Category Archives: Activism

OWS Unites Against Corporate Personhood

Posted on by

Occupy Wall Street unites around abolition of corporate personhood (via Tikkun Daily):

“There is only one way to reclaim democracy and make our government one of, by and for the People. We must make support of a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood a campaign issue in 2012 and beyond. Candidates around the country are taking a pledge to amend. As they challenge incumbents and better-known challengers in the upcoming primaries, the issue will gain prominence in other races. Eventually it will become generally recognized that when faced with a choice between candidates willing to prove that they are seeking office in order to serve the interests of their constituents and not those of their corporate patrons and themselves, the choice will be obvious. As voters in more and more elections respond by electing candidates who have taken the pledge to amend it will become clear that the amendment will pass.”

Pick-Pockets On The Subway Train

Posted on by

Phil Rockstroh:

“The corporate/national security state, by its very nature is anti-liberty and anti-freedom. Of course, its defenders give lip service to the concept of freedom…much in the manner a pick-pocket working a subway train is very much in favor of the virtues of public transportation.A heavy police presence has ringed Zuccotti Park from the get-go, and whose ranks have now staged a military style raid upon it, a defacto search and destroy mission–because the ruling elite want to suppress the very impulse of freedom. These authoritarian bullies don’t want the concept to escape the collective prison of the mind erected and maintained by the corrupt jailers comprising the 1% who claim they offer us protection as, all the while, they hold our chains…all for our own good, they insist…for our safety and the safety of others.

Although, from studying on these prison walls, the thought occurs to me…that what we might need is protection from all this safety.”

Fighting Our Pornified Culture

Posted on by

Mercator Net has an interview with one of the authors of the new book, Big Porn Inc.

Melinda Tankard Reist: The aim of Big Porn Inc. was to blow apart the myth that porn is just about ‘naughty’ pictures of consenting sex between adults, that it is just a bit of ‘harmless fun’. We wanted to expose that pornography is a multi-billion global industry profiting from commodifying sexuality and selling it back to us as industrialised, commercialised, plasticised porn sex. We also wanted to demonstrate the way pornography is colonising the public space, how everything has become pornified. We believe pornography is a public health hazard of major proportions and it’s time to address it.

How has this industry been able to grow so big? Who else is profiting from it?

The industry has a lot of power. This power has bought off law makers, regulators and enforcement bodies around the world. They know how to gain new users, how to get men (the primary users of pornography) using their product and wanting more. The internet has been a massive boon for the porn industry, estimated to reach $US100billion by 2013. There are so many who profit from it, from traffickers who sell women who are used to make pornography, to the porn companies who make the porn, to the hotels who profit more from pay-per-view porn that they do selling rooms and the mainstream companies who profit from carrying porn brands, such as Diva, a jewellery store chain for girls 8-13, which is currently pimping Playboy brand products to them.

A review notes the following:

Here are just a few, with the total Web pages for each: teen sex – 82 million pages; animal sex – over 50 million; bondage – nearly 30 million; crush sex (which involves the killing of small animals) – 8 million; vomit sex – 4 million; wired porn (involving electrical shock) – 1.7 million; snuff sex (involving actual death) – 1.3 million.

So much for porn being all-American and indispensable for freedom from that terrifying bogeyman of modernity – repression….

That Transparency Meme…

Posted on by

About that transparency meme that I caught on to in 2010, from whence it… er…percolated..to others, like the estimable Daily Bell, whom I have often and meticulously cited,  whom I applaud for its wonderful work and have supported over and over, despite many misgivings….

(One of its associates/editors’ comments to my post can even be seen later in this blog post).

A nod in the direction from where you get stuff, folks, would be nice. It would be even nicer if I got it without having to bring it up, although, as you can see, I’m not bashful about doing that either…

I  give credit regardless, and I hope for the same, politely, humbly, and patiently at first, but if not, then a tad more assertively. Ultimately, this blog is committed to subverting and destroying the lies on which modernity has lived for centuries and a little (intellectual) blood-letting will take place when it has to, with no qualms.

The biggest lie fostered by modernity is the lie called western supremacism, whose economic form is mercantilism. This, as I  see even in this day, can only be sustained by the appropriation of other people’s work, whether physical or mental.  That is fundamental to it.

My attribution battles, small and great, are thus an intrinsic part of  the mandate of this blog, and not solely personal. More later…

Thus this brief history of the transparency meme  is not the first such and it probably won’t be the last.

Over and over, even recently, I blog something  and then see it surface a day or so later, without a nod in this direction. [One recent example was when I blogged why we need avoid treating ‘End the Fed’ as a slogan and why I think that power has already moved to the BIS].

Sometimes, I daresay, it’s just accidental. I allow for that. But more often it isn’t. Then I am reluctantly forced to call them out.

That kind of thing is simply wrong, no matter how many people do it and what theories or philosophies they quote. It is a kind of theft. Whether it is simply careerism or the professional standards of hard money people or marketers or the financial industry, it has to be called out. Nothing will get better without a clean up of the intellectual pollution and smog that clogs political debate.

Think about it. How can you denounce state actions as the means to enforce norms, if your own conduct adheres to none? If you yourself worship at the foot of power, whether money power, or status, or marketing clout, or anything else, and rely on your ability to “get away with it” because “everyone does it,” rather than on objective truth, then you have no moral grounds to complain when another kind of power (state power, the power of law, or the will of the people) opposes you. In fact, your behavior invites it.

That is why, in the end, the OccupyWallStreet folks will triumph. Soros will win. Why shouldn’t he?

If all you really care about is your network, and the money you make from them, and aggrandizing yourself, rather than objective truth, well then, on all those counts Soros is your master. He has proved it.

You cannot complain. If capitalists express in their behavior no more than the tenet, “might makes right”, they  have nothing on which to stand when the might of the state turns against them.  And it will turn against them. In fact, it already has.

And, truthfully, they have no one to blame but themselves.

See below:

http://mindbodypolitic.org/2010/08/03/the-tangled-web/

“Again, I could be mistaken about Wikileaks.

But even if I were,  even if Assange himself turned out to be well-meaning and principled, I’m not enthusiastic about his perfect transparency, leak-for-profit model. I think it has ominous parallels in corporate and state intelligence services. In my reading (and that of some others), it was one of the instigating factors in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Furthermore, the model depends on flouting the privacy rights of innocent people and private outfits.

So however things turn out, I’ll pass on Wikileaks and the “glamor” of spy v. spy. Means are just as important, if not more, than ends. That’s a lesson the Cold War should have taught us. In fact, I thought libertarianism was premised on it.

It troubles me then to see so many liberty-minded people simply brush off these questions as “spiteful” or “envious”……

In such matters, no one is beyond respectful questioning.”

And this post below (I’d actually started doubting Assange much earlier…as you can see from checking back at my posts)

http://mindbodypolitic.org/2010/06/27/more-on-assange-and-wikileaks/

Here’s the main theoretical reason why one might tend to suspect Wikileaks.

Assange objects to privacy. Wikileaks violates privacy. Kind of like Google, notice? Google thinks it’s heroic too and Google has its China-connection too. Wikileaks makes anonymous sources, hacking, leaking, and ratting out your associates cool. It makes snitches heroes.

Cui bono? Need I ask? Corporate rivals, speculators and short-sellers, blackmailers, rival governments, spy agencies. Does that sound like the company the power-elites keep?

So even if Wikileaks were not a disinformation agent, whose agenda would its work finally help? A totalitarian outfit’s. It certainly doesn’t help individualism.

A friend said…

  • [From The Daily Bell]

    Hi! Interesting article. Can you post a definitive (or semi-definitive article) showing Assange is a disinformation agent? Is that your point in this excerpt … that your suspicions are re-ignited? Maybe we misunderstood.

    At this point, (without evidence to change our tiny, collective mind) our betting is still that it is more likely MADSEN is one (since he is actually a member of several US old boy intel clubs) than Assange. We have our doubts about Rense too, where Madsen often appears.

    06/27/10 2:05 PM | Comment Link Edit This

    • Gordon Duff: Look After The Vets Who Are Still Alive

    Posted on by

    Gordon Duff on Crosses of Distraction:

    “Veterans own billions in land across the US, held in trust by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Where that land is wanted by others, it will be given away and sold. Veterans housing, however, will be handled by special interest groups, churches with wild ideas, failed drug rehabilitation programs run by “hucksters” with political connections and petty gangsters who will get free land, free buildings and free money which will, somehow magically, end up being used for everything but veterans housing.

    This is going on “full speed” as we speak and no one is saying a word, nobody really but Bob Rosebrock and his small group of supporters, the “Old Guard” who have been protesting these abuses every Sunday, without fail for almost 3 full years.

    What is it about? How do we fix it?

    It is time we admit that those controlling veterans organizations, the real voices, are nothing but Washington hacks who should be “shilling” for pharmaceutical companies or selling used cars. Their failures are epic and have been for decades. The major veterans organizations lost their way 50 years ago and the “slack” has been picked up by dozens of activist organizations, unfunded but dedicated.

    This is the truth of it and it is a shameful thing for the United States.

    We could talk war itself. Does anyone know why we are fighting or who? At least check, for each estimated “Al Qaeda” member in Afghanistan, we had 20,000 troops.

    In fact, upon closer examination, something newspapers in America and our Congress are unlikely to do, almost everything believed about the “war on terror” and “9/11? is proving to be something very wrong. You may not know it now, you may never want to believe it, but it is true. Something very wrong, very evil, very “unAmerican” happened and is still going on.

    With all the talk about honoring the dead, defending “crosses” or dishonoring Jewish War dead, who speaks for the living? In Los Angeles, it is Robert Rosebrock and his friends, harassed and threatened, abandoned by the Jewish War Veterans, abandoned by the American Legion, abandoned by the VFW.

    If you want to be abandoned, try defending the weak, the abused, the heroic, the honorable from the rich, the greedy and the heartless.

    In February, Rosebrock will be in court. He is suing the Department of Veterans Affairs for arresting him for protesting, trying to force them to do what they are supposed to do, protect and serve America’s veterans. The ACLU is standing with him.

    After three years, the police who arrested him repeatedly, employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs are standing with him also.

    Most veterans groups are not. Why? Too busy with politics and religion?”

    I’m Changing My Name To Chrysler

    Posted on by

    I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler – by Tom Paxton, sung by Arlo Guthrie

    Oh the price of gold is rising out of sight/And the dollar is in sorry shape tonight.
    What a dollar used to get us/Now won’t buy a head of lettuce/No, the economic forecast isn’t right
    But amidst the clouds I spot a shining ray/I can even glimpse a new and better way
    I’ve devised a plan of action/Worked it down to the last fraction/And I’m going into action here today.

    [Cho:]
    I am changing My Name To “Chrysler”/I am going down to Washington, D.C.
    I will tell some power broker/What they did for Iacocca/Will be perfectly acceptable to me.
    I am changing my name to ‘Chrysler’/I am heading for that great receiving line,
    So when they hand a million grand out/I’ll be standing with my hand out/Yes sir, I’ll get mine.r you

    Leonard Cohen On The Global Spy Game: Everybody Knows

    Posted on by

     

     


    “Everybody Knows,” by Canadian singer-poet-mystic, Leonard Cohen, is used on the Alex Jones show, a popular political site that devotes itself to the machinations (conspiracies?) of the power-elite.

    The clip is from the ‘Man from U.N.C.L.E’ – a Cold War TV series from the sixties, featuring the intrepid spies, Ilya Kuryakin (David McCallum) and Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn). It perfectly suits the lyrics of “Everybody Knows.”

    Everybody Knows – Leonard Cohen

    Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
    Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
    Everybody knows that the war is over
    Everybody knows the good guys lost
    Everybody knows the fight was fixed
    The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
    That’s how it goes/ Everybody knows
    Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
    Everybody knows that the captain lied
    Everybody got this broken feeling
    Like their father or their dog just died

    Everybody talking to their pockets
    Everybody wants a box of chocolates
    And a long stem rose/Everybody knows……

    Everybody knows the deal is rotten
    Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
    For your ribbons and bows/And everybody knows…”

    The U.N.C.L.E. clip used in the video is interesting in both anticipating the globalist agenda and capturing the disenchantment of people awakening to the dialectic by which the power elites subjugate them.

    Wiki has this description of the U.N.C.L.E. series:

    “The series, though fictional, achieved such notability as to have artifacts (props, costumes and documents, and a video clip) from the show included in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library’s exhibit on spies and counterspies. Similar exhibits can be found in the museums of the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies and organizations involved with intelligence gathering.”

    Lila: This seems fitting, since the series accomplishes one of the ongoing tasks of the elites themselves, conditioning the popular mind to accept the need for a worldwide intelligence agency run by “good guys,” while distracting from the  biggest “bad guy” of all – government.

    “U.N.C.L.E.’s archenemy was a vast organization known as THRUSH (originally named WASP in the series pilot movie). The original series never explained what the acronym THRUSH stood for, but in several of the U.N.C.L.E. novels written by David McDaniel, it was expanded as the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity, and described by him as having been founded by Col. Sebastian Moran after the death of Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Final Problem“. Later, an alternate—and more plausible—explanation was offered, with THRUSH rising out of the fall of Nazism and founded by high-ranking Nazi officials—including Martin Bormann—who fled to Argentina when defeat was seen as inevitable, taking with them enormous financial wealth, including gold and precious works of art.”

    “THRUSH’s aim was to conquer the world. Napoleon Solo said (in “The Green Opal Affair”), “THRUSH believes in the two-party system: the masters and the slaves”, adding in another episode (“The Vulcan Affair”) that THRUSH will “kill people the way people kill flies: a careless flick of the wrist — reflex action.” So dangerous was the threat from THRUSH that governments, even those most ideologically opposed such as the United States and the USSR, cooperated in the formation and operation of U.N.C.L.E. Similarly, if Solo and Kuryakin held opposing political views, the writers allowed little to show in their interactions.

    The creators of the series decided that the involvement of an innocent character would be part of each episode, giving the audience someone with whom it could identify.”

    Though executive producer Norman Felton and Ian Fleming had developed the character of Napoleon Solo, it was producer Sam Rolfe who created the organization of U.N.C.L.E. Unlike the nationalistic organizations of the CIA and James Bond‘s MI6, U.N.C.L.E. was a worldwide organization composed of agents from all corners of the globe…”

    Jeff Blankfort Deconstructs Chomsky On America and Israel

    Posted on by

    Update

    I should make it clear that, as a libertarian, I don’t support sanctions against any country. I wouldn’t have supported sanctions against South Africa, didn’t support them on Iraq, and don’t support them on Israel. However, targeted boycotts against specific, responsible parties (journalists, academics, government officials, businessmen or military officials directly involved in genocidal crimes or in their cover-up) would be defensible under international law. General sanctions only impoverish people and undermine resistance.

    So my problem here is less with Chomsky’s position on divestment – whatever it is – so much as his apparent double-standards on the issue – one standard for South Africans…… and another for Israel.One for Israel…and another for Palestine. One for the US…and another for Israel.

    If the Jews deserved a homeland, and they did, the Palestinians surely deserved land that was already their home and had been their home for centuries…

    Original Post [all varieties of emphasis –  underlines, capitals, and italics – are mine, not Blankfort’s]:

    The indefatigably brave and honest Jeff Blankfort analyzes Noam Chomsky’s writings on Israel and Palestine. I’ve  been very conflicted about Chomsky’s blind-eye on  9-11 for some time now. What to think about it? This analysis convinces me finally that Chomsky’s bias is not simply an emotional blind-spot, but a deliberate obfuscation that in such a prominent, sophisticated, and powerful voice, must be called out and questioned closely.

    “His reluctance to label Israel’s control of the Palestinians as “apartheid” out of concern that it be seen as a “red flag,” like describing it as “inflammatory,” was a red flag itself and raised questions that should have been asked by the interviewer, such as who would be inflamed by the reference to ‘apartheid’ as a “red flag” in Israel’s case and what objections would Chomsky have to that?

    A more disturbing exchange occurred later in the interview when Chomsky was asked if sanctions should be applied against Israel as they were against South Africa. He responded:

    “In fact, I’ve been strongly against it in the case of Israel. For a number of reasons. For one thing, even in the case of South Africa, I think sanctions are a very questionable tactic. In the case of South Africa, I think they were [ultimately] legitimate because it was clear that the large majority of the population of South Africa was in favor of it.

    Sanctions hurt the population. You don’t impose them unless the population is asking for them. That’s the moral issue. So, the first point in the case of Israel is that: Is the population asking for it? Well, obviously not.”

    Obviously not. But is it acceptable to make such a decision on the basis of what the majority of Israelis want? Israel, after all, is not a dictatorship in which the people are held in check by fear and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for their government’s actions. Israel has a largely unregulated, lively press and a “people’s army” in which all Israeli Jews, other than the ultra-orthodox, are expected to serve and that is viewed by the Israeli public with almost religious reverence. Over the years, in their own democratic fashion, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have consistently supported and participated in actions of their government against the Palestinians and Lebanese that are not only racist, but in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

    Chomsky made his position clear:

    “So calling for sanctions here, when the majority of the population doesn’t understand what you are doing, is tactically absurd-even if it were morally correct, which I don’t think it is. The country against which the sanctions are being imposed is not calling for it.”

    The interviewer, Lee, understandably puzzled by that answer, then asked him, “Palestinians aren’t calling for sanctions?

    Chomsky: “Well, the sanctions wouldn’t be imposed against the Palestinians, they would be imposed against Israel.”

    Lee: “Right… [And] Israelis aren’t calling for sanctions.”

    That response also disturbed Palestinian political analyst, Omar Barghouti, who, while tactfully acknowledging Chomsky as “a distinguished supporter of the Palestinian cause,” addressed the issue squarely:

    Of all the anti-boycott arguments, this one reflects either surprising naiveté or deliberate intellectual dishonesty. Are we to judge whether to apply sanctions on a colonial power based on the opinion of the majority in the oppressors community? Does the oppressed community count at all? [7]

    For Chomsky, apparently not……

    ………In an exchange with Washington Post readers, Chomsky was asked by a caller:

    Why did you sign an MIT petition calling for MIT to boycott Israeli investments, and then give an interview in which you state that you opposed such investment boycotts? What was or is your position on the proposal by some MIT faculty that MIT should boycott Israeli investments?

    Chomsky replied:

    As is well known in Cambridge, of anyone involved, I” was the most outspoken opponent of the petition calling for divestment, and in fact refused to sign until it was substantially changed, along lines that you can read if you are interested. The “divestment” part was reduced to three entirely meaningless words, which had nothing to do with the main thrust of the petition. I thought that the three meaningless words should also be deleted… On your last question, as noted, I was and remain strongly opposed, without exception — at least if I understand what the question means. How does one “boycott Israeli investments”? (Emphasis added). [10]

    I will assume that Chomsky understood very well what the caller meant: investing in Israeli companies and in State of Israel Bonds of which US labor union pension funds, and many states and universities have purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth. These purchases clearly obligate those institutions to lobby Congress to insure that the Israeli economy stays afloat. This isn’t something that Chomsky talks or writes about.

    The caller was referring to a speech that Chomsky had made to the Harvard Anthropology Dept. shortly after the MIT and Harvard faculties issued a joint statement on divestment. It was gleefully reported in the Harvard Crimson by pro-Israel activist, David Weinfeld, under the headline “Chomsky’s Gift”:

    MIT Institute Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky recently gave the greatest Hanukkah gift of all to opponents of the divestment campaign against Israel. By signing the Harvard-MIT divestment petition several months ago—and then denouncing divestment on Nov. 25 at Harvard—Chomsky has completely undercut the petition.

    At his recent talk for the Harvard anthropology department, Chomsky stated: “I am opposed and have been opposed for many years, in fact, I’ve probably been the leading opponent for years of the campaign for divestment from Israel and of the campaign about academic boycotts.”

    He argued that a call for divestment is “a very welcome gift to the most extreme supporters of US-Israeli violence… It removes from the agenda the primary issues and it allows them to turn the discussion to irrelevant issues, which are here irrelevant, anti-Semitism and academic freedom and so on and so forth.” [11] …….

    ….

    Chomsky’s rationalization of Israel’s criminal misdeeds in The Fateful Triangle should have rung alarm bells when it appeared in 1983. Written a year after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, in what would become a sacred text for Middle East activists, he actually began the book not by taking Israel to task so much as its critics:

    In the war of words that has been waged since Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, critics of Israeli actions have frequently been accused of hypocrisy. While the reasons advanced are spurious, the charge itself has some merit. It is surely hypocritical to condemn Israel for establishing settlements in the occupied territories while we pay for establishing and expanding them. Or to condemn Israel for attacking civilian targets with cluster and phosphorous bombs “to get the maximum kill per hit.” When we provide them gratis or at bargain rates, knowing that they will be used for just this purpose. Or to criticize Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ bombardment of heavily-settled civilian areas or its other military adventures, while we not only provide the means in abundance but welcome Israel’s assistance in testing the latest weaponry under live battlefield conditions... .In general, it is pure hypocrisy to criticize the exercise of Israeli power while welcoming Israel’s contributions towards realizing the US aim of eliminating possible threats, largely indigenous, to American domination of the Middle East region.[ 21]

    First, the PLO was seen as a threat by Israel, not by the United States in 1982, particularly since it had strictly abided by a US-brokered cease-fire with Israel for 11 months, giving it a dangerous degree of credibility in Israeli eyes. Second, whom did Chomsky mean by “we?” Perhaps, President Reagan and some members of Congress who gently expressed their concern when the number of Palestinians and Lebanese killed in the invasion and the wholesale destruction of the country could not be suppressed in the media. But he doesn’t say. It certainly wasn’t those who took to the streets across the country to protest Israel’s invasion. Both political parties had competed in their applause when Israel launched its attack, as did the AFL-CIO which took out a full page ad in the NY Times, declaring “We Are Not Neutral. We Support Israel!” paid for by an Israeli lobbyist with a Park Avenue address. The media, in the beginning, was also supportive, but it is rare to find an editorial supporting US aid to Israel. It is rarely ever mentioned and that’s the way the lobby likes it. So is Chomsky creating a straw figure? It appears so.

    If we follow Chomsky’s “logic,” it would be an injustice to bring charges of war crimes against Indonesian, El Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian, or Filipino officers, soldiers, or public officials for the atrocities committed against their own countrymen and women since they were funded, armed and politically supported by the US. Perhaps, General Pinochet will claim the Chomsky Defense if he goes to trial.

    He pressed the point of US responsibility for Israel’s sins again in his introduction to The New Intifada, noting that as one of the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, “It is therefore Washington’s responsibility to prevent settlement and expropriation, along with collective punishment and all other measures of violence… .It follows that the United States is in express and extreme violation of its obligations as a High Contracting Party.” [22]

    I would agree with Chomsky, but is the US refusal to act a more “extreme violation” than the actual crimes being committed by another signatory to the Conventions, namely Israel? Chomsky would have us believe that it is.

    It is a point he made clear at a talk in Oxford in May, 2004, when he brought up the killing a week earlier of the Hamas spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin by the Israeli military as he left a Mosque in Gaza. “That was reported as an Israeli assassination, but inaccurately” said Chomsky. “Sheikh Yassin was killed by a US helicopter, flown by an Israeli pilot. Israel does not produce helicopters. The US sends them with the understanding that they will be used for such purposes, not defense, as they have been, regularly.”

    Chomsky is correct to a point. What is missing from his analysis is any reference to the demands from Congress, orchestrated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s officially registered lobby, to make sure that the US provides those helicopters to Israel to use as its generals see fit. (In fact, there is not a single mention of AIPAC in any one of Chomsky’s many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict). What Chomsky’s British audience was left with was the conclusion that the assassination of Sheik Yassin was done with Washington’s approval.

    While its repeated use of helicopters against the Palestinian resistance and civilian population has been one of the more criminal aspects of Israel’s response to the Intifada, absolving the Israelis of blame for their use has become something of a fetish for Chomsky as his introduction to The New Intifada [23] and again, in more detail in Middle East Illusions, illustrates:

    On October 1, [at the beginning of the Al-Aksa Intifada] Israeli military helicopters, or, to be more precise, US military helicopters with Israeli pilots, sharply escalated the violence, killing two Palestinians in Gaza… . The continuing provision of attack helicopters by the United States to Israel, with the knowledge that these weapons are being used against the civilian Palestinian population, and the silence of the mainstream media is just one illustration of many of how we live up to the principle that we do not believe in violence. Again, it leaves honest citizens with two tasks: the important one, do something about it; and the second one, try to find out why the policies are being pursued. (Emphasis added) [24]

    What to do Chomsky again doesn’t say, but he does try to tell us why:

    “On that matter, the fundamental reasons are not really controversial… It has long been understood that the gulf region has the major energy sources in the world… ” [25]

    Chomsky then goes on for two pages explaining the importance of Middle East oil and the efforts by the US to control it. It is the basic explanation that he has repeated and republished, almost verbatim, over the years. What it has to do with the Palestinians who have no oil or how a truncated Palestinian state would present a threat to US regional interests is not provided, but after two pages the reader has forgotten that the question was even posed. In his explanation there is no mention of the lobby or domestic influences.

    Chomsky does acknowledge that “major sectors of American corporate capitalism, including powerful elements with interests in the Middle East [the major oil companies!]” have endorsed a “two-state solution” on the basis that

    the radical nationalist tendencies that are enflamed by the unsettled Palestinian problem would be reduced by the establishment of a Palestinian mini-state that would be contained within a Jordanian-Israeli military alliance (perhaps tacit), surviving at the pleasure of its far more powerful neighbors and subsidized by the most conservative and pro-American forces in the Arab world… .This would, in fact, be the likely outcome of a two-state settlement.” [26]

    Such an outcome would have little direct influence on regional Arab politics, except to demoralize supporters of the Palestinian struggle in the neighboring countries and around the world, a development that would clearly serve US interests. It would, however, curb Israel’s expansion, which is critical to Israel’s agenda, not Washington’s. Chomsky also fails to recognize a fundamental contradiction in his argument. If the support of Israel has been based on its role as protector of US strategic resources, namely oil, why does not that position enjoy the support of the major oil companies with interests in the region?…”

    (Lila: My emphasis)

    Stuxnet: A Chronology (Ongoing)

    Posted on by

    October 2, 2010

    The NY Times now backtracks, claiming that Israeli cyber warfare experts are “too smart” to leave a clue behind. Thus..by inference…it must be a country that wants to implicate Israel, which..by inference…is Iran (surprise).  Too clever by half, these folks. Another reason I believe Israel or an Israeli-backed team is behind Stuxnet is the fact that Wikileaks apparently had a reference to a possible nuclear “accident” in Iran in July 2009. That is around the time when some researchers argue Stuxnet infections first began.

    October 2, 2010

    Jeffrey Carr backs off from the allegation that Israel is the culprit, claiming that Ralph Langner was the sole source of the allegation and was irresponsible in posting it on his blog as though it were the opinion of the intelligence community. Carr quotes an earlier piece of his, along with these words:

    “Last week I wrote about how the Israel-Iran conspiracy theory around the Stuxnet worm was built entirely on one security engineer’s personal conjecture (Ralph Langner) with absolutely no weighing of alternative possibilities for attribution, nor any objective assessment of the evidence.”

    However, if you click on the earlier piece he cites, he wrote nothing of the sort in it. Nowhere in that piece did Carr claim that Langner was the sole source of the allegation; he quotes the NY Times as noting several people who’d reached the same conclusion. Also, there is no hint in the piece that he considered Langner’s allegation speculative or poorly founded. He cited it instead as a likely possibility. This is clear back-pedaling, probably provoked by the fear that the story might lead to a crackdown on Iranian dissidents and foreigners. Well, of course it will. But that’s not the fault of journalists reporting on the story. Or of Ralph Langner, who clearly states on his blog that he is “speculating” (see previous link).

    The fault lies with the unknown cybercriminal/s who came up with Stuxnet.

    “Stuxnet Speculation Fuels Crackdown By Iranian Intelligence,” Jeffrey Carr, The Firewall, Forbes, October 2, 2010/

    *October 1, 2010

    [See “Clues Emerge About Genesis Of Stuxnet Worm,” CS Monitor, October 1, 2010]

    *October 1, 2010

    [“Israel: Smart Enough To Create Stuxnet; Stupid Enough To Use It” War In Context, Oct. 1, 2010]

    *October 1, 2010

    Cryptome is arguing that Israel would never have done anything so sloppy as what’s alleged. Could it be that some group is deliberately playing off one side against the other, that is, playing divide-and-conquer? Or is this more “plausible deniability”?

    On looking back, I notice that one of the first people to launch the “Israel did it” allegation is one Richard Falkenrath, who works for the Chertoff Group (my emphasis).

    That makes me wonder.

    Here’s Cryptome:

    “Really? Personally I’d be surprised if a crack team of Israeli software engineers were so sloppy that they relied on outdated rootkit technology (e.g. hooking the Nt*() calls used by Kernel32.LoadLibrary() and using UPX to pack code). Most of the Israeli developers I’ve met are pretty sharp. Just ask Erez Metula.

    http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/METULA/BHUSA09-Metula-ManagedCodeRootkits-
    PAPER.pdf

    “It may be that the “myrtus” string from the recovered Stuxnet file path

    “b:\myrtus\src\objfre_w2k_x86\i386\guava.pdb” stands for “My-RTUs”

    as in Remote Terminal Unit. See the following white paper from Motorola, it examines RTUs and PICs in SCADA systems. Who knows? The guava-myrtus connection may actually hold water.

    http://www.motorola.com/web/Business/Products/SCADA%20Products/_Documents/Static%20Files/SCADA_
    Sys_Wht_Ppr-2a_New.pdf

    As you can see, the media’s propaganda machine is alive and well.”

    I am completely out of my depth in the technical part of this. But not in the propaganda part.

    As an instance of the way group conflicts can be set off, think of how during the financial crisis there were an inordinate number of Indians being trotted out to do the explaining…and taking the brunt of the public’s anger, although last I looked, despite a respectable number of Indian billionaires, the head honchos of the major banks (with one exception) and the biggest and most important speculators, managers, and  international officials were not Indian, to phrase it as politely as possible.

    Setting race and nation each against other is of course the modus operandi of the power elite, and both Kashmir and Israel have played that divisive role in the past….and continue to do so.

    *October 1, 2010

    A link to an Examiner piece is coming up right at the top of a Google search of Stuxnet and Israel. With all due respect to the author, who probably thinks he/she is on the side of the angels and simply preempting an outburst of anti-Semitism by this effort, the piece is quite misleading….and, apparently, deliberately so, as an examination of the other links listed here, from a variety of  sources in the West (see this NY Times pieces) will prove.

    For instance, the Examiner piece doesn’t cite the reports from many western security companies and research teams (see links below) that have extensively researched the issue, nor does it acknowledge that it was these sites that first advanced the claim that Israel/Israeli hackers were likely responsible. Instead, it cites a Times of India piece that republishes the claims.

    The attempt, apparently, is to mislead the public into thinking that the allegation of Israeli involvement is one mainly advanced by untrustworthy foreigners with axes to grind (note the description “Iran’s friend, India”).

    “Another of Iran’s friends, India, is pushing the notion that Israel did it. According to an http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com on Friday, “A Biblical reference has been detected in the code of the computer virus that points to Israel as the origin of the cyber attack.” It’s further explained that the word “myrtus” is in the code, and that this is a “reference to the myrtle tree”

    In point of fact, it was western security companies and western researchers who came to that conclusion.  Moreover, the targets of the worm fit very well with Anglo-Zionist imperial objectives – covering as they do the largest Muslim populations in Asia.

    [See “German Firm Employee May Have Created Stuxnet; Israel Blames.” Examiner.com, October 1, 2010

    *September 30, 2010

    Quote:

    “Buried in Stuxnet’s code is a marker with the digits “19790509” that the researchers believe is a “do-not infect” indicator. If the marker equals that value, Stuxnet stops in its tracks, and does not infect the targeted PC. The researchers — Nicolas Falliere, Liam O Murchu and Eric Chen — speculated that the marker represents a date: May 9, 1979. While on May 9, 1979, a variety of historical events occurred, according to Wikipedia “Habib Elghanian was executed by a firing squad in Tehran sending shock waves through the closely knit Iranian Jewish community,” the researchers wrote. Elghanian, a prominent Jewish-Iranian businessman, was charged with spying for Israel by the then-new revolutionary government of Iran, and executed May 9, 1979.”

    Quote:

    “Last weekend, Iranian officials confirmed that tens of thousands of PCs in their country had been infected by Stuxnet, including some used at a nuclear power plant in southwestern Iran that’s planned to go online next month. The Symantec researchers also revealed a host of other Stuxnet details in their paper, including a “kill date” of June 24, 2012, after which the worm will refuse to execute.”

    [See “Stuxnet Code Hints At Possible Israeli Origin, Researchers Say,” by Gregg Keizer, Symantec, Sept. 30, 2010]

    *September 30, 2010

    Symantec puts out a dossier of information on Stuxnet that includes the following:- attack scenario and timeline, infection statistics, malware architecture, description of all the exported routines, injection techniques and anti-AV, the RPC component, propagation methods, command and control feature, and the PLC infector.

    Eric Chien summarizes findings about the worm:

    “Only more recently did the general public realize Stuxnet’s ultimate goal was to sabotage an industrial control system.

    Analyzing Stuxnet has been one of the most challenging issues we have worked on. The code is sophisticated, incredibly large, required numerous experts in different fields, and mostly bug-free, which is rare for your average piece of malware. Stuxnet is clearly not average. We estimate the core team was five to ten people and they developed Stuxnet over six months. The development was in all likelihood highly organized and thus this estimate doesn’t include the quality assurance and management resources needed to organize the development as well as a probable host of other resources required, such as people to setup test systems to mirror the target environment and maintain the command and control server.”

    [See W32.Stuxnet Dossier, Eric Chien, Sept. 30, 2010]

    *September 25, 2010

    Quote:

    The director of the Information Technology Council of the Industries and Mines Ministry has announced that the IP addresses of 30,000 industrial computer systems infected by this malware have been detected, the Mehr New Agency reported on Saturday. “An electronic war has been launched against Iran,” Mahmoud Liaii added.“This computer worm is designed to transfer data about production lines from our industrial plants to (locations) outside of the country,” he said.

    [See “Iran Successfully Battling Cyber Attack,” Mehr News, Sept. 25, 2010]

    *September 24, 2010

    A piece in the Guardian suggests that a government agency is most likely behind the worm but warns against leaping to conclusions. It notes that many hackers/criminals might have become sophisticated enough to create a worm of this type. The piece notes that attacks against Iran have increased and that the identification of the worm was originally made by a Belarus security firm for an Iranian client and that Iran had been experiencing problems with their nuclear facility at Bushehr for months. It notes that the worm uses a stolen cryptographic key from the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer Realtek.

    [See “Stuxnet Worm Is The Work Of A National Government Agency,” Josh Halliday, Guardian, Sept. 24, 2010]

    “Stuxnet: The Trinity Test Of Cyberwarfare,” War In Context, Sept. 23, 2010

    *September 16, 2010

    Symantec researchers say that Stuxnet had to be created by a state, because it was the most devious and sophisticated malware they’d come across.

    Quote:

    “I don’t think it was a private group,” said O Murchu. “They weren’t just after information, so a competitor is out. They wanted to reprogram the PLCs and operate the machinery in a way unintended by the real operators. That points to something more than industrial espionage.”

    The necessary resources, and the money to finance the attack, puts it out the realm of a private hacking team, O Murchu said.

    “This threat was specifically targeting Iran,” he continued. “It’s unique in that it was able to control machinery in the real world.”

    “All the different circumstances, from the multiple zero-days to stolen certificates to its distribution, the most plausible scenario is a nation-state-backed group,” said Schouwenberg, who acknowledged that some people might think he was wearing a tin foil hat when he says such things. But the fact that Iran was the No. 1 target is telling.”

    [See “Is Stuxnet the Best Malware Ever?” Gregg Keizer, Symantec Security Response, Sept. 16, 2010]

    *September 13, 2010

    German computer security research Ralph Langner speculates that Stuxnet is part of cyberwar:

    Ralph’s theory — completely speculative from here

    “It is hard to ignore the fact that the highest number of infections seems to be in Iran. Can we think of any reasonable target that would match the scenario? Yes, we can. Look at the Iranian nuclear program. Strange — they are presently having some technical difficulties down there in Bushehr. There also seem to be indications that the people in Bushehr don’t seem to be overly concerned about cyber security. When I saw this screenshot last year (http://www.upi.com/News_Photos/Features/The-Nuclear-Issue-in-Iran/1581/2/) I thought, these guys seem to be begging to be attacked. If the picture is authentic, which I have no means of verifying, it suggests that approximately one and a half year before scheduled going operational of a nuke plant they’re playing around with software that is not properly licensed and configured. I have never seen anything like that even in the smallest cookie plant. The pure fact that the relevant authorities did not seem to make efforts to get this off the web suggests to me that they don’t understand (and therefore don’t worry about) the deeper message that this tells.

    Now you may ask, what about the many other infections in India, Indonesia, Pakistan etc. Strange for such a directed attack. Than, on the other hand, probably not. Check who comissions the Bushehr plant. It’s a Russian integrator that also has business in some of the countries where we see high infection rates. What we also see is that this company too doesn’t seem to be overly concerned about IT security. As I am writing this, they’re having a compromised web site (http://www.atomstroyexport.com/index-e.htm) that tries to download stuff from a malware site that had been shut down more than two years ago (www.bubamubaches.info). So we’re talking about a company in nukes that seems to be running a compromised web presence for over two years? Strange.
    I could give some other hints that have a smell for me but I think other researchers may be able to do a much better job on checking the validity of all this completely non-technical stuff. The one last bit of information that makes some sense for me is the clue that the attackers left in the code, as the fellows from Symantec pointed out — use your own imagination because you will think I’m completely nuts when I tell you my idea.

    Welcome to cyberwar.”

    [See “Stuxnet is a directed attack: hack of the century,” Ralph Langner]

    *September 8, 2010

    German computer security expert Ralph Langner writes to a friend:

    Historical document: Ralph informs Joe Weiss what Stuxnet is. Note the date of the email.

    *July 22, 2010

    Symantec analyzed W32.Stuxnet as a worm that uses a  hitherto unknown Windows bug to attack and then searches the target for SCADA systems and design documents. SCADA is a network used to control utilities, transportation and other critical infrastructure. The worm then contacted Command &Control servers that control the infected machines and retrieved the stolen information. The servers were located in Malaysia and Symantec redirected traffic away from them to prevent the take-over of the information.

    Within a 72 hours period Symantec identified close to 14,000 IP addresses infected with W32.Stuxnet trying to contact the C&C server. 58.85 % came from Iran, with the rest coming from Indonesia (18.22%), India (8.31%), with the Azerbaijan, US, and Pakistan making up the other affected countries, with under 2% each (this information is also provided at the Microsoft website).

    [See Symantec Security Response,W32.Stuxnet – Network Information, Vikram Thakur, July 22, 2010]

    *July 21, 2010

    Quote:

    “The zero-day vulnerability, rootkit, main binaries, stolen digital certificates, and in-depth knowledge of SCADA software are all high-quality attack assets. The combination of these factors makes this threat extremely rare, if not completely novel.“

    Quote:

    “The complexity and quality of the attack assets lead some to believe only a state would have the resources to conduct such an attack. However, the usage of the second digital certificate is a bit odd. One could make the case that once the first attack succeeded, a state would take cover and not waste the second digital certificate. Instead, by signing a very similar binary, security companies were immediately able to detect the second stolen certificate, making it useless in further compromises…..

    Quote:

    .. Hackers bound by a common cause may target another country, organization, or company that they feel are their enemies. Such hacking groups often have the patience and expertise to gather such attack assets. Further, their goals of continued attack may lead them to continue to refine their attack as they are thwarted or discovered, such as resigning their driver files with a newly stolen digital certificate, modifying their binaries to avoid security product detection, and moving their command-and-control hosts as they are decommissioned…..

    Quote:

    …..This scenario [terrorism] is like something out of movie and, while for most attacks we’d immediately dismiss this as a possibility, given the amount and quality of the attack assets, terrorism even seems within the realms of possibility in this case.“

    [See “The Hackers Behind Stuxnet” by Patrick Fitzgerald, Symantec Security Response,  July 21, 2010]

    *July 17, 2010

    Researchers find that Stuxnet targets industrial control systems of the kind that control manufacturing and utility companies. It targets Siemens management software called Simatic WinCC, which runs on the Windows operating system.

    The systems that run the Siemens software, called SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems, aren’t usually connected to the Internet, but the virus spreads when an infected USB stick is inserted. If it detects the Siemens software, the virus logs in using a default password.

    [See “New Virus Targets Industrial Secrets,” Robert McMillan, Computer World, July 17, 2010]

    *July 16, 2010

    Symantec starts a blog series on the Stuxnet infection that continues through the summer and into September

    [See also Microsoft Security Advisory, July 16, 2010 and Krebson Security, July 16, 2010]

    *July 7, 2010

    Stuxnet could well have caused the glitch in the solar panels of India’s Insat-4B satellite on July 7, 2010. That led to the shutting down of 12 out of 24 of the transponders and 70% of the customers dependent on Direct to Home (DTH) including those using Doordarshan (Indian TV), Sun TV and Tata’s VSNL. The customers were redirected to point to the Chinese satellite  ASIASAT-5, owned and operated by Asia Satellite Telecommunications Co., Ltd (AsiaSat) whose two main shareholders are General Electric (GE) and China International Trust and Investment Co. (CITIC), a state-owned company

    [See “Did The Stuxnet Worm Kill India’s INSAT-4B Satellite?” by Jeffrey Carr, The Firewall, Forbes.com, Sept. 29, 2010]

    *June 16, 2010

    Symantec Security Response Team begins its investigation into the Stuxnet worm. The first sample dates from June 2010, but the team believes the worm dates back a year, or maybe even earlier.

    *June 2010

    The malware is first identified by a Belarus security company, Virusblokada, for its Iranian client.

    [See Symantec Security Response, webpage, Sept 30, 2010]

    *January 2010

    Stuxnet infection begins, according to Symantec

    *July 2009

    Stuxnet infection begins, according to to Kasperksy

    Memoirs Of An American Refugee…

    Posted on by

    Stuart Bramhall links back to my earlier post on Barry Zwicker and the Left Gate-Keepers... who still refuse to talk about 9-11, under an article about the infiltration of the foundation left:

    “As Dana Priest’s recent Washington Post expose reveals, the use of private contractors to spy on Americans (in addition to the proliferation of government spy agencies) has gone viral since the 2002 enactment of the Patriot Act. In fact some civil libertarians warn that Americans’ shrinking privacy and personal freedom is rapidly approaching that of communist East Germany under the Stasi (the East German secret police) – where one in sixteen residents were paid to report on their friends on neighbors.

    Was There Domestic Spying Before 2002?

    Based on 20 years experience as an anti-war and single payer activist in Seattle, I would hazard that that spying on political and community groups didn’t suddenly leap from non-existent to astronomic levels when it was “legalized” in 2002. It has always been my impression that it increased at a fairly steady rate with the rightward drift at all levels of government following Reagan’s election in 1980. I also believe that prior to the enactment of the Patriot Act, much of this domestic “counterinsurgency” activity occurred under the auspices of “left” identified foundations and think-tanks. These are private entities, funded through a combination of CIA monies and right wing philanthropy, that give the appearance of being autonomous – and genuinely progressive and liberal. However it appears that their true function is to restrict the acceptable range of progressive debate and political activity. Barry Zwicker calls them “left gatekeepers (see July 19 and 24 blog)” and Webster Tarpley “counterinsurgency” foundations.

    Left Gatekeeping Foundations and the Single Payer Movement

    Most of my personal experience with these left gatekeeping foundations occurred as a single payer activist. In Washington State, the single payer movement was started by doctors in 1988, under the auspices of Physicians for a National Health Program. Between 1988 and 1993, when the Seattle chapter was run by and for health professionals, it expanded rapidly, attracted much public and media attention. It was also an important partner in a broader coalition that pressured the governor to appoint a blue ribbon health commission to develop a proposal for state based, publicly financed universal health care.

    Then in 1993, when the health provider joined with Washington Gray Panthers to build a broad based coalition, we suddenly hit a roadblock. There were suddenly all kinds of difficulties, which on the surface amounted to a textbook case of Cointelpro infiltration. However unlike Cointelpro, the problems didn’t appear to originate with the FBI or the police, but with local “left” leaning think tanks and foundations. The tactics, however, were classic – with the appearance of quirky outsiders who tampered with our database, seized control of our contact list to launch rumor and character assassination campaigns, split our coalitions by launching parallel, competing organizations (focused on safer lobbying activities and mild reformism), and scared off new members by repeatedly picking fights at our meetings.

    A Clear Pattern

    In one case we discovered the operative had a history of similar behavior in Seattle’s first Anti-Gulf War Coalition (1991) and the Seattle chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. The pattern in all three cases was the same – getting control of the database and leadership and shutting all three down – including the single payer coalition.

    It was only when Washington State joined a regional coalition with single payer activists from Oregon and California – the Pacific Rim Single Payer Summit – that I got some inkling of what was happening. The synchronicity activists from other states described – down to the exact political rhetoric and targeted personal attacks – was uncanny.

    It’s safe to assume that specific left gatekeeping foundations involved in suppressing the single payer movement receive generous support from the powerful insurance lobby and Big Pharma – in addition to any CIA and right wing philanthropy. Both the insurance and the pharmaceutical industry stand to lose big under a publicly funded health care system (as the sole purchaser of medication for 300 million Americans, the government would force the drug companies to agree to massive volume discounts – this occurs in all industrialized countries with publicly funded health care).

    I write about my personal experience, as a single payer activist, with left gatekeeping foundations in my recent memoir The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.”