Member banks within each of the 12 districts of the Fed elect 6 of the 9 regional board members and the president for that district. Since the Treasury now intends to take minority equity stakes in some banks that it claims are struggling, (ostensibly for the purpose of preventing investors from pulling out), it will have partial control over the Fed. That means the Fed is now even less independent.
Category Archives: Police State
Solzhenitsyn on the Cancer of Conformity
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died today. For most of his life, he was the conscience of the Soviet Empire. Some of the most forceful passages in his writing were directed against the intelligentsia who allowed themselves to be puppets for their rulers:
“A man sprouts a tumor and dies — how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?” he asked questioning the complicity of ordinary Russians in the crimes of Stalin’s era.”
Media-Trix: Rehearsing Our Rulers
“The most interesting of the seminars was presented by Dr. Vincent Covello, a crisis communication expert who told us an amazing story. His group had rehearsed former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his officers in how to respond to situations that included planes hitting the World Trade Center. Statements had been prepared and rehearsed way in advance of September 11, 2001. Suddenly, the poise and leadership that Giuliani was admired for seemed hollow.
Every eventuality, said the crisis expert, should be prepared for and rehearsed so that those in charge look cool and confident when it happens. In fact, said the expert, nothing should be left to chance. Former Gulf War Commander Norman Schwarzkopf had rehearsed the famous tear he shed during a Barbara Walters interview when she asked about the casualties of the first Gulf go ’round.
More in an interesting post at The Congress Blog.
Torture Files: Testimony of Richard Wurmbrand About Communist Torture
“……I have been for years in prison with thieves and murderers. Even before having been put in prison I have been chaplain of a prison. A thief after he has stolen is a gentleman. He gives to the waiters the greatest tips and he invites girls and he invites you and he orders the best wines. He has not worked for his money. And such thieves are the communists. They have stolen half of Europe, they have stolen Russia, too. They have stolen a great part of Asia. And now they have what they have stolen and they are gentlemen and they expect the next occasion to steal again.
In this sense there is a relaxation with us, but it is not an essential one. We continue to have the avowed dictatorship of an atheistic party. We have one party. There can be no religious freedom where there is one party. We have elections. Now a joke is made with us that when God created Adam, He created only one woman, Eve, and He said to Adam, “You are free to choose for wife whomsoever you wish.” But there was only Eve. And so are the elections with us. (my emphasis)
Our Government doesn’t mind old women coming to church, but our childhood, our youth is poisoned with atheism. We are not allowed to counteract, and what bitter fruits will come out of this seed nobody can know.
Now you have asked another question, do we have open churches in Rumania? If somebody comes to Rumania – it is another situation in Russia – if somebody comes to Rumania, he is really impressed.
The Orthodox liturgy is something very beautiful. It is grand. And if you come in Rumania you see thousands of churches open, liturgies, sermons, many people in the church. And I have spoken with Americans who have been there and have told me, “I was very impressed.” And now there is really a certain religious liberty. In Rumania you are allowed to say as much as you like that God is good. You are not allowed to say that the Devil is bad. St. John the Baptist could have saved his life if he had said: “Repent because the kingdom of heaven is near.” Nobody would have touched him. He was touched when he said, “You, Herod, are bad.”
If Christ would have delivered a thousand “Sermons on the Mount” they would not have crucified Him. They crucified Him when He said, “You vipers,” then He was crucified.….”
Comment
One of the heroes of modern evangelical Christianity, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, on the state’s use of religion as propaganda, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1966.
Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor of Jewish origin who died in 2001, isn’t easily dismissed: he spoke 14 languages, was a professor of the Old Testament and suffered over a dozen years of torture in Romanian prisons, several in solitary confinement underground.
He’s worth reading again today for anyone inclined to romanticize communism in the last century. And for anyone concerned about the direction in which the west is heading today.
More on what Wurmbrand suffered (his wife, Sabina, lost her entire family and herself worked as a slave laborer):
“His captors dumped him at Calea Rahova, a spanking new prison for dissidents, enemies of the people and criminals of various stripes. The warders there gave him a new identity (Vasile Georgescu), and set about erasing his old one. The 39-year-old Wurmbrand was 6 feet, 3 inches tall, with a medium build, and enjoyed relatively hale health before his abduction. But after being subjected to physical and psychological depredations and humiliations during his first year in the gulag, he nearly expired, kept just this side of living by the facility’s doctors. Dead, of course, he would be incapable of divulging information.
In clear, straightforward, occasionally stomach-churning prose, Wurmbrand recounts his horrific tortures: sleep deprivation; starvation diet; made to race around his four-steps-by-two-steps cell for hours until he collapsed; beatings with truncheons and boots; water funneled down his throat until it filled his stomach, which was then violently kicked; the bastinado, a relic of the Spanish Inquisition in which the bare soles of the feet are flogged; guards urinating and spitting into his open mouth; drugged into delirium; terrorized by dogs kept inches from his throat; solitary confinement–speaking to no one except inquisitors–for nearly three years in a three-paces-by-three-paces cell, this one located 30 feet underground; tossed into the “carcer,” a constricting, closet-sized enclosure with metal-spiked walls. In short, he experienced his own personal Passion.
“It was an image of hell,” Wurmbrand reported, “in which the torment is eternal and you cannot die.” He confessed to any false charges concerning himself–adultery, homosexuality–but steadfastly refused to implicate other believers, irrespective of denomination.
Transforming solitary confinement into his crucible, Wurmbrand affirmed his faith and tried to keep sane by mentally composing approximately 350 sermons and 300 devotional poems, which he later claimed to have memorized by employing condensed rhyme schemes and mnemonic devices. (He published 22 of the former in 1969’s Sermons in Solitary Confinement.) Additionally, he “talked” with and “preached” to inmates in adjacent cells by tapping on the walls using Morse code, which the prisoners learned from each other; devised chess matches with himself, substituting bread crumbs for pieces; and held imaginary conversations with his wife Sabina and young son Mihai.
More than three years into his ordeal, Wurmbrand was hauled before a faceless quartet of judges for a 10-minute trial, found guilty of subversive activities and sentenced to 20 years’ hard labor. Wracked by tuberculosis, he spent four years rotting in a prison TB ward in the Carpathian foothills. With no medicine, many died. While there he learned that his wife had been arrested in 1950 and pressed into slave labor digging and carting dirt for the Danube-Black Sea canal, a project eventually abandoned as infeasible. Held for three years, she ate grass when necessary.
A member of the secret police whom Wurmbrand had earlier converted to Christianity helped secure his release in June 1956, and he rejoined Sabina and Mihai in Bucharest, where he resumed preaching. “I knew, of course,” he wrote, “that sooner or later I would be rearrested.” In January 1959 he was re-imprisoned during a renewed crackdown on the clergy, his old sentence–plus five years–reimposed. Plunged back into the black hole of the gulag, he endured extensive brainwashing designed to eradicate religious beliefs. Five and a half years later he walked away, his faith intact…..”
More in an obituary in 2001 in the New York Press.
On the other hand, the Independent in its obituary took a more reserved view of Wurmbrand’s experiences and testimony.
Not So Quiet On the Eastern Front….
WASHINGTON – U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce computers, officials and industry experts told The Associated Press.
Surreptitious copying is believed to have occurred when a laptop was left unattended during Gutierrez’s trip to Beijing for trade talks in December, people familiar with the incident told the AP. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident was under investigation….”
The Unfree Web: Malaysian Blogger Charged with Sedition
“Take note of what’s been happening in Malaysia these past few days since popular blogger and political commentator Raja Petra Kamarudin, 58, was imprisoned on Tuesday after a trial which saw him charged with sedition for having written a blog post.
If the Malaysian government was truly worried about bloggers effecting social unrest, now they have it. Remember, this is a country where any politician worth their mutton—Jeff Ooi was one of several Malaysians who rode their blog and calls for reform to Parliament in recent elections—has a blog, and even the old goats now blog too.
Ex-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has a highly-read blog, as does PM hopeful Anwar Ibrahim.
“They set up their blogs, and they try to close down our blogs.”
Raja is one of the sharpest voices both online and off in Malaysia, so it’s highly suggested you check out his statements to the public right after his sentencing, lbogged by Malaysian citizen media stronghold, Malaysiakini.
More at Global Voices Online
Comment:
Over here in the US, there’s always a chorus of voices in defense of every moron’s right to exhibit his moronity (yes, it is a word) in public….in defense of spam, porn, and of course the non-stop invasion of the privacy of the privates of the Brittany-Paris posse…..which is presumed to have no rights, least of all to sympathy, being made up of the rich, the blonde and the giddy.
But the real defense of free speech usually has few cheerleaders.
On Iraq, on Palestine, on racial issues, on the war between the sexes, on religious belief and the state, on terrorism, on any of the most important issues around, the rule in the mainstream media is doublespeak and slogans. And it’s not much better in the alternative press.
Abroad the threat of jail time lends some dignity to political bloggers. Here we only get sentenced to not being read.
Police State Chronicles – disciplining the disabled
“TAMPA, Fla. – Four sheriff’s deputies have been suspended after purposely tipping a paralyzed man out of his wheelchair onto a jailhouse floor, authorities said.
Surveillance footage from Jan. 29 shows Hillsborough County Deputy Charlette Marshall-Jones, 44, dumping Brian Sterner out of his wheelchair and searching him on the floor after he was brought in on a warrant after a traffic violation.”
More at MSNBC,
Is Lila Rajiva a CIA agent?
This is for whoever is nursing a misplaced anxiety about my possible affiliation and frantically conducting searches into it…
NO. I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor plan to be, a CIA agent, flunky, or stooge…(well, on that last — one can never tell. It’s possible I’ve posted articles which were concocted as disinformation, but if so, that would be pure error and I probably mentioned somewhere that I wasn’t sure about the authenticity of the information – I usually don’t touch topics where I can’t tell if what’s going on is staged…)
The closest I got to the CIA was at a dinner party two years ago, when I met the former head of the psychic research division at the CIA. (There was one…it was shut down, so they say…more on that at another time).
We had a lengthy conversation about the CIA, Aurobindo, and mind-body research. I still get circulars from the outfit he runs now which develops forecasting systems for business. He’s an engineer and fighter pilot, who builds planes in his spare time – but we share interests in Rudolph Steiner and philosophy.
So much for the Mata Hari thing. Besides that, I’ve worked in India (for a couple of months) for a Christian aid organization (World Vision) – helping with promotional material for potential donors to medical care for the poor. I mention it because I’ve read that some Christian mission and aid organizations have ties with the CIA. But, if there were any moles sniffing around, I didn’t know any of them.
As anyone who follows this blog would know, any espionage or terrorist organization who tried to recruit me would be shooting itself in the foot – as big- mouthed as I am.
I’d probably be blogging the whole thing…
Propaganda State: the war we don’t (want to) know…
In “Operation Homecoming,” one returning Marine, who takes to drinking heavily in an effort to cope with the crushing guilt and revulsion he feels over how many people he’s seen killed, fumes about how “you can’t talk to them [ordinary Americans] about the horror of a dead child’s lifeless mutilated body staring back at you from the void, knowing you took part in that end.” Writing of her return home, Kayla Williams notes that the things most people seemed interested in were “beyond my comprehension. Who cared about Jennifer Lopez? How was it that I was watching CNN one morning and there was a story about freaking ducklings being fished out of a damn sewer drain — while the story of soldiers getting killed in Iraq got relegated to this little banner across the bottom of the screen?” In “Generation Kill,” by the journalist Evan Wright, a Marine corporal confides his anguish and anger over all the killings he has seen: “I think it’s bullshit how these fucking civilians are dying! They’re worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don’t even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this — all these women and children we’re killing? Fuck no. Back home they’re glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you.””Generation Kill” recounts Wright’s experiences traveling with a Marine platoon during the initial invasion. The platoon was at the very tip of the spear of the invasion force, and Wright got a uniquely close-up view of the fighting. In most U.S. news accounts, the invasion was portrayed as a relatively bloodless affair, with few American casualties and not many more civilian ones. Wright offers a starkly different tale. While expressing admiration for the Marines’ many acts of valor and displays of compassion, he marvels at the U.S. military’s ferocious fire-power and shudders at the startling number of civilians who fell victim to it. He writes of neighborhoods being leveled by mortar rounds, of villages being flattened by air strikes, of innocent men, women, and children being mowed down in free-fire zones. At first, Wright notes, the Marines found it easy, even exciting, to kill, but as the invasion progressed and the civilian toll mounted, many began to recoil, and some even broke down. “Do you realize the shit we’ve done here, the people we’ve killed?” one Marine agonizes. “Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison.”
More by Michael Massing in “We are the Thought Police,” at Salon.
Police State Pakistan: Fighting terrorists or civil society?
“Launched after the Sept. 11 attacks on America, the campaign against militancy has suffered growing setbacks, including the recent disastrous attempt by thousands of security forces to win back Swat district in northwestern Pakistan. They have only lost more control.
On Tuesday the situation got worse, as hundreds of militants consolidated their grip on the Matta region of Swat. Dozens of troops and police manning four security posts gave up without a fight.
“The campaign against religious extremism has been a dismal failure, and that has nothing to do with civil society and the media. It is because the Pakistan military has not been able to cleanse itself of militant sympathizers,” Hasan said, referring to the historic involvement of Pakistan in supporting Islamists in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
In fact, many observers see Musharraf’s emergency declaration and swift move to replace its independent-minded judges not as a strategy to combat terrorism but a blatant tactic to prevent the Supreme Court ruling against his recent election victory. Critics say the vote was unconstitutional, as he contested while still army chief.”
More at the International Herald Tribune.
Comment:
I suppose in response to this, gold soared to $820 and the dollar plummeted to depths not seen since the 1970s. The only good news, besides Kucinich’s characteristically conscientious bid to impeach Cheney, which has now inched its way to the Judiciary Committee,
is Ron Paul’s surging campaign contributions – $4 million in a 24 hour period.