Power and Terror - Noam Chomsky

Habermas Hyldest til Irerne

"Borgerne aner, at der er formynderi på færde. De bliver igen bedt om at sige god for noget, som de ikke har været deltagere i. Ganske vist har regeringerne stillet i udsigt, at man ikke denne gang vil ty til at holde stadig nye folkeafstemninger, indtil folket omsider makker ret. Og er irerne, dette lille folk af frihedskæmpere, ikke det eneste i hele Europa, som overhovedet har stillet spørgsmålstegn ved traktatens betydning?

De nægtede at lade sig behandle som stemmekvæg, der skal trækkes til urnerne. Med undtagelse af tre parlamentsmedlemmer, der sagde nej, stod irerne over for hele den kompakte politiske klasse. I den forstand var det hele politikken som sådan, der var på valg. Desto større blev derfor også fristelsen til at tildele politikerne en huskekage. I dag er denne fristelse blevet for stor alle vegne."

http://www.information.dk/161126

Den originale tyske artikel. http://www.sueddeutsche.de/ausland/artikel/310/180753/

Himalaya The Science of Mind

BBC Dokumentar: Human, All Too Human - Martin Heidegger.

US militær manual lækket for nylig

Leaked U.S. Military Manual

"How to covertly train paramilitaries, censor the press, ban unions, employ terrorists, conduct warrantless searches, suspend habeas corpus, conceal breaches of the Geneva Convention and make the population love it."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20125.htm

Direkte link til selve manualen.

http://file.sunshinepress.org:54445/us-fm-31-20-3.pdf

Dagens Citat: Søren Kierkegaard

"Af alle tyrannier er en folkeregering den kvalfuldeste, den åndløseste, ubetinget alt storts og ophøjets undergang. En tyran er dog menneske eller et enkelt menneske. Han har dog ordentligvis én tanke selvom det er den urimeligste. Man kan nu overveje med sig selv om det er umagen værd for den tanke at lade sig slå ihjel, om det således kolliderer med ens egne tanker, eller om det ikke er umagen værd. Og så indretter man sig og lever.
Men i en folkeregering: hvem er herskeren? Et X eller det evindelige pjat: hvad der i ethvert øjeblik er eller har majoriteten - den afsindigste af alle bestemmelser. Når man ved, hvorledes det går til med at få majoritet og hvorledes den kan fluktuere, at så dette nonsens er det regerende!
En tyran er dog kun én; man kan altså, hvis det så synes én, indrette sig på at undgå ham, leve fjernt fra ham o.s.v. Men hvor skal jeg i en folkeregering undfly tyrannen? Ethvert menneske er jo, i en vis forstand, tyrannen; det er blot han skaffer et opløb: en majoritet.
En tyran som enkelt menneske er da så ophøjet, én så fjern at man for ham kan få lov til at leve privat som man vil. Det kan i al evighed ikke falde en kejser ind at bryde sig om mig, hvordan jeg lever, hvad tid jeg står op, hvad jeg læser o.s.v. - ordentligvis ved han slet ikke af, at jeg er til. Men i en folkeregering er jo »ligemanden« det herskende. Ham beskæftiger sligt, om mit skæg er som hans, om jeg tager i Dyrehaven på samme tider som han, om jeg er ganske som ham og de andre. Og hvis ikke, ja da er det en forbrydelse - en politisk forbrydelse, en statsforbrydelse!
En folkeregering ville i maksimum skaffe nogle martyrer, af hvilke den har fortjeneste som Josephs brødre af Joseph.
At leve under en sådan regering er det mest dannende for evigheden, men den største kval så længe det står på. Kun én længsel kan man have, hin sokratiske: at dø og at være død. Thi Sokrates, han har døjet i denne åndløshed, at numerus er regeringen, at vi ikke alle er lige for Gud (thi hvad bryder man sig om Gud i en folkeregering!) men alle lige for tallet! Og tallet er just det onde, som det også i Åbenbaringens Bog bruges således prægnant. En folkeregering er det sande billede på helvede. Thi selvom man skulle holde dens kval ud, det var dog en lise, hvis man fik lov til at være ene, men det kvalfulde er netop, at »de andre« tyranniserer én."
Dagbogsoptegnelse fra 1848, her efter A. Egelund Møller: Søren Kierkegaard om politik, Kbh. 1975 s.139f.

Iraq - What happened to the 23 Billion

Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq.

Link til Pdf-filudgaven af Corpwatch's rapport om ousourcing af efterretningsvirksomhed i Irak.

http://www.corpwatch.org/downloads/L-3TITANreport.pdf

For Profit

By Malcolm Martin

19/05/08 "ICH" -- - Our children are taught that the United States of America is a democracy. As the tale is told, at the founding of the nation, a government “of, by, and for the people” was established. Four score and seven years later, a President Abraham Lincoln called the nation’s people to join and die in a great civil war that such a form of government might not perish from the earth and their eventual victory preserved American democracy into the future.

Those children can someday refer to the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for the full story. But aside from how closely this lesson is in accord with the historic truth, the idea has today become an outright lie and an utter absurdity. The United States of America is now better described as a corporatocracy. The government is owned and the people are dictated to by these capitalist creations whose God is Mammon. Ironically as Lincoln spoke his immortal words at Gettysburg, the Industrial Revolution had begun to generate these entities that would have completely removed any vestige of American democracy seven score and five years later.

Corporations are, of course, different from people. They are devoid of human emotion. They are constitutionally unable to generate empathy. They feel nothing if people suffer exploitation, if people live in misery, or if people die horribly. Union Carbide was unaffected by the thousands dead and dying in Bhopal. It registered only on a balance sheet as a $470-million loss taken for the sake of future corporate viability under a new name, Dow Chemical. The corporation cannot be reasoned with, pleaded with, or shamed into changing course even in times like these, when life on the planet hangs in the balance. McDonald’s is in the process of teaching Starbucks that even the pretense of a social conscience is too expensive a marketing ploy.

The corporation recognizes and reacts only to threats to its air supply—profits. So figuratively speaking; corporations do share something with human beings. They have an instinct for self-preservation and if they are deprived of a life giving element they die. While human beings must have oxygen and water, the corporation’s lifeblood is those quarterly profits. The corporation must make a profit and then continue making ever greater profit. Corporate profits must grow, forever! Irrational, impossible, unsustainable but that is in the nature of the beast—much as lemmings are pushed into the sea.

The largest US oil corporations ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron have registered world record profits for the last several years. But Big Oil cannot afford to rest! Beating those records is now a fight for survival into the future. The price of gas, nearing $4.00 per gallon, must continue upwards. The government regulatory agencies must continue to “accidentally” give up oil royalties revenue, the President must continue pushing for exploration in the Alaskan wilderness and off the Gulf Coast, the Congress must continue making theatrical calls for price-gouging investigations and stay away from actual windfall profits tax legislation. Damn public opinion, the US military must remain in Iraq and must soon assault Iran to secure the Middle East’s vast oil reserves.

The parameters are the same in every corner of the global economy. The maximum profit is a product of the greatest possible productivity and the lowest possible wage. US corporations have moved everything that isn't nailed down to lower wage countries. Nothing is made in today’s de-industrialized United States. American consumer's service calls are answered in Ireland and India. Major League baseballs are made in Haiti. AirJordan’s come out of Nike's sweatshops in Indonesia. Microsoft conducts 85% of its research in the US so Bill Gates wants to lift H-1B visa restrictions to bring the low wage workers here. Halliburton is now headquartered in Dubai and preparing to receive its old boss, Dick Cheney, in his retirement years.

To survive under their profit imperative, corporations must undertake a never ending process of consolidation. There is consolidation by horizontal integration. For instance, numerous US corporations once dotted the auto making landscape. In the recent past it was down to the Big Three. Today Chrysler is doomed, Ford is on life support, and General Motors is on its knees. In the corporate world of the near future cars will be made in Japan, or China, or India. Ultimately, the industry will settle in one corporate entity.

Then there is consolidation by vertical integration and its heavyweight champion is Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation. Wal-Mart has made a partner of the Chinese government. Working together, the partners have turned China into a vast subsistence-wage labor camp. China supplies Wal-Mart so it has no need of domestic vendors like the now destroyed Rubbermaid. Armed with the lowest production costs, Wal-Mart’s rise up on every other street corner selling every commodity imaginable and every service the corporation can get its hooks into. Wal-Mart lays waste to local economies and then picks up the pieces to become the only butcher, baker and candlestick maker in town. The corporation recently moved to provide banking services in its stores.

The US government has been hollowed out during the rise to absolute power of the corporations. Elections have become an elaborate “reality show” that plays out on corporate television for viewers entertainment. If you watch FOX, the reality is filtered through Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, NBC is General Electric news, CNN is Time/Warner news, ABC brings you into Disney’s world, and Viacom regularly checks the iconic CBS news department to make sure Edward R. Murrow is still dead and buried under a mountain of infotainment. That is when Viacom is not preparing America’s youth for slavery and death through MTV and B.E.T.

The actual counting of the American people’s votes is done by the corporations—giant defense contractor United Technologies recently moved to take the job off Diebold’s hands. Corporate sentinels, the lobbyists, roam the halls of government enforcing discipline among the hired hands, allowing the most servile to feed longest at the public trough. So the Congress has not passed legislation and the Supreme Court has not decided a case, in which significant wealth was involved, in favor of the people in thirty years. Each and every decision of all three branches of the US government now transfers wealth from the people to their corporate masters.

The corporations now have in their sights the last remaining institutional pillars of American democracy. The Business Roundtable, the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation are working mightily to smash the public schools. Wall Street is funding the effort to gain control of the Social Security trust fund for its investment bankers. And the whole corporate gang is intent on “starving the beast” or killing state and local governments. Their success in this effort is probably best expressed in California’s $17.4 billion budget deficit and Florida’s crushing $5 billion revenue shortfall this fiscal year.

Then finally, there is the most ominous development of all. The corporations have begun forming their own Praetorian Guard. The massacre of Iraqi civilians and the patrolling of the hurricane ravaged streets of New Orleans have made Blackwater Worldwide, formerly Blackwater USA, the most famous of the rising corporate armies. Contrary to any notion of cost effectiveness, Blackwater mercenaries protect US State Department personnel in Iraq instead of the regular military. It seems not to make sense, unless the corporatocracy is looking ahead to a day when they can no longer trust the US military to carry out attacks on an American people’s democratic resistance striking at their profits—their air supply.

A Brief History of Religion

Dagens Citat: Cristopher Lasch

"The best defences against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted ... that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable us to explore a small corner of the world and come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.... We find it more and more difficult to a achieve a sense of continuity, permanence or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom."

Fra "The Culture of Narcissism".

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

US_Backed Iraqi Police Public Execution

Greg Palast: The Most Important Investigative Reporter You've Never Heard Of

Fed Politisk Antikrigs Spoken Word

The Death Squads

Chomsky Lecture: The Iraq War

Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq war

KRIGSDEMOKRATI

Den koldblodige morder er unægtelig blandt de mest forhadte forbrydere, for det forekommer os generelt uforståeligt at nogen kan besidde en sådan bestialitet og hensynsløshed, at han uden at blinke kan tage livet fra et andet menneske, hvorfor han da også generelt menes at fortjene straf for sin forbryderiske gerning. Det interessante er imidlertid, at det kun er den morder som ved egen førstehåndsgerning bringer et andet menneskes liv til ende, som generelt ses straffet, i nogle såkaldte demokratier, undertiden med den ultimative straf, døden. Hvor det koldblodige mord på et andet menneske ofte vurderes som værende et udtryk for psykopati eller fejhed, findes der imidlertid en anden form for mordere hvis virke nærmest går, hvis ikke ubemærket, så i hvert fald ustraffet hen. Her tænkes selvfølgelig på politiske myrderier som tilvejebringes rent administrativt, gennem udstikkelsen af ordrer fra politiske topposter, men hvor meget fejere er da ikke den bureaukratiske morder, der bag skrivebordets tryghed udsteder ordrer om statslig deltagelse i massemord, uden selv at have gjort sig førstehånderfaringen af hvad det vil sige at berøve et andet menneske fra hans hjertes banken, end den morder som har berøvet en anden livet ved egen direkte gerning, uanset hvor grusomt dette må forekomme at være? Alligevel går denne form for morderisk virksomhed som oftest ramt forbi, og i vores eget lands tilfælde, har denne forbigåelse jo som bekendt betydet, at de nuværende magthavere - til trods for deltagelsen i det økonomisk motiverede kultur og folkemord, som det uprovokerede angreb på Irak har haft som konsekvens – endda er blevet belønnet med embedsforlængelse, selvom deres forbrydelse er usammeligneligt mere vidtrækkende og omfattende, end den morderiske gerning der i reglen straffes hårdt.

Disse kujoner(!), hvis børn yderst sjældent tælles blandt de faldne for den påståede gode sag - kan gøre dette uden at blinke, da det alt sammen foregår på bekvem afstand, hvor hverken det uskyldige civile offer for præcisionsbombardamentet eller dennes pårørende, udgør nogen trussel for genvælgelsen og embedsforlængelsen. Men hvordan kan det egentlig være at det er lykkedes disse forbrydere, at undslippe den hårde konsekvens vi ellers normalt betragter som et udtryk for retfærdighedens fyldestgørelse? Er det fordi deres forbrydelser ifølge en eller anden bizar logik ikke er forbrydelser men derimod legitime handlinger? Svaret på dette spørgsmål afhænger selvfølgelig af hvem der holder mikrofonen. Hvis Nürnberg-tribunalet mod nazismens forbrydere i dag dannede grundlag for nogen nævneværdig præcedens, er magthavernes meddelagtighed i den uprovokerede angrebskrig, ikke blot en forbrydelse, men snarere at betragte “som den største internationale forbrydelse, som kun afviger fra andre krigsforbrydelser, idet den i sig, indeholder helhedens akkumulerede ondskab.” Alligevel bestrider disse personer stadigvæk de højeste embeder i det politiske system, hvilket er bemærkelsesværdigt, men langt fra underligt. Pressen har nemlig for en stor dels vedkommende (med Information som eneste nævneværdige undtagelse) haft andet at se til, såsom at sælge reklameplads i gratisaviserne, hvorfor man ikke lige har kunnet finde tiden til at agere befolkningens vagthund. Undertiden har lovprisningen af den bureaukratiske elite, endda været af et sådan omfang karakter, at specielt en af de store avisers ukritiske “journalistiske” virke, undertiden vækker minder om den nære fortids, autokratiske regimers partiaviser.

Demokrati høres ofte forsvaret med, at det er en styreform som er at foretrække frem for andre mere diktatoriske eller autokratiske styreformer, da den beherskede befolkning dels er garanteret nogle forfatningssikrede frihedsrettigheder og dels kan leve i nogenlunde tryghed for forfølgelse og undertrykkelse. Dette argument godtages generelt og møder sjældent de store indvendinger. Det interessante er imidlertid, at denne styreforms tilsyneladende sikring af frihedsrettigheder og forsikring mod forfølgelse og undertrykkelse, åbenbart ikke gælder udenfor landets grænser, for hvem vil mon driste sig til at hævde, at det generelt lovpriste repræsentative demokrati, har udvirket noget sådant for den irakiske befolkning? Det britiske meningsmålingsbureau Oxford Research Bureau opdaterede for nylig dets vurdering af dødsfald forårsaget af Irak-krigen til 1.3 millioner dræbte, men uanset om denne vurdering præcist udtrykker blot et brudstykke af “helhedens akkumulerede ondskab” eller dødstallet, som nogle hævder, er langt mindre, er der utvivlsomt tale om uhyrligheder af et rædselsvækkende omfang, hvorfor i hvert fald to spørgmål melder sig. Er repræsentativt demokrati eksporterbart med vold og tvang som midler? Og er den politiske elite der nu – efter gennem en anseelig periodes morderiske sanktioner, med hundredetusinder børneliv som omkostning - har orkestreret “den største internationale forbrydelse”, virkelig at betragte som stort bedre for irakerne, end den morderiske despot, hvis detronisering man med tiden valgte at begrunde og legitimere krigen med? Dette vil jeg lade op til læseren at vurdere.

The World According to Monsanto - A documentary that Americans won't ever see.