by Paul Joseph Watson (Global Research)
7 May, 2009
Prison Planet.com
Elitists divided on whether to quickly sink economy and replace it with new world order, or set in motion long, agonizing depression
On the eve of the 2009 Bilderberg Group conference, which is due to be held May 14-17 at the 5 star Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece, investigative reporter Daniel Estulin has uncovered shocking details of what the elitists plan to do with the economy over the course of the next year.
The Bilderberg Group meeting is an annual confab of around 150 of the world' s most influential powerbrokers in government, industry, banking, media, academia and the military-industrial complex. The secretive group operates under “Chatham House rules,” meaning that no details of what is discussed can ever be leaked to the media, despite editors of the world's biggest newspapers, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Financial Times, being present at the meeting.
According to Estulin's sources, which have been proven highly accurate in the past, Bilderberg is divided on whether to put into motion, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”
The information takes on added weight when one considers the fact that Estulin's previous economic forecasts, which were based on leaks from the same sources, have proven deadly accurate. Estulin correctly predicted the
housing crash and the 2008 financial meltdown as a result of what his sources inside Bilderberg told him the elite were planning based on what was said at their 2006 meeting in Canada and the 2007 conference in Turkey.
Details of the economic agenda were contained in a pre-meeting booklet being handed out to Bilderberg members. On a more specific note, Estulin warns that Bilderberg are fostering a false picture of economic recovery, suckering investors into ploughing their money back into the stock market again only to later unleash another massive downturn which will create “massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead,” according to a Canada Free Press report.
According to Estulin, Bilderberg is assuming that U.S. unemployment figures will reach around 14% by the end of the year, almost doubling the current official figure of 8.1 per cent.
Estulin's sources also tell him that Bilderberg will again attempt to push for the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty, a key centerpiece of the agenda to fully entrench a federal EU superstate, by forcing the Irish to vote again
on the document in September/October despite having rejected it already, along with other European nations, in national referendums.
“One of their concerns is addressing and neutralizing the anti-Lisbon treaty movement called “Libertas” led by Declan Ganley. One of the Bilderberger planned moves is to use a whispering campaign in the US media suggested that Ganley is being funded by arms dealers in the US linked to the US military,”reports CFP.
Daniel Estulin, Jim Tucker, and other sources who have infiltrated Bilderberg meetings in the past have routinely provided information about the Bilderberg agenda that later plays out on the world stage, proving that
the organization is not merely a “talking shop” as debunkers claim, but an integral planning forum for the new world order agenda.
Indeed, just last month Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon bragged that Bilderberg helped create the Euro by first introducing the policy agenda for a single currency in the early 1990's. Bilderberg's agenda for a European federal superstate and a single currency likely goes back even further. A BBC investigation uncovered documents from the early Bilderberg meetings which confirmed that the European Union was a brainchild of Bilderberg.
In spring 2002, when war hawks in the Bush administration were pushing for a summer invasion of Iraq, Bilderbergers expressed their desire for a delay and the attack was not launched until March the following year.
In 2006, Estulin predicted that the U.S. housing market would be allowed to soar before the bubble was cruelly popped, which is exactly what transpired.
In 2008, Estulin predicted that Bilderberg were creating the conditions for a financial calamity, which is exactly what began a few months later with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Bilderberg has routinely flexed its muscles in establishing its role as kingmaker. The organization routinely selects presidential candidates as well as running mates and prime ministers.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were both groomed by the secretive organization in the early 1990's before rising to prominence.
Barack Obama's running mate Joe Biden was selected by Bilderberg luminary James A. Johnson, and John Kerry's 2004 running mate John Edwards was also anointed by the group after he gave a glowing speech at the conference in 2004. Bilderberg attendees even broke house rules to applaud Edwards at the end of a speech he gave to the elitists about American politics. The choice of Edwards was shocking to media pundits who had fully expected Dick Gephardt to secure the position. The New York Post even reported that Gephardt had been chosen and “Kerry-Gephardt” stickers were being placed on campaign vehicles before being removed when Edwards was announced as Kerry's number two.
A 2008 Portuguese newspaper report highlighted the fact that Pedro Santana Lopes and Jose Socrates attended the 2004 meeting in Stresa, Italy before both going on to become Prime Minster of Portugal.
Several key geopolitical decisions were made at last year's Bilderberg meeting in Washington DC, again emphasizing the fact that the confab is far more than an informal get-together.
As we reported at the time, Bilderberg were concerned that the price of oil was accelerating too fast after it hit $150 a barrel and wanted to ensure that “oil prices would probably begin to decline”. This is exactly what
happened in the latter half of 2008 as oil again sunk below $50 a barrel. We were initially able to predict the rapid rise in oil prices in 2005 when oil was at $40, because Bilderberg had called for prices to rise during that
year's meeting in Munich. During the conference in Germany, Henry Kissinger told his fellow attendees that the elite had resolved to ensure that oil prices would double over the course of the next 12-24 months, which is
exactly what happened.
Also at last year's meeting, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice formalized plans to sign a treaty on installing a U.S. radar base in the Czech Republic with Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.
Rice was joined at the meeting by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who reportedly encouraged EU globalists to get behind an attack on Iran. Low and behold, days later the EU threatened Iran with sanctions if it did not suspend its nuclear enrichment program.
There was also widespread speculation that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's “secret meeting,” which was accomplished with the aid of cloak and dagger tactics like locking journalists on an airplane to keep them from tracking the two down, took place at the Bilderberg meeting in DC.
It remains to be seen what kind of mainstream media press coverage Bilderberg 2009 will be afforded because, despite the proven track record of Bilderberg having a central role in influencing subsequent geopolitical and financial world events, and despite last year's meeting being held in Washington DC, the U.S. corporate media oversaw an almost universal blackout of reporting on the conference, its attendees, and what was discussed.
Once again, it will be left to the alternative media to fill the vacuum and educate the people on exactly what the globalists have planned for us over the coming year.
~ Center for Research on Globalization ~
[ Interesting aside: see also Is Dick Cheney Betting on Economic Collapse? from 2006 ]
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The "illuminati" worlds’ elite meet in Greece, bombs already going off in Athens
14 May, 2009 (The London Daily News)
International Desk
The world’s elite will meet in Greece today in an annual gathering of the "Bilderberg Group" the source of many conspiracy theories and books on the “New World Order”.
Security officials in the Greek capital are reported to have locked down the area around the meeting, reported in The Times as the luxury 5 star hotel Nafsika Astir Palace in the Voulgiameni district of Athens which will last for two days.
A bomb attack by the "Revolutionary Struggle" has already been reported at 3:30pm on Tuesday 12 May on the Vouliagmenis Avenue in the Greek capital within the vicinity of the location of the Bilderberg meeting on the Greek Eurobank branch with a 5 kilo bomb.
The President of the World Bank Robert Zoellick and Tim Geittner the US Treasury Secretary are reported by sources in The Times report as having "unspecified business" in Europe for the next two days.
The agenda of the Bilderberg Group this year is reported to be looking at a "prolonged agonising depression that dooms the world for decades of stagnation decline and poverty, or an intense but shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency".
The UK is sending representatives from the government, who may include it is reported past participant Lord Mandelson. Other past attendees of the Bilderberg Group from the UK have included Ed Balls (2006),Tony Blair (1993),Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington (Steering Committee member) Kenneth Clarke (1993, 1998,[23] 2006[24] & 2007[25]), former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey (founder and Steering Committee member) George Osborne (2006)[26] (2008) Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 2004-Present; member of the opposition 2001-Present, Eric Roll (1964, 1966, 1967, 1973-1975, 1977-1999) (Bilderberg Steering Committee),[27] Department of Economic Affairs, 1964, later Bilderberg Group Chairman, Edward Heath, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher [29].
A London Daily News correspondent based in Athens Evangelos Andreotis who is based near the Athens Astir Palace has said that "security in Athens is especially tight with Anarchist groups and protests already mobilised to try and disrupt the meeting of this group. Greek police and the government have ordered a no tolerance ethos to policing the event, with heavily armed soldiers and police in the streets of Athens".
photo credit; LONDON DAILY NEWS
Our man at Bilderberg: Close, but still no cabal
With the annual secret meeting of the global elite only hours away, the shadowy corporatocracy remains tantalisingly elusive, writes Charlie Skelton
Read Charlie Skelton's first Bilderberg dispatch
Charlie Skelton (The Guardian)
13 May 2009
Security goons with special bomb mirrors deciding whether or not to let me in for a cheese omelette. Photograph: Charlie Skelton/Charlie Skelton
It's B minus one, the day before Bilderberg. And it is definitely happening: I've seen the guns. I thought it might be a good idea to go to the Astir Palace resort for lunch. See just what kind of a cheese omelette the president of the Federal Reserve is going to be enjoying. I didn't get far. At the gates, there were machine guns and men in loose jackets and guards checking under cars for bombs with those mirrors on sticks that morbidly obese people use to check whether they've taken their knickers off.
I should have come for breakfast. Maybe I would have got in. A security guard opened the cab door, leaned in, and asked me if I was staying at the hotel. I gave it my best shot. Not much of a shot, but my best one. "I'm here for lunch." Smile feebly.
"We're closed now. Only guests." And to the driver, a bark of instructions to turn around. We turned around. I explained to the driver what was happening at the hotel, trying to avoid words like "globalisation", "corporatocracy" and "dissolution of sovereignties leading to supranational control structures". I think he got the gist. "They come to here? The leaders of the world?" He honked amiably at a girl in a bikini. "To have conference, or to have holiday? Now is time for holiday! Look to the beach!"
~ more... ~
From Shadowy Bilderberg group meet in Greece — and here’s their address:
...For the Bilderbergers it is a little like that recent MI5 recruitment ad: “See all your best work go unnoticed!”
Each country delegates two people to the steering committee that is the intellectual hub of Bilderberg. In the past Kenneth Clarke, the Shadow Business Secretary, and Martin Taylor, formerly head of Barclays Bank, have had their hand on the British tiller.
This year the club is going to talk about depression. “According to the pre-meeting booklet sent out to attendees, Bilderberg is looking at two options,” says the Bilderberg-watcher Daniel Estulin — “either a prolonged, agonising depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty — or an intense but shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”
Since Bilderberg does not officially exist, it cannot deny anything and is therefore manna from heaven for the conspiracy theorist. Eurosceptics are convinced that the future development of the European Union was plotted here — EU commissioners have always been welcomed into the coven, with Peter “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” Mandelson a particular favourite. Margaret Thatcher, it is said, was a shy debutante at a Bilderberg meeting in 1975.
Jim Tucker, veteran stalker of the Bilderberg club meetings, claims that Mrs Thatcher was ordered “to dismantle British sovereignty, but she said, ‘no way’, so they had her sacked”. Left-wing conspiracy theorists believe that Bilderbergers form a capitalist nucleus, and there is a germ of truth in this. The meetings were started in the Netherlands, in the Hotel de Bilderberg, near Arnhem, by the Polish exile Joseph Retinger. He was worried about growing anti-Americanism and the advance of Communism in Western Europe. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands agreed to sponsor the idea, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Walter Bedell Smith, threw his weight behind it and so did the White House.
The Bilderberg consensus is that national problems are best solved by an internationally oriented elite, that a global network of decision-makers should have a common language and that the boundaries are fluid between the monied and the political classes.
And so there has been a natural bias towards inviting conservatives and market liberals. The only socialists invited are those who “understand money”...
~ more... ~
International Desk
The world’s elite will meet in Greece today in an annual gathering of the "Bilderberg Group" the source of many conspiracy theories and books on the “New World Order”.
Security officials in the Greek capital are reported to have locked down the area around the meeting, reported in The Times as the luxury 5 star hotel Nafsika Astir Palace in the Voulgiameni district of Athens which will last for two days.
A bomb attack by the "Revolutionary Struggle" has already been reported at 3:30pm on Tuesday 12 May on the Vouliagmenis Avenue in the Greek capital within the vicinity of the location of the Bilderberg meeting on the Greek Eurobank branch with a 5 kilo bomb.
The President of the World Bank Robert Zoellick and Tim Geittner the US Treasury Secretary are reported by sources in The Times report as having "unspecified business" in Europe for the next two days.
The agenda of the Bilderberg Group this year is reported to be looking at a "prolonged agonising depression that dooms the world for decades of stagnation decline and poverty, or an intense but shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency".
The UK is sending representatives from the government, who may include it is reported past participant Lord Mandelson. Other past attendees of the Bilderberg Group from the UK have included Ed Balls (2006),Tony Blair (1993),Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington (Steering Committee member) Kenneth Clarke (1993, 1998,[23] 2006[24] & 2007[25]), former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey (founder and Steering Committee member) George Osborne (2006)[26] (2008) Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 2004-Present; member of the opposition 2001-Present, Eric Roll (1964, 1966, 1967, 1973-1975, 1977-1999) (Bilderberg Steering Committee),[27] Department of Economic Affairs, 1964, later Bilderberg Group Chairman, Edward Heath, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher [29].
A London Daily News correspondent based in Athens Evangelos Andreotis who is based near the Athens Astir Palace has said that "security in Athens is especially tight with Anarchist groups and protests already mobilised to try and disrupt the meeting of this group. Greek police and the government have ordered a no tolerance ethos to policing the event, with heavily armed soldiers and police in the streets of Athens".
photo credit; LONDON DAILY NEWS
Our man at Bilderberg: Close, but still no cabal
With the annual secret meeting of the global elite only hours away, the shadowy corporatocracy remains tantalisingly elusive, writes Charlie Skelton
Read Charlie Skelton's first Bilderberg dispatch
Charlie Skelton (The Guardian)
13 May 2009
Security goons with special bomb mirrors deciding whether or not to let me in for a cheese omelette. Photograph: Charlie Skelton/Charlie Skelton
It's B minus one, the day before Bilderberg. And it is definitely happening: I've seen the guns. I thought it might be a good idea to go to the Astir Palace resort for lunch. See just what kind of a cheese omelette the president of the Federal Reserve is going to be enjoying. I didn't get far. At the gates, there were machine guns and men in loose jackets and guards checking under cars for bombs with those mirrors on sticks that morbidly obese people use to check whether they've taken their knickers off.
I should have come for breakfast. Maybe I would have got in. A security guard opened the cab door, leaned in, and asked me if I was staying at the hotel. I gave it my best shot. Not much of a shot, but my best one. "I'm here for lunch." Smile feebly.
"We're closed now. Only guests." And to the driver, a bark of instructions to turn around. We turned around. I explained to the driver what was happening at the hotel, trying to avoid words like "globalisation", "corporatocracy" and "dissolution of sovereignties leading to supranational control structures". I think he got the gist. "They come to here? The leaders of the world?" He honked amiably at a girl in a bikini. "To have conference, or to have holiday? Now is time for holiday! Look to the beach!"
~ more... ~
From Shadowy Bilderberg group meet in Greece — and here’s their address:
...For the Bilderbergers it is a little like that recent MI5 recruitment ad: “See all your best work go unnoticed!”
Each country delegates two people to the steering committee that is the intellectual hub of Bilderberg. In the past Kenneth Clarke, the Shadow Business Secretary, and Martin Taylor, formerly head of Barclays Bank, have had their hand on the British tiller.
This year the club is going to talk about depression. “According to the pre-meeting booklet sent out to attendees, Bilderberg is looking at two options,” says the Bilderberg-watcher Daniel Estulin — “either a prolonged, agonising depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty — or an intense but shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”
Since Bilderberg does not officially exist, it cannot deny anything and is therefore manna from heaven for the conspiracy theorist. Eurosceptics are convinced that the future development of the European Union was plotted here — EU commissioners have always been welcomed into the coven, with Peter “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” Mandelson a particular favourite. Margaret Thatcher, it is said, was a shy debutante at a Bilderberg meeting in 1975.
Jim Tucker, veteran stalker of the Bilderberg club meetings, claims that Mrs Thatcher was ordered “to dismantle British sovereignty, but she said, ‘no way’, so they had her sacked”. Left-wing conspiracy theorists believe that Bilderbergers form a capitalist nucleus, and there is a germ of truth in this. The meetings were started in the Netherlands, in the Hotel de Bilderberg, near Arnhem, by the Polish exile Joseph Retinger. He was worried about growing anti-Americanism and the advance of Communism in Western Europe. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands agreed to sponsor the idea, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Walter Bedell Smith, threw his weight behind it and so did the White House.
The Bilderberg consensus is that national problems are best solved by an internationally oriented elite, that a global network of decision-makers should have a common language and that the boundaries are fluid between the monied and the political classes.
And so there has been a natural bias towards inviting conservatives and market liberals. The only socialists invited are those who “understand money”...
~ more... ~
Konstantina Kouneva’s lawyers are preparing a protest note
12 May, 2009
Konstantina Kouneva’s lawyers are preparing a protest note to the Greek Ministry of Internal Affairs, because of the extremely slow investigation on the attack [on] the Bulgarian [activist]. Lawyers Daphne Vagianou and Kostas Papadakis are preparing a press conference for May 21st, on which they are going to inform the Greek public about the unacceptable investigation, which is still in its first steps. As you already know, Konstantina Kouneva was splashed with acid [and forced to drink it] in front of her home on December 23rd and since then she had to go through many surgeries in the Athenian hospital “Evangelismos.” The doctors are still trying to recover her traumas from the evil attack.
“I am very disappointed. Five months passed and there is no progress in the investigation. I keep expecting that something is going to happen but I’m starting to lose hope,” says her mother Elena Decheva for “Ethnos” newspaper. Two weeks after the attack against Kouneva, the investigators finished the investigation papers and sent it to the prosecutor’s office with the conclusion that the attack was a domestic revenge. Prosecutor Eleni Raykou returned the papers to be completed, because she believed that they were incomplete, one-sided, and subjective. Back then, the prosecutor recommended that other people from Kouneva’s professional environment should be questioned and that investigation of her conflict with her employer should be done objectively.
On February 24th the Greek police announced that it had arrested an Albanian citizen as a suspect in Kouneva’s attack. After the primary excitement, the arrest turns out to be a fiasco and the Albanian was released on the following day. Almost two month after that, the investigation is silent and there is no information on whether anyone is working on the case. On the May 21st press conference, present will be the management of the Cleaners and House Maids Syndicate, whose secretary was Konstantina. The syndicate wants to bring up the question of the lawful labor relations within the cleaning firms and to inform the public about their upcoming protests.
Meanwhile, an anarchist attack ruined the stipulated for Sunday premiere of “Yellow Dog.” As grreporter.info already wrote, on Sunday, May 10th, “Apo Mihanis” theatre was supposed to be hosting the premiere. The author of the play is Michel Fais and director is Lily Meleme but the schedule could not have been followed because about 30 anarchists entered the hall, threw paint and wrote slogans: “Your art smells like death. Solidarity for Konstantina Kouneva!” Their appearance brought chaos and the premiere had to be postponed.
~ Source: GR Reporter ~
Konstantina Kouneva’s lawyers are preparing a protest note to the Greek Ministry of Internal Affairs, because of the extremely slow investigation on the attack [on] the Bulgarian [activist]. Lawyers Daphne Vagianou and Kostas Papadakis are preparing a press conference for May 21st, on which they are going to inform the Greek public about the unacceptable investigation, which is still in its first steps. As you already know, Konstantina Kouneva was splashed with acid [and forced to drink it] in front of her home on December 23rd and since then she had to go through many surgeries in the Athenian hospital “Evangelismos.” The doctors are still trying to recover her traumas from the evil attack.“I am very disappointed. Five months passed and there is no progress in the investigation. I keep expecting that something is going to happen but I’m starting to lose hope,” says her mother Elena Decheva for “Ethnos” newspaper. Two weeks after the attack against Kouneva, the investigators finished the investigation papers and sent it to the prosecutor’s office with the conclusion that the attack was a domestic revenge. Prosecutor Eleni Raykou returned the papers to be completed, because she believed that they were incomplete, one-sided, and subjective. Back then, the prosecutor recommended that other people from Kouneva’s professional environment should be questioned and that investigation of her conflict with her employer should be done objectively.
On February 24th the Greek police announced that it had arrested an Albanian citizen as a suspect in Kouneva’s attack. After the primary excitement, the arrest turns out to be a fiasco and the Albanian was released on the following day. Almost two month after that, the investigation is silent and there is no information on whether anyone is working on the case. On the May 21st press conference, present will be the management of the Cleaners and House Maids Syndicate, whose secretary was Konstantina. The syndicate wants to bring up the question of the lawful labor relations within the cleaning firms and to inform the public about their upcoming protests.
Meanwhile, an anarchist attack ruined the stipulated for Sunday premiere of “Yellow Dog.” As grreporter.info already wrote, on Sunday, May 10th, “Apo Mihanis” theatre was supposed to be hosting the premiere. The author of the play is Michel Fais and director is Lily Meleme but the schedule could not have been followed because about 30 anarchists entered the hall, threw paint and wrote slogans: “Your art smells like death. Solidarity for Konstantina Kouneva!” Their appearance brought chaos and the premiere had to be postponed.
~ Source: GR Reporter ~
Obama administration reverses promise to release torture photos
From the American Civil Liberties Union:
Decision Betrays Commitment To Transparency And The Rule Of Law
FOR IMEMDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
NEW YORK – The Obama administration announced today that it is reversing its promise to make public photos depicting detainee abuse by U.S. personnel overseas. The Department of Defense had told a federal judge that it would release a "substantial number" of photos in response to a court ruling in an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The following can be attributed to Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU:
"The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government. This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.
"It is true that these photos would be disturbing; the day we are no longer disturbed by such repugnant acts would be a sad one. In America, every fact and document gets known – whether now or years from now. And when these photos do see the light of day, the outrage will focus not only on the commission of torture by the Bush administration but on the Obama administration's complicity in covering them up. Any outrage related to these photos should be due not to their release but to the very crimes depicted in them. Only by looking squarely in the mirror, acknowledging the crimes of the past and achieving accountability can we move forward and ensure that these atrocities are not repeated.
"If the Obama administration continues down this path, it will betray not only its promises to the American people, but its commitment to this nation's most fundamental principles. President Obama has said we should turn the page, but we cannot do that until we fully learn how this nation veered down the path of criminality and immorality, who allowed that to happen and whose lives were mutilated as a result. Releasing these photos – as painful as it might be – is a critical step toward that accounting. The American people deserve no less."
More information about the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit, which has resulted in the release of more than 100,000 government documents to date, can be found online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia
Decision Betrays Commitment To Transparency And The Rule Of Law
FOR IMEMDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
NEW YORK – The Obama administration announced today that it is reversing its promise to make public photos depicting detainee abuse by U.S. personnel overseas. The Department of Defense had told a federal judge that it would release a "substantial number" of photos in response to a court ruling in an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The following can be attributed to Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU:
"The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government. This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.
"It is true that these photos would be disturbing; the day we are no longer disturbed by such repugnant acts would be a sad one. In America, every fact and document gets known – whether now or years from now. And when these photos do see the light of day, the outrage will focus not only on the commission of torture by the Bush administration but on the Obama administration's complicity in covering them up. Any outrage related to these photos should be due not to their release but to the very crimes depicted in them. Only by looking squarely in the mirror, acknowledging the crimes of the past and achieving accountability can we move forward and ensure that these atrocities are not repeated.
"If the Obama administration continues down this path, it will betray not only its promises to the American people, but its commitment to this nation's most fundamental principles. President Obama has said we should turn the page, but we cannot do that until we fully learn how this nation veered down the path of criminality and immorality, who allowed that to happen and whose lives were mutilated as a result. Releasing these photos – as painful as it might be – is a critical step toward that accounting. The American people deserve no less."
More information about the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit, which has resulted in the release of more than 100,000 government documents to date, can be found online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia
"I am, of course, prepared to defend myself with my bicycle pump...
...and Regina is deadly with a skillet at ranges up to 15 meters."
A reminder of the twisted fates that await those who get caught in the spokes of Athens politics. From the website of John Brady Kiesling:
My first death threat (admittedly oblique), with commentary below
A reminder of the twisted fates that await those who get caught in the spokes of Athens politics. From the website of John Brady Kiesling:
My first death threat (admittedly oblique), with commentary below
Avriani (sensationalist Athens daily newspaper), Monday, 9 February 2009 p32.
In the Shadow of the Acropolis (p1 box)
Strange affair with foreign agents as participants
Outside the house of a former diplomat (page 32)
Confrontation of agents in the shadow of the Acropolis [illustration: Central Intelligence Agency seal] p32
In one of the most idyllic spots of Athens, in the shadow of the Acropolis, a mini-spy thriller has unwound, which is already troubling foreign secret services and EYP (the Greek Intelligence Service). The description is guaranteed to AVRIANI by a serious source from the space of the Greek intelligence services. The participants: an American former diplomat whose career in our country has had particular publicity; a Lebanese - liaison with Hezbollah and the Iranian services; and a significant number of agents. The setting of the episode, a house below the Acropolis, which the former diplomatic cadre of the U.S. Embassy uses, in which, as was confirmed during the course of his surveillance, he used to meet the Lebanese. The intervention of the agents in the house, which was judged necessary in the course of surveillance, developed literally into a confrontation and it is attributable only to luck that the event did not cause a scandal of international proportions for the Americans, who in the event the "invasion" had a bloody conclusion would have been caught up for months in the affair of their former diplomat and his strange contacts with the Lebanese liaison. It remains unknown whether Greek or American agents took part in the intervention, but it is a fact that the former diplomat had been of interest to the National Intelligence Service, which carefully evaluates every information which concerns not only his career in Greece from the day he interrupted his professional tie with the Embassy but also his contacts with persons who are monitored for their real role and their presence in Greece.
The story is repeated in To Arthro of Sunday, 15 February 2009, p.54 with a different last paragraph:
What should be noted likewise is that the American diplomat in question, who lives permanently in Greece these last years and enjoys friendly relations with a fair number of Greek mass media -in which he also writes regular articles- has recently been attempting to appear as the "spokesman" of the Obama lobby in Athens. Something which, as we learn, has no connection with reality.
Bottom line: The Avriani story is complete fantasy. Nothing even remotely similar has happened. The pieces was planted with a publisher who runs a soft-core blackmail service to prop up his (and alas, the whole newspaper industry's) ailing finances.
The story is meant to remind me that there are people in Athens who are unhappy with me, and that they know where I live (e.g., by having looked it up on my web site). They would like me to ponder the possibility that if I meet with violent death the local police will ignore it as a settling of accounts among mysterious foreign agents. [The police are not as dumb as someone thinks I fear they are].
I currently have no Lebanese contacts, sadly, and have no reason to be wooing Hezbollah or the Iranians, though I hope the U.S. government will start talking to them soon. Given the book I am working on (a detailed study of Revolutionary Organization 17 November), visitors to my site can be pardoned for embracing the idea that I'm a secret agent. Since I can't hope to convince people otherwise, you must take comfort in the idea that I'm a very public and thus not very competent one.
If EYP has been surveilling me or invading our apartment, they have been very discreet and left no traces. They are welcome to try to make sense of my handwriting and notes. My lawyer has copies of everything important. I am, of course, prepared to defend myself with my bicycle pump, and Regina is deadly with a skillet at ranges up to 15 meters.
I don't know what Arthros's source means by the "Obama lobby." Ambassador Speckhard is the spokesman of President Obama in Greece. Yvette Jarvis is the head of Obama's official Athens supporter's group. Through Democrats Abroad, I campaigned for his election among U.S. voters here. When asked, I freely offer my wishful thinking regarding Obama's foreign policy. Unfortunately, I have never met the man or anyone close to him, so take any lavish promises I make on his behalf with a grain of salt.
Garbage Or Nothing ('If it doesn't have a name, how can you talk about it?')
The Digger Papers (August 1968)
Page Eighteen
Page Eighteen
I. The recent death of capitalism has everybody fucked around & confused.
Private enterprise laissez faire legally murderous piracy GONE already buried to be replaced by what?
If it doesn't have a name, how can you talk about it?
And what about the garbage?
WHO'S GOING TO COLLECT THE GARBAGE?
Now there's something you can talk about . .
II. America 1968 so incredibly wealthy that the local spiritual crisis is what're we going to do about the garbage.
the economic crisis how to distribute the garbage,
the political crisis who's going to collect the garbage & why should anyone want the job,
while in the oblivious streets attention has suddenly exploded into flesh bodies & the various ways of rubbing them together.
The Evolutionary Credit & Loan Association has terminated our contract, stamped it PAID IN FULL, & the planet is ours at last.
Sudden flashes that maybe those five thousand years of time payments
—all those payments ON THE DOT—
all those
food wars & social cipher contracts were gestures of empty anxiety.
Now that it's ours & we can take a casual look around, well there's so much GARBAGE.
4 bilion people camped in the planetary wilderness & somehow WE FORGOT ABOUT THE GARBAGE.
Our wilderness is turning sour.
IT STINKS!
No place in the cosmology of planetary physics for garbage.
What?
What an astounding oversight!
What were our ancestors THINKING about?
III. America a nation in 1968 so incredibly wealthy that all morality isbased on the problems of EXCESS:
fantasy executives & governmental spies running wild-eyed down the corridors of control:
"There's too fucking much of it!"
"It's completely out of control!"
"Power leak! Power leak!"
The cells of power grow wild: undisciplined freedom cancer.
Sudden flashes that the future of bureaucracy spy systems lies in garbage control.
People are USING it, picking it up FREE on the streets, living on it, they no longer respond to the seduction of the state, there's no way to get a HOLD on them.
Pomposity suicided & rigidity machines put to work at a furious clip: all this garbage must be catalogued & filed, garbage destruction teams trained, parking lots on the tillable land, thousands of well-programed garbage experts march to work each day to GET IT DOWN ON PAPER, enormous factories hastily tooled for garbage conversion.
"By God, we'll make napalm out of it."
Youngsters who don't understand it's all been paid for already
are given guns!
given napalm!
& shipped to parts of the planet where there MAY be people who MIGHT be hip to OUR garbage & MIGHT WANT SOME OF IT FOR THEMSELVES.
The situation complicates itself incredibly.
Computer engineers make it worse: the machines don't UNDERSTAND power, sex, & control: the machines program useable garbage & forbidden fantasies of FREE.
The Secretary of Garbage Control considers dropping acid & getting it over with.
Systems of control grow schizophrenic . . . they writhe & contort in involute paranoia.
SYSTEMICIDE MAKES HEADLINES.
IV. America a nation so incredibly wealthy in 1968 that all morality is based on EXCESS:
true American career counselors now ask only one question.
"Do you want to produce garbage or do you want to collect garbage?"
Industrialist or politician?
Fishfarm or junkyard?
The young people want no part of it, of course, what with garbage their natural matrix & medium.
Produce it?
Collect it?
They want to fuck in it!
The career counselors build marvelous constructions of seduction & mystery, they trans-substantiate symbol money
- into sex
into power
into death insurance
into pleasure.
But it's just THINGS, it's garbage, it's overflow & the young people know it.
They throw the career counselor out the window.
Who's going to collect the garbage?
who knows?
who cares?
Let's use it to act out our fantasies, use it for unimaginable gratifications.
V. We were sitting around the other night talking about garbage, making screaming intuitive leaps thru each others arguments, when Wm. Fritsch suddenly woke up & shouted, "What I gotta do is learn to do nothing."
And of course that's it
& it's not surprising that the solution came from a man who sometimes arrives at the compulsion to visit all his friends & empty the garbage for them.
VI. Garbage crises cannot be SOLVED:
they must be ALLOWED TO DISAPPEAR.
The alternative to the garbage collection production box
is to do just exactly nothing . . . no more & no less.
Sudden flashes of the invisible network w/ the individual spine planted squarely on it,
organic units in the planetary ecology,
DOING NOTHING.
Ecological systems have no garbage in them, contain nothing that is alien to them.
VII. Invisible networks of nameless human connectives (names shed as metaphysical garbage) can help each other to do nothing.
That part of the psyche organism to which name is attached, that part which DOES things in praise of the name,
that part withers in the flesh caress of the anonymous community.
The galactic actor does nothing in the NAME of anything:
he receives his direction from the silent spinal telegraph,
his spine is planted square on the invisible network,
HE DOES NOTHING,
his movements are not outside the process.
VIII. It's paid for, all of it.
A cellophane bag represents 5000 years of machine history, inventors suicided by their inventions, aeons of garbage dedication, paid for in cancer wombs, in fallen cocks, in the crazy waste of our fathers.
Generations dead of lacklove sold for 29 cents.
Your birth certificate is your final credit card.
Stack the garbage in piles & people will live in among it, communities of free parallel spines planted square on the invisible network.
They will do nothing to effect the celebratory transformation of garbage into spinal food.
Their movements are not outside the process.
IX. The invisible networks grow thru the absent university of nothingness, disguised as dopesellers.
- as sneakthieves
as naked dripping 17 year old Americans girls.
Doctors of garbage philosophy.
Doing nothing in PUBLIC teaching nothing demonstrating nothing living paradigms of nothing!
The absent university is powered by social magic.
It has flesh classrooms.
It is the university of the spine.
Tuition is paid in units of psychic bondage.
Its graduates are FREE.
[end]
Levellers' Day 2009
The Levellers and Levellers' Day
On 17 May 1649, three soldiers were executed on Oliver Cromwell’s orders in Burford churchyard, Oxfordshire. They belonged to a movement popularly known as the Levellers, with beliefs in civil rights and religious tolerance.
During the Civil War, the Levellers fought on Parliament’s side, they had at first seen Cromwell as a liberator, but now saw him as a dictator. They were prepared to fight against him for their ideals and he was determined to crush them. Over 300 of them were captured by Cromwell’s troops and locked up in Burford church. Three were led out into the churchyard to be shot as ringleaders.
In 1975, members of the WEA Oxford Industrial Branch went to Burford to reclaim a piece of history that seemed to be missing from the school books. They held a meeting in remembrance of the Leveller soldiers. The following year, Tony Benn came and read in the church and in each succeeding year, people have come to Burford on the Saturday nearest to 17 May, debated, held a procession, listened to music and remembered the Levellers and the importance of holding on to ideals of justice and democracy...
Winstanley, The Diggers
Excerpt from Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century
By Kenneth Rexroth
Surprisingly the seventeenth century with its almost continuous wars of religion was not a good time for the radical Reformation. Cujis regio, ejus religio — religion had become a matter of large-scale politics. Wars fought between nations and alliances of nations divided Europe into blocks of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Small groups of the elect were crushed out by the sheer weight of the contending monsters. Then, too, the Thirty Years War, which was fought to destroy the Holy Roman Empire as the dominant power in Europe, also crushed or profoundly distorted the culture of the various parts of the empire. Germany emerged fragmented and wasted and did not recover for generations. The radical Reformation had been a natural outgrowth of the culture of the late medieval middle of Europe and the Thirty Years War destroyed its roots. In the Netherlands, Switzerland, and amongst the Hutterites in their remote refuges, a process of fossilization had set in.
The English Civil War and commonwealth were essentially a product of class struggle, and the proliferation of sects in the latter days of the Civil War took place almost entirely in a lower middle class and upper working class context. In spite of their name, the Levellers were far from being unbridled democrats. They proposed to extend participation in power only to men of substance — small, middle-class substance — like themselves. The Fifth Monarchy men were such extreme chiliasts as to have no real social program.
The Ranters were only incidentally millenarians. Basically they were a revival of the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, who believed that once divinized and absorbed into the Godhead the soul was incapable of evil. Like the Adamites who were expelled from Tabor they lived exalted in an amoral ecstasy. If they practiced community of goods, nudism, speaking with tongues, and sexual orgies it was all part of a frantic, hurried, and hunted life lived in a state of unrelieved excitement. Some Ranters were simply extreme Spiritualists, descendants of Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics; and with the Restoration of Charles II they were absorbed into the Quakers. They really lay completely outside the development of English Puritanism.
The agitation of the Levellers lasted only three years. They were primarily a political party who wished to see the promises of the Rump Parliament — the recruiting propaganda for the second stage of the Civil War — fulfilled. Their leader, John Lilburne, had been an associate of Cromwell’s at the beginning and the Levellers were perfectly right when they accused him of selling out. Although the final form of their Agreement of the Free People of England, their political manifesto, proposes a broader democracy than would come to England until the end of the nineteenth century, they did not believe in universal franchise, but excluded servants, paupers, farm laborers, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Royalists, “heretics,” and, of course, women. Essentially they were left-wing Calvinist republicans. By the end of 1649 they had been completely suppressed...
The True Levellers Standard
A D V A N C E D :
O R,
The State of Community opened, and Presented to the
Sons of Men.
By
William Everard,
Iohn Palmer,
Iohn South,
Iohn Courton.
William Taylor,
Christopher Clifford,
Iohn Barker. Ferrard Winstanley,
Richard Goodgroome,
Thomas Starre,
William Hoggrill,
Robert Sawyer,
Thomas Eder,
Henry Bickerstaffe,
Iohn Taylor, &c.
Beginning to Plant and Manure the Waste land upon
George-Hill, in the Parish of Walton, in the
County of Surrey.
____________________________________
L O N D O N,
Printed in the Yeer, M D C X L I X.
____________________________________
To all my fellow Creatures that shall view these ensu-
ing Lines.
TH E God of this world blinding the eyes of the men of the world, have taken possession of them and their Lives, Rules and Raigns, and in a high measure opposeth the everlasting spirit, the King of Righteousness; both in them, and on the whole Creation, bending all its Wit and power to destroy this spirit, and the persons in whom it lives, rules and governs; making Lawes under specious pretences, yea and penalties too, that all Nations, Tongues and Languages, shall fall down and worship this god, become subject, yea in slavery to it, and to the men in whom it dwels: But the god of this world is Pride and Covetousness, the rootes of all Evil, from whence flowes all the Wickedness that is acted under the Sun, as Malice, Tyranny, Lording over, and despising their fellow Creatures, killing and destroying those that will not, or cannot become subject to their Tyranny, to uphold their Lordly Power, Pride and Covetousness. I have had some Conversation with the Authour of this ensuing Declaration, and the Persons Subscribing, and by experience find them sweetly acted and guided by the everlasting spirit, the Prince of Peace, to walk in the paths of Righteousness, not daring to venture upon any acts of injustice, but endeavouring to do unto all, as they would have done to them, having Peace and Joy in themselves, knit together and united in one Spirit of Glory and Truth, Love to their fellow Creatures, Contentation with Food and Rayment, shewing much Humility and Meekness of spirit; such as these shall be partakers of the Promise.
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit the Earth...
San Francisco style: The diggers and the love revolution
By Alex Forman
[Anarchy 77 (Vol 7 No 7), July 1967]
When a small group of men began to plant and dig upon the Commons on St.
George's Hill in Surrey, in 1649, it marked the radical culmination of the new
forces of change resulting from the Reformation in Germany. For with the
breakdown of the total supremacy of the Roman Church, these new forces were to
go far beyond the moderate rebellion of Martin Luther. The destruction of the
rationale for the Church's omnipotence led suffering people to question the
power of other elements in the collapsing power structure. This can best be seen
in the peasants' revolt in Germany and in the English Civil War. For not only
was the Church questioned but also the institutions of the state and the system
of land ownership.
The Diggers, as the small group of men came to be known, questioned the existing
order in its totality. They had grievances against the clergy, the judges, the
lawyers, parliament, and the nobles. They requested that the common land, which
had belonged to the King who had been executed, be turned over to the people.
The people could run the commons collectively and set up a co-operative
commonwealth alongside the existing system. The Diggers believed that their
system would prove to be so peaceful and filled with reason and love that soon
the whole country would join them. They saw no need for violence and refused
even to defend themselves when attacked.
The Diggers had two distinct arguments for their cause, one religious and the
other political. The religious argument stated that God had not created the
earth to be enjoyed by certain men only, but rather as a common treasury for
all. The ownership of the land in England had been achieved, from William the
Conqueror on, by the use of the sword--indirectly when not directly. Thus land
ownership, based upon blood, was immoral. Diggers believed man to have two
opposing instincts in his spirit: self-preservation, which accounted for greed
and bloodshed, and common preservation, represented by sharing and love. To act
in a morally correct way meant living a life based on common preservation.
Diggers also believed that if men lived for a while in accordance with common
preservation, their bad instincts would disappear because of the supreme power
of universal love.
The Diggers' political argument was that, since the common land once belonged to
the King, it now belonged to all those who had fought to end the monarchy. Thus,
since masses of people had fought, the masses were entitled to former royal
holdings. It's important to note that Gerald Winstanley, the Diggers' leading
spokesman, showed an increasing tendency to base their cause on the more
concrete political arguments during the movement's brief history. The last
important document to come out of the Digger movement was a long appeal from
Winstanley to Oliver Cromwell calling for the creation of a co-operative
commonwealth in England. This included concrete proposals on how to organize the
economy, the schools, the state and judicial system. It favoured private
property within the home, family-based settlements, universal manhood suffrage,
common ownership of all Crown lands, and common storehouses for all products.
Although the original Diggers didn't succeed in their goal, their thoughts have
survived over three hundred years and appeared again in remarkably similar form.
Growing out of give-and-take between the New Left and the old beat generation, a
hippy culture blossomed in San Francisco in late 1965. Two new factors which
made the hippy culture a very distinct phenomenon were, first, a feeling of
community (emphasized by individuals frustrated in the New Left), and second,
the use of LSD. Cutting across the economic and social differences of many
alienated Americans, almost all quite young, a new tribal love culture took root
in the Haight-Ashbury district of the city. The new force unleashed by LSD
constituted the primary unifying factor in a grouping which ranged from the
sometimes violent Hell's Angels motorcycle club to meditating Zen Buddhists.
This new culture was at first amorphous but it soon took on the shape of a
bohemian community complete with its own merchant class: the hip merchants.
Haight-Ashbury's new love community acquired members primarily from the swollen
ranks of alienated young people who were also discovering the "love trip".
Conversations on streets in the Haight-Ashbury became filled with talk of love,
and then, suddenly appearing in the autumn of 1966, was a group calling itself
the Diggers. It began to distribute free food in the local park--food donated by
individuals and collected from the surpluses of local markets. The new group
also attempted to provide housing for the growing number of young people who had
become convinced that they should create a new, loving society.
The important point is that the new Diggers began similarly to the original
ones, by simply showing up on the scene and declaring that they acted in
accordance with the spirit of universal love. The fact that this love was found
partly through LSD--not derived from the Bible--isn't crucial. The original
Diggers were also said to be influenced by mystical ideas during their religious
gatherings...
On 17 May 1649, three soldiers were executed on Oliver Cromwell’s orders in Burford churchyard, Oxfordshire. They belonged to a movement popularly known as the Levellers, with beliefs in civil rights and religious tolerance.
During the Civil War, the Levellers fought on Parliament’s side, they had at first seen Cromwell as a liberator, but now saw him as a dictator. They were prepared to fight against him for their ideals and he was determined to crush them. Over 300 of them were captured by Cromwell’s troops and locked up in Burford church. Three were led out into the churchyard to be shot as ringleaders.
In 1975, members of the WEA Oxford Industrial Branch went to Burford to reclaim a piece of history that seemed to be missing from the school books. They held a meeting in remembrance of the Leveller soldiers. The following year, Tony Benn came and read in the church and in each succeeding year, people have come to Burford on the Saturday nearest to 17 May, debated, held a procession, listened to music and remembered the Levellers and the importance of holding on to ideals of justice and democracy...
Winstanley, The Diggers
Excerpt from Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century
By Kenneth Rexroth
Surprisingly the seventeenth century with its almost continuous wars of religion was not a good time for the radical Reformation. Cujis regio, ejus religio — religion had become a matter of large-scale politics. Wars fought between nations and alliances of nations divided Europe into blocks of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Small groups of the elect were crushed out by the sheer weight of the contending monsters. Then, too, the Thirty Years War, which was fought to destroy the Holy Roman Empire as the dominant power in Europe, also crushed or profoundly distorted the culture of the various parts of the empire. Germany emerged fragmented and wasted and did not recover for generations. The radical Reformation had been a natural outgrowth of the culture of the late medieval middle of Europe and the Thirty Years War destroyed its roots. In the Netherlands, Switzerland, and amongst the Hutterites in their remote refuges, a process of fossilization had set in.
The English Civil War and commonwealth were essentially a product of class struggle, and the proliferation of sects in the latter days of the Civil War took place almost entirely in a lower middle class and upper working class context. In spite of their name, the Levellers were far from being unbridled democrats. They proposed to extend participation in power only to men of substance — small, middle-class substance — like themselves. The Fifth Monarchy men were such extreme chiliasts as to have no real social program.
The Ranters were only incidentally millenarians. Basically they were a revival of the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, who believed that once divinized and absorbed into the Godhead the soul was incapable of evil. Like the Adamites who were expelled from Tabor they lived exalted in an amoral ecstasy. If they practiced community of goods, nudism, speaking with tongues, and sexual orgies it was all part of a frantic, hurried, and hunted life lived in a state of unrelieved excitement. Some Ranters were simply extreme Spiritualists, descendants of Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics; and with the Restoration of Charles II they were absorbed into the Quakers. They really lay completely outside the development of English Puritanism.
The agitation of the Levellers lasted only three years. They were primarily a political party who wished to see the promises of the Rump Parliament — the recruiting propaganda for the second stage of the Civil War — fulfilled. Their leader, John Lilburne, had been an associate of Cromwell’s at the beginning and the Levellers were perfectly right when they accused him of selling out. Although the final form of their Agreement of the Free People of England, their political manifesto, proposes a broader democracy than would come to England until the end of the nineteenth century, they did not believe in universal franchise, but excluded servants, paupers, farm laborers, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Royalists, “heretics,” and, of course, women. Essentially they were left-wing Calvinist republicans. By the end of 1649 they had been completely suppressed...
The True Levellers Standard
A D V A N C E D :
O R,
The State of Community opened, and Presented to the
Sons of Men.
By
William Everard,
Iohn Palmer,
Iohn South,
Iohn Courton.
William Taylor,
Christopher Clifford,
Iohn Barker. Ferrard Winstanley,
Richard Goodgroome,
Thomas Starre,
William Hoggrill,
Robert Sawyer,
Thomas Eder,
Henry Bickerstaffe,
Iohn Taylor, &c.
Beginning to Plant and Manure the Waste land upon
George-Hill, in the Parish of Walton, in the
County of Surrey.
____________________________________
L O N D O N,
Printed in the Yeer, M D C X L I X.
____________________________________
To all my fellow Creatures that shall view these ensu-
ing Lines.
TH E God of this world blinding the eyes of the men of the world, have taken possession of them and their Lives, Rules and Raigns, and in a high measure opposeth the everlasting spirit, the King of Righteousness; both in them, and on the whole Creation, bending all its Wit and power to destroy this spirit, and the persons in whom it lives, rules and governs; making Lawes under specious pretences, yea and penalties too, that all Nations, Tongues and Languages, shall fall down and worship this god, become subject, yea in slavery to it, and to the men in whom it dwels: But the god of this world is Pride and Covetousness, the rootes of all Evil, from whence flowes all the Wickedness that is acted under the Sun, as Malice, Tyranny, Lording over, and despising their fellow Creatures, killing and destroying those that will not, or cannot become subject to their Tyranny, to uphold their Lordly Power, Pride and Covetousness. I have had some Conversation with the Authour of this ensuing Declaration, and the Persons Subscribing, and by experience find them sweetly acted and guided by the everlasting spirit, the Prince of Peace, to walk in the paths of Righteousness, not daring to venture upon any acts of injustice, but endeavouring to do unto all, as they would have done to them, having Peace and Joy in themselves, knit together and united in one Spirit of Glory and Truth, Love to their fellow Creatures, Contentation with Food and Rayment, shewing much Humility and Meekness of spirit; such as these shall be partakers of the Promise.
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit the Earth...
San Francisco style: The diggers and the love revolution
By Alex Forman
[Anarchy 77 (Vol 7 No 7), July 1967]
When a small group of men began to plant and dig upon the Commons on St.
George's Hill in Surrey, in 1649, it marked the radical culmination of the new
forces of change resulting from the Reformation in Germany. For with the
breakdown of the total supremacy of the Roman Church, these new forces were to
go far beyond the moderate rebellion of Martin Luther. The destruction of the
rationale for the Church's omnipotence led suffering people to question the
power of other elements in the collapsing power structure. This can best be seen
in the peasants' revolt in Germany and in the English Civil War. For not only
was the Church questioned but also the institutions of the state and the system
of land ownership.
The Diggers, as the small group of men came to be known, questioned the existing
order in its totality. They had grievances against the clergy, the judges, the
lawyers, parliament, and the nobles. They requested that the common land, which
had belonged to the King who had been executed, be turned over to the people.
The people could run the commons collectively and set up a co-operative
commonwealth alongside the existing system. The Diggers believed that their
system would prove to be so peaceful and filled with reason and love that soon
the whole country would join them. They saw no need for violence and refused
even to defend themselves when attacked.
The Diggers had two distinct arguments for their cause, one religious and the
other political. The religious argument stated that God had not created the
earth to be enjoyed by certain men only, but rather as a common treasury for
all. The ownership of the land in England had been achieved, from William the
Conqueror on, by the use of the sword--indirectly when not directly. Thus land
ownership, based upon blood, was immoral. Diggers believed man to have two
opposing instincts in his spirit: self-preservation, which accounted for greed
and bloodshed, and common preservation, represented by sharing and love. To act
in a morally correct way meant living a life based on common preservation.
Diggers also believed that if men lived for a while in accordance with common
preservation, their bad instincts would disappear because of the supreme power
of universal love.
The Diggers' political argument was that, since the common land once belonged to
the King, it now belonged to all those who had fought to end the monarchy. Thus,
since masses of people had fought, the masses were entitled to former royal
holdings. It's important to note that Gerald Winstanley, the Diggers' leading
spokesman, showed an increasing tendency to base their cause on the more
concrete political arguments during the movement's brief history. The last
important document to come out of the Digger movement was a long appeal from
Winstanley to Oliver Cromwell calling for the creation of a co-operative
commonwealth in England. This included concrete proposals on how to organize the
economy, the schools, the state and judicial system. It favoured private
property within the home, family-based settlements, universal manhood suffrage,
common ownership of all Crown lands, and common storehouses for all products.
Although the original Diggers didn't succeed in their goal, their thoughts have
survived over three hundred years and appeared again in remarkably similar form.
Growing out of give-and-take between the New Left and the old beat generation, a
hippy culture blossomed in San Francisco in late 1965. Two new factors which
made the hippy culture a very distinct phenomenon were, first, a feeling of
community (emphasized by individuals frustrated in the New Left), and second,
the use of LSD. Cutting across the economic and social differences of many
alienated Americans, almost all quite young, a new tribal love culture took root
in the Haight-Ashbury district of the city. The new force unleashed by LSD
constituted the primary unifying factor in a grouping which ranged from the
sometimes violent Hell's Angels motorcycle club to meditating Zen Buddhists.
This new culture was at first amorphous but it soon took on the shape of a
bohemian community complete with its own merchant class: the hip merchants.
Haight-Ashbury's new love community acquired members primarily from the swollen
ranks of alienated young people who were also discovering the "love trip".
Conversations on streets in the Haight-Ashbury became filled with talk of love,
and then, suddenly appearing in the autumn of 1966, was a group calling itself
the Diggers. It began to distribute free food in the local park--food donated by
individuals and collected from the surpluses of local markets. The new group
also attempted to provide housing for the growing number of young people who had
become convinced that they should create a new, loving society.
The important point is that the new Diggers began similarly to the original
ones, by simply showing up on the scene and declaring that they acted in
accordance with the spirit of universal love. The fact that this love was found
partly through LSD--not derived from the Bible--isn't crucial. The original
Diggers were also said to be influenced by mystical ideas during their religious
gatherings...
Police under investigation after Kentucky Derby beating video emerges
From the Photography is Not a Crime blog:
At the Kentucky Derby. The cops tell this drunk man to take a walk before the video begins to start. He decides not to walk away and sits by these people.
At least four officers have him under control while one of them punches him repeatedly as another officer yells “quit fighting, quit fighting.”
At the Kentucky Derby. The cops tell this drunk man to take a walk before the video begins to start. He decides not to walk away and sits by these people.
At least four officers have him under control while one of them punches him repeatedly as another officer yells “quit fighting, quit fighting.”