated categorically here that this writer defends freedom of speech without endorsing the speech’s content. Thus, I am unequivocally denouncing the killings in France. The use of satire as camouflage for racist and offensive speech is unacceptable and should be equally denounced.

It is also urgent for progressive forces to work to ensure that the killings and mass mobilizations are not turned into vehicles for manipulating the working people to support racism, islamophobia and other forms of European jingoism and chauvinism. .... This spectre of fascism must be taken seriously because fascism emerges in the midst of a capitalist crisis when the ruling elements mobilize chauvinism and racism to divert the attention of the working people from mobilizing against the capitalist class. This was the concrete experience of fascism during the last major capitalist depression.

Campbell sees that the directors of the Empire are using this recent terrorist event to prepare Europeans for more austerity as their economy faces numerous serious problems.

The Euro is unravelling and the recent decision of the Swiss to abandon the Euro is one clear manifestation that the expedient of transferring the losses of the banks to Greek and Spanish workers cannot hold for long. France will either have to nationalize the banks and impose greater controls of the top one per cent or intensify the austerity measures of laying off government employees, cut pensions and cutting services in health, education, housing and sanitation. This path to save the risky banks will be to intensify repression. In this alternative, the present militarization and war on terrorists will be like a dress rehearsal for moving the military against students and workers.

.... The manipulation in Paris should be seen as a pre-emptive move for deepening militarization. Progressives must oppose the rising fascist forces in Europe and neo-conservatism in the Americas.

Paris Shootings: Maybe the Last Piece of a Horrible Puzzle

Click here to access article by Henry Kamens from New Eastern Outlook.

Kamens is referring to the puzzle of many mysterious, unconvincing assassinations and "terrorist" events in the past 50 plus years some of which he reviews and finds similar elements appearing in the Paris shootings. 

The United States has spent several years installing a bunch of Moslems, initially Chechens but now also from other countries, in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia. It trains them there in irregular warfare and forms them into a mobile “hit squad” which commits “terrorist atrocities” in different parts of the world when it suits US interests to intervene in those countries.

These atrocities are then blamed on “Islamic fundamentalists”, but are actually committed by these US-sponsored individuals, selected and trained for the purpose, who are not native to those countries but are sent to each place as needed.

Prison Dispatches from the War on Terror: Ex-CIA Officer John Kiriakou Speaks

Click here to access article by Andrew Jerell Jones from The Intercept.

Kiriakou speaks of his experience in the CIA with their torture programs and the harrowing experiences he endured after he leaked this information to a reporter. Meanwhile, the torturers are rewarded for their efforts.

Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists

Click here to access article by Oliver Milman from The Guardian.

Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results.

.... Steffen said the research showed the economic system was “fundamentally flawed” as it ignored critically important life support systems.

“It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive,” he said. “History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.” 

Don’t Worry: USDA Says Pesticide-Laden Food is Safe to Eat

Click here to access article by Mike Barrett from NaturalSociety. 

Despite the U.S. food supply already being riddled with copious amounts of pesticides, the United States Department of Agriculture continuously approves new pesticides to be used on U.S. crops. The most recent case of approval revolves around the sale and planting of Monsanto’s genetically engineered dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton. Even more concerning, though, is that the USDA recently claimed that current pesticides levels on food are mostly nothing to worry about, and that we should continue eating food coated with toxic chemicals.

How the People Can Outwit the Global Domination Plans of Agribusiness

Click here to access article by Jonathan Latham from Common Dreams.

What I found remarkable about this essay is that Latham provides establishment sources via links to back up his claims that the promotion of agribusiness is based on lies.

...what industry understands, and the food movement does not, is that what prevents total rejection of bland, industrialised, pesticide-laden, GMO food is the standard acceptance, especially in Western countries, of the overarching agribusiness argument that such food is necessary. It is necessary to feed the world.

Hence, the solution is:

...the food movement could show that famine is an empty threat then it would also have shown, by clear implication, that the chemical health risks and the ecological devastation that these technologies represent are what is unnecessary. The movement would have shown that pesticides and GMOs exist solely to extract profit from the food chain. They have no other purpose. Therefore, every project of the food movement should aim to spread the truth of oversupply, until mention of the Golden Fact invites ridicule and embarrassment in the population, rather than fear. [my emphasis]

Leave fossil fuels buried to prevent climate change, study urges

Click here to access article by Damian Carrington from The Guardian.

The study they are referring to is posted in Nature (PDF), a professional scientific journal and website, and is being made freely accessible to the public. The editors apparently made this exception to their standard paywall website because they felt that the content merited this exception. 

The scientists in the Nature study reached the following conclusion:

...these results demonstrate that a stark transformation in our understanding of fossil fuel availability is necessary. Although there have previously been fears over the scarcity of fossil fuels, in a climate-constrained world this no longer a relevant concern: large portions of the reserve base and an ever greater proportion of the resource base should not be produced if the temperature rise is to remain below 2°C.

However, for those of us not sufficiently trained in the physical sciences, The Guardian provides us with their summary of the findings.

Vast amounts of oil in the Middle East, coal in the US, Australia and China and many other fossil fuel reserves will have to be left in the ground to prevent dangerous climate change, according to the first analysis to identify which existing reserves cannot be burned.

The new work reveals the profound geopolitical and economic implications of tackling global warming for both countries and major companies that are reliant on fossil fuel wealth.

However, notice in the last paragraph how limited the liberal Guardian is in comprehending scientific findings that conflict with capitalist ideology. The article does not mention the real profound implications the study has for capitalism which requires relatively cheap sources of energy to fuel its insatiable appetite for unlimited growth. (This phenomenon is what is often referred to as self-censorship. The Guardian fired Nafeez Ahmed, the last environmental columnist, who refused to censor himself.) The editors of The Guardian who depend on advertising revenues would not want to damage the source of their funding even if their board of directors, who are likely thoroughly embedded in the system, would permit mention of such "profound geopolitical and economic implications". Our masters in the One Percent whose wealth and power depends on the system of capitalism would not want you to be influenced by such subversive thoughts.

Thus, you will find that the study along with all the other scientific findings will be diminished, ignored, or denied by our masters who are thoroughly addicted to the drugs of power and wealth that the current system delivers to them. The ultimate, dramatic implication is that the responsibility to change things lies with us in the Ninety-Nine Percent, the people who are not addicted to such powerful drugs. If we fail to take on this responsibility to create a sustainable economic system, we humans will surely perish (along with many other species) from the Earth. 

Save the Humans!

In the Charlie Hebdo psyop double standards, logical fallacies and crass ignorance are everywhere

Click here to access article by "The Saker" from The Vineyard of the Saker. 

There has much been written about what The Saker refers to as a psyop, but this passionate essay is one of the best. I am posting this as another antidote to the poison being so widely spread by Empire directors to exploit this latest "terrorist" incident in order to curtail more civil liberties and justify more military adventures. We must use the internet to fight back!

When considering any aspects of the Charlie Hebdo psyop you will inevitably find that double standards and logical fallacies are everywhere.  That some speech is freer then other, that some victims matter more then others, that some atrocities are more atrocious then others and that some pain gets more respect then other.  But the worst for me is this sickening solidarity with those who made insulting others into some kind of noble feat, these "heroes" are lionized for their "courage" to generate real moral pain in others.  I see nothing noble in that at all and the fact that they were brutally and viciously murdered by, apparently, a gang of Takfiri freaks does not make then anyway more respectful.

Charlie Hebdo - The Hidden Agenda Exposed

Click here if you wish to access this excellent 5 minute video and transcript with many supporting links from StormCloudsGathering. 

Whatever you believe actually happened in Paris, one thing is very clear: the powers that be are going to try to use this event to expand wars, intensify domestic surveillance, and legislate away more of our rights.

This is not speculation. They have already started in France, in the U.K. ..., at the E.U. level, in the United States and they are going to attempt to push this on a global scale.... All nicely coordinated to ride the wave of outrage that followed the attacks.

Forbidden History: Operation Gladio

Click here to access article by Don Quijones from Raging Bull-Shit. 

I have not viewed the BBC video so I cannot comment on its quality. But notice that this was released to the British public in 1992. The reason for this was, no doubt, to manage the fall-out of information first released to the European public in 1990 by key Italian figures who had knowledge of this secret CIA organized program in Italy. You can learn most of the details about this operation in a very important book entitled NATO's Secret Armies by Daniele Ganser published finally in 2005. 

Following these Italian disclosures other informants came forward in many other European countries reporting about the same Gladio operations in their countries. This was sensational news in Europe, but barely made a dent in US coverage. I, as a reasonably informed political person, was not aware of it until several years later when more obscure US left wing publications made mention of it.

Unbeknownst to most people, the CIA in the 1990s developed an updated version, something like Gladio 2.0. Sibel Edmonds, an exceptionally courageous FBI whistleblower, has written many articles and done many interviews on this subject which she first learned about as an FBI translator translating reports coming from several Middle Eastern countries shortly after 9/11. According to her this updated version is known by US secret services as Gladio B. 

She describes this updated version in her recently published work of political fiction entitled The Lone Gladio. (If you don't know what "political fiction" is and how this form is used, click on the above link.) This new version is one which specializes in false-flag operations using terrorist front organizations, assassinations, and drug-trafficking. Sound familiar? She provides extensive information about Gladio B also on her website, Boiling Frogs Post. You might start with this article entitled "Georgia: The New CIA-NATO Arab Terrorist Training Center".

The Prison State Of America: 5% Of World’s Population But 25% Of World’s Prison Population

From RT via Mint Press the following important video featuring Chris Hedges exposing the exploitation that is going on in the ruling class's vast prison system. 

For-profit prisons have created a “neo-slavery” in the US, according to award-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Inmates work eight hours per day for major corporations such as Chevron, Motorola, Nordstrom’s and Target, yet only have the possibility of making up $1.25 an hour. In addition, companies that provide services like phone calls overcharge prisoners on even the most basic services, making hundreds of millions in profits annually. RT’s Ben Swann speaks to Hedges, who explains how this shadowy system came into existence.