CNN continues reeling from its propagandistic Russia coverage as the network plummets into international disgrace, losing three prominent journalists. Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris all resigned after the network was forced to retract and apologize for yet another baseless accusation of illegal Trump/Russia collusion. This comes as The New York Times simultaneously retracts their own ‘Russiagate’ canard, alleging “17 intelligence agencies” made US election hacking reports when only 3 did – and those conclusions were drawn not by the actual agencies in full, but by a mere two dozen loyalists within said agencies (NSA, CIA, FBI), hand-selected by Russophobic eugenicist Clapper himself. As investigative journalist Robert Parry observes, if you ‘hand-pick’ the analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion.
Embarrassments of this sort might be too numerous to count when it comes to viral media stories hyping dubious Russia threats over the last year, but most American’s are no more shocked by this than we were by the fact that pro wrestling represents little more than staged fiction. Incidentally, pro wrestling and CNN both share identical broadcasting territory since they both just happen to be in the entertainment business.
But CNN still revels in it’s reckless claims, as exemplified by a series of new reports compiled by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas called American Pravda. O’Keefe has presented footage of CNN producer John Bonifield making shocking admissions about “ratings” acting as the primary driver behind a Russiagate story that he admits is “mostly BS.” Bonifield even suggests that Trump could be correct in his characterization of the story as a “witch hunt.”
O’Keefe’s revelations also include footage of CNN commentator Van Jones admitting the whole Russia story is “just a big nothing burger.”
Bonifield is right about the ratings though. Blatantly inane anti-Trump Russia conspiracies command a large audience because there is a voracious appetite among anti-Trump news viewers for stories, no matter how false, that they want to believe are true. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it certainly doesn’t appear to be as lucrative. By Wikileaks’ count, there have been 3,490 fake news stories reciting the “17 agencies” lie. Ratings indeed.
In spite of this latest fiasco, the corporate media seems to be digging their heels in even further. Take, for example, CNN’s CEO Jeff Zucker, who insists that his network is “trusted now more than ever.” Unfortunately for Zucker, the battle for “most viewed” does not necessarily translate into “most trusted,” as recent poll numbers regarding viewer’s trust in the network’s integrity stand in stark contrast to his remarks. And the Times’ belated correction affirms the growing perception that corporate media has engaged in a political vendetta against Trump, casting aside professional standards to the point of repeating false claims simply to denigrate him.
The good news is that the corporate-Deep State’s ploy to scare us into compliance with this narrative has failed. Accusing anyone who dared express any skepticism about the Russiagate story of being a Kremlin sympathizer, one of Putin’s “useful idiots,” or even an outright agent for the Russian government, only emboldened researchers committed to authentic journalism. The false Russiagate narrative continues to persist solely due to the US Deep State’s regime change ambitions in Moscow and Damascus.
But at the end of the day, the American people really don’t seem to care about Russian hacking. They care about their ongoing struggle to make ends meet. They care about how they’re going to feed their children. They care about their vanishing job security, pensions, benefits and living wages. And it appears perfectly obvious that Russiagate served as yet another attempted distraction to draw attention away from crimes committed right in front of all of us, every single day, by the American ownership class.
So perhaps now we ask ourselves whether America’s masses will tolerate yet another involvement in yet another illegal war with yet another sovereign nation.
Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show.
It’s hard to say how much of the spectacle is real and how much of it is merely theater. Having said that, the mainstream media assure us that Hillary won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College. The whole scenario seems inverse from just about everyone’s projections, regardless of their leanings, with very few exceptions. The outcome doesn’t make any sense at first glance. Clinton was guaranteed all of the support from all of the major players; all of the industrial and corporate heads, all of the big banks – even the fucking Bush family were on her side! The wikileaks revelations confirmed that Trump wouldn’t be allowed to win. It was game, set and match.
Then again, this is the country that placed actors Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger into ceremonial positions of artificial power. Actors on a stage. Masks in a play. Let’s try to remember that Trump is still just a figurehead, and so too would Hillary have been.
So who will fill the positions of the upcoming administration? It’s hard to say. Once again, there is a lot misinformation and disinformation polluting the airwaves. One headline claimed that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan/Chase (one of the key players of the financial meltdown in 2009) was propositioned to serve as Trump’s secretary of Treasury, but turned it down. But upon closer examination that scenario doesn’t make any sense, since Trump isn’t the kind of guy to go around asking people if they want to be on his team. Trump’s entire TV show hinged on people coming to him for a job and turning most of them away. “You’re fired!”
Then there were headlines that Ben Carson, a creationist and retired neurosurgeon, was tapped as a potential secretary of education; that Myron Ebell—a longtime skeptic of climate change—is a likely choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
The New York Times reported:
Jeffrey Eisenach, a consultant who has worked for years on behalf of Verizon and other telecommunications clients, is the head of the team that is helping to pick staff members at the Federal Communications Commission.
Michael Catanzaro, a lobbyist whose clients include Devon Energy and Encana Oil and Gas, holds the “energy independence” portfolio.
Michael Torrey, a lobbyist who runs a firm that has earned millions of dollars helping food industry players such as the American Beverage Association and the dairy giant Dean Foods, is helping set up the new team at the Department of Agriculture.
There were reports that other potential appointees included oil-tycoon Forrest Lucas, venture capitalist Robert Grady, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross and oil company CEO Harold Hamm.Then rumors circulated that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was being considered as a potential attorney general. But none of these appointments were announced by Trump’s transition team, and there seems to be reason to believe that these rumors were created Giuliani and others as a sly means of applying for cabinet positions.
But even if Donald is considering these aforementioned names to fill his cabinet positions, that too is of little surprise. Despite Trump’s promises to “drain the swamp,” the alligators are the only ones who know where the drain plug is.
After several decades of super-concentrated Wall Street cabinets I would be earnestly surprised if Mr. Trump – who is himself in league with the Wall Street gangsters – decides to counter the will of the banks and fill his cabinet positions with anything other than finance oligarchs, just as every other administration since Carter has done.
We know from the wikileaks cables that Citibank’s “recommendations” for Obama’s cabinet 8 years ago were almost entirely on the money – long before Obama was confirmed as president. The reality is that said list was not full of recommendations. That cable was a direct order from the real power structures. And I am sure that in time, the same will be revealed about this moment as well.
But pay no attention to these men’s administrations. Get mad at the figurehead, minions! That is, after all, what they’re there for. And keeping our focus trained on the figurehead is a sure fire way to maintain our societal ignorance about what is actually going on in political life.
So what changed this week? How did we suddenly end up here? And what difference – if any – does it really make?
Here are some of the more distinct possibilities:
The FBI may be seeking indictments due to the wikileaks cables that confirm the crimes of the Clintons – which include but are not limited to solid confirmation of their involvement in pedophilia organizations and human trafficking vis-à-visPizzagate – but it would appear that the FBI are holding off on said indictments until after Obama steps down so that Barack cannot pardon the Clintons when charges are pressed – a legal situation that the major players may have seen as a bad investment for the future, especially if impeachment proceedings were to follow.
There is the possibility that Team Clinton’s incessant and unnecessary antagonism of Russia, in addition to their repeated threatening of a no-fly-zone over Syria (which, by the way, constitutes a declaration of war) made the military a bit nervous, especially since the American Empire bloated beyond a stable carrying capacity long ago.
Perhaps the investment class have doubts about the longevity of Hillary’s ability to command a presidential administration in the most stressful chapters of the American Empire, because, as once again confirmed by much of what wikileaks has revealed in the weeks and months leading up to this moment, Hillary isn’t exactly in the best health of her life.
Or perhaps team Trump out-maneuvered the vote-rigging software in key states – a possibility now corroborated by investigative reporter Greg Palast.
It could be a mix of several of these reasons. Maybe there’s something even bigger going on that none of us can see. But at the end of the day, all I can say with absolute certainty is that Trump’s victory made absolutely no sense given what we knew – or what we thought we knew – leading up to election day.
But what is perhaps even more interesting than the result of Celebrity Deathmatch 2016, is liberal America’s reaction to it. Why are so many people so unbelievably depressed? Why do so many allow inconsequential politicians to govern over their emotional state? Why give so much personal power away like that? Why allow what goes on outside of you to govern over our peace of mind? This was just a reality TV show, after all. So what if the season finale didn’t turn out the way you wanted or expected? Does that really warrant temper tantrums and sobbing fits?
No one shed a tear when the city of Damascus was reduced to rubble, along with tens-of-thousands of innocent lives. But a sporting event like the presidential reality show tosses in a surprise ending and everyone loses their fragile minds? It’s just sports. It’s like the Cowboys won and now everyone is walking around with a frown on their face and a slump in their posture. Why?
Let’s remember that what happens in Washington is only a symptom of the real power structures. I find it amusing that people who allow hatred of ceremonial figureheads like Trump and Clinton into their hearts have no idea who Zbigniew Brzezinski is; they usually have no idea of the depth and breadth of the crimes against humanity committed by Henry Kissinger (who enthusiastically endorsed Hillary); they have no idea who Jamie Diamond is; who Lloyd Blankfein is; who David Rockefeller is.
I think what so many people’s rage and sorrow is really about is the fact that our collective denial of what America has become is now finally ending. A lot of people started waking up after Bush’s illegal wars and the formation of the Patriot Act. But the a savior came onto the stage. When Barack Obama was placed into the White House liberal America went back to bed. Barack’s slick, charismatic, articulate salesmanship did not stop the crimes of the American Empire, but those crimes became easier to ignore because this salesman made us feel better about those crimes, and convinced the dim and naive that those crimes weren’t even happening (or that they were happening, but they weren’t crimes).
Never mind that Guantanamo Bay remains open to this very day. Never mind that torture, extraordinary rendition and the unconstitutional assassination of American citizens continues to this very hour. Never mind that not only was the Patriot Act continued under the Obama administration, but the even more draconian Freedom Act that places all of the burdens of proof for illegal surveillance in the private hands of Internet Service Providers, was approved and signed into law by the same, so-called “progressive” administration. Never mind that the drone murders of hundreds of children and thousands of adult civilians continues. Never mind that the illegal bombings and troop deployments in Syria, Libya and Africa happened under the Obama Administration. Never mind the AFRICOM program. Never mind the frack attack that continues permanently poisoning watersheds from sea to polluted sea – a situation championed more fervently by Hillary Clinton than any other DC politician I am aware of. Never mind the Dakota Access Pipeline situation, which continues to grow scarier by the day. And of course, never mind the Banker Bailouts that delivered the final death blow to the US manufacturing sector while the investment class laughed all the way to the bank and created the very situation that made Trump’s popularity inevitable.
Does anyone actually think that fascism isn’t already here?
We have more people locked up in America’s prison system today than Stalin had locked up in the infamous Gulag Archipelago at the height of his reign of terror. More black men today are imprisoned today than were enslaved in the 1850’s. Police murders of unarmed civilians continue with unceasing repetition. All of this was allowed to take place under the auspices of America’s first – and perhaps last – African American president.
Obama’s calm, rational, likeable demeanor – his expert salesmanship – allowed Americans the luxury of ignoring reality behind a veil of innocuous jargon. That luxury is gone now. Americans finally have to start facing the music. The problem is, Americans have been ignoring it for so long, it seems rather overwhelming now. 8 years of Obama was the equivalent 8 years of a Prozac prescription. We didn’t deal with the reasons for our depression. We simply took a drug so that we might feel a lot better about those reasons. This slaughterhouse of a world sure was getting us down before our doctors at Citibank and Goldman Sachs recommended 8 years of Obama. But now that our prescription is ending, we’re finally left with a stark reality we’ve consciously chosen to ignore. It’s like our lollypop has been stripped from our grasp, so we’re left with no alternative but to sob angry tears of deluded disappointment.
Fascism isn’t on the horizon and Trump is not going to bring it about. He might make it worse, but it’s already here. It’s just beyond your front door. And with Trump as commander in chief, complacent Americans can no longer dismiss the obvious realities swarming around them.
Had Hillary won, would any of us really have any cause for celebration? What bizarre turn of events led us to wish for the ascension of someone who once described Black children as “super-predators,” who voted for the Iraq War, who sings the praises of fracking and “free” trade agreements – how did it come to this? We know now, from the Podesta emails, that Hillary was well aware that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the main funders of ISIS and were at the time she was meeting with their heads of state and accepting huge sums of money from their governments on behalf of her foundation. What do you call someone who meets with people known to be financing terrorists?
While the mainstream pundits were shocked by the rejection of the candidate they had convinced themselves was the only rational choice, those of us who live a little closer to her so-called “deplorables” – who have been left behind by the Democratic strategy of Wall Street and Identity Politics – we were less surprised by this outcome. The disenfranchised, having endured a relentless economic beat-down over the past two generations, coupled with incessant slander against them by supposedly enlightened liberals, when offered a choice between the old boss and something different, not surprisingly, opted for something different.
And it’s not as black-and-white as anyone might think. What happened this election is very difficult to quantify because our limited human perceptions are ill-equipped to make sense of the staggering complexities of the increasingly confounding world around us. For example, I spoke to a maintenance worker this week who admitted to having voted for Trump, but told me that he felt ashamed to have done so. He said he was worried about what Trump might try to do as president, but he was more worried about what Clinton would do given her clear track record. But the media’s hate-filled narrative paints such people as rabid, mouth-breathing, homophobic racists. That kind of image branding doesn’t leave a lot of room for a conflicted working class desperate to break the cycles of globalization and poverty.
The media has doubled down, attributing [Trump’s] win to the notion that there are just more “racist white people” in the country than they originally thought. Which is fine so long as you can ignore the fact that Trump actually performed 8-points better with Hispanics than Mitt Romney did in 2012. But that fact doesn’t fit the mainstream narrative that now eggs on the behavior that many lefties claimed to be appalled by but are now succumbing to – that behavior being protests that unfortunately turned violent on Thursday night, characterized by bricks through windows, smashed cars, and fires lit in the street.
No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, most Americans would agree that violence and property destruction are counterproductive and should be condemned. That said, we’ve noticed that all the “Better Together” campaign rhetoric of the left that was so prevalent just a few days ago, has now completely vanished. Perhaps “Better Together – But Only If Democrats Win” would have been a more accurate slogan, no?
But a closer examination of the violent protests reveals a darker truth. Thousands of these protesters were recruited and are being paid by Billionaire globalist financier George Soros’ MoveOn.org. While the dimwitted may be joining in, the foundation of these riots are not organic crowds of concerned Americans, but paid protesters responding to Craigslist ads. Whether this is an attempt by the Banking elite to intimidate Trump into following their age-old status quo agenda, or to provoke a color revolution in America by stoking the flames of ethnic tribalism remains to be seen.
But nuance rarely finds a home in the mainstream media and I fear that many well-meaning, highly-educated, fellow human beings, have been infected by the fear-mongering of polarity consciousness.
Meanwhile, as anti-Trump protesters in Portland apparently “smashed shop and car windows, threw firecrackers and set rubbish alight…chanting “We reject the president-elect!”, the president-elect has announced his intentions to pursue progressive financial policies that sound as if they could have come from Bernie Sanders, including a “21st century” version of the 1933 Glass-Steagall law that required the separation of commercial and investment banks. Then again, what politician hasn’t told us exactly what we wanted to hear? Rhetoric aside, we’ll see what actually happens.
But the reason that large numbers of people – especially poor white people – voted for Trump is not because they are fascists, it’s not because they’re racists, it’s not even because they’re homophobic. It’s simply because their lives have disappeared, due in large part to neoLiberal Democratic policies (such as NAFTA). The way they see it, any change is worth a shot as long as it’s actually real. The liberal elitists have had nothing to offer poor people, apart from pious and asinine suggestions that they “get a degree” or “move to where the jobs are.” When the backbone of America is labeled as unnecessary racists because they cared more about their lost jobs, plundered communities, and diminished prospects, do not be surprised when they act in the interests of survival. Civilization and anarchy are only seven meals apart, and desperate people can not be blamed for their behavior, especially if the conditions that brought about their desperation could have been avoided but were not avoided because it was more convenient to ignore them.
As Pulizter Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges wrote yesterday:
In presidential election after presidential election, especially after Nader’s success in 2000, so-called progressives succumbed to the idiotic mantra of the least worst. Those who should have been the natural allies of third parties and dissident movements abjectly surrendered to the Democratic Party that, like the Republican Party, serves the beast of imperialism… The cowardice of the liberal class meant it lost all credibility, much as Bernie Sanders did when he sold his soul to the Clinton campaign. The liberal class proved it would stand and fight for nothing. It mouthed words and ideas it did not truly believe. It bears significant responsibility for the phenomena that created Trump. It should have had the foresight to abandon the Democratic Party after President Bill Clinton passed the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, to build parties and institutions that defended the interests of the working class. If it had stood up for working men and women, it might have prevented [this outcome].
Many liberals are choosing to blame this outcome on simple racism. They say that Trump won because America is simply more racist than we thought. But you can’t claim that race is a social construct and then go around blaming everything on white people; you can’t have it both ways.
This hypocrisy is obvious to people who do not fit any of the demographic categories that modern neoliberalism has canonized as being worthy of having their pain acknowledged. And while the result of this was a win for Trump on the presidential ballot, please take notice that 7 of 9 Marijuana initiatives passed, as well as 4 of 5 minimum wage initiatives and 3 of 4 firearm initiatives. The people who voted for Trump are probably not who you and I have been led to believe they are. You have more in common with Trump’s supporters than you may suspect.
One upshot of all this is that it’s now conservatives’ turn to go through the same process of disenchantment that many lefties did during the Obama administration when liberal America began to realize who Obama’s funders were in 2008 and who filled the ranks of his entire administration. However, the desire for real change will remain a driving force for those who voted for Trump as well as those who voted for anyone else, and that is where our opportunities lie. If we can find it within ourselves to focus on all that we have in common, and not on what separates us, we just might be able to join forces with Hillary’s so-called “deplorables” for the benefit of everyone. Divide and Conquer is the name of THEIR game, and while I hate to be the bearer of bad news, if you’re one of the people who is playing into that Divide-and-Conquer game by focusing on what makes you different from your neighbors instead of what makes you the same as them, you’re part of the problem. Do we value a diversity of ideas or not? Do we value the freedom of speech or don’t we?
Learning is not about agreement. If we all had to agree about everything all the time none of us would ever learn anything. And now that I think about it, if we all had to agree about everything all of the time, that’s the central ruling edict for just about every dystopian novel and film I’ve ever seen or read. If we can actually be okay with people having different ideas than we do, we might just be able to work with them, and working together is the only thing that will build real solidarity and create real solutions. We’ve all heard it before but I’ll say it again – united we stand, divided we fall. Hard truths like this take a minute to learn but a lifetime to master.
It’s easy to sit in our posh coffee bars with our chic laptops and trendy ideas and philosophize about the world out there. It’s easy for us to talk about how open minded and forgiving we are. But unless and until we’re willing to talk with people who hold very different perspectives than us – perspectives, I remind you, that were garnered through a very different experience of reality than our own – and substantively demonstrate our tolerance, patience and compassion, then what good is any of our political theory? What good are ideas if they’re never implemented?
I ask you to look inside of your heart and consider what kind of world you really want to live in. Do you want to build a just world for everybody, or just for your friends? Do you truly care about what happens to other human beings on this planet, or just about what happens to people who hold the same ideas as you do? How big is your heart? How open is your mind? Is there room in there for the toothless redneck? For the heroin junkie? How about the homeless vagrant? If we really do claim to care about everyone, then shouldn’t we be expressing that by reaching out instead of recoiling in horror from imaginary demons of our own creation? You can’t call somebody bad and expect them to be good, after all. We talk a good game about inclusiveness and compassion, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing if we can’t put those tools to use when it isn’t easy, or comfortable, or convenient to do so. How you act in conditions of adversity is what defines you as a person.
Perhaps people will once again, out of disgust or apathy or laziness, unplug from political life until the next election when the whole, sad spectacle is doomed repeat all over again. But perhaps not. Trump’s inauguration might be just what it takes to finally shake Americans out of their ignorance, out of their complacence, and out of their slumber.
Then again, does any of it really matter? In the ultimate scheme of things, we’re on a rock, floating in space. There are 400 million known galaxies in our universe. The dimension of Samsara does not represent the highest dimension of existence . This is not heaven. This is not the only vibrational reality in the universe. This life does not represent the panacea. Let’s get real about where we are and what we’re meant to do while we’re here; this fleetingly short period of time that represents the lives we take for granted and waste on the most trivial and vacuous of obsessions. Ask yourself: What’s really important? What really matters?
When our brief, bright lives begin to flicker out, are we going to lament the most common regrets that people repent on their deathbeds? I wish I had been more loving to the people who matter the most to me; I wish I had been a better spouse; I wish I hadn’t spent so much time working; I wish I had taken more risks; I wish I had lived my own dream; I wish I had taken better care of myself; I wish I had done more for others. It’s only fear that keeps us from doing these things. So let’s try to remember how to forget that fear.
This analysis was written by Joshua Davis and Brandt Miller, Edited by Gabrielle Lafayette Contact the research team at outerlimitsradioshow@fastmail.fm
The establishment have pulled out all the stops with the 2016 election, presenting the two most hated candidates yet. But convincing the American people to accept the old game has proven no simple task. The latest round of propaganda includes the creation of a new super PAC in support of Clinton which was kicked it off with a video featuring wealthy celebrities including Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey Jr, Don Cheadle, Keegan Key and others, edited together to berate the viewer with a very simple message: “We’re rich so our opinions are more important than yours.” The video is entitled Save The Dayand if you’ve seen it, you probably weren’t aware that it was a Super PAC created by Hollywood director Joss Whedon.
Super PACs are a type of independent Political Action Committee (PAC) that are legally permitted to raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, and individuals. One of the touchstones of the Bernie Sanders campaign was its lack of Super PAC money.
But the Save The Day propaganda video wasn’t the only helping hand Hillary received from her friends in Hollywood, as her subsequent appearance on the mock celebrity interview show “Between Two Ferns” with Zach Galifianakis further exemplifies the extent to which moneyed interests are willing to go in their vain attempt to distract Americans from awakening to the realization that there are no political solutions, that the elections are merely a spectacle, and that it doesn’t matter who is elected. Continuity of the status quo marches on regardless of whose face is on it. Those who see the corruption but fail to understand the meaninglessness of the presidential circus understandably favor Donald Trump because of his appearance as a political outsider, and to express their fury at America’s dwindling economic status that took perhaps one of its hardest blows from NAFTA during the administration of Hillary’s husband.
Meanwhile the media have granted Trump billions of dollars in free television coverage to constantly push a message of fear, that the Donald is going to usher in an era of Fascism. But doesn’t America already resemble a fascist state? Look around. You ever hear about this endless string of police murders (more Americans have been killed by police since 9/11 than soldiers killed overseas)? You ever hear about the use of slave labor in our massive prison industrial complex that houses nearly two-and-a-half million prisoners (most of whom are there for the victimless offense of drug possession)? Have you been following the violent treatment of peaceful protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline? And how about the NSA’s egregious dragnet surveillance programs that constitute the most invasive obstruction of the Fourth Amendment in US history? Or the elimination of due process and Habeas Corpus through the extraordinary rendition (or kidnapping) of American citizens made legal under section 1021 of the NDAA? Have you watched the slow, institutionalized normalization and justification of CIA torture programs? And what about the unprecedented war against the whistleblowers who have sought to make the American people aware of these simple truths? All of this constitutes the actions of a kind of fascism. We’re there already. So Donald Trump is not the problem.
What is perhaps most ironic is that there are more black men in prison under an administration led by America’s first African American president than were enslaved in the 1850’s. And every single week we’re bombarded with yet another string of videos showing militarized police unnecessarily murdering African Americans or their SWAT counterparts suppressing the ensuing protests that invariably follow. Is Obama simply apathetic about African American lives, or is it just that presidents do not have any of the authority that most Americans ascribe to them?
As observed by Douglas Adams in the lat 1970’s, “The job of the president is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.”
The President is only a figurehead who wields no real power whatsoever. But many of us get so caught up in it as if elections determine the country’s socioeconomic or geopolitical trajectory, and as if citizens could ever influence them. As if the Electoral College doesn’t determine the outcome. As if the candidate with the most Super PAC money doesn’t always win. As if electronic voting machines in swing states haven’t repeatedly proven to favor the establishment candidate, even when exit polls reveal that the machines are counting the votes incorrectly. As if our elections aren’t decided years in advance at the Bilderberg Meetings by the world’s most powerful oligarchs. And as if the founding fathers actually desired a popular democracy in the first place (their idea of a democratic Republic did not grant the power of the vote to women, or Native Americans, or African slaves, or even white men who didn’t own land).
Longtime Clinton friend Jim Messina of The Messina Group attended the 2015 globalist conference. Messina also heads up the super PAC Priorities USA, which supported Obama and is now firmly in the Clinton camp. Messina also spearheaded Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 and has just come back to the US after leading the deeply unpopular UK prime minister David Cameron to a surprise majority victory in British elections (of course, David Cameron resigned following the UK’s democratic decision to leave the EU).
So how best to convince an American constituency – who have become increasingly suspicious of corporate power – into accepting an establishment candidate like Hillary as the next Führer of the American Empire? A difficult pill to swallow considering the Clinton’s sordid history with pay-to-play politicking through the infamous Clinton Foundation. Despite public awareness of the truth, television personalities like John Oliver continue to signal establishment support for the Clintons by glossing over the most disturbing aspects of the Clinton Foundation, such as:
The siphoning of Haiti relief money following the 2010 earthquake that prevented millions of homeless and starving Haitians from receiving aid
Protecting an African Warlord on behalf of a Swiss mining company called Lukas Lundin that violates international law to exploit Africa’s natural resources and paid the Clintons $100 million to keep the international community off their back for violating international sanctions in Sudan and elsewhere
Selling Nuclear Weapons technology to China to finance Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign in what has become known as the Chinagate scandal that resulted in the indictment and arrest of many top Clinton officials
When it became clear that many liberal American women weren’t taking the bait of accepting another corrupt Clinton as the “historic milestone” to follow up the disappointment that was the nation’s first African American president, Hillary’s campaign managers resorted to gender shaming women with Madeline Albright’s abominable declaration that there is a “special place in hell” for women who don’t support Hillary. This is the same Madeline Albright who calmly justified to a bedazzled 60 Minutes television audience in 1996 (while serving as Bill Clinton’s UN advisor) that the half-million dead children who perished as a result of America’s economic sanctions in the Mid-East was “worth it”. Isn’t that a message that American mothers can identify with? And if there ever really was a special place in hell for women who don’t support each other, then where was Madeline Albright’s support for Jill Stein?
So when Albright’s declaration about “women who don’t support each other” backfired, the machine resorted to the one tried-and-true tactic that has worked like a charm in just about every presidential election in our collective memory: the lesser of two evils boogieman.
This strategy is simple. Scare the bejeezes out of the people with a scary opposing nominee to pressure them into supporting the favored pick. This is why the media have given so much air time to Trump while practically blacklisting Bernie and outright ignoring Dr. Jill Stein.
In many ways, Donald Trump is the trump card for the elites. Trump reinforces the faux-feminism of the Clinton Cartel by demonstrating his very own brand of bona fide chauvinism with his beauty pageants and unfortunate instances of mouth-diarrhea. The media have worked hard to turn the 2016 electoral farce into a men-versus-women circus. The problem is that women don’t automatically support Hillary just because she’s a woman any more than men support Trump just because he’s a man. In fact, Hillary’s disingenuous bombast has been described by many as bourgeois feminism – a particularly vile brand of ideological feminism that neglects millions of immigrant women, poor women and the women under America’s bombs.
We’ve been told incessantly that this is “history in the making,” since“never before has a woman run for president!”
But this so-called “historic occasion” was already achieved many times over. In 1872 Victoria Woodhull ran for president after being nominated with the Equal Rights Party with Frederick Douglass as her running mate. Then there was Belva Ann Lockwood in 1884, Grace Allen in 1940, Ellen Jensen in 1952, Charlene Mitchell in 1968 –and the list goes on.
Clearly this is not history in the making.
Fortunately, reading the comment sections of the aforementioned videos and articles reveals an inspiring truth; that after decades of broken promises, blatant corruption and political impotence from Washington, many Americans aren’t buying into the bullshit anymore. In fact, the free publicity for Trump seems to be backfiring a la The Streisand Effect.
And let’s not forget that voting machines are designed, programmed and manipulated by the very corporate elites who own the system and seek to preserve their power by rigging elections. This is why swing states are plagued by voting machine glitches, gerrymandering, prohibitive voter ID laws and even conspicuous acts of outright fraud. Presidents are not elected. Presidents are selected, and not by you or I.
Even after he was given the Nader treatment, Bernie Sanders played his role like the obedient puppet he is. When America’s confidence in the political process was at an all-time low, he got people excited about it again. When Hilary rigged the Democratic Primary against him, he endorsed the Democratic nominee – just like he said he would two years before his campaign even started – before taking a bow and exiting stage left. In the weeks and months since the DNC he has only betrayed the message of his campaign to parrot the politics of fear and peddle the nonsense of lesser-evilism. The same is true of other turncoats like Elizabeth Warren and Robert Reich, whose allegiance to the system outweighs all logic and certainly outweighs their genuine concern for the American people. The politics of fear predominates the narrative of every election. Its obtuse ideology paves the way to hell. The 2016 cycle is no different.
Even if, by some miracle, a candidate who actually had the best interests of the people in mind was allowed into the Oval Office and sworn in as President, their proposed policy positions would always be massively outgunned by the money, resources and lobbyists of the military-industrial-complex, the oil companies, the banks, et cetera.
If Jesus Christ somehow became President with the Buddha as his Vice and the 12 disciples fulfilling the roles of secretary of State, Defense, Treasury, Interior, and so on, the system would continue right on the way it always has because its structure determines its trajectory. It doesn’t matter who the players are.
We know that the elections are rigged. We know that there are no political solutions. We know that the banks and corporations are infinitely more powerful than the politicians they control. So why do we default back to this bogus idea that, “This time it’s different“?
America’s imperial system is a self-actualizing feedback loop that grants a monopoly of force and authority to the ownership class by siphoning resources away from anyone who refuses to bow at their feet. Distraction from this reality is the explicit purpose of electoral politics.
Perhaps we’re just addicted to pointing the finger at external personalities for the way things are. If we don’t face our own shadows we end up projecting them onto other people, and who better to point our fingers at than people like Hillary and Donald?
Then again, perhaps we don’t actually want things to change. Perhaps Americans really enjoy the heated hatred and finger-licking loathing that each election cycle brings to the table. It is, after all, an entertainment spectacle among the greatest shows on earth. Perhaps Americans are addicted to complaining instead of acting. Complaining is a comforting default but solutions require work.. It takes less effort to tolerate and complain about our enslavement than it does to alter the underlying foundations of it. So perhaps we subconsciously enjoy being ruled. Self-reliance, after all, requires personal responsibility. Laziness can never grant or maintain liberty. .
Plotting a course through uncharted political wilderness is an endeavor of uncertainty and our tendency to retreat to the familiar side of the river is strong when the water’s currents prove scary and cold. For many, a familiar lie is preferable to unknown and yet-to-be-discovered truths.
If we want the world to change around us, the first thing we have to change is ourselves. We would do well to heed the wise observation of French Sociologist Jacques Ellul who proclaimed:
There are no political solutions, only technological ones; the rest is propaganda.”
Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show. Catch the cloudcast at mixcloud.com/outerlimitsradioshow Check out the more frequently updated tumblr page at outerlimitsradioshow.tumblr.com Contact the research team at outerlimitsradioshow@fastmail.fm
The President of the United States grants clemency every November to a turkey, while 46 million other members of that bird’s species are slaughtered, to “celebrate” the ongoing genocide of 100 million Native Americans, including American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, who was wrongfully imprisoned 44 years ago for murders he did not commit.
Rather than following the White House tradition of “pardoning” a turkey destined for a thanksgiving dinner table, shouldn’t the American President extend that courtesy instead to some of the thousands of human beings caged up in America’s federal prisons? And rather than continuing to make another routine charade of this presidential power, he should use this privilege to provide clemency to Leonard Peltier.
Coinciding with the American Thanksgiving holiday, 2015 will mark the 50th National Day of Mourning for many Native Americans; an annual event meant to honor ancestors that were murdered at the hands of the European invasion, and expose the bloody history behind the November holiday.
Despite popular belief, Thanksgiving is a day rooted in the homecoming celebration of colonists returning safely from raids and massacres against Native American villages. The term itself was coined by wealthy Puritan Governor John Winthrop following a “successful” massacre of 700 women and children of the Pequot Nation in 1637. A “Thanksgiving” was in-turn observed to celebrate the war party’s safe return.
While we might teach our children that the holiday is about unity and peace, nothing could be further from the truth. While Natives and Pilgrims did share one quaint meal on one occasion, that meal has nothing at all to do with the annual “Thanksgiving holiday” nor its reference to marauding colonists. The Native Americans haven’t forgotten, hence the National Day of Mourning observed each year at Plymouth Rock.
In addition to “Thanksgiving,” the newer but equally insulting and redundant exposition of “turkey pardoning” comes as a supreme insult to the Native Americans. Not only will America continue an observance as historically misunderstood as it is brutal, but the President of the nation will openly mock his ability to free the people who are in the most desperate need of it.
No one deserves a Presidential pardon more than Leonard.
Leonard Peltier was born on 12 September 1944 in Grand Forks, North Dakota. As a descendant of the Anishinabe, Dakota, and Lakota Nations, he traces the roots of his activism to the rampant discrimination and vicious poverty that were inseparable from daily existence as an Indian child growing up on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Fort Totten Sioux reservations in North Dakota. To adequately appraise the circumstances of Leonard’s incarceration, it is paramount to understand the conditions of Indian Reservations at the time his life took a turn for the worst.
In 1943 the United States Senate conducted a survey of the state of Indian affairs. Living conditions on reservations were found to be appalling, and severe poverty was commonplace. The Senate found The Bureau of Indian Affairs and federal bureaucracy to be at fault due to extreme financial mismanagement. But instead of investigating, the government instead chose a policy that would terminate the recognition of 109 tribes by 1964—effecting 12,000 Native Americans in turn forcing thousands more Natives from lands that had sustained their tribes for generations, into metropolitan centers.
The Klamaths who owned valuable timber property in Oregon and the Agua Caliente, who owned the land around Palm Springs were some of the first tribes to be affected by the U.S. government’s new “Termination Policy.” These lands, rich in resources, were taken over by the Federal Government. Approximately 2,500,000 acres of trust land was removed from protected status and sold off to non-Indians as tribes lost official recognition. Thus the dire poverty that so troubled Natives on reservations in 1943 grew far worse as the meager amends allotted to tribal members was greatly diminished, and a long chronology of Indian Eradication marched ever onward.
It was at this time that Leonard was growing into a teenager. With his father, he attended meetings on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota to discuss the government’s decision – Turtle Mountain was one of three reservations which the U.S. Government chose as the testing ground for their new Termination Policy.
Leonard recalls an Ojibwa cousin of his standing up angrily and asking in a loud, emotional, tear-filled voice, “Where are our warriors? Why don’t they stand up and fight for their starving people?”
Remembering that moment, Peltier later said, “That sent electric vibrations from my scalp all the way down my spine to the soles of my feet! It was like a revelation to me — that there was actually something worthwhile you could do with your life, something more important than living your own selfish little life day by day. Yes, there was something more important than your poor miserable self: your People. You could actually stand up and fight for them… and as I would come to see in later years, all Indian people, all Indigenous People, all human beings of good heart. I vowed right then and there that I would become a warrior and that I’d always work to help my people. It’s a vow I’ve done my best to keep.”
During one particularly difficult winter on the Turtle Mountain Reservation protests against the Bureau of Indian Affairs became particularly fierce due to the desperate lack of food, as the termination policy withdrew federal assistance, including food, from those who chose to ignore the government decision and remain on their land. Following these protests, B.I.A. social workers came to the reservation to investigate the situation. Leonard Peltier and one of the organizers on the reservation went from household to household before the arrival of the investigating party to tell the local people to hide what little food they had. When he got to the first house, he found that there was no food to hide and the same story was repeated in each of the households that he went to. This experience awakened him to the desperate situation for all people on his reservation, and the resulting protests and demonstrations by tribal members introduced Leonard Peltier to Native resistance.
From that point, Peltier lived his life for his People, doing what he could to help. He protested for fishing rights in the Northwest, helped found a Native halfway house for ex-prisoners, and worked for several years as part owner of an auto body shop which he used to employ Native people and to provide low-cost automobile repairs for those who needed it. His community volunteer work included Native Land Claim issues, alcohol counseling, and participation in protests concerning the preservation of Native land within the city of Seattle.
But his first real experience with confronting the might of the U.S. Government was his participation in the 1970 peaceful takeover of the abandoned Fort Lawton, outside Seattle, Washington. The Fort was on “surplus” federal land to which the Indians were granted first right under the law.
Faced with government machine guns and flamethrowers, the protestors were taken into custody. Peltier and the other Natives were beaten by law enforcement repeatedly from the time of their arrest to the moment they were caged in their cells. When finally released, Peltier refused to leave the Army stockade until all the other protestors had been freed.
Ultimately, the Indian’s challenge was successful. Today, Fort Lawton is an Indian cultural center.
After Fort Lawton, Peltier traveled the country where, in Colorado, he joined the American Indian Movement (AIM).
“AIM was born out of [the] turmoil [of “termination”]… The attempt to destroy us had only made us stronger, more aware, more dedicated. Every single one of us was willing to lay down our life for our cause, which was the very survival of Indian peoples…The growth of the Indian movement and the history of AIM are intertwined with my personal history… We found our inspiration and our strategy in the example and message of AIM leaders such as Dennis Banks, John Trudell, Russell Means, Eddie Benton-Banai, and Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt — all imperfect men, no doubt, yet men whose vision and bravery and fiery, even incendiary, words gave voice to a whole generation of Indian activists, myself included.”
In 1973 the Wounded Knee occupation marked the beginning of a three-year period of political violence on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The tribal chairman hired vigilante teams self-proclaimed as “GOONS,” to rid the reservation of American Indian Movement (AIM) activity and sentiment. More than 60 traditional tribal members and AIM members were murdered, and scores more were assaulted. Evidence indicated GOON responsibility in the majority of crimes but despite a large FBI presence, the U.S. Government did nothing to stop the violence. Instead, the FBI supplied the GOONS with weapons, ammunition, and intelligence on AIM members, and ignored the violent criminal fallout that resulted.
By this time Leonard Peltier was an AIM leader, and was asked by the traditional people at Pine Ridge to support and protect those being targeted by the mercenaries. Peltier and a small group of young AIM members set up camp on a ranch owned by the traditional Jumping Bull family, setting the stage for an event that would not only go down in history as one of the darkest days in Native American history, but a day that would change Leonard Peltier’s life forever.
On June 26, 1975 two FBI agents in civilian clothes driving unmarked cars followed a pick-up truck onto the Jumping Bull ranch. Fearing another attack from the local mercenaries, local families immediately sounded the alarm and a shoot-out erupted. It’s unclear who fired the first shots, but when the initial firefight ended, two FBI agents and one Native American lay dead, culminating into a nationwide manhunt, as more than 150 agents, GOONS, and law enforcement surrounded the ranch. While the deaths of the FBI agents were thoroughly investigated, the Native American, Joseph Stuntz, who was shot in the head by a sniper’s bullet, has never been investigated, nor has anyone ever been charged in connection with his death.
According to FBI documents, more than 40 Native Americans participated in the gunfight, but only AIM members Bob Robideau, Darrell Butler, and Leonard Peltier were brought to trial.
Mr. Robideau and Mr. Butler were arrested first and sent to trial. A federal jury in Iowa acquitted them on grounds of self-defense, finding that their participation in the shoot-out was justified given the climate of fear and violence that existed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and further, that they could not be tied to the close-range shootings.
Leonard Peltier, who had fled to Canada, was arrested on February 6, 1976. The U.S. Government wanted to try Peltier for the death of the two FBI agents, but had to legal extradite him from Canada to do so. So, to justify the extradition, the United States Government presented the Canadian court with affidavits signed by one, Myrtle Poor Bear who said she was Mr. Peltier’s girlfriend and allegedly saw him shoot the agents despite the fact that Ms. Poor Bear had never met Peltier and was not present during the shoot-out. Soon after, Ms. Poor Bear recanted her statements, asserting that the FBI had threatened her and coerced her into signing the false affidavits.
Mr. Peltier was thus extradited to the United States where he was tried in 1977. Every aspect of the trail was rigged against Leonard.
The trial was held in North Dakota before United States District Judge Paul Benson, a conservative jurist appointed to the federal bench by Richard M. Nixon. Key witnesses like Myrtle Poor Bear were not allowed to testify and unlike the Robideau/Butler trial in Iowa, physical evidence regarding the event on Pine Ridge was severely restricted.
An FBI agent who had previously testified that the agents followed a pick-up truck onto the scene – a vehicle that could not be tied to Mr. Peltier – changed his account, stating that the agents had followed a red and white van onto the scene, a vehicle which Mr. Peltier drove occasionally.
Three teenaged Native witnesses testified against Mr. Peltier, all later admitting that the FBI forced them to testify, and still, not one witness had positively identified Mr. Peltier as the shooter.
The U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case claimed that the government had provided the defense with all FBI documents concerning the case. To the contrary, more than 140,000 pages had been withheld in their entirety.
An FBI ballistics expert testified that a casing found near the agents’ bodies matched the gun tied to Mr. Peltier. However, a ballistic test proving that the casing did not come from the gun tied to Mr. Peltier was intentionally concealed.
The jury, unaware of the aforementioned facts, found Mr. Peltier guilty. He was convicted for the deaths of the two FBI agents and Judge Benson, in turn, sentenced Mr. Peltier to two consecutive life terms – a sentence he is serving to this very day, 38 years later.
Leonard Peltier is now an imprisoned Native American considered by Amnesty International, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Congress of American Indians, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and the Dalai Lama, among many others, to be a political prisoner whose release should be immediate.
Following the discovery of new evidence obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Mr. Peltier sought a new trial. The Eighth Circuit ruled, “There is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government’s case.” Yet, the court denied Mr. Peltier a new trial.
During oral argument, the government attorney conceded that the government does not know who shot the agents, stating that Mr. Peltier is equally guilty whether he shot the agents at point-blank range, or participated in the shoot-out from a distance. Mr. Peltier’s co-defendants participated in the shoot-out from a distance, but were acquitted.
Judge Heaney, who authored the decision denying a new trial, has since voiced firm support for Mr. Peltier’s release, stating that the FBI used improper tactics to convict him and that the FBI was equally responsible for the shoot-out.
Today, Leonard suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and a heart condition. Time for justice is short.
Despite his imprisonment, which poses numerous barriers, Mr. Peltier has made remarkable contributions to humanitarian and charitable causes. He has found ways of getting people from different tribes, with a history of animosity, to come together in peace. He advocates for peaceful resolution of all issues that deal with Native Americans and respect for the rights of others.
He has worked with Dr. Steward Selkin on a pilot program on the Rosebud Reservation, the Leonard Peltier Health Care Reform Package, to document needs and requirements for delivery and care. The ultimate intent of the program is to fundamentally alter health care delivery on reservations throughout the U.S.
He has worked with Professor Jeffery Timmons on a program to stimulate reservation-based economics and investments in Native American business enterprises, including a component to teach business ownership and operation to the young people of First Nations.
In 1992, He established a scholarship at New York University for Native American students seeking law degrees. He also was instrumental in the establishment and funding of a Native American newspaper by and for Native young people in Washington State. In addition to having supported two of his grandchildren from prison, Leonard Peltier has also sponsored two children through ChildReach, one in El Salvador and the other in Guatemala. Every year, he sponsors a Christmas gift drive for the children of Pine Ridge and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Peltier also serves as an honorary member of the Board of the Rosenberg Fund for Children and on the honorary advisory committee for the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign.
He has organized an emergency food drive for the people of Pohlo, Mexico, in response to the Acteal Massacre. He also frequently contributes to Head Start programs and domestic violence shelters to help address funding shortfalls.
Peltier has helped several Indian prisoners rehabilitate themselves by advocating a drug-and alcohol-free lifestyle while encouraging pride and knowledge in their culture and traditions, and works to develop prisoner art programs thereby increasing prisoners’ self-confidence.
Leonard Peltier has been widely recognized for his humanitarian works, winning honors including but not limited to: 1986 Human Rights Commission of Spain International Human Rights Prize; 1993 North Star Frederick Douglas Award; 2003 Federation of Labour (Ontario, Canada) Humanist of the Year Award; 2004 Silver Arrow Award for Lifetime Achievement; 2009 First Red Nation Humanitarian Award; 2010 Kwame Ture Lifetime Achievement Award; 2010 Fighters for Justice Award; and 2011 Mario Benedetti Foundation (Uruguay) – First International Human Rights Prize.
The work received wide acclaim and attracted the attention of luminaries such as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth. As a result, the European Parliament approved a resolution calling for Peltier to be freed and France’s former First Lady Danielle Mitterand — then president of the French human rights organization, France Libertés — also called for the release of Leonard Peltier.
Editor Harvey Arden said, “Leonard Peltier’s powerful memoir, a Native American spiritual testament, will shake the conscience of the nation… and the world. It’s a flaming arrow aimed at the circled wagons of American injustice.”
In 2009, for the sixth consecutive year, Leonard Peltier also was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Leonard Peliter was an activist scapegoated for a complex culmination of circumstances in South Dakota. His trial was a mockery, the evidence used to convict him does not exist, and evidence that proved his innocence was ignored. 39 years later, organizations and individuals the world over continue to demand clemency for Leonard, because the only hope he has at this point is a presidential pardon. Beings as Obama is nearing the sunset of his second term, the next year constitutes Leonard’s last hope of receiving the freedom he deserves in time enough to enjoy what life he has left.
Four decades after our government locked up an innocent man, isn’t it time to right this wrong?
Kiriakou concludes: “With his presidency coming to a close and Thanksgiving around the corner, it’s the perfect time for Obama to offer a gesture to help make amends with our nation’s original people. Instead of pardoning a turkey, he should pardon Leonard Peltier instead.”
If a path to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society, and if we fail to remember our history we’re doomed to repeat it. But as yet another Thanksgiving approaches it should be our goal to right the wrongs of atrocities gone by instead of continuing to mindlessly celebrate the genocide of Native American peoples. This doesn’t mean we sulk off and pout over our guilt or make a public display of our collective shame and self-loathing. It simply means we endeavor to stop doing harm.
As the 46th National Day of Mourning beckons, let’s ask ourselves what the adult thing to do is. Should we defend the lie and celebrate the extermination of a hundred million human beings by eating turkey and watching football? For most of us, national holidays like Thanksgiving are the only times we have to settle down from our wage slave jobs and enjoy time with our families, but reaffirming an archaic celebration of genocide is not the solution. If we never have time to see our families but for a few fleeting evenings during the holiday season, perhaps it’s time we rethink our relationship to the American Empire and analyze why the ownership class allow us so few moments of uninterrupted peace with our loved ones.
If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst. For Native Americans, the idea of celebrating Thanksgiving is tantamount to Jewish peoples celebrating Hitler’s birthday in April.
Does that seem like an exaggeration? It’s an understatement.
While Hitler’s were undoubtedly among the most evil acts ever committed by human hands on Earth, they pale in comparison to those of other dictators throughout history. If we simply analyze the numbers, we see that Hitler murdered somewhere between 10 and 16 million people he deemed unworthy of existence. Numbers like that are difficult to comprehend, but we can at least try to fathom what 16 million people looks like – what the loss of 16 million people feels like – can’t we?
16 million people seems like a lot, but what then are we to make of Joseph Stalin, who killed 40 million people through similar means? He had concentration camps as well, after all. Stalin was directly responsible for the violent deaths of three to four times as many human beings as Hitler. But when we think of the iconic symbol of evil, few of us think of Stalin’s face.
And what about Mao Zedong in China? Estimates of his killing spree top out at round 100 million human beings. Surely, the murder of 100 million people is indisputably more grotesque than the murder of 16 million, isn’t it? So why then is Hitler our symbol of evil in the west?
There is no doubt that he was evil, but by statistical merit, isn’t Stalin more sinister? -wouldn’t we consider the crimes of Mao to be significantly more monstrous than those of Hitler?
By this measure, no empire is more murderous than the Anglo-American world Empire. Between the genocide of the Native Americans and the transit deaths of African slaves across the Altantic, America murdered more than 300 million human beings. That means that America is responsible for the violent deaths of three times as many people as Maoist China, and that’s without including America’s long history of illegal wars. In 239 years of existence America has been at war for 218 of those years – barely two decades of intermittent peace throughout two-and-a-half centuries of history. And yet, despite all of this, we think of America as that shining city on a hill where the edicts of freedom and democracy dwell, while Hitler remains our idea of evil — a man, by the way, whose rise to power was financed and supplied by American and British corporations. Hitler would never have risen to power if it weren’t for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the Bush family’s Union Banking Cartel, IBM’s punch card system for categorizing Germany’s “human inventory”, IG Farben’s chemical weapons, Rothchild Bank loans, and many other logistical supports. So I’ll ask again – why exactly is Hitler our symbol of evil in the west? What more do we need to have happen on this planet for the majority to understand that the power behind the throne is more powerful than the throne itself?
Is it possible for us to break this cycle, or will we look on as another turkey pardoning transpires at the White House at the hands of a black president as the oppressed remnants of Native nations observe another national day of mourning – as Native activist Leonard Peltier rots in an American prison? If there’s a path to the better, it starts with a thorough look at the worst, and the unjust imprisonment of Leonard Peltier stands as one of the worst ongoing crimes of the American Empire, worsened by the ridiculous charade of turkey pardoning, among the death of 46 million turkeys to celebrate the theft of America from 100 million Native Americans.
Call the White House comment line and demand that Leonard be freed, at (202) 456-1111
Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity.
But silence is impossible.
Silence screams.
Silence is a message,
just as doing nothing is an act.
Let who you are ring out and resonate
in every word and every deed.
Yes, become who you are.
There’s no sidestepping your own being
or your own responsibility.
What you do is who you are.
You are your own comeuppance.
You become your own message.
You are the message.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
~Leonard Peltier
This article was a collaboration between Alexandria “Rain” Smith and Gabrielle Lafayette
Catch the cloudcast at mixcloud.com/outerlimitsradioshow Check out the more frequently updated tumblr page at outerlimitsradioshow.tumblr.com Contact the research team at outerlimitsradioshow@fastmail.fm
Lord Acton asserted nearly two centuries ago that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.”
While I find this observation to be apt, it is decidedly incomplete. It’s not only that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but also that positions of high authority have an overwhelming propensity to attract the corruptible. Sociopaths driven to dominate are motivated by a seething ambition that the rest of us simply cannot identify with.
In the 1960’s, Alan Watts discerned that:
“…nobody is more frightened of anybody else than a tyrant. He sits with his back to the wall, and his guards on either side of him, and he has you face downwards on the ground because you can’t use weapons that way. When you come into his presence, you don’t stand up and face him, because you might attack, and he has reason to fear that you might because he’s ruling you all. And the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch. Because he’s the one who succeeded in crime. The other people are pushed aside because they — the criminals, the people we lock up in jail — are simply the people who didn’t make it. So naturally, the real boss sits with his back to the wall and his henchmen on either side of him.”
Thus we can begin to conjure the philosophical reasons for the problems of the world that Socrates and Aristotle debated over two-thousand years ago: Why is it that our governing institutions are plagued with corruption to the point that fraud, depravity and exploitation seem not to be bugs of the system, but programs inherent within the system itself? Why is the emergence of ethical and benevolent leaders so incredibly rare?
Part of the problem stems from the fact that the greedy typically stop at nothing in their ruthless pursuit of power, while the wise avoid it altogether. The truly wise recognize this world for the illusion that it is, and cultivate that which is truly important for the nourishment of their soul, and material wealth and physical power simply don’t fit into that perspective. So the wise retain an extreme aversion to the pursuit of power because wisdom is inherently without greed; meanwhile, the greedy gravitate upward into positions of power and bring into being a plethora of problems because greed is inherently without wisdom.
With the internet age catapulting the evolution of human culture and ideas into today’s intimidating exponential acceleration, the possibility finally exists for the last vestiges of the old paradigm to finally fall away, including their manifestations which include parasitism, dominance, morality, war and predation. As professor Robert Solomon observes, the emergent paradigm has the possibility of a human society predicated upon the edicts of truth, loyalty, justice and freedom.
I would respectfully suggest that for this new paradigm to materialize as more than mere philosophical musings on the blogosphere, and become a concrete reality that can be seen and touched in the physical world, that the wise must change their paradigm as well, and pursue the throne for the benefit of all beings. Until that happens, the greedy, for whom wealth and power are endless pursuits, will take ever more power, resources, and wealth, and impoverish the rest of the world until they are forced by an extinction event or a mass revolution to cease their looting of the planet. The addictions of wealth, possessions and power are like salt water – the more one partakes of them, the thirstier they become – trying to fill the inner void with these unskillful means inexorably expands the void. And right now, the biggest imperial expansion in written human history is underway.
It’s called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and if you’re unfamiliar with it you might want to start asking yourself why you’ve never heard of it. Because behind those seven syllables of banality, those three innocent words, is a cleverly disguised iron fist of biblical proportions.
For many who have heard of it, the Trans-Pacific-Partnership has been sold by the Associated Press and Reuters as nothing more than a casual business deal as boring as it is innocuous. A cleverly orchestrated smokescreen of financial jargon and obfuscating legalese is drawn to calm the masses and appease the public who are wooed to complacency on the promise that the TPP has nothing to do with us.
Meanwhile, a steady campaign of apocalyptic headlines is pumped into our consciousness to distract us from the biggest corporate power grab ever, as the emergency headlines of confederate flags, ISIS attacks in Paris, and the unadulterated puerility of Donald Trump are beamed into the consciousness of the nation. Thus few have heard of the TPP or are familiar with how its passage promises to usher in a state of fascist dictatorship the scope and magnitude of which have never been witnessed on planet Earth before.
While we’re meant to think that this so-called “trade deal” is solely concerned with the mutual lowering of tariffs, it’s really a corporate ownership agreement that will change every facet of our lives. The TPP will change our laws in favor of a global legal system that caters to corporations and which is presided over by corporate lobbyists. The allowance of corporations to sue governments for impeding on their projected profits by means of secret trade tribunals is perhaps one of the most diabolical effects of the TPP. If a country has any kind of regulations on industry intended to protect environmental or social health, the corporation can sue the country for a loss of projected profits, as Philip Morris did against Uruguay last year for the country’s tobacco regulations. But under the TPP, we can expect this kind of lawsuit to become commonplace. As former Secretary of Labor under Clinton Robert Reich wrote earlier this year:
“The TPP also gives global corporations an international tribunal of private attorneys, outside any nation’s legal system, who can order compensation for any ‘unjust expropriation’ of foreign assets.”
“Now the TransPacific Partnership – which is being called “NAFTA on steroids” – would award Big Pharma and other multinationals even more corporate “rights” in more countries, including the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism by which they can sue signatory governments for regulatory changes that affect their profits.
“As the Canadian website rabble.ca notes: ‘The Canadian government is currently being sued through NAFTA by Eli Lilly, an American pharmaceutical company, for invalidating the firm’s patent extensions on two mental health drugs. A Canadian Federal Court decided in 2010 that the patent extensions had not delivered the promised benefits and the drugs should therefore be opened up to generic competition. Generic drugs significantly reduce the cost for end users, but Eli Lilly cried foul and launched an ISDS claim against the government, demanding US$500 million in compensation for lost profits. The case is still in progress, but regardless of the outcome we can expect the TPP to lead to similar ISDS disputes. Powerful multinational pharmaceutical companies will use any available means to cling to over-priced drug monopolies. Greater intellectual property protections in the TPP will give these companies an even stronger quasi-legal basis to sue governments and crowd out generic [drug] competition.’”
Following the recent publication of the TPP’s 30 chapters, Ralph Nader, referring to the TPP as “the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” explained the trade tribunals in more detail to journalist Chris Hedges:
“It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws…The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.”
“The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global economy. It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.”
This trade deal could make any form of dissent or protest illegal, since any open act of defiance can be construed as an impediment to a corporation’s “projected earnings” and is therefore eligible for lawsuit under the ISDS provisions. But that isn’t the only way in which protesting the New World Order may become impossible with this new system of law.
Recognizing how the free flow of information threatens corporate hegemony, the TPP also promises to censor and control the internet, something the corporations failed to accomplish with all of their previous internet control bill attempts, illustrating how determined these people are to never accept “no” for an answer regardless of how much resistance they encounter from the people. When they pushed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) the internet community rallied together and shouted “No!” Then they pushed PIPA (Protect IP Act) which failed due to popular resistance. Then they created CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) and the internet community shut them down again. Then they pushed ACTA down our throats (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) and again, the reaction was no different. Legislative attempts to shackle the free flow of information have failed because the internet community has consistently stood up and denounced internet control. But as long as the same corrupt bureaucrats who cooked up these schemes remain in power they will they will never stop their attempts to censor the internet, and the TPP provides them the legal loophole they need to bypass our parliamentary process altogether, effectively nullifying whatever popular resistance emerges as a result. As the Guardian’s Evan Greer reported earlier this month:
“TPP even prescribes a mechanism for that censorship to occur. A section that can best be described as “Zombie-Sopa”, due to its similarity to the failed Stop Online Piracy Act, would require internet service providers (ISPs) to play “copyright cops” and create systems for hastily taking down internet content upon a copyright holder’s request, even without a court order.”
Many ISPs such as Charter Communications are already playing the role of “copyright cops,” spying on their users activities and enabling armies of lawyers and lobbyists to threaten to sue their customers whenever the potential to monetize copyright infringement presents itself. Now the TPP codifies this borderline criminal activity into law at the expense of every internet user, and in-turn threatens to abolish free speech through a clever alteration of conceived copyright rules, as Greer also explains:
“One provision demands that TPP member countries enforce copyright terms 70 years after the death of the creator. This will keep an immeasurable amount of information, art and creativity locked away from the public domain for decades longer than necessary, and allow for governments and corporations to abuse copyright laws and censor content at will, since so much of what’s online will be subject to copyright for decades.”
In short, the TPP is a complete power grab nightmare that is so much worse than anyone could have predicted; a veritable wish-list for corporations tired of playing by the rules, sick of adhering to environmental standards, and no longer willing to tolerate the ridicule for their slave-labor practices around the world. Of all the corporate threats to humanity, the TPP constitutes the most egregious menace yet conceived, and it will transform our world into a totalitarian travesty devoid of any constitutional protections or basic human rights.
Chris Hedges summarizes how the TPP will change our world inside out:
“Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault. Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.
“The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.
“These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.”
I implore whoever is reading this to not give in to the phenomenon of learned helplessness that the system has beaten into all of us, perpetuating the myth that there is nothing we can do about this. we need to shatter this presumption, because like the elephant who learns over time through classical conditioning that being tied to a tiny twig in the ground constitutes unconditional immobility, these limitations exist solely in our imagination. It’s obvious to us that a seven-ton elephant is more than capable of freeing itself from a flimsy twig, but the elephant, having been tied to a tree at an early age, was conditioned from infancy not to question its human authorities. Nevertheless, the limitation is a figment of the imagination, and so it goes with societal obedience to the established oligarchical regime. If the people ever wake up to the power of the swarm, it could spark a global big-bang movement capable of changing the course of history away from tyranny’s predictability.
And don’t fall into the mental trap that the buck stops with the parliamentary circus of our congressional representatives; even if most of them weren’t payed off by the corporations that fund their campaigns, they couldn’t do anything about this even if they wanted to, because of fast-track authority enables President Obama to sign the agreement before Congress even has a chance to debate it. Hedges continues:
“The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.”
However we conceive the world creates the reality we see around us, but the first step is getting informed. So whatever you do, don’t give into the learned helplessness that suggests there’s nothing you can do about any of this, because that’s the television talking. When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. There is still time to stop the TPP/NWO, but if it passes, resistance to it will define daily life for those of us who simply cannot accept the annihilation of the indomitable human spirit. If you don’t do something, you are complicit in whatever happens.
Openly opposing and preventing the TPP are just the beginning, however. If our previous experiences with internet control bills tell us anything, it’s that our owners will never take “no” for an answer. Even if we can somehow prevent the TPP’s passage, the oligarchs will draft another document that will be negotiated in secret and they will not stop until they have successfully dominated every square inch of every continent, every penny of every dollar, every action of every body, and every thought in every mind. The time has come for an explicit rejection of every system, product and personality contributing to the paradigm that is destroying the planet and every life upon it.
Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show.
Catch the cloudcast at mixcloud.com/outerlimitsradioshow Check out the more frequently updated tumblr page at outerlimitsradioshow.tumblr.com Contact the research team at outerlimitsradioshow@fastmail.fm
22 veterans commit suicide every day in America, while more than 60,000 homeless veterans wander a hopeless landscape. The organization charged with taking care of veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs, has become notorious for delaying claims, losing paperwork, and ultimately denying benefits. VA whistleblower Rustyann Brown said she was part of a team assigned to process claims, and the job began with a disturbing discovery:
“Half of the veterans were dead that I screened. So almost every other piece of paper that I touched was a veteran who had already passed away.”
The system isn’t “broken.” The agenda of denying benefits to combat veterans cannot be described as anything but deliberate, especially after numerous VA whistleblowers provided evidence that the government intentionally pushes vets toward suicide, employing time tested tactics to systematically deny benefits. Two years ago we presented the life and struggle of Missoula-area Vietnam veteran Lance Michael Hartley and his 40-year fight to gain health benefits through the VA. Two years later we revealed the unbelievable follow-up.
The 11th of November is Veterans Day; America’s annual tribute to the brave men and women who have served in America’s armed services. The observance originates with the close of the First World War, which ended after a cease-fire, or armistice, between Germany and the Allied Nations that eventually paved the way for the formal peace negotiations at Versailles. The initial cease-fire that started it all was affected on the 11th of November, 1918. One year later President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed November 11th 1919 would mark the first official commemoration of Armistice Day. So at 11 am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the nation halted all business activities and transactions for two minutes in a symbolic gesture to acknowledge the fallen and to honor veterans. Seven years later, in 1926, Congress passed a resolution to observe the recurring anniversary with thanksgiving and prayer, as well as exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations. Congress eventually amended Armistice Day in 1938, rebranding it as Veterans Day. Three decades later Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill to provide three-day weekends for federal employees on the fourth Monday of October. Observing a November holiday in October resulted in wide spread confusion, so President Ford changed it back to November 11th in 1978.
It’s been nearly a century since the Armistice that generated the Veterans Day holiday took place. Today, November 11th is decorated with American flags, honor guards, parades and a wreath is ceremonially laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. But on November 12th, the country forgets all about our veterans until Memorial Day, America’s other patriotism-fueled three-day weekend in the month of May. For thousands of veterans struggling to be acknowledged by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Veteran’s Day has become nothing more than another day off; an empty symbolic gesture masquerading as something more. And the story of Lance Hartley illustrates how America’s corporate indifference toward veterans is exemplified writ large by the VA.
LANCE HARTLEY is a 69 year-old Vietnam veteran. Since 1986, he’s managed a one-man upholstery shop from his garage here in Missoula. Though he should be retired by now, Lance anticipates he will probably work until the day he dies. While he qualifies for Social Security, his monthly check doesn’t touch his living expenses, so he’s able to make ends meet with his upholstery business – at least he was able to until he took a fall in the autumn of 2014, breaking several bones including ribs and his neck. Since upholstery requires a steady hand and strong frame, Lance has been turning away jobs ever since, and the bills are piling up. 8 months behind on his mortgage, Lance is now facing the possibility of homelessness, alongside 60,000 other American veterans, unless he can get healthy enough to begin working again. Unfortunately, Lance doesn’t have affordable access to health care. His status as a Vietnam-era combat veteran should earn him health care benefits through the VA, but it doesn’t.
Though his broken neck was the last straw, Lance’s health problems are numerous: he suffers from hypertension and type II diabetes; his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) produces chronic anxiety, sleep deprivation, nightmares and severe depression; and since he broke his neck last year, Lance has survived five heart attacks. On top of it all, he’s dealing with a skin condition common among Vietnam-era veterans. Lance pulled up the sleeves of his shirt to reveal his forearms, which were covered in purple splotches. I would have initially mistaken the blemishes as birthmarks if Lance hadn’t told me what they actually were. “That’s agent orange,” he said. “That’s what’s killing me right now. I had a little spot like this and it was bleeding so I put a band aid on it. Well, when you take the band aid off, the skin comes off.”
Lance’s exposure to Agent Orange has resulted in painful open sores
The multiplying sores on his skin aren’t the only legacy of his exposure to Agent Orange; it’s also weakening his immune system. Lance has watched Agent Orange contamination consume his friends over the years. The appearance of lumps that resemble grapes, both in color and size, typifies the beginning of the end for those affected. Of the 14 veterans in Lance’s PTSD therapy group, seven have died as a result from their exposure to Agent Orange, and a number of Lance’s personal friends have undergone surgery to remove tumors that appeared as a result of their exposure to the chemical.
Lance in Vietnam, 1968. Because 55-gallon barrels are used to transport such a wide variety of supplies, those containing weaponized herbicides were painted orange to indicate danger and set them apart, hence Agent Orange.
Lance was mobilized with the 3rd Battalion of the 26th Marine Regiment as a rifleman in April of 1968, just three months after the Tet Offensive surprise attack and one month prior to the highest casualty rate in the entire conflict.
Lance experienced the worst of the worst during his deployment. He told me about villages his teams had been ordered to destroy “with extreme prejudice” in Laos and North Vietnam. He recounted the terror he experienced when his helicopter was shot down, landing over a sector of enemy territory that he could only describe as “Dante’s Inferno.” He recalled narrowly escaping with his life after US fighter jets, mistaking his platoon for enemy troops, bombed his position and killed most of his men. He detailed a CIA briefing that involved covert plans to deploy nuclear weapons into Vietnam that were to be blamed on the Chinese government. Fighting through the tears, Lance articulated one unspeakable horror after another.
“I always called myself the poster child for PTSD,” he said. “I had PTSD before they had a name for it. Even last night, I was up until four or five in the morning. I haven’t slept [more than] two hour naps since Vietnam.”
Lance endured seven brutal months of combat before finally sustaining an injury that he couldn’t walk off. In September of 1968, a Rocket Propelled Grenade attack severely injured his knee. Though he babied it, his commanders recognized that it required surgery.
So in October of 1968, he began a long and stressful journey home. The America he returned home to was very different than the one he’d left as intense protests were overwhelming entire cities. After arriving at Marine Corps headquarters at Quantico, Virginia, Lance underwent two knee surgeries. When he was well enough to get out of the hospital, the military concluded that he was of “no further use to the Marine Corps” and offered him an early out with an honorable discharge if he would agree to remove the physical limitations the doctors had placed on him. Interestingly, one of the activities the doctors had specifically restricted him from was riot control, which many Marines were being assigned to amid the growing protests.
Because his surgeries were still healing up, Lance’s doctors were reluctant to sign off on his release from medical restrictions and return to full duty, but eventually capitulated because of the promise of an early discharge. But as soon as his medical status was altered, instead of discharging him, the military assigned him to riot control in Washington D.C.
Lance recalls what happened when he was assigned to full duty. “They told me I had four and a half months of ‘bad time’ to make up, so I’ve got to be a squad leader and they were going to send me up to Washington D.C. for riot control. And at that time in ’69, all the returning vets were taking their medals and throwing them on the White House lawn. And so when they tell me I’ve got to go up there and do riot control I said, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’”
While the military took an active policy of using combat trained soldiers to suppress domestic protesters, Lance was appalled by the orders. After seeing the horrors of Vietnam with his own eyes, being asked to suppress Americans on US soil was too much for him to handle. Memories of what he’d seen in Vietnam plagued him with nightmares, his PTSD was making him increasingly paranoid, and he was haunted by guilt for having been sent home early. Lance was terrified of what might happen if he was ordered to endure the stress of riot control, and the thought of firing on American citizens was too much for him.
“And that’s where I went AWOL from,” Lance says. “Remember it like it was yesterday. I said, ‘I’m going home.’ And that Captain said, ‘You can’t go home -you can’t get off this base!’ I walked off the base and went up the road a couple hundred miles and became a lifeguard again at Ocean City, New Jersey.”
After more than three years of active duty service, and with only a few months to go in his contract with the Marines, Lance left the military life behind and forgot all about the Marines. But a year later, Lance discovered that the Marines had not forgotten about him.
“So a year goes by and the next summer I came home to find two FBI agents sitting on my porch,” Lance remembers. “They took me right back to Quantico, shaved my head, and put me in a barracks with bars over the windows. The next day they called me up and said that if I wanted out of the Marine Corps, they had some papers for me to sign.”
Lance was forced to sign release papers for his official discharge from the US military. As the reason for his separation, the document lists reason number 246: “Discharge by reason of request for discharge.” Unfortunately for Lance, this is known as a “bad paper” discharge, as it is listed as under “other than honorable conditions.” Although he was told that his status would change from “undesirable” to “honorable” after 6 months, no such upgrade ever took place.
The rest of Lance’s military record paints a picture of exceptionally meritorious service: 2 Purple Heart Medals; National Defense Medal; Vietnam Service Medal; two Presidential Unit Citations; and the Combat Action Ribbon. Even though he served in combat, even though he was wounded, and even though he continues to endure the mental burden of PTSD as well as the physical deterioration that results from Agent Orange contamination, Lance had received a “bad paper” discharge which meant that he did not qualify for benefits – benefits which he was increasingly in need of due to the mental trauma associated with what he had seen and done.
Five years later a decision by President Ford gave many Americans the impression that the atmosphere in Washington was changing. Six weeks after taking office, President Ford announced his program for the “Return of Vietnam Era Draft Evaders and Military Deserters.” Ford established a Presidential Clemency Board to grant clemency on a case-by-case basis. They reviewed applications from former servicemen like Lance who received undesirable discharges for going AWOL between August of 1964 and March of 1973, bracketing the period between when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was enacted until the last American combatant left Vietnam. During that time, approximately 13,000 civilians evaded the draft, and more than 100,000 service members committed what the government termed “absence offences.”[1] On top of that, at least 560,000 Vietnam veterans were given discharges under conditions that were less than honorable.” [2]
With the help of a lawyer, Lance applied for and was granted a presidential pardon in November of 1975, signed by President Gerald Ford. Two years later in September of 1977, the military changed his discharge to reflect this correction, upgrading it to a “General Discharge under Honorable Conditions.” But the VA concluded that Lance was still ineligible for benefits, pension, or disability.
“I turned all the paperwork in,” Lance recalls. “And the VA tells me, ‘Well that’s no good.’ I asked why and they said, ‘Ford isn’t president anymore.’”
Lance’s attorney, Jim Taylor is not deterred. “That’s a pretty unique interpretation of the law and I don’t think it has any basis,” he says. “However, the VA can still legally deny Lance his benefits because after President Ford issued these pardons and instituted the clemency program, Congress almost immediately passed a law nullifying benefits for clemency beneficiaries.”
Helping Lance navigate the complex legal terrain he faces is attorney Jim Taylor alongside law student and Army veteran Nick Kirwan. Jim is a Missoula-based attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, though he is not representing Lance in his ACLU capacity, but as a pro-bono case per a BAR referral program. Jim has a deep respect for veterans, which multiplied due to trips he took to Afghanistan.
While Lance’s situation is not particularly uncommon, Jim is confident that his case is unique. “I can understand that maybe you’re not going to treat people who evaded the draft and went to Canada the same way you’re going to treat people who served honorably, but I can’t for the life of me think of a reason why somebody who served honorably, was wounded, and suffers from those injuries should not be receiving benefits. There’s no moral justification for that,” Taylor says. “I don’t care what the law says.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs is notorious for denying benefits, losing paperwork and relying on a variety of excuses from budget shortfalls to overwhelming workloads to electronic data filing errors. Most of the veterans I’ve spoken to recognize major problems within the VA, and attempts to overhaul the system by means of lawsuits are surprisingly numerous. “There’s been many class-action suits but I don’t know whatever happens with them,” Lance says “Even with a federal judge, the VA Turns around and says ‘we’re appealing the decision.’ And that’s what they do: they outlive you.”
“If you look at the number of people nationwide that have pending cases, it’s routine that veterans are denied benefits,” says Taylor. “There are an enormous number of cases pending before the VA. The law student helping me on this case is another military vet who has had benefits denied to him. It happens all the time to people and they have to work their way through the system, and most of them do it without access to attorneys.”
“It would be great if they didn’t do this to any other Vietnam-era vets. As time goes by there are fewer and fewer of them,” observes Taylor. “I think it’s wrong that we’re denying these people benefits that served honorably and went AWOL after they came back to the states, for whatever reason. If you look into those situations I think you would find almost uniformly they were suffering from PTSD from their military service.”
This April, the Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School filed a class action suit on behalf of Marine Corps veteran Conley Monk Jr. and thousands of other veterans.[3] The lawsuit, which involves veterans who are facing medical and financial hardships, claims that long waits amount to an outright denial of benefits, and calls for a court order to force the V.A. to make decisions within 30 days on every appeal that has been pending for more than a year.[4]
It’s a continuation of another suit filed last year that would have provided veterans like Lance a chance to present evidence to upgrade their eligibility for benefits, including disability pay. In the November 2014 issue of The American Legion Magazine, Tom Philpott writes:
“Tens of thousands of veterans discharged under other-than-honorable (OTH) conditions who were later diagnosed with post-traumatic-stress-disorder, or can present evidence they suffered from war-related stress, have fresh chances to seek upgrades to their discharges and gain eligibility for veterans benefits, including disability pay…It seeks relief for tens of thousands of veterans who developed PTSD in service and received OTH discharges.
“The complaint says that as a result of undiagnosed PTSD, these veterans were unable to perform assigned military duties and were discharged for misconduct attributable to their post-traumatic-stress. Yet over the years, the military ‘has near-categorically refused to correct these wrongful discharges.’”[5]
And OTH discharges are often the result of deliberate efforts by the military to leverage traumatized soldiers afflicted with PTSD into early dismissal. Distressed soldiers typically turn to alcoholism as a means of masking their pain and inability to sleep upon returning home, resulting in DUIs and other alcohol related offenses that are used as an excuse to dishonorably discharge them. Last month, NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling reported:
“…since January 2009, the Army has “separated” 22,000 soldiers for “misconduct” after they came back from Iraq and Afghanistan and were diagnosed with mental health problems…Why would commanders kick out soldiers for misconduct, instead of giving them more intensive treatment or a medical retirement on the grounds that they have persistent mental health problems? …It takes less time and money to get rid of problem soldiers on the grounds of misconduct.”[6]
By exploiting this technicality, the US government manages to save billions of dollars in aid to veterans that don’t qualify for benefits. And for those who do qualify, getting a response from the VA is something of a crap shoot. This August Alexander Reed Kelly reported:
“Internal memos leaked by Veterans Affairs employees over the years have shown that dishonest bookkeeping encouraged by department managers has resulted in the widespread denial of medical care to combat veterans. …an agency document—leaked by staffer Scott Davis—showed that more than 35,000 veterans had been denied care because of an “error” in the department’s computer system. Nearly half of these veterans have waited more than five years for coverage, and one document indicated that nearly one-third of those who had been waiting have died.”[7]
But perhaps the most egregious account of VA negligence comes from an article entitled, I Survived the VA that appeared in the Huffington Post this August, describing the harrowing story of a soldier suffering from Behcet’s Syndrome, an auto-inflammatory disease that causes swelling and degeneration of major organs, and legions that spew bloody puss from numerous open sores that are often the size of quarters. After months of patiently waiting for a call from the VA, he discovered that he’d been placed on a fraudulent wait list designed to go nowhere. Meanwhile the inflammation was smothering his organs, shutting down his central nervous system, and overwhelming his senses with crippling pain. When he was finally able to make an appointment, the doctor accused him of picking at his wounds and implied that he was a mentally-ill hypochondriac. It wasn’t until he took a video of himself caring for his wounds that he was able to convince medical professionals that he wasn’t fabricating his illness. While his condition is now irreversible, the resulting ER visit saved his life. He is still in perpetual limbo with the VA bureaucracy.[8]
The mistreatment and outright disregard for veterans seems to be a mainstay of the American Military so common it’s almost cliché, and charts as far back into history as one cares to chronicle America’s wars. One of the most notable instances occurred in the summer of 1932 during the Bonus Army march, when thousands of World War I veterans gathered in Washington D.C. to demand cash redemptions for their service certificates. The basic sentiment that motivated the Bonus Army exists as strongly today as it ever has – it is easier and cheaper to forget the soldiers once they’ve left the military than it is to take care of them.
As far as Lance’s situation is concerned, the Code of Federal Regulations states that his AWOL status does not bar him from benefits “if there are compelling circumstances to warrant the prolonged unauthorized absence.” Given that he saw combat, has suffered from PTSD ever since, and was ordered to violently suppress lawful anti-war protests in Washington D.C., it seems as though said “compelling circumstances” are there for any who care to look. But however compelling those circumstances might seem, and in spite of president Ford’s pardon, the VA Board has concluded that Lance’s undesirable discharge from the Marine Corps resulted from his “own willful and persistent misconduct,” and that “eligibility for veterans’ benefits is not bestowed by reason of his clemency discharge.”
Lance is on the verge of giving up hope. His friends and family can hear it in his voice every time they talk with him; they can see it in his eyes, they can feel it in his gestures. Despite his willingness to endure combat for America, he feels invisible in the eyes of his country. Close to losing his house, spending his days in agonizing pain, haunted by memories of the war, he sees little if any reason to hang on any longer. “I’m out of time,” he says. “It’s like my dad used to say: ‘Going up against the system is like beating yourself in the head with a hammer, and it feels so good when you quit.’ Well, I’m ready to quit.”
Situations like Lance’s can help provide a window of insight into why 22 veterans commit suicide every single day in this country.[9] While Jim’s suit presents Lance’s best possible chance of living out his golden years with dignity, the VA will likely continue to deliberately ignore Lance’s pleas unless they are forced to help him.
Last month Senator Daines mailed letters throughout Montana pledging his support for veterans, listing several pieces of legislation Daines has introduced and short descriptions of their intended purpose. In particular, S. 1567 applies directly to Lance’s situation, for it creates a “presumption in favor of the veteran when petitioning the Secretary of Defense for an upgrade in discharge status based on medical evidence certified by the VA.”[10] Unfortunately, this bill is a long way from getting passed, and every day that goes by is an excruciating ordeal for Lance. He needs help yesterday, not tomorrow.
While Jim is confident that the unique qualities of Lance’s case provide a good possibility for a win, he recognizes the need for political pressure. “We’re going to be reaching out directly to Senator Daines, to Senator Tester, to Congressman Zinke,” he says. “The fastest way this can be resolved is if our congressional delegation puts political pressure on the VA and they act responsibly and get this man the benefits he’s entitled to.”
As with most veterans, Lance relives the horrors from his past every day of his life. But at this point in his life, Lance’s chief concern is the wellbeing of his grandchildren, and his darkest fear is that they will follow in his footsteps. “I’ve got five grandkids,” he says. “And whenever I see them, they’re playing some kind of war video game. How do we keep these kids from going in the military?”
Though I don’t see anything inherently wrong with joining the military, and I didn’t have an answer for Lance at the time he asked it, it eventually occurred to me that the best chance we have of breaking this cycle is for our society to begin ignoring pro-war messages in our media, instead of ignoring our veterans. They understand better than anyone else where militarism leads. Having someone around who has seen the horrors of war with their own eyes, who can relate the reality of combat, is perhaps the only antidote available against the seductive pull of the military-industrial complex. But for Lance to be able to council his grandchildren, he needs to be around to tell the tale, and he won’t be able to do that without adequate access to healthcare.
The reality of how veterans are treated in America stands in stark contrast to the fantasies of military hero worship so effectively manufactured by Hollywood. When I joined, I was sold on delusions of grandeur, as images of ticker-tape parades marched through my imagination. But where did those fantasies come from? In my own experience, films depicting the glory of war have long been used to popularize military actions, steer the historical narrative away from imperialism, and most importantly, maintain a steady flow of naïve American youth into the jaws of the armed services. John Wayne’s WWII film The Longest Day has provided this for several generations, and helped to reinforce within my young brain the binary fiction of American heroes overcoming the evil forces of darkness threatening the purity of our innocence the world over.
As the decades counted forward and the motion pictures became more sophisticated, films became more graphic and realistic, in turn ramping up the heroism factor as well. Even extremely horrifying films like Black Hawk Down and Full Metal Jacket still somehow managed to paint a picture of valor and excitement for those who have never experienced the profound suffering, permanent injuries, and mental scars that wars leave behind. Even if the picture had an anti-war message, kids like me fixated on how cool the soldiers looked shooting their cutting-edge weapons, riding around in vehicles that were as state-of-the-art as they were sexy.
Very few films ever depict the reality of war’s aftermath. The only two I’m aware of are The Deer Hunter, and Born on the Fourth of July – two phenomenal films that are widely unknown because they don’t provide the unrealistic happy ending that most movie goers have come to expect from the “entertainment industry.” Today’s so-called entertainment is characterized by interactive mental programming like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Army of Two, Halo, Metal of Honor, Killzone, Halflife, Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell. When I was in high school I scoffed at the idea that the deluge of violence pouring through my retinas and into my mind could be altering the way I think. Looking back I’m able to see now that the reason I considered these first-person shooter games as benign entertainment was due to the simple fact that I was too young to understand how such stimulation could create a craving for destruction that was further frustrated by society’s ills.
Violence is the path of least resistance, which is what makes it so seductive, especially to America’s youth, who are next in line to fight in America’s next illegal war and in-turn, the next generation to be denied basic health benefits when their wartime injuries become too heavy a burden to bear.
Our leaders need to consider the human costs of their war profiteering. We are in desperate need of a political class who will no longer send our sons and daughters into calculated quagmires simply because it’s good for business. But until that happens, America needs to at least stop chanting meaningless slogans like “support our troops” until our veterans are actually provided for. The VA needs to provide our veterans with adequate care, and start treating all of our veterans, regardless of their discharge status, like human beings. Veterans should be afforded the same enthusiasm that our young recruits receive, and men like Lance Hartley should not have to return from war only to spend the rest of their lives fighting for something as fundamental as health care. If the government is willing to send you into hell, the least they can do is provide you with a parachute.
Check out the radio broadcast of Lance’s story here
Sources:
[1] Robertson v. Gibson. United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. 21 July 2014. Print.
[2] Izzo, Rebecca. “In Need of Correction: How the Army Board for Correction of Military Records Is Failing Veterans with PTSD.” The Yale Law Journal. N.p., 26 Mar. 2014. Web.
[3] “Veterans Clinic Files Nation-Wide Class Action, Challenging Delays in VA Benefits Processing.” Veterans Clinic Files Nation-Wide Class Action. Yale Law School, 6 Apr. 2015. Web. 03 Nov. 2015.
[4] Monk v. Mcdonald. United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. 6 Apr. 2015. Print.
[5] Philpott, Tom. “Discharges to Be Reviewed in PTSD Cases.” American Legion Magazine Nov. 2014.
[6] Zwerdling, Daniel. “Missed Treatment: Soldiers With Mental Health Issues Dismissed For ‘Misconduct'” Montana Public Radio (n.d.): 28 Oct. 2015. Web.
[7] Kelly, Alexander Reed. “Truthdiggers of the Week: Whistleblowers in the Department of Veterans Affairs.” (2015): Truthdig. 15 Aug. 2015. Web.
[8] Castellanos, Cat Del Valle. “I Survived The VA: A Veteran Tells His Shocking Story.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 28 Aug. 2015. Web. 15 Oct. 2015.
[9] Kemp, Janet, PhD, and Robert Robert Bossarte, PhD. Suicide Data Report, 2012. Rep. N.p.: Department of Veterans Affairs Mental Health Services Suicide Prevention Program, n.d. Print.
[10] Daines, Steve. Working For Montana Veterans. Washington D.C.: United States Senate, 2015. Print.
This post was composed by Outer Limits contributor and Army veteran RemBrandt Miller.
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