Nile Bowie

The Road To Tehran Goes Through Damascus

2012-02-14T08:09:00.000-08:00

Written by Nile Bowie

Between the chaos and artillery fire unfolding in Homs and Damascus,the current siege against the Ba’athist State of Bashar al-Assad parallels eventsof nearly a century ago. In efforts to maintain its protectorate, the Frenchgovernment employed the use of foreign soldiers to smother those seeking toabolish the French mandated, Fédération Syrienne. While former Prime MinisterFaris al-Khoury argued the case for Syrian independence before UN in 1945, French planes bombed Damascus intosubmission.Today, the same government – in addition to the United States and its client regimes in Libya and Tunisia – enthusiastically recognizethe Syrian National Council as the legitimate leadership of Syria. Althoughrecent polls funded by the Qatar Foundation claim 55% of Syrians support the Assadregime,the former colonial powers have made a mockery of the very democraticprinciples they tout.

Irrespective to the views ofthe Syrian people, their fate has long been decided by forces operating beyondtheir borders. In a speech given to the Commonwealth Clubof California in 2007 retired US Military General Wesley Clark speaks of a policy coup initiated by members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Clark cites a confidential documenthanded down from the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2001 stipulating theentire restructuring of the Middle East and North Africa. Portentously, thedocument allegedly revealed campaigns to systematically destabilize thegovernments of Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Iran.Under the familiar scenarioof an authoritarian regime systematically suppressing peaceful dissent and purginglarge swaths of its population, the mechanisms of geopolitical stratagem havefreely taken course.

Syria is but a chess piecebeing used as a platform by larger powers. Regime change is the unwaveringinterest of the US-led NATO block in collaboration with the feudal Persian GulfMonarchies of the GulfCooperation Council (GCC). This is being accomplished by using Qatar-ownedmedia outlets such as Al-Jazeera to project their version of the narrative tothe world and by arming radical factions of the regions Sunni-majoritypopulation against the minority Alawi-Shia leadership of Assad. Since 2005, theBushadministration began funding Syrian opposition groups that lean toward the Muslim Brotherhood and their aspirations to build aSunni-Islamic State. TheMuslim Brotherhood has long condemned the Alawi-Shia as heretics and historicallyattempted multiple uprising in the 1960’s. By arming radical Sunni factions andimporting Iraqi Salafi-jihadists and Libyan mercenaries, the NATOGCC plans totopple Assad and install an illegitimate exiled opposition leader such as Burhan Ghaliun (leader of theSyrian National Council) to be the face of the new regime.

The recent example of implementingforeign policy by arming Al-Qaeda fighters in Libya has proved disastrous - asthe rule of law passes from the NATO-backed Libyan Transitional Council tohundreds of warring guerilla militias. At a meeting between Turkish Foreign MinisterAhmet Davutoglu and Hillary Clinton, Davutoglupledged to find ways outside the United Nations Security Council to pressureAssad. Inaddition to bolstering longstanding sectarian divides in Syria, the USis smuggling arms into Syria from Incirlik military base in Turkey and providing financialsupport for Syrian rebels. Syrian opposition forces led by defected Syrian colonel Riad al-Assadhave been trained on Turkish soil since May 2011. Exclusive military and intelligence sourceshave reported to Israel’s DEBKAfile that British and Qatarispecial operations units are assisting rebel forces in Homs by providing body armor, laptops, satellite phones andmanaging rebel communications lines that request logistical aid, arms andmercenaries from outside suppliers.

Although the UK has vehemently denied these reports, Qatar’s leader Sheikh Hamad bin KhalifaAl Thani recentlysuggested sending troops into Syria to battle Assad’s forces. Military bases situated near Turkey’ssoutheastern border with northern Syria have become a crucial hub used for thedelivery of outside supplies. Unmarked NATO warplanes near Iskenderum have received fighters from Libya’s TransitionalNational Council wielding weaponsformerly belonging to Gaddafi’s arsenal. AbdelHakim Belhaj, (former leader of the extremist Libyan Islamic Fighting Group turned NTC military governor atthe directive of NATO) is leading the infiltration of Libyans intoSyria in person with the help of the Turkish government. It has also been reported that Mahdi al-Harati, resigned from his functions asdeputy chief of the Military Council in Tripoli to oversee the Free Syrian Army.

Syrian press has also reported that armedterrorist groups brandishing up-to-date American and Israeli weapons have roamed the countryside ofDamascus committing blind acts of terror by setting off explosive devices andkidnapping civilians. As the NATOGCC continue to insist that Assad iscommitting acts of genocide against unarmed civilians, one must drawcorrelations between events reported by the Syrian state media and recentstatements released by the leadership of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, praising thearrival of Iraqi fighters in Syria and advising rebels to use roadside bombs. Paradoxically, Al-Qaeda frontman Ayman al-Zawahri has called on Muslims from across the Arab World tomobilize and support the Free Syrian Army after the disappointing Russian and Chinese veto at the UNSC. Few things aremore absurd than the notion of Al-Qaeda terrorists – unanimously portrayed asostensible “savages” by virtually all-Western media sources - entrust theapparatus of the United Nations andtheir capacity to resolve the Syrian conflict. The true purpose of Al-Qaeda andits role in influencing foreign policy has never been more evident.

Surely, Assad accusing foreign-sponsoredterrorist groups of fomenting violence in Syria is simply evidence of hisillegitimacy - as Western and Gulf allies assert. Even as Syrian state TVbroadcasts reports showing seized weapons stockpiles and confessions by terrorists describing howthey obtained arms from foreign sources, the NATOGCC continues to draft legislationin an effort pressure the Assad regime into dissolution. In the face of anoutright campaign of foreign-funded sabotage, Syrian hackers have targetedAl-Jazeera’s "Syria Live Blog", which provides ongoing coverage of theunrest. The hacker-ring boldly denounced Al Jazeera for broadcasting "false and fabricatednews to ignite sedition among the people of Syria to achieve the goals ofWashington and Tel Aviv."

Through the fiery rhetoric of Susan Rice and herrelentless condemnation of Assad - like Gaddafi before him - the UnitedStates is again attempting to invoke the Right to Protect (R2P) doctrine totake direct action against the Assad regime. In another parallel to the Libyanconflict, the UN’s astounding official death toll in Syria is taken solely fromhuman rights groups, backed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), theInternational Criminal Court and the Syrian National Council. The officialnumbers rely exclusively on an obscure organization knownas the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) -based in London, not Damascus - whose evidence is largely reliant on hearsay, pixelated YouTube videosand activist Twitter feeds. SOHR’s disputed reports present evidence that wouldnot hold up in any court of law, much less should it be the basis of UnitedNations resolutions. TheObservatory's director RamiAbdelrahman collaboratesdirectly with BritishForeign Minister William Hague and derives legitimacy solely fromconnections withcorporate/foundation-funded civil society networks. Claims that Assad’s securityforces indiscriminately kill scores of newborn babies are palpably a product ofBritain’s foreign office.

As a further indication of theon-going media war in Syria, none is more telling than the report produced by the Arab League’sobserver mission into Syria. The contents of the report were completely ignored by thecorporate-media after Qatar disputed its findings, the only nation to do so inthe Arab League'sMinisterial Committee. The report unalterably concluded that theSyrian government was in no way lethally repressing peaceful protestors. Furthermore,the report credits armed gangs with the bombing of civilian buses, trainscarrying diesel oil, bombing of police buses and the bombing of bridges andpipelines. During an interview with Arab League observer Ahmed Manaï, hepraises the Sino-Russian veto at the UNSC and encouraged the Syrian leadershipto implement reforms. Manaï states, “The Arab League isentirely discredited by burying the report of its own observers’ mission andits appeal to the Security Council. It missed the opportunity to participate inthe settlement of the Syrian affair. All it can offer in the future will beworthless.”

Whilethe initial observer report is predictably absent from mainstream mediacoverage and cited as inept (presumablyfor contradicting the official line of the allied Western-Gulf powers), ArabLeague mission leader Mohammed al-Dabi officially resigned, stating, "I won’t work one more time in the framework of the Arab League, Iperformed my job with full integrity and transparency but I won’t work hereagain as the situation is skewed.” The UnitedNations and the Arab League are now consideringwhat was originally a jointobserver mission – now referred to as a peacekeeping mission. The Arab League, in tandemwith Saudi Arabia is preparing a nearly identical resolutioncalling for an armed peacekeeping council to present to the UN. Much like the indistinguishablesaber rattling seen before Libyan intervention, the new resolution condemnsAssad for lethal repression and calls for a transitional shift to democracy.The resolution is expected to create similar Sino-Russian divisions over itsimplementation, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Gennady Gatilov, previouslyscorned the document as "the same unbalanced draft resolutiontext."

The conflict in Syria has brought light tolongstanding Cold War divisions between world powers. The Sino-Russian veto of theUNSC resolution calling for intervention has blocked the opportunity forWestern powers to exert overt aggression, as demonstrated by NATO in Libya.Instead, it appears that the Assad regime will be destabilized through covertmercenary groups bent on committing blind acts of terrorism by means of sniperassassinations and roadside bombs. Learning from the Libyan experience, Russiaand China perceive the UN Human Rights Report authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the Washington-basedcorporate-funded think-tank, Middle East Policy Council - to be explicitly comprised; victims among the civilian population area result of armed paramilitaries doing battle with the Syrian military inresidential areas. In an interview with former RussianJoint Chiefs of Staff, Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov pledges that Russia will protectIran, Syria, and the world from American fascism. In a show of support for the Syriangovernment, Russia hassent a large naval forceinto the region andChina hasfurther warned against a strike on Syria.

It is truly a paradox that thecountries least fit to dictate principles of human rights, do so largelyunhindered on the world stage. Without hesitation Hillary Clinton proclaimed, “What happenedyesterday at the United Nations was a travesty” referring to the Sino-Russian veto. Shethen called forthe formation of an international alliance between the war-profiteering eliteof the West and absolutist Wahhabi Persian Gulf monarchies - amusingly titled,the Friends of Syria. International calls toabstain from violence have done little to influence the Gulf Cooperation Council andtheir brutal crackdown against Shiites in Bahrain. Incredibly, Saudi Arabia hasentered the dialogue on human rights and democracy promotion – perhaps theworld’s most defining feudalistic theocracy, a nation that prohibits political parties and national elections and executes those who apostatize Islam.

Iran’s Press TV news networkhas reportedly leakedintelligence exposing the American agenda in Syria. The report calls forthe recognition ofthe Syrian National Council as the legitimate government and their positioningin Turkey to work against the Assad regime. Washington would then taskTurkey with sending troops into Syria to arm the opposition forces, followed byWahhabi fighters and Libyan mercenaries. Ominously, the intelligence stipulatesthat Israel will enter the fray to carry out military operations against Syria. If the regime fails to dissolve, Syrian state television channels will be taken down and Assad will beassassinated. Considering how other enemies of the West have faired in recenttimes, the sequence of events reported by Press TV would be largelyunsurprising. The Wahhabis of the Persian Gulf are playing junior to Americanaggression in an effort to dominate the Shia-Alawi religious faction presentlyupheld by the leadership of Syria and Iran, but also to secure their places asregional powers.

Domestic affairs in Syria areof little consequence to the powers trying to topple the nation; the realpriority is to further isolate Iran by eliminating its Shia-Alawi ally inDamascus. Israel reaps enormous benefit from toppling the Assad regime, as theSyrian Nation Council pledges to cut ties with Iran and discontinue armsshipments to Hezbollah and Hamas. If Syria falls and Iran is directlythreatened, the potential for a regional conflict of the utmost seriousnessexists, assuming China and Russia move in to defend Iran. Such a conflict wouldcreate detrimental implications for the global economy, potentially triggeringa hyper-inflationary financial crisis. William Hague and billionaire financiersbehind the civil society groups bestowing legitimacy to violent oppositionactors are not the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people. Althoughthe reforms have been slow, the Assad government is in themidst of drafting a new constitution. Syria’s sovereignty has come underdirect fire from powers claiming to be defending Syria’s people. An attempt onthe life of Bashar al-Assad may have similarconsequences to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As the Syrian National Councilfamiliarly calls for the implementation of a no-fly zone, those members ofthe International Community with any integrity left must work diligently todiffuse conflict in the region.

The Economics of Incarceration

2012-02-05T22:34:00.000-08:00

Written by Nile Bowie

James Nachtwey / VII

For anyone paying attention, there is noshortage of issues that fundamentally challenge the underpinning moralinfrastructure of American society and the values it claims to uphold. Underthe conceptual illusion of liberty, few things are more sobering than theamount of Americans who will spend the rest of their lives in an isolatedcorrectional facility – ostensibly, being corrected.The United States of America has longheld the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing any othernation. For every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars. Presently,the prison population in America consists of more than six million people, anumber exceedingthe amount of prisoners held in the gulags of the former Soviet Union atany point in its history.

While miserable statistics illustrate somemeasure of the ongoing ethical calamity occurring in the detainment centers insidethe land of the free, only a partialpicture of the broader situation is painted. While the country faces anunprecedented economic and financial crisis, business is booming in otherfields – namely, the private prison industry. Like any other business, theseinstitutions are run for the purpose of turning a profit. State and federalprisons are contracted out to private companies who are paid a fixed amount tohouse each prisoner per day. Their profits result from spending the minimumamount of state or federal funds on each inmate, only to pocket the remainingcapital. For the corrections conglomerates of America, prosperity depends onhousing the maximum numbers of inmates for the longest potential time - asinexpensively as possible.

By allowing a profit-drivencapitalist-enterprise model to operate over institutions that should rightfullybe focused on rehabilitation, America has enthusiastically embraced a prison industrial complex. Under the promiseof maintaining correctional facilities at a lower cost due to marketcompetition, state and federal governments contract privately run companies tomanage and staff prisons, even allowing the groups to design and constructfacilities. Theprivate prison industry is primarily led by two morally deficient entities, theCorrectionsCorporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut CorrectionsCorporation). These companies amassed a combined revenue of over $2.9billion in 2010, not without situating themselves in the center ofpolitical influence.

The number of people imprisonedunder state and federal custody increased 772% percent between 1970 and 2009, largely due to theincredible influence private corporations wield against the American legal system. Because judicial leniency and sentencing reductions threaten the verybusiness models of these private corporations, millions have been spentlobbying state officials and political candidates in an effort to influenceharsher “zero tolerance” legislationand mandatory sentencing for many non-violent offenses. Political actioncommittees assembled by private correctional corporations have lobbied over 3.3 million dollarsto the political establishment since 2001. An annual report released bythe CCA in 2010 reiterates the importance of influencing legislation:

“The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affectedby the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parolestandards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certainactivities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance,any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegalimmigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, andsentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities tohouse them. Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could lowerminimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and make more inmates eligiblefor early release based on good behavior. Also, sentencing alternatives underconsideration could put some offenders on probation with electronic monitoringwho would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly, reductions in crime rates orresources dedicated to prevent and enforce crime could lead to reductions inarrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctionalfacilities.”

Considering today’sprivate prison population is over 17 times larger than the figure two decadesearlier, the malleability of the judicial system under corporate influenceis clear. The Corrections Corporation of America is the first and largestprivate prison company in the US, cofounded in 1983 by Tom Beasley, formerChairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. The CCA entered the market andovertly exploited Beasley’s political connections in an attempt to exertcontrol over the entire prison system of Tennessee. Today, the company operatesover sixty-five facilities and owns contracts with the US Marshal Service,Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Bureau of Prisons. The GEOGroup operates 118 detention centers throughout the United States, SouthAfrica, UK, Australia and elsewhere. Under its original name, the WackenhutCorrections Corporation was synonymous for thesadistic abuse of prisoners in its facilities, resulting in the terminationof several contracts in 1999.

The political action committees assembledby private prison enterprises have also wieldedincredible influence with respect to administering harsher immigrationlegislation. The number of illegal immigrants being incarcerated inside theUnited States is rising exponentially under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),an agency responsible for annuallyoverseeing the imprisonment of 400,000 foreign nationals at the cost of over$1.9 billion on custody-related operations. The agency has come under heavycriticism for seeking to contract a 1,250-bed immigration detention facility inEssex County, New Jersey to a private company that shares intimateties to New Jersey's Governor, Chris Christie. Given the private prisonindustry’s dependence on immigration-detention contracts, the huge contributions of the prison lobby towardsdrafting Arizona’s recrementitiousimmigration law SB 1070 are all but unexpected. While theadministration of Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer is lined with former privateprison lobbyists, its Departmentof Corrections budget has been raised by $10 million, while all other Arizonastate agencies are subject to budget cuts in 2012’s fiscal year.

Perhapsthe most disturbing aspect of this obstinate moral predicament presents itselfin the privatecontracting of prisoners and their role in assembling vast quantities ofmilitary and commercial equipment. While the United States plunges itself intoeach new manufactured conflict under a wide range of fraudulent pretenses, itis interesting to note that all military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproofvests, ID tags, uniforms, tents, bags and other equipment used by militaryoccupation forces are producedby inmates in federal prisons across the US. Giant multinationalconglomerates and weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and RaytheonCorporation employ federal prison labor to cheaply assemble weapons components,only to sell them to the Pentagon at premiumprices. At the lowest, Prisoners earn 17 cents an hour to assemble high-techelectronic components for guided missile systems needed to produce PatriotAdvanced Capability 3 missiles and anti-tank projectiles.

In thepast, political mouthpieces of the United States have criticized countries suchas China and North Korea for their role in exploiting prisoner labor to createcommodity products such as women’s bras and artificial flowers for export.Evidently, outsourcing the construction of the military equipment responsiblefor innumerable civilian causalities to the prisons of America warrants no suchcriticism from the military industrial establishment. In utter derision toward the integrityof the common worker, prison inmates are exposed to toxic spent ammunition, depleted uraniumdust and other chemicals when contractedto clean and reassemble tanks and military vehicles returned from combat.Prison laborers receive no union protection, benefits or health and safety protectionwhen made to work in electronic recycling factories where inmates are regularlyexposed to lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic.

In addition to performing tasks that canresult in detrimental illnesses, prison labor produces other military utilitiessuch as night-vision goggles, body armor, radio and communication devices, componentsfor battleship anti-aircraft guns, land mine sweepers and electro-opticalequipment. While this abundant source of low-cost manpower fosters greater incentivesfor corporate stockholders to impose draconian legislation on the majority ofAmericans who commit nonviolent offenses, it’s hard to imagine such an innatelycolossal contradiction to the nation’s official rhetoric, i.e. American values.Furthermore, prison labor is employed not only in the assemblyof complex components used in F-15 fighter jets and Cobra helicopters, italso supplies 98% of the entire market for equipmentassembly services, with similar statistics in regard to products such aspaints, stoves, office furniture, headphones, and speakers.

It is some twisted irony that largesections of the workforce in America’s alleged free-market are shackled in chains. Weapons manufactured in theisolation of America’s prisons are the source of an exploitative cycle, whichleaves allied NATO member countries indebted to a multibillion-dollar weaponsindustry at the behest of the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. Completewith its own trade exhibitions, mail-order catalogs and investment houses onWall Street, the eminence of the private prison industry solidifies the ongoingcorrosion of American principles – principles that seem more abstract now, thanthe day they were written.

Predictably, the potential profit of theprison labor boom has encouraged the foundationsof US corporate society to move their production forces into American prisons.Conglomerates such as IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless,Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, LucentTechnologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's,Pierre Cardin, Victoria’s Secret, and Target have all begun mounting productionoperations in US prisons. Many of these Fortune 500 conglomerates are corporatemembers of civil society groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). These think tanks are criticaltoward influencing American foreign policy. Under the guise of democracypromotion, these civil societies fund opposition movements and train dissentgroups in countries around the world in the interest of pro-US regime change. Withnaked insincerity, the same companies that outsource the production of theirproducts to American prisons simultaneouslysponsor civil societies that demanded the release of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyifrom house arrest – anoverly political effort in the on-going attempts to install a compliant regimein that country.

The concept of privatizing prisons toreduce expenses comes at great cost to the inmates detained, who are subjectedto living in increasingly squalid conditions in jail cells across America. In 2007, the Texas YouthCommission (TYC) was sent to a West Texas juvenile prison run by GEO Group forthe purpose of monitoring its quality standards. The monitors sent by the TYC weresubsequently fired for failing to report the sordid conditions they witnessedin the facility while they awarded the GEO Group with an overall compliancescore of nearly 100%. Independent auditors later visited the facility anddiscovered that inmates were forced to urinate or defecate in small containers dueto a lack of toilets in some of the cells. The independent commission alsonoted in theirlist of reported findings that the facility racially segregated prisonersand disciplined Hispanics for speaking Spanish by denying their access tolayers and medical treatment. It was later discovered that the TYCmonitors were employed by the GEO Group. Troublingly, the Walnut GroveYouth Correctional Facility (WGYCF) operated by the GEO Group in Mississippihas been subject to a class-action lawsuit afterreports that staff members were complicit in the beating and stabbing of a prisoner who consequentlyincurred permanent brain damage. The officialcompliant authored by the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center alsohighlights cases where the administration turned a blind eye to brutal cases ofrape and torture within the facility.

The first private prison models wereintroduced following the abolishment of slavery after the American Civil War from1861 to 1865, which saw expansive prison farms replace slave plantations. Prisonsof the day contractedgroups of predominately African-American inmates to pick cotton and constructrailroads principally in southern states such as Alabama, Georgia andMississippi. In 2012, there are more African-Americans engrossed in the criminal-justicesystem than any point during slavery. Throughout its history, the Americanprison system has shared little with the concept of rehabilitation. Like thepost-Civil War prison farms, today’s system functions to purport requiredlabor, largely on a racially specific basis. African-Americans consist of 40% of the prisonpopulationand are incarcerated seventimes more often than whites, despite the fact that African-Americans make up only 12% of the national population. Once released, formerinmates are barred from votingin elections, denied educational opportunities and are legally discriminatedagainst in their efforts to find employment and housing. Few can deny thetargeting of underprivileged urban communities of color in America’s failed Waron Drugs. This phenomenon can largely be contributed to the stipulations of itsanti-drug legislation, whichcommanded maximum sentencing for possession of minute amounts of rock cocaine,a substance that floods poor inner-city black communities.

Unbeknown to the vast majorityof Americans, the US government has been actively taking steps to modify thelegal infrastructure of the country to allow for a dramatic expansion of thedomestic prison system at the expense of civil rights. On December 31^st,2011, BarackObama signed into law the NationalDefense Authorization Act (NDAA) H.R. 1540. Emulating the rouge militarydictatorships the US Government has long condemned in its rhetoric, the NDAAintroduces a vaguely worded legislation that allows for US citizens to bearbitrarily detained in military detention without due process - might they be predictably deemed radical, conspiratorial or suspected of terrorism. In a climate ofrising public discontent, the establishment media has steadfastly worked toblur the line between public activism and domestic extremism. In addition to the world’s largest network ofprison facilities, over800 located detainment camps exist in all regions of the United States withvarying maximum capacities.

Facing economic stagnation, manyAmericans have been detained in responder camps as aconsequence of publically demonstrating in accordance with the Occupy WallStreet movement launched in New York City. Under the guise of protectingAmericans from a largely contrived and abstract threat of fundamentalistviolence, citizens have been denied the right of peaceful assembly and placedin detainment apparatuses, managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency(FEMA). Documents have been released by the American Civil Liberties Uniondetailing the Pentagon’swidespread monitoring of public demonstrations and the targeting of individual activistsunder threat of national security. Co-authored by Senator Joe Lieberman, the EnemyExpatriation Act (HR 3166) gives the US government the power todetain nationals and revoke their American citizenship under suspicion ofbehavior perceived as terrorism.

This legislation becomes increasingly moredangerous as citizens can be labeled domestic extremists based on theirconstitutionally protected activism or personal political leanings. In January 2006, a contract toconstruct detentionfacilities for the Department of Homeland Security worth a maximum of $385million was awarded to KBR, a subsidiary of Haliburton. Following thesigning of NDAA earlier in 2012, leaked documents reveal that KBRis now seeking to staff its detention centers and award contracts forservices such as catering, temporary fencing and barricades, laundry and medical services, powergeneration, and refuse collection. It would be reasonable to assume that thesefacilities could be managed in partnership with private corporations such as the GEO Group or the CCA, as many federal and state penitentiaries privatizesections of their facilities to privately owned companies. DeclassifiedUS Army documents originally drafted in 1997 divulge the existence ofinmate labor camps inside US military installations. It is all but unexpectedthat the relationship between the upper echelons of government and the privateprison enterprise will grow increasingly more intimate in the current climateof prison industrial legislation.

The partnership between the United Statesgovernment and its corporate associates spans various industries however, theyall seek the common pursuit of profit irrespective of the moral and ethicalconsequence – the human consequence.The increasing influence of the Prison Industrial Complex towards officiallegislation and economic undertakings signifies a reprehensible threat to basichuman rights. Perhaps the issuance of government legislation that leads offendersinto detainment for the benefit of private shareholders is the purestembodiment of fascism, as cited in Mussolini’s vision of a Corporate State. Perhaps we all (this authorincluded) fail to grasp the seriousness of these legislations and their implicationson our lives.

MumiaAbu-Jamal has spent over three decades on death row in the throngs of theAmerican prison system. Prior to his conviction in 1981 for the murder of a whitepolice officer, Jamal was a political activist and President of the PhiladelphiaAssociation of Black Journalists. Critical evidence vindicating Jamal was withheldfrom the trial prior to the issuance of the death penalty. Forensic experts believehe was denied a fair trial. On December 7, 2011, the Philadelphia District Attorney announcedthat prosecutors would no longer seek the death penalty for Jamal. He remainsimprisoned for life without parole and continues his work as a journalist fromhis jail cell in Pennsylvania.

Note: The figure of six million peoplecited in the first paragraph of this article represents all people in juvenile detentionand adult facilities, in addition to those who have passed through the prisonsystem and are now being subjected to some form of parole or probation, i.e. correctionalsupervision.

ACTA: The Corporate Usurpation of the Internet

2012-01-27T02:20:00.000-08:00

Written by Nile Bowie

In the wake of apublic outcry against internet regulation bills such as SOPA and PIPA, representativesof the EU have signed a new and far more threatening legislation yesterday inTokyo. Spearheaded by the governments of the United States and Japan and constructedlargely in the absence of public awareness, the measures of the Anti-Counterfeiting TradeAgreement (ACTA) dramatically alter current international legal framework, whileintroducing the first substantial processes of global internet governance. Withcomplete contempt towards the democratic process, the negotiationsof the treaty were exclusively held between industry representatives andgovernment officials, while excluding elected representatives and membersof the press from their hearings.

Under the guise of protecting intellectualproperty rights, the treaty introduces measures that would allow the private sectorto enforce sweeping central authority over internet content. The ACTA abolishesall legal oversight involving the removal of content and allows copyrightholders to force ISPs to remove material from the internet, something thatpresently requires a court order. ISPs would then be faced with legalliabilities if they chose not to remove content. Theoretically, personalblogs can be removed for using company logos without permission or simply linking to copy written material; users could becriminalized, barred from accessing the internet and even imprisoned forsharing copyrighted material. Ultimately, these implications would bestarkly detrimental toward the internet as a medium for free speech.

The Obama Administration subvertedthe legal necessity of allowing to US Senate to ratify the treaty byunconstitutionally declaring it an “executiveagreement” before the President promptlysigned it on October 1^st, 2011. As a touted constitutionallawyer, Barack Obama is fully aware that Article 1, Section 8 ofthe US Constitution, mandates Congress in dealing with issues ofintellectual property, thus voiding the capacity for the President to issue anexecutive agreement. The White Houserefused to even disclose details about the legislation to elected officialsand civil libertarians over concern that doing so may incur "damage to the national security."While some may hang off every word of his sorely insincere speeches and stillbe fixated by the promises of hope offered by brand-Obama, his administrationhas trampled the constitution and introduced the most comprehensiveauthoritarian legislation in America’s history.

In addition to imposing looselydefined criminal sanctions to average web users, the ACTA treaty will also obligateISPs to disclose personal user information to copyright holders. Themeasures introduce legislativeprocesses that contradict the legal framework of participant countries andallows immigration authorities to search laptops, external hard drives andInternet-capable devices at airports and border checkpoints. The treaty is notlimited solely to internet-related matters, ACTA would prohibit the production of genericpharmaceuticals and outlaw the use of certain seeds for crops throughpatents, furthering the corporate cartelization of the food and drug supply.

ACTA would allow companies fromany participating country (which include EU member states, the United States,Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Singapore andMorocco) to shut down websites without any explanation. Hypothetically, nothingcould prevent private Singaporean companies from promptly taking down American websitesthat oppose the Singapore Air Force conducting war games on US soil, suchas those conducted in December 2011. By operating outside normal judicialframework, exporting US copyright law to the rest of the world and mandating privatecorporations to conduct surveillance on their users, all prerequisites of democracy,transparency and self-expression are an afterthought.

The further monopolization of theexisting resources of communication, exchange and expression is ever present inthe form of deceptive new articles of legislation that unanimously call for theimplementation of the same austere censorship measures. Even if the ACTA treatyis not implemented, the Trans-PacificPartnership Agreement (TTP) between Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, NewZealand, Peru, Vietnam and the United States offers more extensive intellectualproperty regulations. Leaked documents prepared by the U.S.Business Coalition (whichhave been reportedly drafted by the Pharmaceutical Research andManufactures of America, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Motion PictureAssociation of America) report that in addition to ACTA-style legislation, theTTP will impose fines on non-compliant entities and work to extend the generalperiod of copy write terms on individual products.

Under the sweeping regulations ofthe Trans-Pacific Partnership, individual infringers will be criminalized and sentencedwith the same severity as large-scale offenders. Within the United States, therecently announcedOnline Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) H.R. 3782regulation seeks to install policies largely identical to SOPA and PIPA. TheObama administration is also working towards anInternet ID program, which may be mandatory for American citizens andrequired when renewing passports, obtaining federal licenses, or applying forsocial security. Spreading these dangerous measures to other countriesparticipating in these treaties would necessitate a binding obligation on theUS to retain these policies, averting any chance of reform.

The ACTA will become law once itis formally ratified and cleared by the European Parliament in June. By petitioningmembers of the European parliament and educating others about the potentialdangers imposed by this legislation, there is a chance of the treaty being rejected.Upon closer examination of the human condition with all of its inequalities,food insecurity and dire social issues, our governments have lost theirlegitimacy for giving such unwarranted priority to fighting copyrightinfringement on behalf of lobbyists from the pharmaceuticaland entertainment industries. The existence of ACTA is a clear statement thatsurveillance, regulations and securing further corporate centralization dwarfsany constructive shift towards stimulating human innovation and self-sufficienttechnologies.

When former US NationalSecurity Advisor and Trilateral Commission co-founder, Zbigniew Brzezinskispoke before the Council on Foreign Relations in 2010, he warnedof a global political awakening beginning to take place. Technology such as file sharing,blogging, and open source software has the potential to undermine theoligarchical governing interests seeking to centrally control our society andenforce the population into being entirely dependent on their commodities. The following excerpt fromBrzezinski’s book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era,provides invaluable insight into the world being brought in; “The technetronic era involves the gradualappearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated byan elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible toassert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintainup-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information aboutthe citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by theauthorities.”

Australian Militarism in the Asia-Pacific Century

2012-01-21T09:45:00.000-08:00

Written by Nile Bowie

For a nation who has historically subordinated itself to largerpowers, Australia’s Labour-led foreign policy shows little divergence away frombeing wholly complicit to American full spectrum dominance in the region. For allof its pristine natural beauty, the continent-nation has become a treasurechest of precious natural resources managed by a monopolistic elite, and amartial subsidiary of the world’s most militaristically aggressive empire. Whilethe potential exists for Australia’s economy to hemorrhage in the absence ofChinese trade and demand, the permanentforce of 2,500 US marines building up in the Northern Territory certainlydoes not appear to be in the public interest.

A document issued by theAustralian Ministryof Defense in 2009 entitled "Defending Australia in theAsia-Pacific Century: Force 2030" cites the introduction of anexpansive military program, which seeks to enable a “comprehensive setof reforms that will fundamentally overhaul the entire Defense enterprise,producing efficiency and creating savings of about $20 billion.” The agenda’s efficiency andthe savings it can potentially yield however, are unquestionably a subject of speculation.Reconfigurations of Australia’s armed forces under Julia Gillard’s Labourgovernment have ratified a $100 billion program to purchaseadvanced military hardware from the United States, such as F-35 jet fighters, missile-guidedfrigates and submarines.

With naval expansionism being cited as a highpriority, Australia seeks to maintain twelve submarines, three destroyers equippedwith SM-6 long-range anti-aircraft missiles, eight new frigates and a fleet ofLHD amphibious ships bythe mid 2030s. Australiahas also recently purchased ten C-27Jaircraftsequipped with missile warning systems and radar from the United States, to thetune of $95 million. While the Gillard government pays lip service to China by welcoming its rise, the zeros on herdefense receipt suggest otherwise. With regards to China, the Ministry of Defensedocument states “China’s rise in economic, political and military terms has become moreevident. Pronounced military modernization in the Asia-Pacific region is having significantimplications for our strategic outlook.”

By heavily depending on China in theeconomic sphere and aligning itself militarily with the United States, playingboth sides of the coin may prove to be most injudicious. Australia’sinvolvement in the ostensiblyanti-Chinese multilateral tradeagreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) appears to be fencing China intoan economic exclusion zone at the behest of US corporate interests. Much likethe detested US-KoreaFree Trade Agreement, the TPP requires participating countries torestructure their economies to benefit transnational entities. The carbontax-pushing Gillard has alsoaligned closer to India in the form of a new trilateral security pact, whichalso incorporates the United States. The Chinese perspective on thesedevelopments remains plausible; commentators such as People’s Liberation ArmyMajor General Luo Yuan reiterate, “Theintent is very clear - this is aimed at China, to contain China".

As a means strengthen the foundation of thenew trilateral pact, the Labour government has overturned its own ban on selling uranium to countries that are notsignatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). By giving India access to 40% ofthe world’s identified uranium reserves (possessed by Australia), the countryplans to build 30 nuclear power stations in the next 20 years, earning billionsfor the Australian corporate elite. Australianuranium is also sold to the General Atomics Corporation;a producer of unmanned aerial drone aircrafts, which are frequently deployedagainst sovereign nation-states to indiscriminately exenterate any living beingin its focus. The Australian leadership’s contribution to such unethical formsof warfare is truly against the will of the Australian people.

As the US faces economic torpidity andabject bankruptcy, it’s clear that a restored focus on Asia is not solely inthe interest of economics, as professed by Hillary Clinton in her manifesto, America’sPacific Century. The skulking encroachment of American militarismbeneath the public relations-jargon of the State Department is increasinglyevident in dealings with Australia. Although the Gillard government criminalized certain lethal armaments such as Clustermunitions under Australian law, USpersonnel transit and stockpile the weapons at US military facilities inDarwin. The people of Australian cannot tolerate a foreign military powerillegally conducting operations on their territory and aforeign President asserting, “we’re hereto stay.”

The underlining initiative of recent USforeign policy has been to continually thwart Chinese economic interests invarious parts of the globe, irrespective of moral and ethical consequence. Themoment that it’s provocations appear too reckless, China may incite a collapseof the US dollar by dumping its holdings of US treasury bonds. While the current Labour government spendsan unjustifiable amount of money on military expansion, the originalinhabitants of Australia have the shortest life expectancy of any of theworld’s indigenous groups. The Aboriginaland Torres Strait Islander Commission has reported that half of theIndigenous people in the Northern Territory do not have adequate housing, whilevarious communities are unable to access potable water.

Australiais the only developed nation where cases of blinding trachoma still exist.While basic infrastructure and housing in Aboriginal communities is abjectlyinsufficient, clearly, owning amphibious warships is more of a priority for the Australianleadership, who sheepishly play junior to American authority. While the rate ofAboriginal imprisonment in the state of Western Australia is eight times the figure than that of SouthAfrica’s apartheid regime, the scene of mining bulldozers demolishinginvaluable Aboriginal artwork on the walls of expansive natural cavessituated on traditional tribal land is truly the weltschmerz of an entire people. Canberra’s allegiancesare evidently not to its population, but to amoral mining enterprises and themilitary industrial complex.

A New Kind of Communism

2012-01-20T00:51:00.000-08:00

Written by Nile Bowie

In 2012, we stand inundated in the totality of consumption. Within our post-ideological age, the proverbial benefactor of even the most elementary forms of material comfort has negated the compulsion for most to personally deconstruct the religious and moral foundations of society, as they see fit. The fractal nature of its economic architecture has influenced the realization of the highest material living standards so far experienced by our species, not without the constant construction of au courant divisions and new forms of apartheid.

The Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek has been one who charismatically explores the philosophical notion of totality, its relation to political totalitarianism and the defunct ideology of a post-ideological world. While using models presented in consumer culture to palpably dissect the structure of commodities, he examines the ideology espoused within capitalist totality and its relationship with the dimensions of the unsaid and the implied in our culture.

Žižek argues that the market and existing liberal democratic framework in itself cannot cope with problems related to the dissemination of intellectual property, structural unemployment wrought on by technological innovation, and the delivering of individual freedoms. He speaks of the expansion of global capitalism and the consequence of inherent geopolitical exclusions and socio-economic primativization of nation states; “the irony is that global capitalism, where commodities circulate freely, is characterized by new walls everywhere.”

He notes that countries under either authoritarian or communist governments such as Singapore and China undertake today’s most efficient form of capitalism, a brand disunited from the democratic process, allowing capitalism to follow its innermost necessity. While the Western model of disqualified consumerism stagnates through “post-ideological protests” such as the rioting and looting seen in the UK, Žižek advocates the renovation of the communist concept.

Žižek cites the increasing possibilities made available in the fields of private sexuality; technological, scientific and medical innovations and yet, the absolute impossibility of a change within the global capitalist economic hierarchy. Regardless of the characteristic distinctions between market capitalism, corporate fascism, crony-capitalism, Žižek succeeds in provoking critical thought in stating, “the only utopia today is the idea that with small changes here and there, things can go on the way they do.”

Note: The views of the presenter do not ineludibly reflect those of this writer.

DHS Targets Nigerian Islamist Group Boko Haram

2012-01-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

US Homeland Security Suggests Military Action in Nigeria

Written by Nile Bowie

As turmoil ensues and Nigerian law enforcement officers begin to join the IMF-induced demonstrations, President Goodluck Jonathan’s recent declaration of the dire threat posed by Islamist group Boko Haram appears to be setting the stage for a coming initiative. A recent video posted online by alleged Boko Haram leader, Imam Abubakar Shekau successfully channels the theatrics of Bin-Ladenesque villainy, as he exclaims, “First we do not believe in the Nigerian constitution and secondly we do not believe in democracy but only in the laws of Allah.” Shekau familiarly goes onto pledge his groups’ commitment to wage jihad and bring death to America.

“Boko Haram” in the Hausa language translates into “Western education is sacrilege”, the group has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks across the country, most notably for the August 2011 suicide bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Mohammed Yusuf, a Muslim cleric who was allegedly the victim of an extrajudicial execution at the hands of Nigerian security forces, formed the group in 2002. Under the command of Imam Abubakar Shekau, The group has shown to be violently opposed to secular leadership and Nigeria’s own Muslim elites, while striving to implement Sharia Law and the eventual establishment of an Islamic State in Northern Nigeria.

Amidst the current economic unrest in the nation, sectarian violence has continued provoking retaliatory attacks between religious groups along the sensitive Niger Delta region, a prominent source of oil largely designated for export to the United States and others. Imam Abubakar Shekau's recent video transmission espouses fanaticism that may form the beginnings of a sectarian civil war, stating “Christians cheated and killed us to the extent of eating our flesh like cannibals; you did all you wanted to us. We are trying to coerce you to embrace Islam, because that is what God instructed us to do.”

Regardless of this group’s legitimacy, remarkable unoriginality and possible foreign nurturing, the case for marketing foreign military intervention to Western audiences is steadily increasing. As an OPEC member, an unstable political climate leading to inaccessibility of its enormous domestic oil reserves would have dramatic ramifications for global oil markets. As the fourth largest supplier of oil to the United States, it is clear that the American Government would behave forcefully to preserve its stake in the region. A recently released subcommittee report issued by the United States Department of Homeland Security entitled “Boko Haram: Emerging Threat to the US Homeland” is a further testament towards the shape of things to come.

The document insinuates the growing threat of Boko Haram by associating it with other terrorist groups in the region such as Al Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Somalian militant group Al-Shabaab; the authors themselves reiterate on the sensitivity of the resources within the Niger Delta region.

Page 18

In May 2007, protestors from the Ogoni tribe in the Niger Delta overran an oil pipeline, cutting Nigerian oil production by 30 percent. That same month, militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), bombed three pipelines, decreasing oil production by 100,000 barrels a day for the Italian oil company Eni. This disruption caused oil prices to rise by 71 cents a barrel in New York. A well-co-ordinated attack by Boko Haram could result in far worse damage, completely cutting off Nigerian oil production in a worst-case scenario. If that occurred, eight percent of U.S. oil imports would be cut off, which could result in a spike in oil prices worldwide and soaring domestic gas prices.

Furthermore, in an effort to combat the emerging instability being seen throughout Nigeria, the authors of this document suggest implementing a military cooperation policy similar to that administered in Yemen, which ostensibly includes extrajudicial assassination and the use of unmanned aerial drone bombardments.

Page 24

It is critical that the U.S. work more closely with Nigerian security forces to develop greater domestic intelligence collection and sharing with the U.S. IntelligenceCommunity. Military cooperation is vital to a successful counterterrorism strategy. A possible model includes Yemen, with whom U.S. built an effective intelligence sharing partnership following the Christmas Day 2009 attempted attack to hunt suspected militants. While this relationship continues to pose challenges, it has had notable success, highlighted by the killing of Anwar al Awlaki.

Just as the Franco-Anglo-American triumvirate orchestrated the recent snatch-and-grab regime change in Libya, the same military-industrial players are offering their services in an effort to secure their share of domestic resources within Nigeria.

Page 25

In a recent display of growing international concern surrounding the rise of Boko

Haram, France has offered military support to Nigeria. Meeting in Abuja with his Nigerian counterpart, Olugbenga Ashira. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe stated: "We shall fight against this phenomenon. We are ready to share any information. We are ready to coordinate our intelligence services. We are ready also to give our help in training cooperation. France is directly concerned with the question of terrorism.” Lieutenant General Azubuike Ihejirika, the Nigerian Army Chief of Staff, said that in addition to the United States and France, Pakistan and Britain have also offered to assist with counterterrorism training.

Although the document admits that Boko Haram poses a low threat to the US homeland, it cites the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to detonate a bomb in his underwear during a Christmas day flight on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as an instance where seemingly obscure terrorist organizations thought to lack capability to deploy militants to the United States were nearly successful, thus requiring increasing vigilance to combat an ever increasing threat. It certainly makes one reexamine the supposed threat posed by foreign terrorist groups when examining the mainstream media reportage of the Abdulmutallab incident, which famously omitted critical eyewitness testimony that exposed the involvement of various elements of the US Intelligence community.

If Nigeria continues to face severe instability, the actions foreign powers will take to preserve their economic and geopolitical interests is quite clear. At this stage, it remains uncertain whether Boko Haram is a legitimate indigenous extremist movement or a nurtured product of Intelligence communities working to benefit from destabilizing Africa’s most populous nation. The tired theatrics and recycled rhetoric of Boko Haram’s leadership certainly lends credence to the latter. As The United States African Command (AFRICOM) continues to expand its influence throughout the continent, the entity has long anticipated Nigerian instability; its 2008 war-game scenario envisioned 20,000 U.S. troops maintaining security of the Niger Delta oil fields within a dissolved anarchic Nigeria.

According to a Washington, D.C. based journalist, Scott Morgan, Nigerian military sources have confirmed that U.S. troops are scheduled to be deployed within Nigeria to help local forces do battle with Boko Haram. U.S. officials have not confirmed the deployment, however the increased presence in the region would be consistent with the cumulative expansion of an aggressive Pan-African foreign policy, spearheaded by America’s first President of African descent.

For more on the situation in Nigeria, see:

Lagos Dissents Under IMF Hegemony

2012-01-06T05:24:00.000-08:00

Nigeria: The Next Front for AFRICOM

Written by Nile Bowie

Photo: Sunday Alabama / Associated Press

On a recent trip to West Africa, the newly appointed managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde ordered the governments of Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon, Ghana and Chad to relinquish vital fuel subsidies. Much to the dismay of the population of these nations, the prices of fuel and transport have near tripled over night without notice, causing widespread violence on the streets of the Nigerian capital of Abuja and its economic center, Lagos. Much like the IMF induced riots in Indonesia during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, public discontent in Nigeria is channelled towards an incompetent and self-serving domestic elite, compliant to the interests of fraudulent foreign institutions.

Although Nigeria holds the most proven oil reserves in Africa behind Libya, it’s people are now expected to pay a fee closer to what the average American pays for the cost of fuel, an exorbitant sum in contrast to its regional neighbours. Alternatively, other oil producing nations such as Venezuela, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia offer their populations fuel for as little as $0.12 USD per gallon. While Lagos has one of Africa’s highest concentration of billionaires, the vast majority of the population struggle daily on less than $2.00 USD. Amid a staggering 47% youth unemployment rate and thousands of annual deaths related to preventable diseases, the IMF has pulled the rug out from under a nation where safe drinking water is a luxury to around 80% of it’s populace.

Although Nigeria produces 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day intended for export use, the country struggles with generating sufficient electrical power and maintaining its infrastructure. Ironically enough, less than 6% of bank depositors own 88% of all bank deposits in Nigeria. Goldman Sachs employees line its domestic government, in addition to the former Vice President of the World Bank, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who is widely considered by many to be the de facto Prime Minister. Even after decades of producing lucrative oil exports, Nigeria has failed to maintain it’s own refineries, forcing it to illogically purchase oil imports from other nations. Society at large has not benefited from Nigeria’s natural riches, so it comes as no surprise that a severe level of distrust is held towards the government, who claims the fuel subsidy needs to be lifted in order to divert funds towards improving the quality of life within the country.

Like so many other nations, Nigerian people have suffered from a systematically reduced living standard after being subjected to the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP). Before a loan can be taken from the World Bank or IMF, a country must first follow strict economic policies, which include currency devaluation, lifting of trade tariffs, the removal of subsidies and detrimental budget cuts to critical public sector health and education services.

SAPs encourage borrower countries to focus on the production and export of domestic commodities and resources to increase foreign exchange, which can often be subject to dramatic fluctuations in value. Without the protection of price controls and an authentic currency rate, extreme inflation and poverty subsist to the point of civil unrest, as seen in a wide array of countries around the world (usually in former colonial protectorates). The people of Nigeria have been one of the world’s most vocal against IMF-induced austerity measures, student protests have been met with heavy handed repression since 1986 and several times since then, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths. As a testament to the success of the loan, the average laborer in Nigeria earned 35% more in the 1970’s than he would of in 2012.

Working through the direct representation of Western Financial Institutions and the IMF in Nigeria’s Government, a new IMF conditionality calls for the creation of a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Olusegun Aganga, the former Nigerian Minister of Finance commented on how the SWF was hastily pushed through and enacted prior to the countries national elections. If huge savings are amassed from oil exports and austerity measures, one cannot realistically expect that these funds will be invested towards infrastructure development based on the current track record of the Nigerian Government. Further more, it is increasingly more likely that any proceeds from a SWF would be beneficial to Western institutions and markets, which initially demanded its creation. Nigerian philanthropist Bukar Usman prophetically writes “I have genuine fears that the SWF would serve us no better than other foreign-recommended "remedies" which we had implemented to our own detriment in the past or are being pushed to implement today.”

The abrupt simultaneous removal of fuel subsidies in several West African nations is a clear indication of who is really in charge of things in post-colonial Africa. The timing of its cushion-less implementation could not be any worse, Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency after forty people were killed in a church bombing on Christmas day, an act allegedly committed by the Islamist separatist group, Boko Haram. The group advocates dividing the predominately Muslim northern states from the Christian southern states, a similar predicament to the recent division of Sudan.

As the United States African Command (AFRICOM) begins to gain a foothold into the continent with its troops officially present in Eritrea and Uganda in an effort to maintain security and remove other theocratic religious groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, the sectarian violence in Nigeria provides a convenient pretext for military intervention in the continuing resource war. For further insight into this theory, it is interesting to note that United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania conducted a series of African war game scenarios in preparation for the Pentagon’s expansion of AFRICOM under the Obama Administration.

In the presence of US State Department Officials, employees from The Rand Corporation and Israeli military personnel, a military exercise was undertaken which tested how AFRICOM would respond to a disintegrating Nigeria on the verge of collapse amidst civil war. The scenario envisioned rebel factions vying for control of the Niger Delta oil fields (the source of one of America’s top oil imports), which would potentially be secured by some 20,000 U.S. troops if a US-friendly coup failed to take place. At a press conference at the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, AFRICOM Commander, General William Ward then went on to brazenly state the priority issue of America’s growing dependence on African oil would be furthered by AFRICOM operating under the principle theatre-goal of “combating terrorism”.

At an AFRICOM Conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly declared the guiding principle of AFRICOM is to protect “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market”, before citing China’s increasing presence in the region as challenging to American interests. After the unwarranted snatch-and-grab regime change conducted in Libya, nurturing economic destabilization, civil unrest and sectarian conflict in Nigeria is an ultimately tangible effort to secure Africa’s second largest oil reserves. During the pillage of Libya, its SFW accounts worth over 1.2 billion USD were frozen and essentially absorbed by Franco-Anglo-American powers; it would be realistic to assume that much the same would occur if Nigeria failed to comply with Western interests. While agents of foreign capital have already infiltrated its government, there is little doubt that Nigeria will become a new front in the War on Terror.

International Translations:

Nigeria: Nächste Front für AFRICOM

Post-Gadhafi Libya: Naked Neo-Imperialism

2011-12-30T06:35:00.000-08:00

The Daylight Robbery of Libyan Resources

Written by Nile Bowie

While the unconcealed hypocrisy that led to the emergence of a new Libya fades from the public consciousness, the governments of the West are beginning to reap the profits of their investments. Under a mandate to protect civilians, these allied forces armed radical factions of Islamist fighters and showered white phosphorus tipped ordnance onto densely populated residential areas. While sponsoring politicians equated the Libyan rebels to heroic advocates of western democracy fighting for freedom, these men committed racially motivated beheadings and executions of migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa and filled mass graves with the corpses of their fellow countrymen, Gaddafi loyalists.

Before being sodomized with a combat knife and extra judicially assassinated by foreign funded rebel fighters, Muammar Gadhafi oversaw one of Africa’s most prosperous nations. With an annual economic growth of 10% and extensive programs for social welfare, public healthcare and education, Libya was viewed as a place of relative opportunity with numerous jobs for migrant workers from neighboring countries in the region. Gadhafi advocated the creation of an African Union with it’s own Central Bank and Monetary Fund and a Gold Dinar currency, a move that would directly threaten the financial oligarchy of the Franco-Anglo-American powers that funded his demise.

In the crumbling ruins of the new Libya under hardline Sharia law, the abduction and subsequent atrocities against former Gadhafi loyalists are commonplace. As the revolutionary vigor dies down, the seeds of civil war between tribal lines of the armed rebel factions may foment at any moment. It is upon this unstable foundation that an economic protectorate is being born. In exchange for being brought to power, representatives from Libya’s National Transition Council (NTC) have recently visited their former colonial administrators in London to begin awarding contracts to insidious corporate entities who will be commissioned to rebuild the country's bombarded infrastructure.

The disingenuous Franco-Anglo-American architects of post-Gadhafi Libya are now being given free reign to economically exploit the country they helped devastate. Irrespective of the moral and ethical consequences of their plunder, the colonial administration’s investment of $500 million USD to oust Gadhafi will result in a projected yield of $300 billion USD over a ten-year period. As shares rise for Shell and British Petroleum, staff members of the UK Department for Trade and Investment have begun to establish themselves in Libya. In exchange for French warplanes over the skies of Tripoli, the NTC allegedly promised to grant 35% of its oil contracts to the French oil conglomerate, Total, a corrupted corporate body complicit in the use of forced labor during it’s pipeline operations in Myanmar. Much to the denial of the French Government, the company has been approved to begin onshore oil extraction in the upcoming year.

While places such as Sirte sit in ruin, opportunist American businessmen scour for building contracts. Richard Peters, a construction firm owner whose company is also involved in rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan after the subsequent US-led occupations has advocated the construction of golf courses and a Disney Land, suggesting that the Libyan people could really do with a little entertainment. On a recent trip to Libya, John Laughland from the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation reported that the NTC was fully aware that the Libyan assets frozen in western banks would be unfrozen and redistributed to the nations originally responsible for orchestrating the NATO bombardment. As an economic client state masquerading as a liberated nation, the new Libyan regime owes its entire sovereignty and legitimacy to colonial European powers responsible for fomenting anarchy and civil war within their country.

It is interesting to note that the NTC declined business opportunities to countries opposed to the way NATO interpreted its mandate, such as Germany, China and Russia. Several billion dollars worth of construction and arms contracts between Russia and Gadhafi’s government are now contested and subject to revaluation. In 2010, China was the recipient of 11% of Libya’s oil exports and maintained approximately 30,000 workers in Libya through China’s National Petroleum Corporation. It remains unclear if these nations will be able to fully reclaim their business interests in the country.

While corporate opportunists talk of developing Libya to become the next Dubai, cases of political executions and atrocities against Gadhafi loyalists are a non-issue to the NTC and major media outlets of the West. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen proclaims, “Our military forces prevented a massacre and saved countless lives”, upon the recent discovery of three hundred alleged Gaddafi supporters who were executed with their hands bound. Tragically, the Libyan people themselves fail to recognize that their country has been usurped. Abdullah Naker of the Tripoli Revolutionists Council recently released the following statement, “We've seen many examples in the past when peoples' revolutions were stolen and we are very clear that our struggle is far from over. Gadhafi may still come back – in some other shape or form – and in that case, we will have to take up our weapons and defend our revolution.” Unfortunately, Naker’s proverbial Gadhafi has already returned… and he’s wearing a five thousand dollar business suit.

Understanding North Korea

2011-12-28T02:35:00.000-08:00

Analyzing social engineering through domestic propaganda & official mythology

Written and Photographed by Nile Bowie

These portraits of the Great Leader, Kim il Sung and

the Dear Leader, Kim Jung il are required to

be hung in the home of every Korean by law.

The recent political transition in North Korea has once again focused the world’s attention towards the least accessible society on earth. Its epitaphic spectacle of mourning for the Father Leader, the Great General Kim Jung il, has invited a torrent of conjecture and analysis from the peering spectators of the outside world. While the majority of experts speak of issues such as the possibility of a failed succession, followed by a military coup d’état or a “Pyongyang Spring”, it becomes apparent that so few outlets take the domestic North Korean worldview into account. While all parties exchange wild rhetoric, Washington’s insistent stance on denuclearization is a clear demonstration of its incoherency in diffusing tension, reaching a common resolution with Pyongyang and most importantly, understanding how the regime views itself.

While the country is referred to as the twenty first century’s last bastion of Stalinism, the internal propaganda to which the domestic population is exposed suggests an antipodal ideology intrinsically irreconcilable with the worldview of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Under the surface of immense concrete monuments espousing Communism and the rambling doctrine of Juche Thought, North Korea’s domestic propaganda suggests that its identity is derived from a staunchly race-based brand of nationalism, at times channeling a rhetoric of ethnic superiority, similar to that claimed by the Nazis. While the propaganda designated to foreign scrutiny dryly champion’ principles of self-reliance in vague humanistic themes, as found within the Juche doctrine, the least accessible propaganda intended for internal consumption is a uniquely Korean brand of racist orthodoxy.

“The Korean people are too pure-blooded and therefore

too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.”

The servicemen depicted on this Korean banknote share identical physical characteristics; great pride is taken in the homogenous & mono-ethnic features of the Korean race.

While some dismiss the hysterical outpour of sorrow displayed at the mourning ceremonies of Kim il Sung and Kim Jung il as “dramatized acting”, the intimacy of the people’s emotional attachment to their exalted Parent Leaders is genuine and unparalleled in it’s fanaticism, even in contrast to the fervor displayed in other devoutly religious cultures. Great pride is derived from the unique homogeneity of the Korean race and with that, a heightened sense of innately inborn ethics and lofty virtues. The characteristic virginal innocence of the Korean people is stressed incessantly in its propaganda, necessitating the guidance of an unchallenged parental overseer to protect the race. The internal apparatus of Korean pedagogy is unique in its portrayal of the ruling Kim as a hermaphroditic entity espousing both maternal concern and paternalistic authority. In Korea’s brand of unique Theocratic National Socialism, Kim il Sung is the nation’s Phallic Mother.

“Mono-ethnicity is something that our nation and no other on earth can pride itself on. There is no suppressing the nation’s shame and anger at the talk of ‘a multi-ethnic, multi-racial society’, which would dilute even the bloodline of our people.”

For centuries prior to the peninsula’s division, Korean civilization was firmly grounded in the staunch Confucian ideology of China, a worldview that espouses total compliance to the fatherly authority figure within royal dynasties and individual families. The Korean Peninsula has been historically referred to as “The Hermit Kingdom” because of its self-imposed isolation from mainland China in the seventeenth century, as a means to safeguard it’s internal Confucianism (Koreans saw themselves as superior Confucian practitioners when equated to the Chinese themselves). For centuries, the xenophobic kingdoms of the Korean Peninsula upheld a repressive brand a Confucianism that oversaw virtually no intramural innovation, while the accounts of many historians indicate diminutive loyalty paid towards the concept of a distinct Korean race or nation-state.

“Long live the Democratic People’s Republic Of Korea!”

The unwavering proudness of the Korean ethnic distinction, displayed today in both nations, was cultivated in part under the decree of Japanese fascism during their brutal thirty-five year occupation of the peninsula beginning in 1910. As certain regimes of that period justified their supremacy through the prepotencies of racial pseudo science, which exhorted a claim of predominance due to their hereditary characteristics and epistatic genealogy, the Japanese asserted that their Korean subjects shared a common bloodline and were products of the same racial stock. These racial proclamations sought to imbue its Korean subjects with a strong sense of national pride, suggesting the common ancestry of a race, morally superior to all others. Following the independence of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the internal propaganda apparatus further mythicized their inherent claims to racial superiority and exploited the Korean people’s traditional tendency to conform.

Thousands of years ago, on a beautiful peninsula in the center of East Asia, there emerged one of mankind’s first distinct races, the Korean race. While still evolving from the early Korean to the modern Korean man, the Koreans settled the whole peninsula and much of northeast Asia. All they lacked was a strong leader. At last, in the third millennium BE, a great emperor named Tan’gun united Koreans into a state named Choson, taking Pyongyang as it’s capital. Koreans were thus the first Asians to achieve nationhood, a crucial first stage of civilization.

Though Old Choson shared the peninsula with other, smaller kingdoms, the Koreans were always one people with the same blood, language, culture and lofty morals. In the year 918 they were united once more. Alas, foreign aggressors, resentful of Korea’s autonomy and greedy for it’s natural riches, refused to leave the peace-loving people alone. Only by repeatedly driving back invading forces – from Chinese tribes to Japanese Samurai to American war ships – was the Korean race able to preserve its unique integrity up to the present day.

From the start Koreans were marked by a strong sense of virtue and justice, and their exemplary manners earned then country renown as “The Land of Politeness in the East.” No less famous were their clothes, which were as white as the snow-capped peaks of Mount Paektu. Kind-hearted and well featured, Koreans lived in harmonious villages, respecting the people above them and loving those beneath them. Unfortunately, the effete ruling classes, having fallen under the sway of Confucianism, Buddhism and other pernicious foreign ideologies, proved no match for the imperialists’ schemes, and in 1905 Korea became a Japanese colony.

Burning with righteous anger, the masses rose up on March 1, 1919 to demand national independence. The demonstration was brutally suppressed. Fortunately a great leader had already been born who would guide the nation to its proper place on the world stage…

Images of fresh snowfall and the snow-capped peaks of

Mount Paektu are conjured to exemplify

the pristine quality of Korean racial stock.

Much emphasis is placed on the purity of the race, its homogeneity and its virtuous accomplishments, including defending the motherland against reviled foreign invasion. Unlike modern South Korea, which still remains strongly influenced by Confucian values, the official line in the North rebukes these social systems, branding them as trappings of an over refined ruling class. The personality cult itself is built into the story of racial origins, mythicizing Kim il Sung into a messianic entity, destined to lead to Korean people to independence through Korean Socialism and self reliance. Like the mysticism around Japan’s Mount Fuji during the time of the Japanese occupation, Korea’s highest peak, Mount Paektu, was designated a sacred place and given a central role in official mythology. Kim Jong il’s birth supposedly took place on the peaks of Mt. Paektu beneath twin rainbows in a log cabin during the armed struggle against the Japanese occupiers. His biography reads, "Wishing him to be the lodestar that would brighten the future of Korea, they hailed him as the Bright Star of Mount Paektu."

“The snowstorm rendered Pyongyang – this city steeped in the five thousand year old, jade-like spirit of the race, imbued with proudly lonely life-breath of the world’s cleanest, most civilized people – free of the slightest blemish… covering everything in a thick white veil of purity.”

“The Revolutionary Spirit of Mount Paektu.”

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea may have a communist exterior, however it bares little resemblance to a Marxist-Leninist state in its commitment to improve material living standards; economics are nowhere near a central priority. Its emphasis is on maintaining an ideological state focused on personifying Korean virtues, as embodied in the state’s ruling family. Unlike the communist models of the past, which strove to educate the masses to empower the working classes, the Korean model encourages quite the opposite. Alternatively, the Korean model encourages its subjects to remain in their natural state of intellectual juvenescence and innocence, under the watch of the Great Parent. Official media would often refer to Kim il Sung under the androgynous title of Parent Leader (아버지수령 aboijee seulyong), as his portrayal depicted him as a nurturing maternal figure, fussing over the food his soldiers consumed and making sure they had warm clothing. Internally, there is a stronger effort on indoctrinating the masses with the official fantasy biographies of the Leaders (furthering their messianic character), than there is a serious application of the leaders teachings, such as Juche Thought.

It becomes more likely that the Juche doctrine’s existence, in addition to Kim il Sung’s reputation as a playwright, is used to justify his intellectual credentialism, much like Chairman Mao, a noted poet and creator of Mao Zedong Thought. Kim is feted as a boundless academic under the authorship of Juche law, allowing his government to expediently indite policy, irrespective of criticism. Additionally, while the Juche ideology trumpets autonomy and self-reliance (something that was never economically realized in the history of the nation, as the majority of it’s infrastructural development was funded by the Soviet Union), it provides a convenient facade to outside spectators away from the central ideology of xenophobic race-based nationalism. The ruling Kim is never seen exerting authority or divulging insight to his people, rather stories of him caring for injured children in hospitals and nurturing soldiers on the front lines are far more prevalent, defining “the Great General as the loving parent who holds and nurtures all Korean children at his breast”.

As further evidence of purging the North of cultural ideologies such as Confucianism (still a huge foundation of importance in South Korea), the acclimation of the Korean Worker’s Party as the ‘Mother’ Party lends further credence to this vastly different social climate due to the impossibility of reconciling a maternal authority figure within the male-centric bounds of Confucianism. While Confucius necessitated meticulous self-cultivation through study and condemned race-oriented claims to superiority, the Kim cult encourages its subjects to maintain a perpetual state of childhood in the Parent Leader’s embrace, while remaining naturally virtuous. The maternal appeal is evident in the popular poetry and literature of the country:

Ah, Korean Workers’ Party

At whose breast only

My life begins and ends;

Be I buried in the ground or strewn to the wind

I remain your son, and again return to your breast!

Entrusting my body to your affectionate gaze,

Your loving outstretched hand,

I will forever cry out in the voice of a child,

Mother! I can’t live without Mother!

“When provoking a war of aggression, we will

hit back, beginning with the US!”

Nearly all of Korea’s internal propaganda maintains a derogatory depiction of foreigners, especially of Americans, who are unanimously viewed as depraved vampires of polluted racial stock. Such animosity exists partly due to the degree of devastation experienced during the Korean war, when nearly a third of the North Korean population were killed in US led aerial bombardments, flattening seventy eight cities and showering over fourteen million gallons of napalm on densely populated areas over a three year period. While these events have faded from the historical consciousness of most, far more civilian causalities existed in North Korea in contrast to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Americans are also blamed for the initial division of the peninsula and for preventing it’s reunification, all true to some extent. While these historical events would create deep seeded trauma and xenophobia in any nation, the added influence of a blood-based nationalism created a climate where even allied Chinese troops were regarded with hostility.

Although under a thick climate of excessive race-based nationalism, there was little hesitation in adopting foreign administrative models deemed progressive to the leadership. Just as South Koreans today view the United States as developmentally superior while being morally inferior, the same relationship existed between the Soviet Union and North Korea. While Kim il Sung paid tribute to the Soviet Union’s “superior culture” in his speeches, foreign literature translated into Korean was sparsely available and the performance of Soviet plays were outright prohibited, instead domestic propaganda focused on the virtues of the Korean race and the purity of it’s bloodline. The accounts of diplomats residing in Korea at the time observed how the education system was not oriented to the study of Marxism-Leninism and how the successes of the nation were attributed to the Korean workers and leadership, omitting the huge role of foreigners in the creation of the state itself. Korean women who romantically affiliated themselves with foreign aid workers or diplomats from the Communist Bloc were accused of betraying their race.

The war crimes committed by American soldiers in the Korean war and the subsequent struggle of the Korean people is constantly channelled in domestic propaganda.

As the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea exists today in a virtual time pocket, one of the world’s wealthiest and most developed economies exists just south of the Demilitarized Zone in the Republic of Korea. The contrast couldn’t be any harder to fathom. There was once a time after the Korean War where the North was developmentally superior to the South, decades of Northern propaganda depicted the South as an emaciated Yankee Colony where American soldiers reign freely, killing Korean children for pleasure. While the South Korea public regards the US military presence in their country (and the legitimate cases of rape and unprovoked murder committed by US soldiers) with the highest distain, the South has become one of the world’s flourishing hubs of modernity and economic development.

Kim Jung il is depicted as the

center of public praise in Seoul.

While knowledge of the South’s economic success became well known among citizens of the North, the propaganda apparatus began to openly admit that the Southerners enjoy a higher standard of living, due to Kim Jong il’s military-first policy which allegedly prevented American forces from fomenting additional war on the peninsula. Despite their wealth, North Koreans are taught that their brethren in the South are humiliated living under the yoke of American imperialism and unanimously seek the warm embrace of the Great Leader’s bosom. North Korean leadership has expressed its repugnance towards the South’s unwavering consumerism and the youth’s adoption of decadent foreign trends such as American hip-hop and immoral foreign fashions. As nearly all other formerly State-planned economies have incrementally adopted a market-based system with relaxed controls on foreign entertainment. Doing so for North Korea would have detrimental consequences for its race-based nationalism, which seeks to preserve innate Korean purity. Any adoption of foreign pop culture is viewed as a pollutant to the virtuous consciousness of the people.

“Through all manner of falsehoods and trickery, the imperialists and reactionaries are paralyzing the healthy thinking of the masses while spreading among them bourgeois-reactionary ideas and rotten bourgeois customs. What will happen if we succumb to and fail to block these customs of living that the bastards are disseminating? In a word, we become… incapable of adhering to socialism. Most importantly, we become unable to defend to our death the leadership of the revolution.”

– Kim Jong il

The cost of travel is subsidized for villagers from the

countryside who must annually pilgrimage

to Kim il Sung’s mausoleum in Pyongyang.

Despite the staunch central authority enjoyed by the leading Kim (and potentially the ruling hierarchy in their ability to influence policy, especially under Kim Jong Un), the North attempts to convey its commitment to democracy (at least to it’s own people). Unsurprisingly, the concept of democracy is interpreted differently in North Korea. Due to the leaders irreplaceable qualifications and the unanimity of the people’s desire to hold him in the highest esteem, his rule constitutes the absolute fulfillment of democratic principles. One may be confused as to how any country, which touts Marxism-Leninism as a central ideology, can be associated with theocracy. Karl Marx himself was famous for his view of religion being a characteristic of oppressed creatures, citing “Religion is the opium of the people.” Amidst this supposedly atheist society, Kim il Sung’s mausoleum shares every possible characteristic associable with a sacred place of worship. For North Koreans, the final resting place of Kim il Sung (and now, Kim Jong il) is viewed at the virtual Mecca of their ideology. The aura within this colossal structure of marble and granite is unmistakably pious, the perfect resting place for the posthumous deities responsible for leading the perfect race.

Kim Jong il is depicted as the father of a grieving nation following the death of the Great Leader, Kim il Sung in 1994. The stormy skies foreshadow the difficult times approaching.

The events following North Korea’s first political transition subsequent to the death of Kim il Sung in 1994 were surely the nation’s most unstable period. Kim Jung il was portrayed in much the same way as his father, however substantial economic difficulties ensued due to the recent fall of the DPRK’s biggest creditor, the Soviet Union. Severe flooding, a lack of arable land and a breakdown of the countries food distribution system led to a period referred to as The Arduous March, resulting in nearly one million deaths from hunger-related causes during the worst period of the famine, from 1995 to 1997. As the economy collapsed, social discipline and internal security began to breakdown outside of Pyongyang. Refugees have allegedly reported seeing streets littered with famished corpses of the starving, soldiers robbing civilians in search of food and widespread cannibalism. Kim Jung il managed to maintain his legitimacy in this period by condemning the US-led economic blockade against Korea, citing it as the dominant cause of the famine and depravity. While it is no exaggeration that sanctions are an act of war and have yielded debilitating results in various countries around the world, there are widespread reports of Kim Jong il’s disproportionate use of the countries budget to import gourmet foods for himself and the upper echelons of his government during this period. Much of the food aid received from abroad was redistributed directly to the military.

“Held together not by a mere bond between a leader and his warriors but by the family tie between a mother and her children who share the same blood and breath, Korea will prosper forever. Let the imperialist enemies come at us with their nuclear weapons, for there is no power on earth that can defeat our strength and love and the power of our belief, which thanks to the blood bond between mother and child create a fortress of single-heartedness. Our great Mother, General Kim Jong il!”

While it has been reported that under the rhetoric, the North Korean leadership seeks peaceful relations with the United States (allegedly even advocating the establishment of an American Embassy in Pyongyang), the policy of the United States Government is one pushing unwavering denuclearization of the North’s nuclear artillery. Washington’s insistent stance on disarmament tends to eclipse any concentration on other issues vital to building stability and more importantly, it advertises their inability to understand how the regime views itself. Kim Jong il oversaw the shift from his father’s policy of equal focus on both economic development and military prowess, to the highly touted Songun rule or, military-first policy, under which his legitimacy is derived solely from reaching the status of a nuclear state. The propaganda apparatus had done much to equate this accomplishment as the pride of the nation, depicting it as integral to the national defense of the country and the race. When taking this into account, Washington’s efforts to convince the DPRK to forfeit it’s main source of pride, legitimacy and defense to it’s blood-enemy in exchange for only thin assurances of prosperity and opportunity seem entirely futile.

“In 2006 the Dear General successfully saw the acquisition of a nuclear deterrent that would protect the Korean race forever. Truly, the son had proven himself worthy of his great father.”

The Songun Military First emblem has become a prominent

propaganda motif under Kim Jung il, “Let us loyally

venerate the party’s military-first leadership!”

The recent actions of NATO in Libya (a former nuclear state which complied to disarmament) has only cemented the resolve in Pyongyang, a DPRK spokesmen commented, "It has been shown to the corners of the earth that Libya's giving up its nuclear arms was used as an invasion tactic to disarm the country by sugarcoating it with words like 'the guaranteeing of security' and the 'bettering of relations.' Having one’s own strength is the only way to keep the peace. The way of the Songun (military-first ideology) that we have chosen is proper in a thousand ways, and our self-defense forces act as a precious restraint that blocks war.” It is unfeasible to expect a country that has so strongly advocated it’s own belief system and intellectual isolation from the outside world to voluntarily eliminate its nuclear stockpiles, while it’s biggest adversary (historically responsible for the deaths of a third of the North Korean population), boasting the world’s highest military budget, reigns unhindered in the region.

“Kim Jong Il, great master of politics and illustrious commander born of Heaven, honorably defended the socialist gains, noble heritage bequeathed by the President, by dint of Songun politics despite the collapse of the world socialist system, the demise of the President which was the greatest loss to the nation, the vicious offensive of the imperialist allied forces to stifle the DPRK and severe natural disasters. He turned the DPRK into an invincible political and ideological power in which single-minded unity has been achieved and made it emerge a nuclear weapons state and an invincible military power, which no enemy can ever provoke.”

A painting on the North Korean side of the DMZ reads:

“Our children will inherit a unified peninsula!”

The reunification of the Korean Peninsula is something that the North claims to desperately yearn towards, propaganda promoting eventual reunification is displayed all over the country in an obstinate vigor. Increasingly, the younger generations in South Korea have begun to regard the concept of reunification with indifference and disregard (much to the dismay of the North). Although the circumstances were drastically different, the only comparable reunification scenario in Germany saw citizens in the socialist German Democratic Republic earning a third of what their West German counterparts earned; the income gap is forty times higher in the South than in the North. The contrast between the two Koreas is not only vastly divergent in its economic and infrastructural development, but more crucially, in its cultural awareness and social consciousness. North Koreans remain one of the least exposed populaces in the world, completely restricted from Internet access and foreign travel (domestic travel is heavily restricted as well); their version of the world is purely an illustration of the worldview decreed to them by their state. In contrast, South Korea is one of the world’s most wired countries, boasting the world’s fastest Internet connection speed; it is a leading producer of smart phones, luxury goods, fashion and commercial pop music. The idea of reunifying these two countries would be akin to building a bridge between two different time periods, so perhaps the outside world should place more emphasis on encouraging economic stimulus in the North, so that it can perhaps develop into a more manageable state. At this stage, reunification can be considered a non-statement because each country views its eventual integration completely in its own vision and ideological concept, irrespective of the views of the people on the opposing side.

“We should highly value comrade Kim Jong Un’s military-first leadership and should preserve our socialist system and achievements of our revolutions through bolstering our defense power in every way, Kim Jong Il passed away to our sorrow before seeing the victory in the drive for building a thriving nation, his great desire, but we are under respected Kim Jong Un identical to him. Kim Jong Un's leadership provides a sure guarantee for successfully carrying forward the revolutionary cause of Juche through generations, the cause which was started by the President and led by Kim Jong Il to victory.”

The circumstances of the recent political succession in the North are quite different to that of Kim Jung il’s experience. Today, the DPRK is far more stable than it was during the period of the Arduous March, following the first political succession. Many analysts have made comments suggesting that high-level military officials within the regime would feel ashamed to recognize a 27-year-old as their Supreme Leader (a concept highly incompatible under Confucian practices). As the succession of Kim Jong Un appears to have smoothly shifted without censure, this lends further credence to the cultural purging of Confucianism in the North. Although the Dear Leader has perished, the regime remains unscathed. During this eleven-day mourning period, the North Korea propaganda apparatus has focused more on paying homage to the late Kim Jong il than it has on authoring an elaborate fantasy biography around his son. Unsurprisingly, there is an emphasis on Kim Jong Un being identical to his father, primarily in his military-first approach to governing. According to North Korea’s official news agency, the skies over the sacred Mount Paektu glowed red, while the ice on the volcanic Lake Chon cracked with a with a load roar just minutes prior to Kim’s recent death. While appearances may have changed, Pyongyang’s system is not ideologically shifting focus.

For more on North Korea’s recent succession:

The Changing Face of Pyongyang by Nile Bowie

Many translations in this article have originally

appeared in BR Meyer’s book, The Cleanest Race

Editor’s note: After years of fascination, I had the opportunity to spend eight days in North Korea in September 2011. At the moment, it is only possible to visit North Korea through a highly organized government-sanctioned tour. Perhaps the most incredible thing about my time there was the genuine authenticity of the emotions displayed in ordinary people towards their leaders, who are viewed with the utmost piety. The degree to which the Korean people are motivated and inspired by the State’s official media and mythology is unparalleled in contrast to any other country. I wrote this article in an attempt to define their worldview as I have come to understand it, because it remains one of the world’s least understood (and most fascinating) societies.

The Changing Face of Pyongyang

2011-12-20T06:15:00.000-08:00

Hereditary succession under close scrutiny of elite US policy makers

Written and Photographed by Nile Bowie

Sombre scenes of hysterical crowds mourning the recent death of Kim Jong il before Pyongyang’s immense paintings and concrete monuments have triggered mass speculation regarding the countries future leadership and political climate. Outside the borders of North Korea, Asian financial markets immediately dived due to fears of regional instability. Uncertainty personifies the regime and the legitimacy of its successor, amid concerns of an internal power struggle between senior political and military officials.

Inside the countries borders, however, an eleven-day mourning period to honor the fallen leader has begun. The KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) has reported that the 27-year-old Kim Jong Un will be the official successor of his father, rousing the first glimpses into his official mythobiography intended to inspire his people. The KCNA has further reported, "All the party members, servicepersons and people should remain loyal to the guidance of respected Kim Jong Un and firmly protect and further cement the single-minded unity of the party, the army and the people.”

While little is known about Kim Jong Un, images illustrating his propaganda biography are beginning to surface. He is depicted during his time overseas studying in Switzerland, gazing at the sun rising in the east, suggesting that his motherland, North Korea consumed his thoughts.

North Korea remains the world’s most isolated and enigmatic state, characterized by its hereditary secessionism and immeasurable personality cult. The countries unwavering resilience through famine and economic stagnation have forced Washington policy makers to reassess their original assumptions of regime collapse following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the death of North Korea’s Eternal President, Kim il Sung in 1994. Still, the revolutionary forces working towards the vision of Korean Socialism solider on, with exceptionally persistent unanimity.

On the other side of the world, the policy makers in Washington have long targeted Korean Socialism for evisceration, not without exploiting the threat of war on the Korean peninsula, in a bid to sell enormous quantities of military technology to the government of South Korea, as well as securing a pretext to maintain a vastly unpopular military presence in Japan and South Korea.

As other countries deemed incompliant to the interests of the ‘International Community’ (essentially consisting of the financial oligarchy of England, France and the United States) crumble under military intervention and foreign-funded “people’s revolutions”, the existence of North Korea will surely have no place in the touted vision of “America’s Pacific Century”. A report issued in 2009 by The Council on Foreign Relations, a prominent think-tank instrumental in authoring US foreign policy, has shed light on the advisable American response to the fluctuating climate of Pyongyang.

The document, ostensibly titled "Preparing for Sudden Change in North Korea” attempts to foresee three future scenarios in a post-Kim political climate: a smooth transition under a managed succession, leaving the current ideological infrastructure intact; a contested succession, in which government officials attempt to usurp power and a failed succession, where the new leadership cannot foster it’s legitimacy, triggering a chaos induced collapse.

For anyone who has visited Pyongyang and researched the inner Korean ideological structure, it becomes apparent that the CFR and various American policy makers, who have uniformly pressured the North to denuclearize, have very little understanding of the world view behind the system they wish to dismantle. The CFR Report calls for using 115,000 to 230,000 foreign soldiers to “maintain stability and security” and to assist in “locating and securing Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction” in a collapsed post-regime North Korea.

The CFR document has also highlighted the need to manage legal issues relating to the formation of a compliant transitional government and the forced implementation of market liberalization and privatization to encourage the emergence of a private sector. In an ultimate show of solipsistic condescension, the CFR alludes to the ‘possibility’ of including the North Korea authorities in their transformation of North Korea, page 41 of the document reads, “Institutional change would be much faster and simpler if developed with former North Korean authorities in a framework that might lead to eventual reunification.”

Of course, the very idea of the US Government implementing this CFR-authored foreign policy is not only completely negligent to the American people and their interests, but it is also aptly ridiculous in the fiercely sovereign Korean context. The mere suggestion that their firmly indoctrinated populace would not only accept such measures, but also be complicit in them, is profoundly naive on the part of the CFR. With regards to foreign troops policing North Koreans and the armed reaction it most certainly would provoke, the CFR suggests substantially increasing it’s occupation forces to 460,000 troops, a number more than three times the amount of American troops in Iraq.

The 2009 CFR document titled, "Preparing for Sudden Change in North Korea” suggests sending 115,000 to 460,000 foreign soldiers into a post-regime North Korea to maintain security. North Korea maintains a 1.2 million-person army with four million reserve soldiers, nuclear arms and ballistic missiles. Considering Korea’s long history of abuse under foreign occupation, it is totally unfeasible for the fiercely sovereign North Korean populace to comply with foreign troops ‘maintaining security’ within their borders.

In the event of a failed succession, there are certainly less abrupt ways to diffuse conflict in a post-regime North Korea. In any case, the result of the current succession of Kim Jong Un into the reigns of leadership will be highly debated in the outside world. North Korea is the world’s only communist nation to uphold a system of hereditary succession, partially due to its history of extreme Confucianism, maintained in Korea for hundreds of years prior to the Korean War, which spilt the country.

During that historic period of male-centric Confucian repressiveness, extreme limitations on expression and women’s rights were enforced and the elder male authority figures within royal dynasties and individual families were never questioned. Respect towards the elderly remains a cornerstone of Korean culture, so it is certainly curious that a 27-year-old will usurp a phenomenal position of power in the hyper-traditional North Korea, while presiding over seasoned military generals and government officials.

As wild debates ensue over the future administration in Pyongyang, it is likely that Kim Jong Un will not be a reformer, even if he were, it would not be politically viable to introduce reforms in the early stages of his leadership. As similar propaganda biographies of the “Great Successor” begin to surface, it appears that the system in Pyongyang is not ideologically shifting focus.

If any drastic reforms were to be eventually made, they would loosely follow the Chinese model in the fields of manufacturing, as North Korea would be an attractive destination for the world’s next sweatshop hub, boasting Asia’s lowest wages. The Korean leadership will almost certainly maintain the airtight policy of intellectual isolation, staunchly blocking all access to the Internet and loathed foreign pop cultural trends, which have taken root in South Korea, in a bid to preserve traditional Korean ethics and morality.

While the people of North Korea may continue to view the deceased Kim’s as pious deities, their support for Jong Un is unanimous. While many question the direct experience of Kim Jong Un and his qualifications to lead, many fail to realize that he will be surrounded by hardened senior officials, which will most certainly become trusted political advisors, potentially leading to the strengthening of their political roles and influence. At this stage, stability in the succession is foreseeable, absent a direct threat to North Korea’s existence.

Many question the sincerity of mourners seen hysterically crying on the post-Stalinistic streets of North Korea. Once you have visited Pyongyang and experienced the sincere and intimate praise the masses bestow towards the idols of their leadership, there is little questioning how this country weathered famine, war and isolation. Over sixty years of isolation and social engineering have produced a system where the devotion to Kim il Sung and Korean Socialism is absolutely genuine and completely unwavering. There is no other country of its kind.

Unrest in Moscow – Funded by Washington

2011-12-08T01:37:00.000-08:00

US taxpayer dollars support open Russian political destabilization

by Nile Bowie

In a sane world, any unnecessary pressure that could contribute to a potentially detrimental conflict between world powers would be avoided at all cost. As a testament to the mental health of the policy makers in Washington, an unprecedented amount of agitation has begun to build between Russia and the United States. Russian officials have recently voiced their severe agitation with regards to US military expansion in the former Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe. President Obama has called for the construction of an anti-ballistic missile system on Russia’s doorstep to safeguard against a possible strike from Iran. Initially, Moscow pressed American officials for a guarantee that this AMB system would not be used to target Russia, something that Washington refused to legally guarantee.

In response, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned, “Russia will deploy modern offensive weapons systems in the west and south of the country, thereby ensuring its ability to take out any part of the US missile defense system in Europe.” Medvedev also hinted at Moscow’s withdrawal from the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed in 2010, an initiative to mutually reduce nuclear stockpiles in the United States and Russia.

By opposing the hostile installation of a proxy government in Libya and further sanctions against Syria, Russia has become a thorn in the side of corporate policy makers peddling fictitious rhetoric towards the leadership of any non-acquiescent foreign government. As unrest builds on the streets of Moscow, the corporate media omits a critical fact; millions of US taxpayer dollars have been funneled into opposition-friendly Russian NGOs and electoral watchdogs in an open foreign destabilization bid.

Following the same formula of destabilization, US-backed NGOs and opposition parties are now attempting to ultimately trigger regime change in Russia. Organizations receiving US Government funding and support such as the International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have pledged support for an entity called ‘GOLOS’, responsible for scrutinizing Russian electoral irregularities.

NED and NDI have been major US sponsors of past color revolutions in the region, such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, while the IRI’s website bills its mission in Russia as providing “politically-oriented training and events designed to promote a nationwide grassroots democratic movement” needed to “foster the leadership, institutions and popular support needed to ensure that Russia achieves the democracy it was promised with the fall of communism.” According to the National Endowment for Democracy's website, it has provided GOLOS with substantial financial resources to carry out “press monitoring, monitoring of political agitation, activity of electoral commissions, and other aspects of the application of electoral legislation in the long-term run-up to the elections”.

John McCain’s International Republican Institute has nurtured and promoted the “spontaneous” uprisings in Egypt and Libya this past year and now McCain can hardly contain himself with regards to Russian destabilization. To ward off any skepticism, McCain recently authored the following tremendously irresponsible comment on his twitter page: “Dear Vlad (Vladimir Putin), The Arab Spring is coming to a neighborhood near you.” McCain later deleted the post.

GOLOS has come under heavy fire from Russian lawmakers and observer groups for receiving funding from foreign sources for their political activities. Georgy Fyodorov, chief executive of Russian observer association Civil Control stated GOLOS is “trying to plant doubt and suspicion in people’s minds about the legitimacy of the upcoming election. They have a clear destabilizing tactic; they are carefully conditioning the public to hear some ‘breaking’ news of election fraud. The media will have a field day taping the ensuing clashes between pro-Kremlin and nationalist youth being dispersed by special police. This kind of footage would dilute any remaining trust in Russian elections.”

Russian politicians are not without their own shortcomings and corruption, but when Vladimir Putin recently accused foreigners of funding his political opponents, outlets such as Reuters associated his remarks with “anti-Western rhetoric”. It is not opinion, but fact, that the federally mandated National Endowment for Democracy (NED) contributes millions of US taxpayer dollars to an army of opposition friendly Russian NGOs to pursue “American interests”.

According to the Russian Central Election Commission, Putin’s United Russian Party received 49% of the vote, more than double the votes any other party received, second only to the Communist Party at 19%, the largest gain since the fall of the USSR. In any allegedly democratic society, the majority vote of Putin’s party would pass as a clear victory. Interestingly enough, ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a stern advocate of global government, has declared Russia’s latest election results as ‘null and void’.

While speaking at a conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton championed the work of GOLOS and insinuated that the Russia Government was not committed to “the rule of law” before boldly declaring the Russian elections to be “unfree and unfair”, insisting that “Russian voters deserve a full investigation of electoral fraud and manipulation". As representatives of the tremendously hypocritical US Government lecture others on their commitments to the rule of law, lest we forget the well-documented crimes which took place during the US Presidential elections in both Florida in 2000 and in Ohio during 2004 to bring the Bush Regime into power.

The bold statements of Clinton and McCain show their total ineptitude towards even humoring the idea of diffusing conflict. While the long-term results of this election may be hard to determine at this stage, few would disagree that the mass manipulation of the electoral process in a nuclear armed and sovereign is the antithesis of a ‘commitment to the rule of law’.

For more on this subject, please visit:

Land Destroyer: US Attempts to Overthrow Russian Government!

Color Revolution for Russia? By Daniel McAdams

Mass Protests in South Korea against US Free Trade Agreement

2011-12-03T00:19:00.000-08:00

Written by Nile Bowie

Demonstrations have erupted on the streets of the South Korean capital of Seoul calling for the resignation of President Lee Myun-Bak. Thousands of demonstrators rallied against the publicly loathed free trade agreement with the United States, which is widely perceived by the public to be a catalyst for the stagnation of local businesses and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises in both South Korea and the United States.

The provisions of the treaty aim to eliminate 95% of each nation's tariffs on goods within five years. The flood of imported US agricultural goods in the Korean market is expected to undercut domestically produced products, causing the total decimation of the domestic Korean farming and agriculture market.

Within the United States, tariffs on automotive products from Korea will be slowly phased out. An unfettered surge of Korean auto imports to the United States will essentially be a nail in the coffin for the dwindling automotive manufacturing base within the United States, threatening an already dismal job market.

The KORUS FTA calls for protectionist policies designed to increase the privileges of transnational conglomerates and multinational financial services, thus systematically encouraging offshoring and global outsourcing, an initiative that droves of Koreans have aggressively demonstrated against for years. Although the collective American public seems to be ill informed about the effects of the treaty, the story is front-page news in Korea.

In a country like South Korea, where America’s involvement in its domestic affairs is widely perceived as wholly self-serving and parasitic, the public discourse against the free trade agreement is paramount. The Korean public has been enraged in recent years by cases of rape and murder committed by US solders stationed in American military bases throughout South Korea.

In the past decade, the South Korean public has held massive demonstrations opposing the importation of American beef products, the inclusion of Korean soldiers stationed in Iraq, the existence of extensive US military bases and personal on their soil and the reforms of the WTO to the domestic agricultural sector.

Public discontent remains unwavering towards President Lee Myun-Bak, a man who has steered his country into the orbit of globalist financiers and staunchly reversed the efforts of previous administrations to build a conducive relationship with North Korea.

It is unclear how the Myun-Bak administration will fair in the upcoming South Korean elections when his growing opposition views him as a puppet of foreign corporate interests. There seems to be little debate among the masses of both nations that the KORUS FTA is anything but a race to the bottom for the majority of society.

Myanmar: Sham Democracy For The People

2011-12-01T03:36:00.000-08:00

Written by Nile Bowie

Myanmar's opposition movement
is heavy on rhetoric and low on substance.

Riding on the back of the Obama Administration’s recent foreign policy ‘successes’, such as the extrajudicial execution of Muammar Gadhafi and the announcement of a permanent US military presence in Northern Australia, It appears yet another foreign funded opposition movement is gaining favorable momentum towards American interests. Although the countries newly elected civilian government has released thousands of political prisoners and made tremendous reforms towards political censorship in recent months, this will not be enough to appease the Western investors who have stood behind Myanmar’s highly touted and magnanimous opposition party.

While the majority of Americans may be unable to locate to Myanmar on a map, the US Government has spent millions training political dissidents and funding the countries opposition movement, headed by Aung San Suu Kyi. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is currently on a landmark visit to Myanmar with a list of demands in hand. Ironically, while the US Senate moves on a bill allowing American citizens to be indefinitely detained in domestic detention centers, Clinton has come to Myanmar to trumpet human rights.

Myanmar’s opposition movement led by western educated Suu Kyi has been accredited by dozens of organizations and think tanks, instrumental in influencing American foreign policy. Suu Kyi received a standing ovation and unprecedented praise when she phoned into the 2011 Clinton Global Citizen Awards, an event sponsored by transnational corporations and lined with the despotic corporate-financier interests of Wall Street and the City of London.

Her campaign historically parallels other opposition movements, heavy in rhetoric and low on substance. Her movement’s credibility exists solely due to the corporate media’s portrayal of her as an unfettered “beacon of freedom”, comparable to the inspiring tale used to garner public support for Barack Obama during his electoral campaign. Although her brand may be easily recognizable, few have examined the policies of her party, The National League for Democracy.

The 1989 manifesto of her party (viewable here) is a document that essentially calls for transnational corporations and globalists to manage the innumerably vast supply of natural resources in her country and the abolition and privatization of all nationalized industries. A 2006 report released by Burma Campaign UK (viewable here) details the tremendous financing contributed by the federally supported National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

Just hours ago, Suu Kyi announced her aspirations to participate in the upcoming elections during a teleconference with the insidious Council on Foreign Relations. As scores of well meaning NGOs and women’s rights groups champion this public relations laden personality cult, there is no debate regarding whose agenda Suu Kyi tirelessly serves.

The reality of the situation is that gaining a foothold in resource-rich Myanmar would reap exorbitant profits, a country on China’s doorstep. After decades of mismanagement, the government of Myanmar’s economic policy is finally beginning to breathe an air of coherency. Under the governance of Suu Kyi, one can expect only crony-capitalism of the looming Fortune 500, at it’s best.

As Clinton waddles around the capital of Naypyidaw with her security team and television crew, the government of Myanmar must remain vigilant in asserting its sovereignty to foreign powers. Due to the crippling effect of sanctions, which have blocked incoming medical aid and foreign trade, the government’s cooperation is a bullet that must be bitten. Lest we forget, Suu Kyi herself has called for these damaging sanctions to remain.

For further reading about the situation in Myanmar, please see: Fertile Ground For Washington Sponsored Revolution

SOMALIA: FAMINE FOR PROFIT AND THE EAST AFRICAN FOOD CRISIS

2011-08-13T02:21:00.000-07:00

Written by Nile Bowie

Photographed by James Nachtwey

Few parts of the world aptly fit the description of hell better than Somalia’s crumbling capital city, Mogadishu; a nation ravaged by imperialism, domestic instability and economic sabotage from foreign forces. Parades of malnourished Africans queuing up to receive rations are trumpeted in thirty second news pieces on most mainstream media outlets, of which offer embarrassingly insubstantial examples of journalism with little explanation for such images of unparalleled inequality, past the effects of droughts, while never missing the opportunity to highlight the threat of al-Qaeda. While it cannot be denied that the current droughts in East Africa, which have been reported to be the most dire in sixty years, have been negatively exacerbating the climate of food availability in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia; the mammoth aid conglomerates which ‘shake their coin cup’ for incoming donations from the predominately cash-strapped civilian populations of the ‘developed’ world and the reporting mainstream media outlets consistently fail to maturely scrutinize the basis for such economic dysfunction in East Africa, responsible for the starvation of thousands of people. In Somalia’s case (a nation once self sufficient in it’s food production), the ‘economic medicine’ of the International Monetary Fund and the behest of colossal oil robber-barrens have contributed far more devastation than droughts towards producing the images of deprived and inebriated bodies you see on television.

While a percentage of people around the world enjoy the supersized culture of fast food Globalization in our age of 3D HDTV, quadruple-decker cheese burgers and senseless commodity overproduction, three billion people or nearly half the world’s population individually sustain themselves on less than two USD per day amidst an annual surge in the global price of food, which has increased by thirty seven percent since last year. The loathsomely bias individuals which comprise the International Community, of whom are capable of feeding the entire African content with the loose change in their couch cushions, use today’s reports of legitimate or fabricated human rights abuses in Africa and all over the world as a pretext for exercising avenues of modern imperial conquest in the morally bankrupt pursuit of private geopolitical, economic and militarily strategic gain; this should lend serious credence to the motivations of East African aid supplied by Western Political & Financial Institutions, which have contributed to the very economic genocide responsible for requiring such aid to begin with. The area designated as modern day Somalia is a region believed to have produced the first Homo sapiens, who were responsible for crafting vast anthropological treasures and archeological artifacts, evidence of a highly sophisticated ancient civilization. The region once thrived as a bustling hub of commerce and lucrative international trade, Somali merchants of the time were chieftains of commercial exchange between Asia, Persia and Africa during the time of the Ming Dynasty and were even responsible for influencing Chinese linguistics during the period. Today, the people of Somalia are regarded as little more than ants at a picnic for the Intelligence Agencies and Corporate Interests that seek to occupy this strategically located area. The weapon of choice against them is man made famine.

Somalians belong to a single homogenous ethnic group comprised predominately of nomadic tribesmen who place great importance on poetry and other oral traditions, they are historically characterized by fiercely striving for independence against foreign forces during the Scramble for Africa, most notably from the imposing agents of the British Empire in league with Christian Ethiopians and Italian Fascists in the late 19^th century in their pursuit to control Somalia’s trading ports and strategic coastline. The religious cleric turned patriotic leader of the day, Sayid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan led several successful military ventures using guerilla armies of ethnically Somali fighters from across the Horn of Africa, which overpowered British imperial forces on several occasions. While its surrounding peers had been colonized or utilized as proxy forces, as such in Ethiopia, Hassan fathered the Dervish State in modern day Somalia built on the pillars of homogenous, linguistic and religious unity and national self sufficiency, which had remained the only independent Muslim State on the entire African continent. Like today, any governance that resists the command of Imperialists (now called ‘Globalists’) are dispensed militarily; the British launched the first modern airstrike in Africa against Dervish military bases in Somalia, effectively crushing the resistance of the rightful indigenous inhabitants for their own private objectives of which have continued to the present day in more sophisticated ways.

Somalia was once a progressive developing nation built on homogenous unity and agricultural self-sufficiency, which encouraged gender equality, the emerging roles of women in military and production, and the banning female circumcision.

With total disregard for anthropological requirements and ethnic distinctions of the people within the areas of foreign territory they carved up, the British invaders ceded regions populated by ethnic Somalis such as Haud and Ogaden over to their ally, the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik in 1948; later, crippling regional conflict would ensue in regaining these stolen territories. The geographical borders of the first Somali Republic, which achieved independence in 1960, were literally drawn by British and Italian forces. Mohamed Siad Barre declared Somalia a Socialist state after a military coup in ’69 and attempted to build a nation in Hassan’s vision of state unity and self-sufficiency through cooperative farming and nationalization programs of industry and mass production. While life in the times of Socialist Somalia was far from glamorous, it was absolutely blissful compared to the current state of affairs within the Horn of Africa. At the time Somalia was agriculturally stable and actively implementing sweeping public works programs and working to dramatically increase the nations literacy rate through urban and rural programs, while introducing the first Latin-based orthography of the Somalian dialect as the national language of education. The Islamic government exercised very progressive views towards improving the influence of women in society by offering unisex education and creating laws forbidding female circumcision, woman were actively recruited in the military and female employment in factory production was encouraged. Barre supported the model of Greater Somalia, which sought to regain ethnic Somali territories handed out by the preceding colonial administrations that would encompass Somalia, Djibouti, Ogaden (Ethiopia) and the North Eastern Province (Kenya); these aspirations led to the Ogaden War with Ethiopia, the superpowers of the time aided and funded this conflict in exchange for constructing military bases, thus effectively reducing the Horn of Africa to pliant client states and of the Cold War.

The Soviet Union was closely allied with Barre’s government and supplied vast military and economic aid, allowing Somalia to build up the largest armory on the continent before switching strategies and backing Ethiopia, which was synonymous for being an American proxy state prior to a military takeover which led to the rise of Ethiopian Marxist leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam. Somalia turned to the United States for aid and the resulting conflicts killed thousands of Africans and severely weakened Ethiopia and Somalia, as their lands were used as the inconsequential frontlines of foreign forces. Following the Somalia’s military withdrawal in the Ogaden War, the economy was crippled due to disproportionate military spending and looming foreign debt. In the face of increasing public discontent with Barre’s government and the loss of aid from the Soviet Union, Somalia called to the West; unfortunately for the Somali people, The International Monetary Fund answered. As part of the IMF’s loan protocol, the borrower country must accept the conditions stipulated within structural adjustment policies, thus requiring the suspension of public work programs, investments in education and nearly any outlet which gives priority towards improving people’s conditions and standards of living. Structural adjustment programs are designed to pry countries open to predatory capital, often purging the authority of national companies over the management of the resources in their own lands; these schemes of the IMF and other financial institutions are designed to secure the indebtedness the borrower country to total dependency on further loans and foreign aid; directly attacking national sovereignty and practices of self sufficiency which the Somalis gave their lives to protect.

Following the IMF-imposed austerity measures, Somalia began to grovel and churn by facing food shortages, record inflation and currency devaluation, to a point where a simple meal at a restaurant required paying with bundles of currency notes. Barre’s increasingly irrelevant leadership settled further loan agreements with the Paris Club and International Development Association, which required the Government to sell off vital public systems, such as the countries’ electricity generators, which cast Mogadishu into a nightly darkness. As the situation in Somalia became increasingly unstable, Ethiopians armed and funded various militia clans such as the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and the Somali National Movement, which ousted President Barre after twenty-two years of military rule. Warring foreign funded clans sought to legitimize themselves as Barre’s successor, leading to a Civil War in ‘91, which plunged the nation into anarchy. James Bishop, the former United States ambassador to Somalia stated, “There is competition for water, pasturage, and cattle. It is a competition that used to be fought out with arrows and sabers, now it is fought out with AK-47’s”. Since that time, the nation of Somalia has been largely without a stable Government, after decades of intervention from foreign forces, the Somali people have been brought to their knees. In the present day, Somalia is trumpeted as an emerging front in the ever expanding and oxymoronic War on Terror. Much of the country is under the control of Al Qaeda linked militia group, ‘Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen’, simply known as Al-Shabaab. Under further examination of the International Communities’ engagements in Somalia, the goal of cleansing the land of its indigenous inhabitants becomes glaringly obvious in its brazen criminality.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF MAN-MADE FAMINE & THE CARTELIZATION OF FOOD

“The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.”  - Initiative for the United Nations ECO-92 EARTH CHARTER

The key policy makers, in which the International Community is comprised of, are among the worst examples of human beings our globalized civilization has to offer; through the lenses of their own superiority complex, these individuals view the Third World as a place designated for their personal plunder, populated with third-rate individuals and useless eaters who are unworthy to consume the nourishments produced on their own indigenous lands. Presently, Somalia is weathering consecutively severe droughts, which prevail in the regions of southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle, partially controlled by jihadist militia group, Al-Shabaab. Traditionally, due to its harsh geographical climate, Somalia has always been a pastoral and rural economy of barter between nomadic herdsmen and resident agriculturalists. Despite persistent droughts, Somalia maintained agricultural self-sufficiency throughout the 1970’s and implemented programs, which led to sizeable commercial pastoral development. The IMF-World Bank intervened in the 80’s and set the stage for an agricultural crisis through economic reforms, which diluted the delicate exchange relationship between pastoralists and small farmers, in their relative nomadic and sedentary economies.

In order to service debt owed to the Paris Club and other Washington-based financial institutions, harsh austerity measures were imposed on the former Somali Government, which reinforced national dependency on imported grain, further contributing to bankruptcy and the need for additional loan supplements. Food aid increased by fifteen times between the mid seventies to mid eighties and continued to rise by thirty-one percent per annum. Sedentary agricultural producers were ruined by the IMF stipulated increase of commercial imports, traditionally consumed locally grown crops such as maize and sorghum were replaced with cheap foreign wheat and subsidized US grain in an effort to increase Somalia’s dependency - not its sovereignty. Prices of fuel, fertilizer and farm inputs rose exorbitantly following periodic IMF imposed devaluations of the Somali Shilling, which crushed the nations purchasing power and severely impacted domestic agricultural producers and irrigated farming. The real causes of impoverishment in Somali farming communities were caused by deregulation of the grain market, currency warfare and the influx of foreign food aid, such donations were made with the expectation that Somalia’s best-irrigated farmlands would be used to harvest fruits, vegetables, oilseeds and cotton, not for domestic consumption, but for export into lucrative grocery market shelves in the First World. Donors were able to take control of the entire budgetary process by providing food aid because its domestic sale became the principal source of revenue for the state.

“Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the Third World, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.”- Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize recipient & former US Secretary of State

In a country where fifty percent of the population is comprised of nomadic pastoralists, the role of camels and other livestock is integral to survival and wealth procurement; prior to the IMF’s involvement in Somalia, livestock contributed to eighty percent of export earnings. Ultimately, creating dependency is profitable and securing such relationships is the ultimate goal of a lending institution, loans are distributed attached to structural adjustment polices for that reason. The World Bank encouraged the privatization of livestock veterinary services, a private market for veterinary drugs, and administered the commercialization of water during times of drought, while effectively dissolving the functions performed by the government’s own Ministry of Livestock; thus forcing a traditional exchange economy onto a privatized for-profit system, not catered towards the needs of nomadic herders in remote pastoral areas, which yielded devastating results by wiping out herds and any semblance of the pastoralist economy. Bretton Woods’ institutions oversaw the restructuring of government budgeting and expenditure, which prevented the government from independently utilizing the available domestic resources, leading to an eighty five percent decline in agricultural expenditures from levels in the mid seventies.

The economic restructuring programs implemented by the IMF-World Bank have devastated the practices of nomadic pastoralists and driven them to impoverished austerity. The traditional exchange economy was undone; grain producers who bartered their grain for livestock were ruined as grazing herds faded from starvation, which contributed to dwindling foreign exchange earnings from international beef exports. It is no surprise that the governments once reasonably sound economic and social programs began to deteriorate. According to research published by Michael Chossudovsky, government expenditure on health in ’89 had declined by seventy eight percent in comparison with their relative mid seventies levels and the levels of recurrent annual expenditure on education was only four USD per student, when previously the budget in ’82 allowed for eighty two USD to be allocated per student, amidst a forty one percent decrease in school enrollment, resulting in the relative collapse of the education system. The average public sector wage was reduced to three USD per month and Somalia’s debt-servicing obligations represented a bleak 194.6 percent of export earnings, the situation became hopeless.The World Bank had permitted a structural adjustment loan for seventy million USD in ‘89, but was later frozen due to hemorrhaging economic performance; even if the country were to take new loans in an attempt to repay their debts, Somalia has been taken hostage by predatory capital, debt servicing and structural adjustment. Traditional economies in hundreds of different countries are under attack from the IMF; famines in the present day are not an outcome of a food shortage but the result of economic restructuring, unaffordability and global oversupply.

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” - Ted Turner, CNN founder and donor to the United Nations

The work of the IMF, World Bank and other Bretton Woods financial institutions is to secure the handcuffed dependency of the borrower country to world markets and the destruction of food security; environmental conditions and drought foster additional vulnerability towards food insecurity, as seen presently unfolding in the Horn. Somalia was cast further into economic dysfunction due to the subsidization of duty-free beef and dairy products, imported from the European Union; pastoral farmers are prevented from traditionally procuring wealth from their herds because low quality meat products imported from the EU sell for half the price of domestically produced product. Food aid to sub-Saharan Africa has increased more than seven times since 1974 and commercial grain imports have flooded local markets and more than doubled in availability in countries known to be agriculturally self-sufficient, such as Zimbabwe, where the population was subjected consuming tree bark during a food crisis in 1992, while their fertile lands were used for cultivating tobacco exports to service foreign debt. Financial institutions apply debilitating restructuring to the economies of borrower countries to effectively turn them into breadbaskets for cash crops and other money harvests, using the highest quality farmlands available to cultivate tobacco crops for export, while simultaneously flooding the local market with subsidized foreign grain and meat products; creating a deliberate express route to creating poverty and unraveling local economies. In addition to implementing crippling initiatives of austerity in the rural development, public works and agricultural infrastructure projects of African countries, their shameless pursuit of turning a profit has led the World Bank to trumpet the commoditization of water, which does nothing but actively contribute to food insecurity and famine in arid climates.

IMF-World Bank imposed structural adjustment is the ultimate attack on sovereignty and any local system of exchange that bypasses the global market. The ensuing economic dysfunctions are not a terrible coincidence or a result of mismanagement; they are designed to create dependency through Malthusian policies, market sabotage and contrived famines, resulting in intentionally culling the population of the developing world, out of fear that their indigenous resources and sovereign economies may potentially yield a bountiful amount of wealth and independent development. According to research conducted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the global price of food has skyrocketed more than two hundred and forty percent since 2004; the unwarranted upward mobility of such necessities must not be naively dismissed as market fluctuations, the price of food is directly manipulated by key constituents of the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss food cartel, comprised of a dozen pivotal companies, assisted by another three dozen, which literally hold a monopoly over the world's food supply under the nauseating influence of the inbreeding feudalists within the Royal British House of Windsor. Never before in history have such powerful oligarchs been so blatant in expressing their advocacy for depopulation. Their control of the food supply is enough to loose sleep over.

“To really reduce population, quickly, you have to pull all the males into the fighting and you have to kill significant numbers of fertile age females The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa, or through disease, like the Black Death.”  - Thomas Ferguson, US State Department Office of Population Affairs

The work of the Windsor-led food cartel directly serves to influence the deaths of millions of people annually, by means of starvation through man-made famines. The cartel is comprised of six leading private grain producing companies: Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and Born, André, and Archer Daniels Midland, which control the majority of the world’s grain, wheat, corn, oats, rye, sorghum, barley, meats, dairy, oils, fruits, vegetables, sugars and spices. In an effort to dominate the world’s natural resources, the institution of the House of Windsor has worked to centrally focus control over energy distribution, management of mineral/resources and the cultivation of food. Extensive research published by Richard Freeman in the Executive Intelligence Review thoroughly illustrate the central control of the food cartel, of whom have established four main export blocks used to fuel the global food economy. The regional breakdown of market control includes the United States, the European Union, the Commonwealth Nations such as Australia, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Latin America (Argentina & Brazil); Although these regions account for much less than a quarter of the world population by today’s estimates, they are used to grow produce and other food products, which cheaply pour into the markets of the other 80% of the world.

While it is common for countries producing bountiful and nutritious food to become active in the export market, the four focus regions of the cartel were given unbridled priority as world distributors, effectively instilling forced dependency in the restructuring Third World, which fell into the trap of accepting adjustment loans from the very foreign forces which plundered them in colonization; the countries outside the four export regions could either import from the global market, or starve. War was waged against the independent farm economies of the four export regions, sparring nothing outside of corporate central control. In 1976, Russia was sold 12.4 million tons of grain produced in North America by Cargill and Continental, creating a grain shortage in America and Canada at time. Just because the food is grown in the four export regions, does not entitle those countries to guaranteed food security, or mean the ruling governments of those countries have any authority over the destination or prices of the products, because they are harvested and distributed by totally private entities who make their decisions based on profit, not merit or moral supremacy. In studies conducted by the Trade Analysis Branch of the US Department of Agriculture in 1994, the export regions account for eighty eight percent of the world’s wheat exports, when it comprised only thirty nine percent of the world’s wheat production of 522.4 million tons in ’94 – ’95; although these regions came nowhere close to producing the largest quantities of product, their preeminence is forced by the food cartel through flooding any semblance of a ‘free market’.

“AIDS and other diseases will be the COVER STORY for the decimation. The real causes will be starvation, contaminated water (which has existed for a long time), toxic vaccines given to people who are already immune-suppressed, wars, and of course, stolen farmland.“ - John Rappoport, author of Depopulation and HIV

The direct control apparatus of the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss food cartel are to blame for these tragic fluctuations within this intentionally Malthusian food system. Research published in the Executive Intelligence Review by Joseph Brewda highlight a memorandum authored by the openly eugenic Henry Kissinger, vainly discussing the “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests”. Kissinger, who was the former US Secretary of State during the Nixon and Ford administrations, channels the racial pseudo science of the 1940’s by proposing the implementation of a covert plan to reduce population growth in selected developing countries through targeted birth control, war and famine due to the threat of population growth in the former colonial sector, which was subsequently adopted as official policy by President Gerald Ford in 1975, former National Security Advisor and then-CIA Director George Bush senior would be commissioned to implement the policy. Kissinger gloats, "Capital investments for irrigation and infrastructure and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many least developed countries. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food. It is questionable, whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis" before subsequently warning of a "large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades, a kind the world thought had been permanently banished”.

Mr. Kissinger is well aware that these anomalies are not products of backwards peoples, unable to feed themselves in their own countries, but orchestrated by deliberate financial policies designed to ‘stabilize’ populate levels in potentially competitive and more resource-rich countries. The sheer human suffering being experienced in the Horn of Africa right now is solely a product of decades of Malthusian policies, which harbor food as a weapon. Ironically, the authors of genocidal policies and Malthus advocates never volunteer themselves to starvation; perhaps Mr. Kissinger should experience the receiving end of his population stabilization, although one assumes he wouldn’t fair too well without two thousand-dollar bottles of champagne, foie gras and gourmet truffles. Most people assume the United Nations, with it’s World Food Program and ‘peacekeeping soldiers are on a bold mission to make the world a better place, however these agencies are at the forefront of implementing policies of central control by trumpeting genetically modified organisms, vaccination and sterilization programs in the developing world under the guise of sustainable development, orchestrated by people who can only be described as eco-extremists.

U.N. ENFORCING MASS POPULATION REDUCTION THROUGH VACCINES & GMO

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist.”

- Page 942 of ‘ECOSCIENCE’, authored by current US Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, John P. Holdren

Creating a solution to the current problems within the Horn of Africa is not an issue of unwillingness in utilizing the bountiful available resources of the unimaginably wealthy cabal of bankers, corporate profiteers, monarchs and the general ruling class, all of whom who can contribute such insignificant amounts of their relative fortunes to drastically offset this maltreatment. This is an issue of intentional depopulation, brought you to by the agencies administering the framework for a sounder ecological and sustainable world, which can only be administered through population reduction, primarily in the Third World. Over the past several years millions of dollars have been invested into slick corporate public relations campaigns attempting to subtly condition the public to what appears to be at first, a more reasoned consumer consciousness relating to the environmental impacts of human consumption and unwavering capitalism. While it may be reasonable to conserve water and adopt more ecological forms of waste disposal and packaging, the unwarranted flow of green propaganda is designed to centralize control of nations through a monogovernmental system, in addition to further transferring wealth between the public and the ruling class, by delicately molding public opinion into accepting new forms of taxation, such as a carbon tax.

The world being brought in by the International Community is one where total control is implemented under the guise of environmentalism, where human beings are viewed as liabilities and inadequate pollutants of carbon, of whom, must be culled through policies of enforced genocide and population reduction. The United Nations Population Division released a policy brief in 2009, which literally begins with the phrase, “What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?”. Another mention by the United Nations Population Fund in it’s 2009 State of the World Population Report entitled, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate“ goes on to say “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendants. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time” and also “Strong family planning programmes are in the interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader welfare concerns”. These eco-extremists attempt to rationalize reducing population levels through declaring carbon as a pollutant, effectively accusing human beings or carbon-based forms of life as ‘unsustainable’.

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill, but in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap of mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

- Page 104 of ‘The First Global Revolution’, authored by The Club of Rome, a prominent global think tank consisting of current and former Heads of State, UN bureaucrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe

These accusations of the International Community spiriting a genocidal consensus are not speculation and cannot be immaturely dismissed as ridiculous conspiracy theories, although the proponents of such policies are quite vocal of their intentions, one only has to observe the dire inequalities of the human condition around the world to aptly reach the conclusion that the architecture of our governing institutions are not designed to benefit the common man. Currently, there is a food war being raged against the people of the Horn of Africa and Somalia; the United States is currently working to block international food assistance to areas controlled by Al-Shabaab resistance forces. There is an internationally recognized Somalian Transitional Government, heavily influenced by the United States; the Americans have proposed limiting the distribution of incoming international aid strictly to areas in control of their own Somali proxy leaders, which effectively means starvation for about three million people, since only a few neighborhoods in Mogadishu would receive supplies, amidst an annually dwindling aid program; U.S. food relief to the UN’s Somali operations has been steeply declining since 2009.

The UN’ bankrolled World Food Program is happy to

take your money to assist you in ‘saving lives’, the organization

has syphoned $160 million dollars of aid money to UN

employees, delivered 12% of food aid to intended poverty

stricken areas of Ethiopia, used foreign aid donations to

purchase arms and inflated shipping and

trucking fees up to 300% over the actual cost.

The current Somali Transitional Government can aptly be described as American puppets, which have exhibited incapabilities in garnering public support, defending themselves without the aid of foreign forces and have essentially failed to maintain the infrastructure of a functioning government. The actions of the US Government in the Horn have been a total failure and have only contributed to further civil chaos and domestic instability. Partnered with agencies such as the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), the Somali people are being starved in submission, while the West is refusing to authorize the release of grain piled high in Kenyan warehouses because American forces have failed to install a handpicked ruler can who adequately defend against resistance forces. While they have no problem exploiting the genuine morality and concern of ordinary individuals by fishing for donations to help save lives, the WFP has been accused of syphoning one hundred and sixty million dollars of aid money to UN employees and into arms trading deals with Islamic militants and hired defense contractors by the United Nation’s own Monitoring Group. Elsewhere in Georgia, the WFP proved to be totally incompetent by failing to provide a daily minimum diet to prevent malnutrition and starvation, after food rations were not adjusted during a harsh winter in ’09, in addition to providing terrible quality flour, which produced inedible hardened bread.

"I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history,  but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in  the number of game animals and the need to adjust  the cull to the size of the surplus population."  - Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh,  patron of the World Wildlife Fund

The racial pseudo science of the 20^th century resulted in the extermination of millions of people, motivated by the elimination of undesirable elements within the population. Eugenics is coined as the study of the hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding; these maniacal ideas have stealthily transitioned into the 21^st century, where extraordinarily influential bodies such as the United Nations and other prominent think tanks lined with bureaucrats, government officials, scientists and global business leaders have explicitly called for reducing the world population, strictly cordoning areas of human habitat into designated population zones and the transition of environmentalism into the faith of the future. The vapid performance of the United Nations and its subsidiary organizations to adequately contribute to alleviating food-related disasters and their efforts to influence a reasoned system for food pricing and distribution only gives credence to the fact that although their organizations may market themselves on morally superior concepts such as global harmony and sustainability, individuals within these institutions themselves envision a single sterilization state, within a world absent of the majority of humans.

One may find it curious why bodies such as USAID, the UN’s World Food Program and many other NGO’s concerned with ‘reproductive rights’ still provide food relief to crisis zones if their true intent was the eventual depopulation of the regional occupants; In the Somalian context, creating dependency has been reached through the commoditization of food aid from the outside world, like the situation in Somalia, entire nations can be brought to grovel in impoverishment through economic restructuring and the bounties of ‘free trade’ brought to you by the World Trade Organization (WTO). In addition to reports of the WFP delivering only 12% of food aid to intended poverty stricken areas of Ethiopia, using foreign aid donations to purchase arms and of inflating shipping and trucking fees up to 300% over the actual cost (reflecting the total corruption of private organizations which hold billion dollar contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan), the organization, backed up tirades of UN collectivists actively attempt to coerce governments to adopt transgenic genetically modified organisms and mass vaccination schemes as the only contributable aid or face being cut off and to receive nothing, after all, beggars can’t be choosers. In 1998, the mammoth American pesticide and GM-producing corporation, Monsanto authored an appeal entitled ‘Let The Harvest Begin', which proposed the only hope in alleviating the plight of the world's poor is through force-feeding GMO seeds without prior subjection to independent safety testing, onto African crops and distributed the document to the various African Heads of State, amidst staunch debate and objections from American and European consumers, healthcare experts, environmentalists and food retailers.

"The FDA has placed the interest of a handful of biotechnology companies ahead of their responsibility to protect public health. By failing to require testing and labeling of genetically engineered foods, the agency has made consumers unknowing guinea pigs for potentially harmful, unregulated food substances.” - Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA)

In response to Monsanto’s appeal, representatives from every African nation except South Africa issued a collective response, stating “We strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us. We think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millennia, and that it will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves". Elsewhere, such as in Hungary, nearly one thousand acres of maize found to have been grown with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed in an effort to rid the country of Monsanto’s GMO products; Peru has also recently issued a decade-long ban on GMO production. Monsanto has been systematically blocking researchers from using its patented gene modified GMO seeds to conduct independent research into the potentially debilitating health effects of consuming such products, the company is also the forerunner in attempting to privatize the world seed supply in an attempt to create a world where 100% of all commercial seeds are genetically modified and patented, the company already owns 90% of the world’s patents for GMO seeds including cotton, soybeans, corn, sugar beets and canola.

Monsanto has literally taken organic seeds from farmers to create genetically engineered copycat versions, promising higher yields and effectively committing bio-piracy by retaining all intellectual property rights of the seed; the company invested eighteen million USD to develop technologies to monopolize nature, which directly attack food sovereignty by creating seeds which only yield a single harvest and die before the second generation in an effort to force farmers in developing countries to abide by their agreements to continually purchase the junk seeds, resulting in the accumulation of enormous debt; in India, accounts of over two hundred thousand indebted farmer suicides have been reported. Ironically enough, a large amount of those farmers take their own lives by drinking Round Up Ready, a toxic herbicide produced by Monsanto. In their unwaveringly ethical pursuit of profit, Monsanto has actually filed patent infringement claims against conventional and organic farmers in both Canada and the US whose crops suffer with trace contamination from neighboring GMO crops, and often times, Monsanto is the victor, leaving local farmers with outrageous legal bills and fines, which forces them to shut down, allowing Monsanto to buy up the land. Representatives from Monsanto, The WPF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are annual guests of secret Bilderberg Group meetings, both prominent bodies enforcing sterilization and mass genocide.

"Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing a more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

- David Rockefeller, banker, honorary director of Council on Foreign Relations, honorary chairman of Bilderberg Group & founder of Trilateral Commission, praising Chairman Mao, whose policies resulted in the extermination at least 35 million people

Monsanto was one of the corporate sponsors of HR 875, a bill in the United States that would grant the US Federal Department Of Agriculture central authority to dictate strict laws over organic farming, which include the mandatory spraying of toxic herbicides such as Round Up Ready and control over livestock diets and veterinary services; these new stipulations backed the establishment intentionally mirror loan-restructuring protocol required by indebted countries such as Somalia. The enormously wealthy and influential Rockefeller Foundation, chaired by the robber-barren-Mao-praising David Rockefeller, has long influenced the movement towards sustainability by encouraging the widespread use of transgenic GM seeds, particularly in Africa. On behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, Representative Akinwumi Adesina stated the following before the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference in 2007: ‘”Regarding genetic engineering, by and large, African countries do not currently have in place regulatory frameworks that allow their use for food production. Many challenges face the introduction and cultivation of GM crops in Africa, including fear of GE crops. Assisting Africa to meet its food needs has other advantages for climate change. Increasing population pressure and reliance on extensive agricultural practices will likely lead to further deforestations and carbon dioxide emissions and contributions to climate change”.

While Adesina parrots the tired talking points and green pseudoscience of the International Community by trying to argue that traditional agricultural methods, which have been practiced on the African continent since the early days of human existence will lead to deforestation and that GMO seeds produced by transnational corporations such as Monsanto, backed by maniacal environmental extremists are good, documents released by the Rockefeller Foundation shed light on their strategic motives: “Major organizations such as the Population Council and the National and International Planned Parenthood Federations have been supported by the Foundation in a variety of ways. These and other existing organizations, as well as others that may come into being, represent exceedingly important instrumentalities for the extension of family planning information and contraceptive methods. Future initiatives of the foundation are described: ‘It will explore potentialities of training programs, seminars, public forums, symposia, and other devices for conveying information about the impact of population growth on economic and social development to government officials from ministries of health, planning commissions, and other appropriate agencies, in the interest of motivating greater action on population policy and population control programs.”

“The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet, in reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970’s, ‘If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population’. Agribusiness and the Rockefeller Green Revolution went hand-in-hand.” - F. William Engdahl, author and researcher

Large swaths of land in Africa around the world are being converted into crops used for growing biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol, an increasingly popular additive used in diesel-fueled vehicles and commercial trucks because it is popularly considered to be environmentally friendly due to it’s renewability. Surprisingly enough, recent studies issued by the European Union reveal that biofuels, or fuel made from living, renewable sources, produces 400 percent more CO2 than conventional fossil fuels do; take into consideration that many arguments used to promote transgenic seeds highlight their sustainability to the environment and their potential to reduce carbon emissions. We are told to believe traditional agricultural methods can contribute to famine, deforestation and environmental degradation, while the International Community is authoring authoritarian new green policing policies and claiming the environment is really a priority, when lush rainforests, up to twenty million acres of American farm land in states such as Iowa and the best lands in the Third World, which are traditionally used to grow food for the local communities, are taken over by corporations to grow corn-based ethanol thus, working to exacerbate the phony issue of carbon emissions in the first place.

The green dialogue we are being fed is phony, self contradictory and completely criminal. Biofuels have helped to fuel man-made famines by reducing the amount of local crops allowed to be grown, thus globally increasing the price of food, that includes the subsidized foreign foods used to flood developing markets. This is a sick and twisted scheme to use food as a weapon to achieve the desired culls of the surplus population. The sheer fact that a “marketplace” for life-sustaining goods exists let alone, the fact that such precious resources are subject to maniacal manipulations enforced by a speculative club of super-rich perverts who commoditize everything of value to humanity, leaves little wonder why people around the world are showing their discontent on the streets. Directionless people, totally disenfranchised by leading substance-less lives revolving around neglect and consumerism, the kind of people currently attempting to create chaos on the streets of London are a strong signification that something is really wrong with every foundation of our society, our culture of commodities and our mutual alienation of compassion for human life. Our civilization is looking very bleak at the moment; people loot liquor stores and steal iPads in the developed world, while people in the undeveloped world are viewed as liabilities and denied their sustenance because the International Community tell us, we cannot accommodate their carbon pollution.

"The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent." - Bill Gates, founder of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft

The threat of death, autism and other debilitating neurological disorders associated with pandemic vaccinations is a subject rarely, if ever, brought up by the mainstream media. An episode of 60 Minutes aired once in 1979 and later banned from being rebroadcasted attempted to touch on the subject of devastating vaccination side effects following a US Government sponsored Swine Flu hype, which resulted in the vaccination of 48 million people in 1976. The host interviews a middle-aged schoolteacher named Judy Roberts, who obediently took a vaccination after being influence by Swine Flu propaganda produced by the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) and subsequently began suffering from paralysis. She was later diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS), a fatal disease affecting the peripheral nervous system, causing Roberts to become a quadriplegic. When the director of the vaccination program, Dr. David Sensor was interviewed, he uncomfortably admitted that the pro-vaccination hype generated CDC was unwarranted, because no confirmed cases of the Swine Flu existed. The CDC was responsible for authoring a consent sheet, which stated that scientists performed several safety checks on the vaccine, however the vaccination that was actually distributed, X53A, was another concoction entirely and was subject to no testing.

An interview was also conducted with Dr. Michael Hatwick, the Director of the Vaccination Surveillance team at the time who claimed the agency was fully aware of the health risks attributed to the X53A vaccination. In a blatant lie, Director David Sensor awkwardly claims to never have been aware of such health risks. The CDC was also responsible for creating a vaccination awareness campaign; the agency also used the names of celebrities and pop culture icons of the day without their consent to garner support for their program. It’s hard to distinguish which is more disturbing, the content of the story itself or the fact that the episode had been banned from air. There has been a longstanding demonization of medical doctors who face their careers and credentials being challenged by the establishment if they are viewed as vocal opponents of pandemic vaccinations. Ghislaine Lanctôt, a Canadian author and medical doctor investigated the ineffectiveness and dangers of vaccination and concluded that vaccinations are intentionally being used as a eugenics weapon for a massive and targeted reduction of the world population. Lanctôt writes, “Because of my professional status, my words weighed significantly in the public eye. The Medical Board’s reaction was immediate and strong. Its leaders demanded that I resign as a physician. I answered that I would do so as long as they could prove that what I had written was false. The Medical Board replied with a call for my expulsion. As I witnessed the disproportionate reaction of the Medical Board, I discovered that, despite official claims, vaccines have nothing to do with public health. Underneath the governmental stamp of approval, there are deep military, political and industrial interests.”

“Scientific evidence links vaccinations to chronic fatigue, autoimmune disorders, aids, learning disabilities, and other health problems. Viera Scheibner notes that the annual death rate in Europe prior to 1940 from diphtheria was negligible (less than 300 deaths per million). After this date, when mass vaccinations against the disease were begun, "unprecedented" diphtheria epidemics followed in fully vaccinated subjects.”- Ron Garner, researcher and author of ‘Conscious Health’

Scientists and other prominent professionals who have bravely questioned the inconclusive official account of the September 11^th attacks have similarly been blacklisted and subject to career suicide, equating any intellectual deviation from the Corporate media’s version of effects enough to warrant being burnt at the stake. Recently in Australia, the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccination group, The Australian Vaccination Network, which provides anti-vaccination information through its website, magazines and seminars, has been stripped of it’s charitable status by the government of New South Wales and can no longer appeal for public fundraising. The countries seasonal flu vaccine (which is pushed with priority towards loathed Australian Aboriginals and pregnant women), Fluvax, reportedly caused convulsions in ninety-nine children. The rate of seizures in 2010 were fifty times higher than would ordinarily be expected with a vaccine; similarly in Ghaziabad, India, two nine-month-old twins in died within fifteen minutes of receiving a measles vaccination, research published by Archie Kalokerinos, M.D. states that in some Aboriginal communities of Australia every second child given a vaccination died of crib death, but when fed high doses of vitamin C before and after vaccinations, not a single child died; according to the Australian Government, permitting any awareness toward these legitimate concerns is unacceptable.

In 2009, The World Health Organization declared the first flu pandemic of the 21st century during a propagated Swine Flu scare, which like in 1976, never came into fruition. However, the virus created to combat the much-hyped H1N1, which millions of people willfully accepted, contained some very alarming substances. One of the noted components was Thimerosal, a noted mercury derivative, a substance banned in Russia, Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and Scandinavian countries.

According to a Russian study conducted in 1977, adults exposed to ethylmercury, which is the form of mercury found in thimerosal, suffered brain damage and nervous system injury, which in many cases resulted in coma and death. The vaccine also contained Squalene, an experimental anthrax vaccine component given to returning Gulf War veterans who were used as guinea pigs and subsequently suffered from eveloped arthritis, non-healing skin lesions, aphthous ulcers, neuropsychiatric problems, anti-thyroid effects, anemia, systemic lupus erythematosus, chronic diarrhea and multiple sclerosis, to name a few. Author of the book “Vaccine-A” and journalist Gary Matsumoto commented, “Squalene adjuvants are a key ingredient in a whole new generation of vaccines intended for mass immunization around the globe. Eating and digesting Squalene isn’t a problem. But, injecting it galvanizes the immune system into attacking it, which can produce self-destructive cross reactions against the same molecule in the places where it occurs naturally in the body and where it is critical to the health of the nervous system” and has also stated “Squalene is a kind of trigger for a real biological weapon.” Numerous scientists and medical professionals have refused to take the vaccine.

“Despite the refusal of the conventional health establishment to investigate the long-term effects of childhood vaccinations, independent research reports have increasingly been made public. These link vaccination rates to the epidemic of childhood asthma, as well as to crib death, shaken baby syndrome, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, autism, and juvenile diabetes. Since the 1990s, there has been a tenfold or 1000-percent increase in autism, an increase which has been linked by some researchers to the organic mercury preservative commonly found in baby vaccines.” – Walter Last, author of ‘The Natural Way to Heal’

Despite the findings of medical professionals and numerous researchers, the establishment media and the International Community still find no problem with promoting the supposed ‘beneficial qualities’ of mass vaccination. Bill Gates, who has previously attended closed Bilderberg meetings lined with individuals attempting to influence global society with eugenics and strict breeding policies, has contributed 27.6 million USD on five hundred thousand shares of Monsanto stock between April and June 2010 and unsurprisingly, is an outspoken proponent of global vaccinations and touts goals of vaccinating every single child on the planet, claiming that vaccines are “one of the most effective health interventions ever developed.” Chillingly, Gates, when speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, pledged ten billion USD to developing new vaccines for the world’s poorest countries and while declaring “the decade of vaccines” and their huge impact.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have also contributed over 12.5 million USD since 1998 to the organization, Planned Parenthood. Founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921, a prominent eugenicist famous for quotes such as "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population", "Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race", "The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it" and "Eugenics is… the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems." In 1939, Sanger launched The Negro Project, with aim of steadily reducing the African American population. Sanger managed to cleverly recruit prominent and well-educated African American ministers into supporting her scheme by portraying birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites; abortion clinics were opened en masse in African American inner city neighborhoods. In 1942, the organization achieved federal status and today has 820 clinic locations in the US, with a total budget of approximately one billion USD. To date, according to studies by the CDC, over thirteen million African American fetuses have been aborted and 78% of their clinics are in minority communities. African Americans make up 12% of the US population and 35% of the domestic abortions, effectively making them the only minority in American with a declining population. Annually, the US Government contributes about three hundred and sixty million USD to Planned Parenthood. Jill Stannic, an Illinois hospital employee has testified before the US House Committee about her experiences with Induced Labor Abortions, where medicines inserted into the vaginal cavity produce a premature live birth, the child is the brought by nursing staff into a room where soiled linens are kept until the child dies. Unlike an abortion, the child receives a birth and death certificate.

"I have studied with great interest, the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Under the regime of Barack Obama, who has personally voted no against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which aims to protect the rights of children who survive abortion procedures, has unanimously passed four times, having been backed by every Democratic candidate include Hilary Clinton and John Kerry. Barack Obama and the American establishment effectively support infanticide and the continued rates of abortion within African American communities. The President himself has personally advocated Planned Parenthood, an organization founded on the pillars of racial purity and eugenics: "There will always be people, many of goodwill, who do not share my view on the issue of choice. On this fundamental issue, I will not yield and Planned Parenthood will not yield.” The work of federally funded Planned Parenthood is not the leisurely use of contraceptives, a woman’s right to choose and advocating practices of safe sex; it is about culling racial undesirables and creating a cleaner white race. Unfortunately for Somalians and the people of the African continent, the aims of the Negro Project have not been confined to American borders.

Earlier this year, the United Nation’s news service reports a UN-backed campaign in rural areas of Somalia to vaccinate more than 1.8 million young children against polio, four years after Somalia was declared to be polio-free. The campaign is supported by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and touts goals of reaching every eligible child in the country, despite the fact that the last recorded case of polio in Somalia was in March 2007. Despite numerous studies within the scientific community which indicate that autism may be the result of adverse reactions to childhood vaccinations, research published by environmental physician, Dr. Alan Cohen, stipulates that high levels of autism and attention deficit disorder (ADD) did not occur until the mandatory use of childhood vaccinations, which are still being trumpeted in Africa by the maniacal Neo-Malthusian International Community; officials in Somalia have stated that they hope to reach an estimated 800,000 children in the country's south-central region, UNICEF’s representative in Somalia has called for the necessity of vaccination teams able to access every community, every household and every child aged under five. In reality these vaccinations offer little protection against yearly flu virus strains and are heavily promoted by the CDC, US Public Health Department and most physicians despite the fact that these substances have resulted in thousands of deaths and paralyzing illnesses. There is enough evidence from the medical community available to confirm that the development of the immune system after contracting the usual childhood diseases matures and renders it capable to fight future infections.

The use of multiple vaccines prevents natural immunity and promotes the development of detrimental side effects. Disturbingly, many hospitals have made flu vaccinations of the elderly a part of routine admission orders and studies have disclosed that 23% of vaccinated children develop asthma compared to zero in unvaccinated children. The vaccination of the Somalian masses was allowed to continue; despite reports from the Associated Press stating the accounts of Nigerian health officials claiming the paralyzation of 124 Nigerian children had been caused by a cheap oral polio vaccine used to fight the paralyzing disease, which was made from a live poliovirus and carries a risk of causing polio, even the vaccines used in the United States and other Western nations are administered in shots, which use a killed virus that cannot cause polio. Numerous members of the scientific and medical communities have published their studies against the detrimental effects of pandemic and immunizational vaccination and have bravely questioned disturbing movements designed to reach vast numbers of the population during stages of infancy. It is documented that immune systems are impaired by vaccinations because even though they may claim to protect the body from one strain of infectious disease, they weaken the immune system against future strains in people who have received vaccinations at a young age, who in the future may seek additional vaccinations to offset their weak immunities caused by infantile vaccination in the first place.

International studies have shown that immunization vaccination contributes to around ten thousand cases of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) annually and other studies have determined at least three thousand children die annually from vaccines within the United States. Because of the dire climate of food instability currently unfolding in Somalia, it difficult to track the adverse effects of vaccinations because most casualties may sooner perish from starvation or at least, that is what the mainstream media outlets will report. As a further indication of the true conditions of concern for the people of Somalia, one must investigate the origins of the heavily reported Somalian piracy and the reports of nuclear waste dumped in the Gulf of Aden off the coasts of Somalia. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia claims, “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. European companies found it to be very cheap to get rid of the waste, costing as little as $2.50 a tonne, where waste disposal costs in Europe are something like $1000 a tonne. And the waste is many different kinds. There is uranium radioactive waste. There is lead, and heavy metals like cadmium and mercury. There is also industrial waste, and there are hospital wastes, chemical wastes – you name it. Since the containers came ashore, hundreds of residents have fallen ill, suffering from mouth and abdominal bleeding, skin infections and other ailments."

Much of the materials reported in the Somalian seas, which are contributing to new cases of radiation sickness, strange rashes, nausea, malformed babies and death, can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, that have apparently been passed to the Italian mafia to conduct it’s cheap disposal. During a tsunami in 2005, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore, Ould-Abdallah has claimed European governments were offering, “Nothing. There has been no cleanup, no compensation and no prevention.” Reports within certain circles of Somalian pirates who take over large cargo ships in exchange for millions in ransom money are commonplace, but the media rarely mentions that some pirates have pledged the money going towards cleaning up the radioactive material on their shores. Januna Ali Jama, a spokesperson representing groups of Somalian pirates has claimed that ransom demand is a means of "reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our country for nearly 20 years. The Somali coastline has been destroyed, and we believe this money is nothing compared to the devastation that we have seen on the seas.” Additionally, other European ships have been illegally fishing in Somalia’s seas and harvesting seafood, their greatest resource. Vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas are stealing more than three hundred million USD worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea life every year. Consider the fact that not only are millions of dollars worth of seafood illegally harvested annually, but also it is harvested off the coast of regions synonymous for recent food instability in waters where nuclear waste is being dumped; those fish are then sold at exorbitant prices in grocery stores all over Europe and elsewhere; the total negligence for human health and well being is astonishing.

Although holding hostages may not be justifiable or the best way to go about addressing solutions to the issues and surely several less-enlightened people take part in piracy to fuel their own personal gain, these are characteristics of people who have lost their livelihoods and have nothing else to loose; the mainstream media has totally neglected this perspective on the issue and only focuses on championing the dispatchment of UN paramilitary forces into Somalian waters, which is an excuse for furthering additional geopolitical objectives of the US. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods and the nation is starving. Mohammed Hussein, a local fisherman in the town of Marka told reporters, “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.” A group, who originally referred to them selves as the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia, was comprised of ordinary Somalian fishermen who were first to take out speedboats to try to dissuade foreign dumpers and trawlers and establish a fishing tax.

CONCLUSION

The evidence laid out in this article to support the complex array of sabotage being tragically committed against Somalians, residents with the Horn of Africa and the world is enough to leave one overwhelmed and with a very bleak world view. As if things couldn’t get worse for the Somali people, the Washington Post, New York Times and other major American newspapers have recently reported that the US has extended it’s illegal and oxymoronic War on Terror by beginning to launch drone missile attacks over Somalia, while the Pentagon has roughly three thousand troops from all four major branches of the military assigned to the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa stationed in Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, Somalia's neighboring country to the north. Under the guise of fighting Islamic extremists (the funding of which, will be subject to a separate in-depth article) and degenerate pirates, The US military is preparing to implement an East African military geo-strategy to control the maritime waterways and the movement of international shipping through the Gulf of Aden, as well as the prospects of descending looming multinational corporations to harvest the potential yields of the East African energy basin. Somalia’s lands can very well be subjected to predatory capital and resource-robbers, due to it’s untapped and unexplored potential, and the possibility of American oil giants such as Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips, who have been sitting quietly since nearly two-thirds of Somalia land was allocated to them in the final years before President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and thrown into disarray, to reap prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore millions of acres of the Somali countryside for potential petroleum deposits, once the Somalian people have been democratized and liberated by the United States, of course.

John P. Holdren

Concerned people, disenfranchised with what is taking place in the Horn need to drastically reexamine the claims of this article and adjust their vocalization of this issue away from “a failure of the International Community to make sure people have food to eat” to “a deliberate effort of the International Community to enforce austerity and use food as a weapon to enforce population reduction.” Perhaps there is no better example of the Neo-Malthusian philosophy and it’s role in influencing the future, than the genocidal material authored by John P. Holdren, the Obama administration’s US Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, Paul Ralph Ehrlich, biologist and founder of the Zero Population Growth group and his wife, Anne Howland Ehrlich. The lengthy book they published together is called ‘Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment’ and it provides incredible clarity into the intended directions of the Obama Administration and the United Nations policies on the future management of the world’s resources and society. The document encourages the creation of a Global State run by a Planetary Regime, which enforces mass sterilization, compulsory abortions and the rule of law through an International Police force that has control over the intimate and trivial details of our lives. Dr. Webster Tarpley has been critical in offering his insight into the document and the impacts it may have on the future direction of policy.

Holdren, who proudly boasts himself as a Neo-Malthusianist, views human life has a cancerous outgrowth and ridicules ‘Cornucopians’ or people who believe in the bounties of nature in relation to growth and production, contending that harsh limits must be taken to avoid production and innovation by living within the confines of whichever amount of growth he deems suitable, while actively enforcing deindustrialization. The authors of Ecoscience suggest triaging nations deemed too populous such as India and Bangladesh, withholding them from receiving any international food or monetary aid or any kind and the creation of a Science Court charged with the issuance and controls of innovative new sciences and technology. Holdren argues that the world’s population must be adjusted to ‘carrying capacity’ to be in harmony with nature and advocates reducing the population to one billion people by means of sterilization. Excerpts from the genocidal document suggest the following on page 786: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men. The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.” On page 942: “The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries' shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

On page 837, Holdren advocates compulsory abortion, “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society” and the right of the Government to take away children born in single parent households on page 786, “One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.” Certainly, we have come to a time of great transition in the human story and the prospects our leaders are advocating appear to be intentionally deceptive and contribute to enthusiastically killing any hope of offsetting the abuses described in this article. The eloquence of Mr. Kissinger may help to shed light on why all central authority is mounting towards the continuation of destroying the human condition.

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”

- Henry Kissinger

MALAYSIA: BERSIH 2.0 MASS DEMONSTRATIONS - FUNDING UNREST

2011-07-12T02:48:00.000-07:00

Written and Photographed by Nile Bowie

Accounts of police brutality plague attendees of the

Bersih 2.0 rally, riot police engaged the use

of tear gas and chemical laden

water cannons against demonstrators.

Scenes of chaos unfolded on the streets of downtown Kuala Lumpur this past weekend, culminating in an event that many have called the most defining moment in recent Malaysian history. Thousands of people, many well intentioned first time demonstrators gathered to voice their discontent towards the Malaysian electoral system under the umbrella of Bersih 2.0, calling itself ‘The Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections’, which is comprised of a ‘coalition of like minded civil society organizations unaffiliated to any political party’. Amidst this climate of seeming neutrality, the ruling Malaysian political party Barisan Nasional declared the gathering illegal and has made stark allegations regarding group’s true intentions, accusing the movement of utilizing mass fervor to strengthen foreign funded political parties associated with opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, the former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minster and former Chairman of the Development Committee of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Bersih 2.0 chairperson Ambiga Sreenevasan has admitted to Malaysian Press that two US-based organizations, the National Democratic Institute (which receives funding from the US National Endowment for Democracy) and George Soros’s Open Society Institute have donated an undisclosed amount of money to the organisation; these think tanks and Intelligence front groups based in the United States are synonymous for authoring US foreign policy and shaping world opinion towards foreign leaders as they actively fund various oppositions movements through color revolutions, which lead to the installation of leaders of whom are friendly to objectives of the Anglo-American establishment and profiteers of corporate high finance.

The Bersih 2.0 rallies succeeded in briefly unifying

Malaysia’s various ethnic groups

amidst a history of racial tension.

Malaysia is a multicultural society with a history of race related tensions between the predominantly Islamic Malay ethnicity of whom tend to control political bureaucracy through the preferential treatment of members within their racial group and ethnically Chinese Malaysians, descendants of settlers and economic migrants seeking employment in Colonial British rubber plantations of whom today dominate the business and commercial sectors and hold the highest national income. Regardless of Bersih 2.0’s objectives or its utilization from opposition leaders, the mass gathering succeeded in creating a patriotic and carnival-like atmosphere of unity between its participants of all ethnicities, as they behaved nonviolently and in uniformal stride for greater representation prior to riot police distinguishing any chance of dialogue by dispersing the gathering with waves of tear gas and chemical-laden water cannons, amidst numerous cases of heavy handed police brutality and arbitrary arrests, to the extent of launching tear gas canisters into the compound of a nearby hospital where demonstrators sought cover. Initially, many Malaysians may naively welcome support from American Institutions, which market themselves on keen selling points such as ‘instilling democracy and funding freedom’, this funding is not intended to alleviate corruption or to justly persecute police brutality, it is intended to increase Washington’s presence in countries integrated within China’s economic orbit and the eventual installation of a compliant opposition leader, friendly to the bidding of International Financial regulatory bodies and planners of the New Financial World Order.

Amnesty International has urged the United States Government not to be a spectator while Malaysian authorities defy human rights by dispersing its demonstrations, it’s director adding “If the U.S. government does not take strong approach to human rights in Malaysia, it will seriously affect the United States credibility and effectiveness on human rights in the region”. Dramatic coverage from Al-Jazeera prods the same wound while UN experts warn that the methods of crowd dispersal exercised by the Malaysian authorities actively undermine democracy. While it is distressing to see well-intentioned people from every age demographic gather in the pursuit of a more conducive order in their electoral system be subject to police brutality, their activism will be leveraged and exploited by media outlets and foreign governments to undermine the credibility of the Malaysian authorities, which obviously then provides an outlet for Western Governments to back their own opposition candidate. NGO’s urging the United States Government to enter the dialogue on human rights abuses is equivalent to using a searing branding iron to treat third degree burns. In fact such statements reflect total negligence for human rights by summoning a country currently involved in five wars in the Middle East and North Africa while enforcing heavily militarized domestic police protocol. While aggression cannot be denied on the part of Malaysian police who dispersed the event, it is curious that similar methods of crushing peaceful gatherings utilized in Europe, Israel and North America are met with a total media blackout, often using more elaborate forms of dispersal such as rubber bullets and sound frequency cannons on small gatherings dwarfed in comparison to the volumes of people present at the recent Bersih demonstration.

Bersih 2.0 Chairperson, Ambiga Sreenevasan has

admitted to receiving funds from George

Soros’s Open Society Institute, among

other donors, which notoriously fund opposition

movements’ intent on regime

change in favor of US foreign policy.

Obviously the mainstream accounts make little mention of Internationalist billionaire George Soros and his direct donations to the Bersih Organization, a man who has previously rustled feathers with leaders of the Barisan Nasional, such as former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Bin Mohamad, a vocal critic against the official account of the September 11^th attacks, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and regulations of the financial institutions such as the IMF which utilise "gun to head" policies of national budget restructuring through lending conditions and structural adjustment programs. Mahathir has previously made accusations against George Soros for using his influence in the currency speculation market to contribute to engineering the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis as a punishment for allowing Myanmar to join the ASEAN Union. Malaysia’s central bank, Bank Negara reported a loss of approximately six billion USD when George Soros previously placed bets against it. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi appealed to Madeleine Albright, stating the Malaysian Ringgit and ASEAN currencies "continue to be bedeviled by currency fluctuations caused by hostile elements bent on such unholy actions. It is the height of international criminality that the fate of millions could be subject to the mercy of a few unscrupulous traders.” During the 1997 meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Hong Kong, Mahathir stated, “Great countries tell us that we must accept being impoverished, because that is what international finance is all about. Obviously, we are not sophisticated enough to accept losing money so that the manipulators become richer. We are also warned that these are powerful people. If we make a noise or we act in any way to frustrate them, they would be annoyed. And when they are annoyed, they can destroy us altogether, they can reduce us to basket cases.”

Mahathir’s views on the negative effects of currency trading and speculation from 1997 are a breath of fresh air, especially in today’s climate where wars are fought over financial regulations, as seen in the recent attack on Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who sought to create a Pan-African Dinar currency backed in gold. Former Indonesian President Suharto submitted his resignation while IMF riots swept his country, as the International Financial Regulatory bodies demanded the abolition of government subsidies on staples such as rice and bread while cutting investment contribution towards State-run enterprises; chaos ensued in the streets as the Indonesian Rupiah suffered a debilitating 85% devaluation at the hands of International speculators. On the subject of the crisis in Indonesia, Mahathir offered, "Can it be that all the assets of that huge country, with 220 million hard-working people, are suddenly worth only one-sixth of its previous value? What, indeed, is the worth of a nation, if someone can devalue and even bankrupt it?" Mahathir attracted the envy of other emerging markets by creating exchange controls in defense of the Malaysian Ringgit, which safeguarded the currency, as it’s regional neighbors suffered IMF imposed austerity.

George Soros

George Soros is a Internationalist whose reputation clearly shows him to be no friend of the Malaysian people, the fact that Ambiga Sreenevasan has accepted funds from his Open Society Institute while claiming Bersih 2.0 to be “wholly funded by Malaysians” is simply not true and should raise more than an eyebrow. George Soros has been an integral figure in the funding of opposition movements in the Arab Spring, only to pave the way to governance for opposition leaders such as Mohamed ElBaradei and other trustees of think tanks and other likeminded US based outlets that would be happy to exploit their own people in a bid to grab power. In total covert imperialism, Soros has further contributed funding to organisations attempting to author a new Egyptian constitution. Soros’s influence over the mainstream media is astounding; Fox News reports over thirty major news organisations receive his funds, surely this friendly contribution would not contribute bias to the programming content in anyway. BBC reports Soros vainly calling for regime change in Iran by insinuating an overthrown by means of the “bloodiest of revolutions”. Malaysians may not be happy with the current Prime Minister Najib Razak and the coalition of Barisan Nasional (which has practically ruled Malaysia since it’s independence), however it is unfortunate that popular opinion of the masses in countries around the world are utilized as a vehicle for undermining national sovereignty and eventual regime change.

In the Malaysian context, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim would likely be the beneficiary of the unrest created by Bersih 2.0, as the demonstrators will express their feelings of repression during the next Malaysian election. After the previous Bersih demonstration resulted in similar methods of dispersion, Anwar’s opposition Pakatan Rakyat (People’s Alliance) party gained control of four state Governments. Concerning the Bersih demonstrations, Dr. Mahathir offered, “Its objective is to tarnish the government’s name and the police, and with that the opposition parties will win. There will be some people very angry who will probably, because of the current arrests and action taken, be disenchanted with the Barisan Nasional.” Curiously enough, Anwar Ibrahim served as Deputy Prime Minster from 1993 to 1998 under the administration of Dr. Mahathir Bin Mohamad. The pair initially disagreed on the utilization of recovery methods during the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis. During a 1997 meeting of the Malaysian Cabinet, Ibrahim conceived something of an economic coup by approving IMF austerity measures without consent of then Prime Minister and vocal critic, Mahathir. Anwar favored an economic view open to speculators and defended George Soros as he threatened to ‘destroy the country’ and remove Mahathir from power. During a visit to Malaysia, Al Gore referred to the mobs of people in the streets led by Anwar shouting Reformasi! as the “brave people of Malaysia”; the reforms Al Gore had in mind were strict IMF conditionalities which would cause strict foreign control over the Malaysian economy, of which Mahathir had spoken and guarded so eloquently against.

Ibrahim at the Pentagon with
US Secretary of Defense,
William S. Cohen

Anwar Ibrahim issued a statement in Asian Wall Street Journal suggesting that developing countries should stop “pointing a finger at speculators and put their houses in order first” by ending their “ambitious plans for outlandish projects.” Perhaps, Anwar views the symbol of Malaysia’s economic prosperity, the twin Petronas Towers as outlandish. The tension between the two grew as Mahathir claimed, "Prospective colonialists and their puppets in Malaysia are still trying to weaken this country" and that Anwar “used foreigners and the foreign media to support the actions of his supporters in order to topple the government of our country, his country.” After his years as Deputy Prime Minister, Ibrahim’s close friend, Paul Wolfowitz hired him as a consultant to the World Bank, amidst stints with George Soros-funded International Crisis Group and Dick Cheney’s Foundation For the Future, essentially an engine of South East Asian regime change. While Dr. Mahathir Bin Mohamad may not have led a mistake-proof administration, his assertions on how to handle the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis were bold and his administration presided over an ultimately successful economic transformation of Malaysia, from an exporter of raw material to a manufacturer of steel and vehicles. Cases of police brutality against Anwar Ibrahim during his incarceration are regrettable; his politics are obviously a threat to Barisan Nasional as riot police targeted him during the Bersih 2.0 demonstration by horizontally firing a tear gas canister in his direction, which struck Ibrahim’s body guard, collapsing his jaw.

Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim clearly

targeted by authorities as riot police shot a

tear gas canister in his direction, collapsing

his bodyguard’s jaw.

In this climate of apparent foreign funding subversion, the ruling Government’s actions have played out poorly. They have succeeded in appearing to be authoritarian to the international media and their actions have contributed to many Malaysians feeling spiteful, repressed, neglected, and left viewing Barisan Nasional as a self-serving hollow body. Irrespective of Bersih’s self-publicized disassociation with any political party, surely the actions of the ruling Government spoke volumes to indirectly strengthen the opposition parties led by Anwar Ibrahim. The pursuit of clean and fair elections by means of using indelible ink, postal ballot reform, and maintenance of the electoral roll are coherent and rational goals that would help to reduce corruption within the electoral system, they are goals worth fighting for. However, an investigation of funds Ambiga Sreenevasan claims to have received from George Soros and the National Democratic Institute is imperative.The Inspector General of Police recently announced an investigation of Bersih’s admitted foreign funding while commissioning the Malaysian central bank, Bank Negara to assist in tracing the international money trail. As Western-owned international media has leveraged the plight of the Bersih movement’s activists, it’s opposition leaders are surely bound to receive credibility as Ibrahim warns of further demonstrations materializing in the form of ‘Yellow Saturdays’. If the opposition politics of Anwar Ibrahim use Bersih as a vehicle for his parties’ ascendency then ultimately, the Malaysian people will lose.