All Your Base Is Belong To Us

Coming soon...

K.AI.QMA - our proprietary Artificial Intelligence software for football

Ag suil linn...

... The Wind Doesn't Blow This Far Right

____________________________________________________________________________

The Football is Fixed Network is unique.
We are in a niche of one.
We have no competitors.
____________________________________________________________________________

If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact us in complete confidence via the Contact Form on this blog or via email at footballisfixed@proton.me - we will reply via a secure route

You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals

Football is Fixed operate as a cellular network. We use the Iceberg Effect. We release 5% of our analytics and any hacks made available to us. We retain 95% for strategic defence, constructive negotiation, court. In extremis, we recuse ourselves and operatives will ensure full publication of the relevant information in numerous territories.

Football Is Fixed: We Open Markets - Whistleblowing, Corruption Hacking, Fraud Forensics. 

____________________________________________________________________________

© 2025 Football is Fixed

It's Time to Open the Black Boxes - By Yanis Varoufakis

And then we bring you Yanis and Slavoj...

Ignorance can, and often is, the price we must pay to live better. I do not need to know how my phone works to benefit from it. All I want is that when I dial Danae’s number it is Danae’s phone that rings. How the machines involved, both the individual phone and the network, achieve this is neither here nor there. Indeed, if I invested time and mental energy in understanding what exactly goes on in the various devices surrounding me, I would have to do without other types of understanding that I value a great deal more.

In engineering terms, I have just stated that, to me (as to most people), my phone is a black box: a device or system whose inner workings are opaque and whose only function I understand is how it turns inputs (e.g. my dialling a certain number) into outcomes (Danae’s phone ringing). Come to think of it, my wife’s mind is also, to my own mind, a black box: even if I were a leading neuroscientist, I would be utterly in the dark on the electro-chemical process that led her to put together this installation. Moreover, possibly because I know it to be an impossible task, I harbour no ambition to uninteresting truly this particular electro-chemical process. 
From this perspective, we are surrounded by black boxes. However, not all black boxes are as benign as my phone. Besides phones and humans, companies and states can also be seen as super black boxes. No CEO, let alone a more lowly manager, can ever get the full picture of how each and every decision is reached within his company. Bankers never truly understood the contents of the CDOs and the array of toxic derivatives their banks were churning out (and then hoarding to boot) as if there was no tomorrow. Taking matters onto a higher level, consider the example of the United States. More often than not the State Department, the White House, the relevant Senate Committees operate without much coordination with one another, yet manage to produce policies that the rest of the world recognises as… US ‘government’ policy.
The difference between these black boxes (CDOs, corporations, banks, government) from my humble phone is encapsulated in a single word: power. Not the type of power associated with electricity or the crushing force of the ocean but another, subtler, power: the power to write the agenda, to determine the conversation, to implant desires into our soul, to channel the flow of information along the existing grid of social power, to draw us into the network that determines how our society works and, alas, fails.
In 2008, our world descended in the cauldron of multiple, persistent, spectacular failures of the various power ‘networks’. Europe proved the weaker link and, within it, Greece the weakest. However, even before any of that transpired, our planet had entered an irreversible trajectory towards environmental degradation. With this multilayered Crisis upon us (its economic and environmental facets being the main but not only ones), and given the high concentration of power, it is almost tempting to attribute it to some sick conspiracy among the powerful. Images spring to mind of smoke filled rooms, with heavy furniture and cunning men (plus the odd woman) planning how they shall profit at the expense of the common good. These are, of course, delusions. If our sharply diminished circumstances are to be blamed on a conspiracy, then it is one whose conspirators do not even know that they are part of a conspiracy. That which feels to many like a conspiracy of the powerful is the emergent property of closed networks, of the super black boxes of social power.
Super black boxes take many different forms but, in essence, they are similar: Whenever a politician in the know gives a journalist an exclusive in exchange for a particular spin on the goings on, the said journalist is appended, subconsciously, to a network of insiders. Networks of social power thus control the flow of information in a manner that excludes, co-opts and guides its individual members. They evolve organically, as if under their own steam, and guided by a supra-intentional drive that no individuals, not even the President, the CEO, the persons manning the pivotal nodes, can control.
The key to power networks is exclusion, opacity. If some bank’s employee comes by inside information that is potentially damaging to the bank, whistle blowing, e.g. leaking it to the press, will immediately dissipate her chance at keeping some ‘power’ to herself. But, if she exchanges that ‘secret’ with private information held by some other cog in the machine of finance, then the power of this spontaneously generated pair is multiplied many-fold. This two person de facto conspiracy then forms alliances, via further information exchanges, with other such groups. The result is a network of power within other pre-existing networks involving participants who conspire de facto without being conscious, conspirators. Fascinatingly, some network members, the ones that are only loosely attached to the network, are utterly oblivious of the network that they reinforce (courtesy of having very few contacts with it).
Conceived of as ‘networks of power’, as ‘conspiracies without conspirators’, the powers-that-be with the power to control our lives (the state, corporations, the media, banks, organised pressure groups etc.) are nothing more than a pile of super black boxes: No one understands how they function, not even the individuals at their helm. Yet they are the ones that convert all of our inputs into social, economic and environmental outcomes. Crucially, unlike our phones (that we may legitimately not give a damn to understand; to open up and inspect their inner workings), opening these super-black boxes has now become a prerequisite to the survival of decency, of whole strata of our fellow humans, of our planet even. Put simply, we have run out of excuses. IT IS, therefore, TIME TO OPEN THE BLACK BOXES!
Why now? Why at all? Which boxes should we open? We need to open the black boxes now because 2008 was our generation’s 1929. Moreover, the past decade has seen the effective brewing of an environmental Armageddon. Unlike my phone that works perfectly, and which I have no cause to open up, our global social economy is broken. And so is our planet’s environment. The super black boxes that have been running the show since the 1970s are kaput. No longer able to auto-correct, powerless to reproduce conditions for decent living, these super black boxes must either be opened up or they will consume us, and the generations to come, into some dystopic black hole.
How should we do it? First, we need to acquire a readiness to recognise that we may very well, each one of us, be a node in the network; an ignorant de facto conspirator. Secondly, and this is the genius of Wikileaks, if we can get inside the network, like Theseus entering the Labyrinth, and disrupt the information flow; if we can put the fear of uncontrollable information leaking in the mind of as many of its members as possible, then the unaccountable, malfunctioning networks of power will collapse under their own weight and irrelevance. And then humanity will get another chance to organise an escape from its current cul de sac. Thirdly, by desisting any tendency to substitute old closed networks with new ones.
None of this will be easy. The networks will respond violently, as they are already doing. They will turn more authoritarian, more closed, more fragmented. But this is OK. They will, no doubt, close up and fragment in order to stop the ‘break-ins’. They will expend greater effort at hindering the opening of their black boxes. They will become increasingly preoccupied with their own ‘security’ and monopoly of information, less trusting of common people. However, the more they move in this direction the more seriously they shall deplete their capacity to attract and centralise that which makes them tick: fresh, untainted, plentiful information from people that have not yet been co-opted.
None of this is, of course, new. In his fabled The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli, an early exemplar amongst the advisers to the powers-that-be, advised his Prince  never to allow the popolo a glimpse of what evils were brewing inside the black boxes of his time.[i] His was, admittedly, a more innocent time when it was still excusable to think that centralised  power and information would smoothen humanity’s passage to the good society. Tragically, the tide has gone out on such optimism. State-controlled centralisation got its comeuppance with communism’s collapse in 1991, a turn of events that saw the multiplication and reinforcement of the ‘other’ side’s black boxes, with the Crash of 2008 being the natural conclusion of such hubris. Today, amidst the pessimism of our post-2008, to quote Slavoj Zizek, “we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on. Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures,[ii] the shame – our shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicised.”
Danae Stratou’s new installation goes one step beyond shaming and exposing. It turns the black boxes into art objects that simultaneously encapsulate our angst and hopes, our helplessness and our capacities, our inhuman constraints and human capabilities. Her opened boxes act as a subversive incitement not only to counter our fears and the powers-that-be at once but, additionally, to fashion ideas of new forms of shared power and prosperity.
Yanis Varoufakis

---

[i] Thus it happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off (which it is only given a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow until everyone can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be found.
(The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli [1469-1527])

For Europe's Sake, Save Us From Our Saviours - by Slavoj Žižek

 Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today's Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement - which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it's said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police - have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012.

 

The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to 'civilisation' than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find themselves: 'Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church ... The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.'

 

Many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up dispensing with freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror. If the 'terrorists' are ready to wreck this world for love of another, our warriors against terror are ready to wreck democracy out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it. It's an inversion of the process by which fanatical defenders of religion start out by attacking contemporary secular culture and end up sacrificing their own religious credentials in their eagerness to eradicate the aspects of secularism they hate.

 

But Greece's anti-immigrant defenders aren't the principal danger: they are just a by-product of the true threat, the politics of austerity that have caused Greece's predicament. The next round of Greek elections will be held on 17 June. The European establishment warns us that these elections are crucial: not only the fate of Greece, but maybe the fate of the whole of Europe is in the balance. One outcome - the right one, they argue - would allow the painful but necessary process of recovery through austerity to continue. The alternative - if the 'extreme leftist' Syriza party wins - would be a vote for chaos, the end of the (European) world as we know it.

 

The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current democratic arrangements complain that elections don't offer a true choice: what we get instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes are almost indistinguishable. On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment (New Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other. And, as is usually the case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in a panic: chaos, poverty and violence will follow, they say, if the wrong choice is made.

 

The mere possibility of a Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of fear through global markets. Ideological prosopopoeia has its day: markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their 'worry' at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural reform. The citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these prospects: they have enough to worry about in their everyday lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades.

 

Such predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about the very eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels's technocracy and anti-immigrant populism. This is why Alexis Tsipras, Syriza's leader, made clear in a recent interview that his first priority, should Syriza win, will be to counteract panic: 'People will conquer fear. They will not succumb; they will not be blackmailed.'

 

Syriza have an almost impossible task. Theirs is not the voice of extreme left 'madness', but of reason speaking out against the madness of market ideology. In their readiness to take over, they have banished the left's fear of taking power; they have the courage to clear up the mess created by others. They will need to exercise a formidable combination of principle and pragmatism, of democratic commitment and a readiness to act quickly and decisively where needed. If they are to have even a minimal chance of success, they will need an all-European display of solidarity: not only decent treatment on the part of every other European country, but also more creative ideas, like the promotion of solidarity tourism this summer.

 

In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief - i.e., when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split. This is the position in Europe today. Only a new 'heresy' - represented at this moment by Syriza - can save what is worth saving of the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity etc. The Europe we will end up with if Syriza is outmanoeuvred is a 'Europe with Asian values' - which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, but everything to do with the tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy.

 

Here is the paradox that sustains the 'free vote' in democratic societies: one is free to choose on condition that one makes the right choice. This is why, when the wrong choice is made (as it was when Ireland rejected the EU constitution), the choice is treated as a mistake, and the establishment immediately demands that the 'democratic' process be repeated in order that the mistake may be corrected. When George Papandreou, then Greek prime minister, proposed a referendum on the eurozone bailout deal at the end of last year, the referendum itself was rejected as a false choice.

 

There are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the German-European story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to be brought under control and taught financial discipline) and the Greek story (our national sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy imposed by Brussels).

 

When it became impossible to ignore the plight of the Greek people, a third story emerged: the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if a war or natural catastrophe had hit the country. While all three stories are false, the third is arguably the most disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle, because it is our struggle too.

 

Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself.

War By Media And The Triumph Of Propaganda - John Pilger

Four prescient posts from the past, the first by the late John Pilger, the second an interview with Noam Chomsky, the third by Ellen Brown and the final one by Arundhati Roy.

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what's called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war - with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.

This power to create a new "reality" has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual."

I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only "culture" and introspection could change the world.

Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of "me-ism" had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.

In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new "threats" completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, "What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?"

He replied that if we journalists had done our job "there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq."

That's a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer.  David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.

Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.

Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s - a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official's name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as "Mr. Iraq". Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence," he told me, "or we'd freeze them out."

The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal.  He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis.

What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC's Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman's "memorable moments". Last week, Paxman signed a £1 million book deal.

The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 - a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean.

Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers - all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch's empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.

The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't Fox News; it was the New York Times.

The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war.

Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington's secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.

And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.

Many in the western media haves worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads Nato and is straight out of Dr. Strangelove - one General Breedlove - routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick's General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect.

Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer - the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair's invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.

There is almost the joi d'esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to be "hard facts".

"If you wonder," wrote Robert Parry, "how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason."

Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this "game of chicken", as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: "Let's get ready for war with Russia."
In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as "the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this". Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.

In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism  and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?

In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.

In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism?

Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called "austerity" is necessary?

Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.

But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?

Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be £83 billion. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.

The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who's keeping record straight? Isn't that what journalists are meant to do?

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian revealed something similar in this country.

None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who  routinely smear Julian Assange - though other rewards can be plentiful.

It's clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media's gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He became not only a target, but a golden goose.

Lucrative book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.

None of this was mentioned in Stockholm on 1 December when the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn't exist. They were unpeople. No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively - and brilliantly - rescued Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.

What made this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament - whose craven silence on the Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.

"When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."

It's this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war.

In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika - an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.

It's 100 years since the First World War. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don't know and can't know."

It's time they knew.

Everyday Anarchist - Modern Success Interview With Noam Chomsky

MODERN SUCCESS: You are, among many other things, a self-described anarchist — an anarcho-syndicalist, specifically. Most people think of anarchists as disenfranchised punks throwing rocks at store windows, or masked men tossing ball-shaped bombs at fat industrialists. Is this an accurate view? What is anarchy to you?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times.

Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production. It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and … democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society. And then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should manifest itself, but I think that is the core of anarcho-syndicalist thinking. I mean it’s not at all the general image that you described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none.

MS: With the apparent ongoing demise of the capitalist state, many people are looking at other ways to be successful, to run their lives, and I’m wondering what you would say anarchy and syndicalism have to offer, things that others ideas — say, for example, state-run socialism — have failed to offer? Why should we choose anarchy, as opposed to, say, libertarianism?

NC: Well what’s called libertarian in the United States, which is a special U. S. phenomenon, it doesn’t really exist anywhere else — a little bit in England — permits a very high level of authority and domination but in the hands of private power: so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it likes. The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society. Actually that has been believed in the past. Adam Smith for example, one of his main arguments for markets was the claim that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality. Well, we don’t have to talk about that! That kind of —

MS: It seems to be a continuing contention today …

NC: Yes, and so well that kind of libertarianism, in my view, in the current world, is just a call for some of the worst kinds of tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny. Anarchism is quite different from that. It calls for an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of tyranny that’s internal to private power concentrations. So why should we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination. It’s better to be free than to be a slave. Its’ better to be able to make your own decisions than to have someone else make decisions and force you to observe them. I mean, I don’t think you really need an argument for that. It seems like … transparent.

The thing you need an argument for, and should give an argument for, is, How can we best proceed in that direction? And there are lots of ways within the current society. One way, incidentally, is through use of the state, to the extent that it is democratically controlled. I mean in the long run, anarchists would like to see the state eliminated. But it exists, alongside of private power, and the state is, at least to a certain extent, under public influence and control — could be much more so. And it provides devices to constrain the much more dangerous forces of private power. Rules for safety and health in the workplace for example. Or insuring that people have decent health care, let’s say. Many other things like that. They’re not going to come about through private power. Quite the contrary. But they can come about through the use of the state system under limited democratic control … to carry forward reformist measures. I think those are fine things to do. they should be looking forward to something much more, much beyond, — namely actual, much larger-scale democratization. And that’s possible to not only think about, but to work on. So one of the leading anarchist thinkers, Bakunin in the 19th cent, pointed out that it’s quite possible to build the institutions of a future society within the present one. And he was thinking about far more autocratic societies than ours. And that’s being done. So for example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one. And those not only can be developed, but are being developed. There’s some important work on this by Gar Alperovitz who’s involved in the enterprise systems around the Cleveland area which are worker and community controlled. There’s a lot of theoretical discussion of how it might work out, from various sources. Some of the most worked out ideas are in what’s called the “parecon” — participatory economics — literature and discussions. And there are others. These are at the planning and thinking level. And at the practical implementation level, there are steps that can be taken, while also pressing to overcome the worst … the major harms … caused by … concentration of private power through the use of state system, as long as the current system exists. So there’s no shortage of means to pursue.

As for state socialism, depends what one means by the term. If it’s tyranny of the Bolshevik variety (and its descendants), we need not tarry on it. If it’s a more expanded social democratic state, then the comments above apply. If something else, then what? Will it place decision-making in the hands of working people and communities, or in hands of some authority? If the latter, then — once again — freedom is better than subjugation, and the latter carries a very heavy burden of justification.

MS: Many people know you because of your and Edward Herman’s development of the Propaganda Model. Could you briefly describe that model and why it might be important to the students at the UW-Madison?

NC: Well first look back a bit — a little historical framework — back in the late 19th-, early 20th century, a good deal of freedom had been won in some societies. At the peak of this were in fact the United States and Britain. By no means free societies, but by comparative standards quite advanced in this respect. In fact so advanced, that power systems — state and private — began to recognize that things were getting to a point where they can’t control the population by force as easily as before, so they are going to have to turn to other means of control. And the other means of control are control of beliefs and attitudes. And out of that grew the public relations industry, which in those days described itself honestly as an industry of propaganda.

The guru of the PR industry, Edward Bernays — incidentally, not a reactionary, but a Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal — the maiden handbook of the PR industry which he wrote back in the 1920s was called Propaganda. And in it he described, correctly, the goal of the industry. He said our goal is to insure that the “intelligent minority” — and of course anyone who writes about these things is part of that intelligent minority by definition, by stipulation, so we, the intelligent minority, are the only people capable of running things, and there’s that great population out there, the “unwashed masses,” who, if they’re left alone will just get into trouble: so we have to, as he put it, “engineer their consent,” figure out ways to insure they consent to our rule and domination. And that’s the goal of the PR industry. And it works in many ways. It’s primary commitment is commercial advertising. In fact, Bernays made his name right at that time — late 20s — by running an advertising campaign to convince women to smoke cigarettes: women weren’t smoking cigarettes, this big group of people who the tobacco industry isn’t able to kill, so we’ve got to do something about that. And he very successfully ran campaigns that induced women to smoke cigarettes: that would be, in modern terms, the cool thing to do, you know, that’s the way you get to be a modern, liberated woman. It was very successful —

MS: Is there a correlation between that campaign and what’s happening with the big oil industry right now and climate change?

NC: These are just a few examples. These are the origins of what became a huge industry of controlling attitudes and opinions. Now the oil industry today, and in fact the business world generally, are engaged in comparable campaigns to try to undermine efforts to deal with a problem that’s even greater than the mass murder that was caused by the tobacco industry; and it was mass murder. We are facing a threat, a serious threat, of catastrophic climate change. And it’s no joke. And [the oil industry is] trying to impede measures to deal with it for their own short-term profit interests. And that includes not only the petroleum industry, but the American Chamber of Commerce — the leading business lobby — and others, who’ve stated quite openly that they’re conducting … they don’t call it propaganda … but what would amount to propaganda campaigns to convince people that there’s no real danger and we shouldn’t really do much about it, and that we should concentrate on really important things like the deficit and economic growth — what they call ‘growth’ — and not worry about the fact that the human species is marching over a cliff which could be something like [human] species destruction; or at least the destruction of the possibility of a decent life for huge numbers of people. And there are many other correlations.

In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices. And so this is only one aspect of the PR industry. What Herman and I were discussing was another aspect of the whole propaganda system that developed roughly at that period, and that’s “manufacture of consent,” as it was called, [consent] to the decisions of our political leaders, or the leaders of the private economy, to try to insure that people have the right beliefs and don’t try to comprehend the way decisions are being made that may not only harm them, but harm many others. That’s propaganda in the normal sense. And so we were talking about mass media, and the intellectual community of the world in general, which is to a large extent dedicated to this. Not that people see themselves as propagandists, but … that they are themselves deeply indoctrinated into the principles of the system, which prevent them from perceiving many things that are really right on the surface, [things] that would be subversive to power if understood. We give plenty of examples there and there’s plenty more you can mention up to the present moment, crucial ones in fact. That’s a large part of a general system of indoctrination and control that runs parallel to controlling attitudes and … consumeristic commitments, and other devices to control people.

You mentioned students before. Well one of the main problems for students today — a huge problem — is sky-rocketing tuitions. Why do we have tuitions that are completely out-of-line with other countries, even with our own history? In the 1950s the United States was a much poorer country than it is today, and yet higher education was … pretty much free, or low fees or no fees for huge numbers of people. There hasn’t been an economic change that’s made it necessary, now, to have very high tuitions, far more than when we were a poor country. And to drive the point home even more clearly, if we look just across the borders, Mexico is a poor country yet has a good educational system with free tuition. There was an effort by the Mexican state to raise tuition, maybe some 15 years ago or so, and there was a national student strike which had a lot of popular support, and the government backed down. Now that’s just happened recently in Quebec, on our other border. Go across the ocean: Germany is a rich country. Free tuition. Finland has the highest-ranked education system in the world. Free … virtually free. So I don’t think you can give an argument that there are economic necessities behind the incredibly high increase in tuition. I think these are social and economic decisions made by the people who set policy. And [these hikes] are part of, in my view, part of a backlash that developed in the 1970s against the liberatory tendencies of the 1960s. Students became much freer, more open, they were pressing for opposition to the war, for civil rights, women’s rights … and the country just got too free. In fact, liberal intellectuals condemned this, called it a “crisis of democracy:” we’ve got to have more moderation of democracy.  They called, literally, for more commitment to indoctrination of the young, their phrase … we have to make sure that the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young do their work, so we don’t have all this freedom and independence. And many developments took place after that. I don’t think we have enough direct documentation to prove causal relations, but you can see what happened. One of the things that happened was controlling students — in fact, controlling students for the rest of their lives, by simply trapping them in debt. That’s a very effective technique of control and indoctrination. And I suspect — I can’t prove — but I suspect that that’s a large part of the reason behind [high tuitions]. Many other parallel things happened. The whole economy changed in significant ways to concentrate power, to undermine workers’ rights and freedom. In fact the economist who chaired the Federal Reserve around the Clinton years, Alan Greenspan — St. Alan as he was called then, the great genius of the economics profession who was running the economy, highly honored — he testified proudly before congress that the basis for the great economy that he was running was what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, they won’t do things, like asking for better wages and better benefits. And that’s healthy for the economy from a certain point of view, a point of view that says workers ought to be oppressed and controlled, and that wealth ought to be concentrated in a very few pockets. So yeah, that’s a healthy economy, and we need growing worker insecurity, and we need growing student insecurity, for similar reasons. I think all of these things line up together as part of a general reaction — a bipartisan reaction, incidentally — against liberatory tendencies which manifested themselves in the 60s and have continued since.

MS: With the few remaining minutes we have left, I’m wondering if you could leave the students with one thing you’d like to say to them about how they can be successful in the future.

NC: There are plenty of problems in the world today, and students face a number of them, including the ones I mentioned — the joblessness, insecurity and so on. Yet on the other hand, there has been progress. In a lot of respects things are a lot more free and advanced than they were … not many years ago. So many things that were really matters of struggle, in fact even some barely even mentionable, say, in the 1960s, are now … partially resolved. Things like women’s rights. Gay rights. Opposition to aggression. Concern for the environment — which is nowhere near where it ought to be, but far beyond the 1960s. These victories for freedom didn’t come from gifts from above. They came from people struggling under conditions that are harsher than they are now.  There is state repression now. But it doesn’t begin to compare with, say, Cointelpro in the 1960s. People that don’t know about that ought to read and think to find out. And that leaves lots of opportunities. Students, you know, are relatively privileged as compared with the rest of the population. They are also in a period of their lives where they are relatively free. Well that provides for all sorts of opportunities. In the past, such opportunities have been taken by students who have often been in the forefront of progressive change, and they have many more opportunities now. It’s never going to be easy. There’s going to be repression. There’s going to be backlash. But that’s the way society moves forward.

How America Became An Oligarchy - Ellen Brown

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners — George Carlin, The American Dream

According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites. 

“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?

The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that “all men are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters’ collective will no longer prevails.

In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party came out of nowhere to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a century, no third-party candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age.

In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the vote by going door to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national election, those efforts are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are beholden to big money.

When governments of any size need to borrow money, the megabanks in a position to supply it can generally dictate the terms. Even in Greece, where the populist Syriza Party managed to prevail in January, the anti-austerity platform of the new government is being throttled by the moneylenders who have the government in a chokehold.

How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote?

Democracy’s Rise and Fall

The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States” by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments:

The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the emergence of private banking.  The banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth.  This control of money-creation . . . has given banks overwhelming control over human affairs.  In the United States, Wall Street makes most of the truly important decisions that are directly attributed to Washington.

Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to the 17^th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England’s money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to borrow. The government as borrower then became servant of the lender.

In America, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George forbade that practice, the colonists rebelled.

They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold.

This was the system euphemistically called “fractional reserve” banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks’ privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults. These notes were lent at interest, putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who created the notes with a printing press. It was something the government could have done itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great success until England went to war to stop them.

President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists’ paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called “Greenbacks” that helped the Union win the Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were discontinued.

In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.

The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious challenge to the bankers’ monopoly over the right to create the nation’s money.  According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard, politics after the turn of the century became a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers.  The parties sometimes changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players.

In All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins names six banking giants and associated banking families that have dominated politics for over a century. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks.

Democracy Succumbs to Globalization

In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to control democracies by restricting government participation to the propertied class. When those restrictions were removed, big money controlled elections by other means:

First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden.  Second, the great majority of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they vote or of the issues to be dealt with.  Their judgments are, accordingly, dependent on what they learn from the mass media.  These media, in turn, are controlled by moneyed interests.

Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government.

The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was “globalization” – an expanding global market that overrides national interests:

[T]oday’s global economy is fully transnational.  The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not.

The most glaring example today is the secret twelve-country trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge and supersede domestic laws, including environmental, labor, health and other protections.

Looking at Alternatives

Some critics ask whether our system of making decisions by a mass popular vote easily manipulated by the paid-for media is the most effective way of governing on behalf of the people. In an interesting Ted Talk, political scientist Eric Li makes a compelling case for the system of “meritocracy” that has been quite successful in China.

In America Beyond Capitalism, Prof. Gar Alperovitz argues that the US is simply too big to operate as a democracy at the national level. Excluding Canada and Australia, which have large empty landmasses, the United States is larger geographically than all the other advanced industrial countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) combined. He proposes what he calls “The Pluralist Commonwealth”: a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the democratization of wealth. It involves plural forms of cooperative and common ownership beginning with decentralization and moving to higher levels of regional and national coordination when necessary. He is co-chair along with James Gustav Speth of an initiative called The Next System Project, which seeks to help open a far-ranging discussion of how to move beyond the failing traditional political-economic systems of both left and Right.

Dr. Alperovitz quotes Prof. Donald Livingston, who asked in 2002:

What value is there in continuing to prop up a union of this monstrous size? . . . [T]here are ample resources in the American federal tradition to justify states’ and local communities’ recalling, out of their own sovereignty, powers they have allowed the central government to usurp.

Taking Back Our Power

If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests while the people were asleep at the wheel. State and local governments are not allowed to print their own currencies; but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged.

The federal government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham Lincoln did. Alternatively, it could issue some very large denomination coins as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.

The freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom – the freedom to work and to have food, shelter, education, medical care and a decent retirement. President Franklin Roosevelt maintained that we need an Economic Bill of Rights. If our elected representatives were not beholden to the moneylenders, they might be able both to pass such a bill and to come up with the money to fund it.

How Corporate Power Converted Wealth Into Philanthropy for Social Control - Arundhati Roy

What follows in this essay might appear to some to be a somewhat harsh critique. On the other hand, in the tradition of honoring one’s adversaries, it could be read as an acknowledgment of the vision, flexibility, sophistication, and unwavering determination of those who have dedicated their lives to keeping the world safe for capitalism.

Their enthralling history, which has faded from contemporary memory, began in the United States in the early twentieth century when, kitted out legally in the form of endowed foundations, corporate philanthropy began to replace missionary activity as Capitalism’s (and Imperialism’s) road-opening and systems maintenance patrol.

Among the first foundations to be set up in the United States were the Carnegie Corporation, endowed in 1911 by profits from Carnegie Steel Company, and the Rockefeller Foundation, endowed in 1914 by J. D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil Company. The Tatas and Ambanis of their time.

Some of the institutions financed, given seed money, or supported by the Rockefeller Foundation are the United Nations, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), New York’s most fabulous Museum of Modern Art, and, of course, the Rockefeller Center in New York (where Diego Riviera’s mural had to be blasted off the wall because it mischievously depicted reprobate capitalists and a valiant Lenin; Free Speech had taken the day off ).

Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire and the world’s richest man. He was an abolitionist, a supporter of Abraham Lincoln, and a teetotaler. He believed his money was given to him by God, which must have been nice for him.

When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the United States, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality, and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly nontransparent— what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social, and cultural capital, to turn money into power? What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world? How else would Bill Gates, who admittedly knows a thing or two about computers, find himself designing education, health, and agriculture policies, not just for the US government but for governments all over the world?

Over the years, as people witnessed some of the genuinely good work the foundations did (running public libraries, eradicating diseases)—the direct connection between corporations and the foundations they endowed began to blur. Eventually, it faded altogether. Now even those who consider themselves left wing are not shy to accept their largesse.

By the 1920s US capitalism had begun to look outward for raw materials and overseas markets. Foundations began to formulate the idea of global corporate governance. In 1924 the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations jointly created what is today the most powerful foreign policy pressure group in the world—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which later came to be funded by the Ford Foundation as well. By 1947 the newly created CIA was supported by and working closely with the CFR. Over the years the CFR’s membership has included twenty-two US secretaries of state. There were five CFR members in the 1943 steering committee that planned the United Nations, and an $8.5 million grant from J. D. Rockefeller bought the land on which the United Nations’ New York headquarters stands.

All eleven of the World Bank’s presidents since 1946—men who have presented themselves as missionaries to the poor—have been members of the CFR. (The exception was George Woods. And he was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank.)

At Bretton Woods, the World Bank and IMF decided that the US dollar should be the reserve currency of the world, and that in order to enhance the penetration of global capital it would be necessary to universalize and standardize business practices in an open marketplace. It is toward that end that they spend a large amount of money promoting Good Governance (as long as they control the strings), the concept of the Rule of Law (provided they have a say in making the laws), and hundreds of anticorruption programs (to streamline the system they have put in place). Two of the most opaque, unaccountable organizations in the world go about demanding transparency and accountability from the governments of poorer countries.

Given that the World Bank has more or less directed the economic policies of the Third World, coercing and cracking open the market of country after country for global finance, you could say that corporate philanthropy has turned out to be the most visionary business of all time.

Corporate-endowed foundations administer, trade, and channel their power and place their chessmen on the chessboard through a system of elite clubs and think tanks, whose members overlap and move in and out through the revolving doors. Contrary to the various conspiracy theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is nothing secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this arrangement. It is not very different from the way corporations use shell companies and offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the currency is power, not money.

The transnational equivalent of the CFR is the Trilateral Commission, set up in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the former US national security adviser Zbignew Brzezinski (founder-member of the Afghan mujahidin, forefathers of the Taliban), the Chase Manhattan Bank, and some other private eminences. Its purpose was to create an enduring bond of friendship and cooperation between the elites of North America, Europe, and Japan. It has now become a pentalateral commission, because it includes members from China and India (Tarun Das of the CII; N. R. Narayana Murthy, ex-CEO of Infosys; Jamsheyd N. Godrej, managing director of Godrej; Jamshed J. Irani, director of Tata Sons; and Gautam Thapar, CEO of Avantha Group).

The Aspen Institute is an international club of local elites, businessmen, bureaucrats, and politicians, with franchises in several countries. Tarun Das is the president of the Aspen Institute, India. Gautam Thapar is chairman. Several senior officers of the McKinsey Global Institute (proposer of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor) are members of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, and the Aspen Institute.

The Ford Foundation (liberal foil to the more conservative Rockefeller Foundation, though the two work together constantly) was set up in 1936. Though it is often underplayed, the Ford Foundation has a very clear, well-defined ideology and works extremely closely with the US State Department. Its project of deepening democracy and “good governance” is very much part of the Bretton Woods scheme of standardizing business practice and promoting efficiency in the free market. After the Second World War, when communists replaced fascists as the US Government’s Enemy Number One, new kinds of institutions were needed to deal with the Cold War. Ford funded RAND (Research and Development Corporation), a military think tank that began with weapons research for the US defense services. In 1952, to thwart “the persistent Communist effort to penetrate and disrupt free nations,” it established the Fund for the Republic, which then morphed into the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, whose brief was to wage the Cold War intelligently, without McCarthyite excesses. It is through this lens that we need to view the work that the Ford Foundation is doing with the millions of dollars it has invested in India—its funding of artists, filmmakers, and activists, its generous endowment of university courses and scholarships.

The Ford Foundation’s declared “goals for the future of mankind” include interventions in grassroots political movements locally and internationally. In the United States it provided millions in grants and loans to support the credit union movement that was pioneered by the department store owner Edward Filene in 1919. Filene believed in creating a mass consumption society of consumer goods by giving workers affordable access to credit—a radical idea at the time. Actually, only half of a radical idea, because the other half of what Filene believed in was a more equitable distribution of national income. Capitalists seized on the first half of Filene’s suggestion and, by disbursing “affordable” loans of tens of millions of dollars to working people, turned the US working class into people who are permanently in debt, running to catch up with their lifestyles.

Many years later, this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit to starving peasants with disastrous consequences. The poor of the subcontinent have always lived in debt, in the merciless grip of the local village usurer—the Baniya. But microfinance has corporatized that too. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of suicides—two hundred people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national daily recently published a suicide note by an eighteen-year-old girl who was forced to hand over her last 150 rupees, her school fees, to bullying employees of the microfinance company. The note read, “Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.”

There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.

Arundhati Roy lives in New Delhi, India. She is the author of “The God of Small Things” and “Power Politics” (South End Press).

Stella Assange - The Fight To Save My Husband

On February 20th and 21st, the final attempt to prevent the US / UK from extraditing publisher and journalist Julian Assange will be heard at the High Court in London.

Given how western 'democracy' has dealt with the genocide in Gaza, it is critical to raise funds and awareness in support of this incredibly brave man.

The US and UK war criminals exposed by Assange and WikiLeaks walk free with their wealth while the journalist who revealed such crimes is in a maximum security jail at Belmarsh while two terror states collude over his extradition.

Please visit Stella Assange and discover ways that you can help prevent this crime against a free press. This is a defining moment for investigative journalism.

Below is Chapter 15 '... Death, Crime' from Book One of our Trilogy where we outline the abusive and unjust treatment of Julian Assange.

Most of my Network will be outside or inside the High Court for the two days of the hearing.

Help prevent this grave miscarriage of justice.

Thank you

_________________________________________________________________________________ 

Death

Maria 'Masha' Alyokhina (transcript from the Pussy Riot court appeal): "This trial is typical and speaks volumes. The government will feel embarrassment because of it for a long time to come. Each stage has embodied a travesty of justice. As it turned out, our performance - a small and somewhat absurd act - snowballed into an enormous catastrophe. This trial wears a grotesque mask. It is the face that the government wears when speaking to the people. To the prosecutors, our apologies, our "so-called" apologies. This insults me and causes me moral pain. Our apologies are sincere. So many words have been uttered and you still haven't understood. You're being devious when you don't accept them. What else do you need to hear? For me, this trial is a "so-called" trial. I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of falsehood, of poorly disguised deception, or of the verdict of this "so-called" court. You can only deprive me of my "so-called" freedom. Nobody can take my inner freedom. It lives in the word. It will go on living because of glasnost and, when this is heard by thousands, this freedom lives in every person who is not indifferent and inside those who hear us in this country. For every person who recognises a piece of themselves on trial, as in the words of Franz Kafka and Guy de Bord, I believe that honesty and openness, the thirst for truth, will make us all a bit more free. We will see this"

Mash it up, Masha!

Bertolt Brecht: "Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it."

The Economist: "The Kremlin may want Alexei Navalny to die in prison."

Yanis Varoufakis on Julian Assange's arbitrary detention in Belmarsh Prison: "Let's be clear. The reason why he's there is, I think, best expressed by Mike Pompeo... He described WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service. And, you know what, he's exactly right, that's what WikiLeaks is - it's a non-state hostile intelligence service, precisely that which every newspaper, every radio station, every television station ought to be but is not. This is what the BBC should be. This is what great newspapers should be - a non-state hostile intelligence service. But they are not and the reason why he's in there is because they are trying to kill him. It's really very simple."

Angela Richter: "I've been thinking about the differences between the Eastern European dissidents of the Cold War era and the Western dissidents today. It became clear to me that the Western dissidents - or let's call them 'digital dissidents' - like Assange and Snowden, but also Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown - are not even described as dissidents in the mainstream. Because to admit that we, in the supposedly 'free' West, have political prisoners, imprisoned for simply telling the truth, would be a threat to the very idea we have of ourselves as the 'free world'. It is striking that the story of Aaron Swartz only became known to a wider public after his tragic death."

Kim Dot Com: "Support a free press? Release Julian Assange you press freedom oppressing hypocrites. How dare you speak about press freedom while a journalist who reported US war crimes is your political prisoner."

Toussaint Louverture: "Freedom is a right given by Nature."

The language of power undermines the challenging of power structures and our fake media are more interested in the method of detection of truth than in the truth so sourced.

Julian Assange: "Noam Chomsky in 'The Common Good' wrote that 'the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but to allow a very lively debate within a narrow section of that spectrum'. We live in a Mediaocracy - what is politically possible is defined by the media environment. I started WikiLeaks because I understood this reality, the media frame defines the political possibility. So to bring about political change we have to enlarge the media frame. With WikiLeaks we've had significant successes in achieving this in some areas, but more needs to be done. The single greatest contributor to our expanding horizons is you. You telling your friends what's up, what you saw, what you believe, and who's full of it. Contrasting what appears in the Australian press to itself and to the world. You form part of the largest bullshit detecting machine the world has ever seen. That's why WikiLeaks has such support from people exposed to the internet. That's why we have such support from this generation because you're better informed. This is the best educated generation in the history of the world."

As we catalogue what neo-liberalism is doing to football, we shouldn't ignore the far more important impact that this system-based-on-corruption-and-Schurkenstaat is having on critical investigative journalism. As the Courage Foundation warned in July 2019: "Journalists in Britain are being threatened with the Official Secrets Act", a development they term the 'Assange precedent'. At the same time Jen Robinson of WikiLeaks voices concerns over the effective criminalisation of journalistic practices.

And the mainstream media bifurcates reality to suit hidden agendas of power.

So we have Jamal Khashoggi, Editor-in-Chief of Al-Arab News, Time Magazine Person Of The Year in 2018, whose mission was to expose injustice via a free press, being persecuted by the US government for journalism and self-exiled only to be murdered by the Saudi government in less than a day.

While Julian Assange, Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2010, whose mission was to expose injustice via a free press, is being persecuted by the US and UK governments for journalism, and continues to be slowly murdered by those governments for over more than a decade.

Paul Caruana Galizia linked corporate, political and state worlds together in a tweet: "Vomit-inducing photo of Lex Greensill and his lobbyist David Cameron in Mohammed bin Salman's tent, a year after the crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi's murder."

Simon Busuttil: "When power fuses with criminality, you have a mafia state."

Or rather a spy state that utilises mafia as part of its military strategy - Five Eyes are better than two after all, which is presumably how the British Labour Party came to be led by party-harmer Keir Starmer, a member of the Trilateral Commission - a neo-liberal body founded by bankers whose primary aim is to replace the nation state with something altogether more Davos.

Meanwhile, according to the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the murderer of journalist Jan Kuciak, Marian Kocner, paid one judge at least £150,000 to issue favourable rulings. He even gave the judge USB sticks containing the reasoning he should use to justify them.

Self-censorship is the norm, the only variable being the degree to which you redact or secrete or archive your output. Or the division you elect to make between the area of one's book that is based on fact and the other hybrid region of the publication relating to fiction-based-on-fact.

So-called fact.

We live, as Derrida would have it "... always on the edge of an impossible confidence" while remaining a happy-go-lucky ray of fucking sunshine...

The Grugq: "It was essential that none of you recognise me... so I cut off my face."

The universal is nobler and higher in rank than the particular but, when veiled, what is to be made of this hidden holistic?

So.

Although we know nothing, we know something of the nothing, and we share something of this something of the nothing, to isolationist thresholds.

Like the immense Coletivo Papa Reto, use strategy, bespoke code and networks, direct action and, wherever feasible, immersive investigative journalism.

A senior reporter at RTV-SLO in Slovenia states: "Only a few of us left are still being critical, but we're being silenced."

As the Collectiv cover up in Romania showed, the mainstream media is complicit in state and corporate crime - the needless deaths of many young Romanians was only exposed as malicious by the investigations by sports journalists at the Sports Gazette (Gazeta Sporturilor).

Alexander Nanau: "Being a citizen of a democratic country carries a responsibility that cannot be totally passed on to rightfully elected politicians. The power belongs to the people, to every single one of the people - and with it, the responsibility."

Stuxnet changed everything for everyone everywhere.

The Nitro Zeus malware used to infect Iran's nuclear infrastructure in Operation Olympic Games had its maliciousness disclosed after malicious forces in Israeli Unit 8200x maliciously acted maliciously disobeying their paymasters in the doing.

Now.

Current international law is that "you do whatever you can get away with".

The NSA was allegedly established for code-making and code-breaking but it is located in the same building as Cyber Command and is acquainted with the roles required to develop code for offensive operations e.g. Stuxnet.

Alice Walker: "Imagine it: Years from now people will say: Oh, if only I had known what we were losing when they abused this decent and courageous man [Assange]!"

Geoffrey Robertson: "American pride had been hurt by a pesky Australian, so they targeted him by grand jury proceedings and the military took out its anger on young Chelsea Manning, treating her abominably in prison until Hillary Clinton's press spokesman, P.J. Crowley, resigned in protest. Manning had been kept for eight months in solitary confinement, naked and without blanket or pillow, awoken every few minutes for a pretended 'suicide watch'. Her prosecutors hoped she would confess to being 'groomed' by Assange, and at one point, according to her lawyer, threatened her with the death penalty if she did not. Then came the CIA pressure on Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa, to which they succumbed, to stop receiving donations for WikiLeaks or Assange. (You can still buy Nazi uniforms and Ku Klux Klan outfits with your Visa card but you can't donate to WikiLeaks.) On what basis was Assange demonised? There is no doubt that the cables were of manifest public interest, revealing many examples of human rights violations and political corruption that American diplomats (with their CIA sources) were well aware of, but which had not been made public."

Micah Lee and Glenn Greenwald have explained in the Intercept that the things Assange is accused of doing are things journalists do all the time: attempting to help a source avoid detection, taking steps to try and hide their communications and encouraging sources to provide more material.

Sarah Harrison: "When you see news that you are directly involved in, it's shocking to see how the facts of the matter are not presented correctly; it's spun, and sometimes even outright lies are used."

Kellie Tranter: "The Assange petition calling for [Australian] government action is the largest ever tabled in the Australian parliament yet he remains incarcerated in intolerable conditions... Make no mistake our government is in a position to act in the Assange case and is making a choice not to act."

Sarah Harrison: "The public is actively encouraged to commend journalists for telling them less, for keeping information from them... We clearly can't rely on states to protect us; we need to create tools that will help us to protect ourselves."

Renata Avila: "It was very interesting to see you [Sarah Harrison] locked in one place with Snowden, while Julian was trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy at the same time. And because of modern technology there was this interaction between these two isolated places. It was impressive to see that with the right tools, people can continue to have a powerful effect even under such conditions in what are, perhaps, the two most surveilled countries in the world - the UK and Russia. Seeing the possibilities for continuing to effect change under such conditions has quite a powerful demonstration effect in my opinion."

Antifa: "We are not passive, we are not civil, and we will not apologise."

One might even be tempted to agree with Grazhdanskaya Oberona: "Kill the state within yourself. Our truth, our faith, our deed is anarchy."

Martin Luther King: "In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

George Orwell (1984): "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
_________________________________________________________________________________

I Carried My Dancing Shoes In My Gas Mask Case

Friedrich Nietzsche in 'Beyond Good And Evil': "Ultimately 'love of one's neighbour' is always something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory, when compared with fear of one's neighbour. Once the structure of society seems to have been in general fixed and made safe from external dangers, it is this fear of one's neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. There are certain strong and dangerous drives, such as enterprisingness, foolhardiness, revengefulness, craft, rapacity, ambition, which hitherto had not only to be honoured from the point of view of their social utility - under different names, naturally, from those chosen here - but also mightily developed and cultivated (because they were constantly needed to protect the community as a whole against the enemies of the community as a whole); these drives are now felt to be doubly dangerous - now that the diversionary outlets for them are lacking - and are gradually branded as immoral and given over to calumny. The antithetical drives and inclinations now come into moral honour; step by step the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little that is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, resides in an opinion, in a condition or emotion, in a will, in a talent, that is now the moral perspective: here again fear is the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded and calumniated. Lofty spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even, are felt to be dangerous; everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour quail is henceforth called evil; the fair, modest, obedient, self-effacing disposition, the mean and average in desires, acquires moral names and honours. Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less occasion or need to educate one's feelings in severity and sternness; and now every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and awakens mistrust... 'we wish that there will one day no longer be anything to fear!'"

Mint Press News: "Assange’s 'crime' was revealing deep, embarrassing, sometimes deadly, malfeasance by numerous actors, including the U.S. government, the media, the Democratic Party Clinton machine, and Israel."

Alfred de Zayas: "The US extradition request to the UK must be denied. Assange is a journalist who has done his work as a journalist. The extradition request contravenes the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights."

Jen Robinson believes that the raids against investigative journalists "... are about intimidating journalists and media organisations because of their truth-telling. They are about more than hunting down whistleblowers."

Afshin Rattansi: "No matter how the British, US, Australian, Swedish & Ecuadorian governments torture Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, people all around the world will never be able to "un-see" what he revealed of the barbarity of NATO-nation war crimes."

Caitlin Johnstone: "Isn’t it interesting how an Ecuadorian 'asylum conditions' technicality, a UK bail technicality, and a US whistleblowing technicality all just so happened to converge in a way that just so happens to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for telling the truth?"

Nathaniel St Clair: "Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism."

Oliver Stone: "Julian Assange is a publisher for truth. He’s done great work on behalf of mankind despite his inhumane treatment. This case is crucial to the survival of our right to know and our essential freedom against USA and UK oppression -- and now tyranny!"

Rania Khalek: "One reason corporate journalists and star pundits care so little about the danger prosecuting Assange poses to journalism is that none of them engage in actual journalism. They are stenographers who know they won’t ever be targeted by the state because they mostly serve its interests."

Media Lens: "Where is the outrage at the lies we have been served up for these past seven years? Where is the contrition at having been gulled for so long? Where is the fury at the most basic press freedom – the right to publish – being trashed?"

John Pilger: "The Vichy journalists of the mainstream media have finally taken fright that the monstrous US charges against Julian Assange are now a threat to them. Yet the cowards at the New York Times, the Guardian etc continue to smear this heroic man who shamed them by refusing to join their gatekeepers' club."

DIEM25: ""The whole idea behind WikiLeaks is to take the same technologies that allow the NSA, Google etc, to turn you into a source of data, and turn it against them to make you more opaque and them more transparent. This is why he's paying a price."

Thomas Drake states that what Assange “is accused of doing is exactly what professional journalists do every day - seeking, receiving and publishing important information."

Zerohedge: "How many times must Assange be proven right before people start listening?"

Stefania Maurizi: "I want to live in a society in which you can expose war crimes and mass surveillance without spending 7 years in jail as Chelsea Manning did, without being arbitrarily detained for 11 years as Julian Assange is, without being forced to escape to Russia as Ed Snowden did."

Mark Curtis: "Assange sentence raises serious issues. It dismisses the UN determination on arbitrary detention as 'not binding on this court' and containing 'misconceptions'. If UK judiciary has been captured by the state, that is the very definition of authoritarianism."

Sarah Abdallah: "Julian Assange exposes Hillary Clinton’s role in arming head-chopping Al-Qaeda jihadists both in Libya and Syria and faces up to 170 years in prison on 17 charges. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton roams free, does media, gets book deals and receives never-ending celebrity treatment."

Yanis Varoufakis: "Dan Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, thus turning public opinion against the US government's criminal pursuit of the Vietnam War, is now telling us: Julian Assange is his modern day equivalent."

The New Yorker: "The charges against Julian Assange are an attack on the freedom of the press and on whistleblowers who hold powerful institutions - including the U.S. government - to account."

Ali Abunimah: "Assange, WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning did incalculable service, especially for oppressed peoples, by revealing US crimes and intrigues. They’re paying price for doing the job US regime journalists refuse to do. If you value press freedom as more than a slogan you must stand with them."

Hanna Jonasson: "Is [editor] Kath Viner comfortable that Guardian fake news about Assange is used to justify extradition? By failing to retract, Viner digs herself deeper into a bottomless hole."

The ACLU: "For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment."

Renata Avila: "So the plan was always to first destroy Julian Assange's name, and turn his support base, progressives, against him, to then smoothly prosecute him for the crime of publishing the truth. Do it as slowly as possible, so people will forget the importance of WikiLeaks revelations."

Mark Daly: "You may not like Assange, but journalism and the right to report in the public interest are in the cross hairs here. Whistleblowers already risk much - to lob in Espionage Act or similar? It's an alarming lurch against freedom of expression which not only journalists should fear."

Glenn Greenwald: "There is so much driving the hatred many journalists harbor for Assange. But a huge part of it is professional jealousy: WikiLeaks broke more massive stories than most of these reporters will ever get close to in their lives, all without joining their insular journalism club."

James Goodale (the Pentagon Papers lawyer) says Julian Assange is being indicted "for publishing and gathering the news." He calls the charges "absolutely novel," adding that if the Justice Department finds Assange guilty, they will have "criminalised the news gathering process."

The Tribune: "Julian Assange remains incarcerated in a high-security prison for revealing the truth about wartime atrocities, despite never being convicted of a crime - his case makes a mockery of claims about press freedom."

John Pilger: "Matt Kennard's expose of the Guardian's collusion with Britain's Deep State is real journalism. A veneer of often facile gender promotion is not nearly enough to suppress the truth of a determined assault on democracy from within."

Yanis Varoufakis: "An atrocity against your right to know is unfolding. Julian Assange is about to be thrown into the US supermax gulag. Years of fake news is now whittled down to a simple act of revenge against the person who embarrassed our states by exposing to us crimes committed in our name."

Centre for Investigative Journalism: "WikiLeaks is a publisher. Charges now brought in connection with its material, or any attempt to extradite Assange to the United States for prosecution under the deeply flawed cudgel of the Espionage Act 1917, is an attack on all of us."

Julian Assange: ""I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many awards and protected many people."

WikiLeaks: "A democracy that imprisons publishers is not a democracy."

________________________________________________________________________________

The Navajo, Edelweiss Pirates And Roving Dudes

The Guardian's Direct Collusion With Media Censorship By Secret Services - Thomas Scripps:

Minutes of Ministry of Defence (MoD) meetings have confirmed the role of Britain’s Guardian newspaper as a mouthpiece for the intelligence agencies.

Last week, independent journalist Matt Kennard revealed that the paper’s deputy editor, Paul Johnson, was personally thanked by the Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice (or D-Notice) committee for integrating the Guardian into the operations of the security services.

Minutes of a meeting in 2018 read: “The Chairman thanked Paul Johnson for his service to the Committee. Paul had joined the Committee in the wake of the Snowden affair and had been instrumental in re-establishing links with the Guardian.”

D-Notices are used by the British state to veto the publication of news damaging to its interests. The slavish collusion of the mainstream media ensures that such notices function as gag orders.

Johnson joined the committee in 2014 and evidently excelled in his performance. A separate set of minutes from the first meeting attended by Johnson records the Guardian’s close collaboration with military officials.

Under a section detailing “advice” given by the intelligence agencies to the media, the document reads “most of the occurrences and requests for advice were related to further publications by The Guardian of extracts from the Snowden documents. The Secretary reported that the engagement of DPBAC [Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee] Secretariat with The Guardian had continued to strengthen during the last six months, with regular dialogues between the Secretary and Deputy Secretaries and Guardian journalists.”

The secretary and deputy secretaries were Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance CB OBE, Air Commodore David Adams and Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE. The chairman was Peter Watkins CBE, the MoD’s director general of Strategy, Security and Policy Operations.

Under the direction of these military intelligence handlers, the Guardian played a role in bringing other newspapers internationally to heel. The minutes note, “because of an agreement between the Guardian and allied publications overseas to coordinate their respective disclosures of Snowden material, advice given to the Guardian has been passed on to the New York Times and others, helping guide the disclosures of these outlets.”

In September 2014, the Guardian allowed the former head of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) Sir David Omand to publish an article titled, “Edward Snowden’s leaks are misguided—they risk exposing us to cyber-attacks.”

He declared, “Journalists are not best placed to identify security risks; we have to trust those who oversee the intelligence-gathering.”

In 2016, Paul Johnson used an unprecedented interview with a serving head of MI5, Andrew Parker, to propagandize for the antidemocratic, warmongering interests of British imperialism.

These facts are damning proof of the Guardian’s total integration into the propaganda wing of the MoD following its involvement in the WikiLeaks and Snowden files releases. Indeed, the work of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange has served to expose and confirm the deep ties of the entire mainstream media to the military-intelligence complex.

The Guardian has been viewed historically as the voice of British liberal dissent, critical of the worst excesses of British capitalism at home and abroad. But it has always acted as a political policeman—filtering the news “responsibly” and channelling the resulting anger into impotent moral appeals to the state and other authorities. Its dealings with Assange and Snowden transformed political allegiance into direct subservience. Its liberal, critical pretensions unravelled in a matter of a few months.

When Assange looked to the Guardian and other papers internationally such as the New York Times to publish the Afghan and Iraq war logs and secret US diplomatic cables in 2010, the editors’ main concern was damage control. Within a month of an initial publication of documents, the Guardian had broken off relations with Assange—publishing an infamous December 17 editorial “WikiLeaks: the man and the idea.” It stated that the Guardian had only agreed to publish “a small number of cables” to control the political fall-out from the details of murder, torture, espionage and corruption they revealed and give it the opportunity of “editing, contextualising, explanation and redaction.”

The main purpose of the editorial was to support Assange’s extradition to Sweden on trumped-up allegations of sexual misconduct relating to a trip to that country a few months earlier.

In an op-ed piece published last month by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, he assumes to take the moral high ground by claiming that WikiLeaks issued leaks unredacted, and wanted to continue this practise, in contrast with his “responsible” journalism. An editorial published immediately prior to Rusbridger’s article, again supporting Assange’s extradition to Sweden to face “charges” that don’t exist, stated, “The Guardian disapproved of the mass publication of unredacted documents ... and broke with Mr. Assange over the issue.”

This is a self-serving lie. WikiLeaks has pointed out that the editorial “conveniently leaves out” that it was the Guardian —through a book authored by David Leigh and Luke Harding—that disclosed the password to the digital file Assange had given them in confidence. The book was a hatchet job on WikiLeaks. The rights to it were sold, becoming the basis of a slanderous Hollywood movie.

When NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked files detailing blanket state surveillance of the world’s population in 2013, the Guardian set out to play the same “responsible” role. Asked afterwards if the paper had held back from publishing anything about GCHQ and UK security services because of “worries about national security,” the ever-pliant Mr. Rusbridger replied, “Yes, we’ve held back a great deal, we’ve published a small amount of what we have read.”

This time, however, the Guardian was told by the security services that even rigorously filtering the Snowden’s revelations was not good enough. It must stop publishing immediately.

The country’s top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, called the Guardian’s offices to pass on the demands of then Prime Minister David Cameron that the Snowden material either be returned to the government or destroyed. Editors were threatened with legal action if they did not comply.

Rusbridger later explained, “The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.” This is a masterpiece of understatement. Emails obtained by the Associated Press in 2014 showed that this was an operation conducted in intimate collusion between the government, the British security services and the US National Security Agency, including then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

In the end, two GCHQ security officials directly oversaw the Guardian’s destruction of its own material. Three Guardian staff members, including Paul Johnson himself, destroyed the hard drives in the Guardian’s possession with angle grinders and other equipment provided by GCHQ officials.

The Guardian had been put in a position it never wanted. Its liberal reputation, and previous disclosures, had made it the newspaper of choice for WikiLeaks’ and Snowden’s revelations. But the scale of what had been uncovered threatened the fundamental interests of British and US imperialism. It therefore rolled over when the government told it to cease and desist, before taking its place alongside the rest of the right-wing media on the secret committee responsible for press censorship and propaganda dissemination.

One of Assange’s persecutors-in-chief, Luke Harding, enjoys the most intimate relations with the security services. His notorious November 2018 fabrication, claiming Assange held meetings with US President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, was published in the Guardian just two weeks after Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” with the MoD. The story was widely cited and formed a keystone of the efforts, spearheaded by the Democrats in the US, to present WikiLeaks and “Russian interference” as the causes of Trump’s 2016 election victory.

Harding played a central role in silencing questions over the UK government’s bogus account of the Skripal affair in mid-2018. These events were the subject of at least one D-notice, issued while Paul Johnson was on the responsible committee.

An unintended but valuable consequence of the WikiLeaks exposures has been to explode the fraud of the Guardian’s claim to any critical independence from the state. The crimes of the major imperialist powers against the world’s population made available by WikiLeaks were so great that they could not be neutralised, even by the Guardian’s professional gatekeepers of the “truth.” Not a word published in this imperialist propaganda sheet can ever be taken at face value.

_______________________________________________________________________

Alexa, Fake My Death

Fyodor Dostoevsky in 'Notes From The Underground': "Power, power was what I wanted then, sport was what I wanted, I wanted to wring out your tears, your humiliation, your hysteria - that was what I wanted then."

Gore Vidal in 'History Of The National Security State': "I think everybody should take a sober look at the world about us, remember that practically everything that you're told about other countries is untrue; what we're told about ourselves and our great strength and how much loved we are - forget it. Our strength is there but it's the kind of strength that blows off your hand while you hold up the grenade; it's a suicidal strength as well as a murderous one. So here we are, and let us hope it is not the end of the road, even though there's every sign that it is not the yellow brick road up ahead."

Caitlin Johnstone: "A nation that cannot exist without nonstop warfare is not a real nation, it's an ongoing military operation that happens to have suburbs."

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff (of  'Women Against Rape'): "When Julian Assange was first arrested, we were struck by the unusual zeal with which he was being pursued for rape allegations. It seems even clearer now that the allegations against him are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction."

Noam Chomsky: "The arrest of Assange is scandalous in several respects... These are efforts to silence a journalist who was producing materials that people in power didn't want the rascal multitude to know about. WikiLeaks was producing things that people ought to know about the people in power. But they don't like that, so therefore they have to silence it. This is the kind of scandal that unfortunately takes place over and over."

Slavoj Zizek: "So let's move on to the big question: Why now? I think one name explains it all: Cambridge Analytica - a name that stands for all Assange is about, for what he fights against: the links between the great private corporations and government agencies. Remember how big an obsession was the Russian meddling in US elections? Now we know it was not the Russian hackers (with Assange) who nudged the people toward Trump, but our own data-processing agencies who joined up with political forces... The biggest achievement of the new cognitive-military complex is that direct and obvious oppression is no longer necessary: individuals are much better controlled and 'nudged' in the desired direction when they continue to experience themselves as free and autonomous agents of their own life... Let a hundred WikiLeaks blossom. The panic and fury with which those in power - those who control our digital commons - reacted to Assange, is a proof that such activity hits a nerve. There will be many blows below the belt in this fight... but we should get used to it and learn to strike back with interest, ruthlessly playing one side against the other in order to bring them all down."

Edward Snowden: "Daniel Hale was charged under the Espionage Act for the 'crime' of exposing the classified fact that nearly 90% of those the government kills via drone are innocents and bystanders. 90%. Hale should be pardoned. Reality Winner should be pardoned. End the war on whistleblowers."

Al Wei Wei: ""He [Assange] has the right to stay, as a dissident person, to protect freedom of speech. I think it's a very sad day for Europe, for the West, to arrest someone like Assange."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "The journalist should be like a mosquito, which is there to irritate those in power, buzzing incessantly."

Howard Zinn: "“Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”

Ed Snowden: "It is now undeniable that spies worldwide exploit the credulity of journalists to conceal their violation of human rights. This century will teach a harsh lesson: While terrorism is no existential threat to democracy, our political deference to intelligence agencies might be."

WikiLeaks: "When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are ruled by criminals."

Srecko Horvat: "The current system is more violent than any revolution."

Toussaint Louverture: "It is best I suffer but keep doing good things."

Renata Avila: "We live in a dangerous time in which everyone opposed to great political and financial powers might soon become a target, just like Assange... A Western publisher, a journalist, is gagged in Europe - a symbol of the collapse of the West. Silencing and torturing a journalist - in plain sight - is to cross a limit, and yet no-one rioted."

Even the olives are bleeding as malicious non-democratic forces erode the lives of others.

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie: "WikiLeaks, the utopia we need... The principles upon which WikiLeaks is based are the very same principles that are needed today to create a new political culture: principles of transparency, anti-authoritarianism, internationalism, non-submission, and unconditionality... By defending Assange, we defend and protect the future of democracy. It could be that Assange embodies for the twenty-first century a character as important as Nelson Mandela was in the twentieth century."

Pamela Anderson

Skepticism is brewing -
The public know
when they are being misled -
Journalists tend to underestimate people.
There is wisdom on the streets. People can see through
The attempted smears.
Don’t be polite -
Gloves off !
Julian does not belong in prison.

The tortured guest of a gracious queen...

___________________________________________________________________________________

Crime

Isabelle Allende: "What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, the power to abuse"

Football Index was a criminal construct that might be utilised as a example to demonstrate the corruptions underpinning the English game.

The Index was established as a pseudo-Ponzi construct working with talking heads (John Motson, Guillem Balague, Ralph Honigstein) and rogue media (the Guardian) to create player value markets that were to be gamed by insiders for proprietary profit.

Football Index didn't hold clients' monies in any protected account meaning that, when the Ponzi went belly up, there was nothing for investors to seek. It was all safely banked offshore.

The company issued new shares in footballers to attract mug bettors even when it was known internally that the platform was, in effect, liquidated.

For example, the exchange issued 2,400 new shares in Jadon Sancho to add to the 921,509 already in circulation. When the owners went into hiding, the value of Sancho plummeted to £0.72 from £7.52, having traded as high as £15 just months earlier.

Firstly customers had to put up with manipulated prices, no dividends and enlarged spreads but this soon evolved into an inability to deposit or withdraw funds as the planned for administration came to pass.

Football Index is the biggest ever failure of any British betting company and leads to questions about the role of government and the Gambling Commission who allegedly regulated this pyramid structure. It was essentially operating a fraction reserve banking system where only a small percentage of users' money was available to withdraw at any given time.

Some bettors had £250,000 invested in this newspaper-backed scam. It is estimated that £90 million was pocketed by insiders. Football Index were minting shares right up to the collapse of the platform in an odious display of criminalised marginal gains.

At the same time, an equivalent platform called Footstock also went into administration after the German techie owners ran off with the money. Chris Kamara, the television presenter, had been the public face of this entity, persuading punters to part with their cash with no hope of ever getting it back. Kamara is a serial scumbag.

Kamara: "Ever since gaining my lucky break being spotted playing for the Royal Navy, I've always embraced life's opportunities and working with Footstock is another exciting prospect. The game (!) allows football followers to utilise their knowledge in a fun and responsible way."

There's no fun like bankruptcy Kamara.

Football Is Fixed raised concerns about Football Index from its launch in 2015. Initially we expressed concern that it was a Ponzi scheme dependent on revenue from new customers to pay dividends owed to others further up the pyramid but then we realised that it was worse than a Ponzi - it was an orchestrated criminal enterprise featuring a number of the miscreants who we focus on in these books.

The entity should have been regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) not a captured body like the Gambling Commission. Even when the Gambling Commission eventually spluttered into action (way after the final whistle should have been blown), it elected to suspend the licence of BetIndex (the parent company) rather than revoking it.

A City of London trader states: "Many people in the City were completely astonished that Football Index was able to open and run a fully-blown market-making platform without any oversight from the FCA."

Having Ponzi characteristics, there was no downside protection and there was not sufficient liquidity and BetIndex removed the ability to instantly sell one's positions at the start of the covid-19 pandemic.

There is also a slither of difference between a Ponzi scheme - which serves out its abuses to a natural dynamic over a window of time (think capitalism, for example) and a mafia criminal enterprise that aims to shorten the time frame to optimise the shafting process so that the stolen money may be reinvested as soon as possible.

Due to the inputs of Sky Sports, BT Sport and the Guardian to the fake inputs of Football Index, we are dealing here with a criminal enterprise.

Jean-Francois Lyotard: "In every case, nature produces the least complex local morphology compatible with the initial local circumstances."

The Ponzi operates naturally. The criminal enterprise is orchestrated.

A spokesperson for the support group for those abused by Football Index states: "The things I've heard over the last few weeks beggar belief, and there will be thousands more out there who are suffering in silence."

The entire bookmaking sector requires a robust regulator as much as anything just to allow the basic reality of winning accounts - if bookies close winners down (and 99.9% of them do) then what is betting actually about? Without change more companies will abuse punters in the future safe in the knowledge that they can scuttle off to crown territories with their stolen largesse leaving the inept Gambling Commission to take the flak.

In the aftermath of the collapse of Football Index, more than 40 MPs and peers have demanded a public inquiry to investigate the roles of the Gambling Commission and the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). The signatories are demanding to know why the Gambling Commission ignored numerous warnings about Football Index and "by negligence or design" allowed Football Index to overstate its financial position, reassuring its users to attract more investment and new money into the platform. Our political representatives conclude that the "scandal has brought into sharp focus regulation that is not fit for purpose and mechanisms for consumer redress that are nonexistent."

Of course, the British football media is rancid to the core merely offering staged entertainment extravaganzas for illicit offshore tax-evaded wealth creation - the smiling faces on your television screens are the assassins of your sport. Football has become show business welded onto a betting market.

The Football Index trading model is also increasingly present in financial markets.

One such example is Cadre, an alternative asset entity that allows people to trade in buildings like a digital stock market. Cadre finds investment opportunities with a life of around five to seven years and lists it on its platform. Investors can buy pieces of it and every quarter rental income is paid out. By offering low fees at a quarter of the rates charged by traditional alternative-asset manager, Cadre attracts the befuddled to its platform.

Or take Tether, a so-called stablecoin whose issuer has long claimed that Tethers are backed one-to-one by dollars.

The Economist: "Doubts have long swirled around Tether's claim to be a sort of digital dollar. Critics say the one-to-one backing looks flaky."

There are also suspicions that Tether is being used to manipulate markets and worries exist over the degree of control that Tether's owners have over supply.

New York's attorney-general Letitia James branded the firm fraudulent in February 2021.

The Economist: "Ms James's charge-sheet is damning. Tether, she says, lied about its dollar backing. Its 'self-proclaimed verification' was allegedly a sham... Moreover, Bitfinex [a crypto-currency exchange owned largely by Tether] was not upfront about hundreds of millions of dollars that went missing through a third-party payments processor reportedly based in Panama."

JP Morgan Chase: "Were any issues to arise that could affect the willingness or ability of both domestic and foreign investors to use Tether, the most likely result would be a severe liquidity shock to the broader crypto-currency market." 

Tether is only different to Football Index in its business architecture in that it is tied into the wider crypto-currency universe whereas Football Index was pretty much a sole provider of shares in footballers. This, of course, allowed extended possibilities for price manipulation and abuse.

The government was keen for any inquiry into Football Index to be overseen by the DCMS who hold some responsibility for the scam - the defendant should always be the blinkered self-prosecutor in the eyes of the PM Psycho Monster.

The Guardian attempted to display mock apoplexy over the Football Index shenanigans - shenanigans that their 'journalists' helped to fuel.

The Guardian simply offers Vichy journalism - a paper where the unscrupulous meet the unwise.

Over a two month period between August 3rd 2020 and October 6th 2020, the Guardian newspaper provided the following headlines relating to Jadon Sancho.

In this window, the value of Sancho on the Football Index platform went through the roof as desperate punters sought to get a piece of the action before the player joined one of the world's biggest clubs.

Sancho was hot.

Except that he was not.

In the first 11 Bundesliga matches that he played for Borussia Dortmund in season 2020/21, Sancho failed to score a single goal, indeed his first Bundesliga goal of the season came after the New Year. He failed to score in 6 England internationals but did manage a couple of goals against lesser teams in the Champions League group stages.

All in all, two goals in 22 games - not exactly 250 million euro territory then.

Ed Aarons & Fabrizio Romano (August 3rd 2020): "Manchester United in advanced talks with Dortmund over £90m Sancho"

Ed Aarons, Fabrizio Romano & Jamie Jackson (August 4th 2020): "Manchester United close to £90 million deal with Dortmund after Sancho agrees terms"

Jamie Jackson (August 10th 2020): "Borussia Dortmund insist Jadon Sancho will not leave this summer"

Reuters (August 13th 2020): "Jadon Sancho happy to help 'special young players' develop at Dortmund"

Ed Aarons & Fabrizio Romano (September 9th 2020): "Manchester United make progress in pursuit of Dortmund's Jadon Sancho"

Jamie Jackson (September 9th 2020): "Jadon Sancho, a street player with the potential to be England's Neymar"

Jonathan Liew (September 19th 2020): "Manchester United need time more than money or Jadon Sancho"

Fabrizio Romano (September 29th 2020): "Dortmund tell Manchester United 90 million euros is nowhere near enough for Jadon Sancho"

Jamie Jackson (October 6th 2020): "Manchester United abandoned Jadon Sancho bid as it would cost 250 million euros"

The Guardian output should have been investigated as part of the inquiry into Football Index as the newspaper was complicit in fleecing Football Index punters via fake news.

After the price of Sancho on the Football Index platform was inflated by this pseudo-journalism, the value of Sancho had declined 95% at the time of administration.

Still, money for the boys on the newsdesk.

On February 8th 2021, one of the worst examples of fake-journalist at the Guardian, the lop-sided Barry Glendenning wrote: "Gambling affordability checks by control freaks would be a threat to civil liberties" - hardly surprising that Guardian 'journalists' who receive and bet on inside information and who manipulate markets are complaining about some external monitoring of the illicit revenues they develop through their contacts with those corrupting our sports.

No era football, era fraude.

Otro futbol es posibil.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Mourid Barghouti

After the death of the horseman

The homeward-bound horse

Says everything

Without saying anything

___________________________________________________________________________________

© 2024 Football is Fixed

_________________________________________________________________________