Citizens' Broadcasting Cooperative
Citizens' Broadcasting Cooperative
Arrest Bush: Strategizing After the "Understanding Deep Politics" Conference, Santa Cruz California, May 2010
I have been in California for the past ten days or so, meeting many activists in and around the Understanding Deep Politics conference that took place in Santa Cruz from May 14 to 16. At a retreat after the conference a small group strategized about the actions we might take accompanied by an explanatory manifesto or declaration. Below is my most recent written contribution to that process. I wrote it earlier today, 24 May, 2010 in Monterey. I have made some modifications from my original draft on strategy to be more self-explanatory to the members and readers of Our Own CBC. Stay tuned.
24 May, 2010, Monterey California
Hi Folks;
I'm half way through Charlotte Dennett's brand new book, The People versus Bush. From it I'm learning a lot about the inside story of what has been happening within the United States to hold those legally responsible for the Bush brand of organized crime. I think Charlotte and Kristina Borjesson, Both of whom attended the Understanding Deep Politics conference, have started something that has a momentum we can continue to push forward, albeit now in a more
transnational, inclusive way. Their efforts tie in, for instance, with Splitting The Sky's attempted citizen's arrest of Bush in Calgary in March of 2009.
Kristina is an Emmy-winning investigative reporter who has been writing books about corruption and cover up in the mainstream media, including as practiced by her former employer, CBS. Kristina worked for Charlotte in her recent campaign when she ran for Attorney General of Vermont on a "Prosecute Bush for Murder" platform. I think this approach of continuing the initiative that Charlotte began, with her run for elected office, offers a more pointed way of proceeding than the rather diffuse shotgun approach we initiated on the last day of our retreat.
I think the murderous treachery of Bush together with the culture of impunity that protects him and the big corporate interests behind his cabal's brand of organized crime pretty much embodies all the problems we identified-- the captive corrupt corporate media conglomerates that cover up rather than expose, for starters, the lies and crimes of 9/11; the network of interlinked corporate interests that have become key agencies of state crimes against democracy and the environment as well
as against the victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity etc.
Perhaps our Manifesto could take the form of a notice of citizens' prosecution against Obama's Justice Department for its failures to enforce the rule of law against the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield cabal of war
profiteers. The Bush group set new precedents of lawlessness that the Obama regime apparently wants to maintain and build upon.
Our prosecution needs to link the crimes involved in the diversions and deceits of 9/11 to the bankers' cannibalization of the global economy as advanced during the Bush years and continued now in this time of the big Obama psy op. As I discussed with Ellen Brown, (author of Web of Debt), who was a speaker at the conference, I think the most logical place to dig for the connection between the lies and crimes of 9/11 and the massive derivative/accounting/insurance/hedging frauds is AIG, and especially the Maiden Lane companies set up by the Federal Reserve to do payouts to AIG's so-called counterparties on the company's most "toxic" assets.
This transfer of tax payers money included billions to the fraudsters at Goldman Sachs. The Maiden Lane transactions make the New York Fed perhaps the world's biggest dealer in the dubious variety of bets on bets on bets known as derivatives. Check out the scandals surrounding the Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI) to see the genesis of the privatized terror economy, an important undercover element of the financial debacle whose root sources have as much to do with bets on bets on bets on pipeline routes, regime change and drug deals as with subprime mortgages and government debt in Greece. AIG was one of the operations that moved into the vacuum of deep politics when BCCI went down.
I don't think the idea of an accountabilty movement (Charlotte's phrase) goes far enough. We want to address on a global basis as well as within our respective nations and peoples' polities the mechanics of the culture of impunity that makes such a sad hoax of the rule of law. Bush didn't start the turn towards massive state-sponsored criminality that has caused Charlotte and her mentor, Vincent Bugliosi, to make the case that Bush should be charged domestically with murder for lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and thereby taking the US to war on false premises.
The million or so killed in the name of anti-communism in Indonesia in the mid to late 1960s, for instance, just starts the litany of crimes against humanity directed ultimately by those that control the
executive branch of the US government, whether Democrat or Republican. The US executive branch, but especially the Commander in Chief, has long been a rogue and unaccountable operative responsible for global murders and mayhem on an enormous scale. This executive branch has
long been a puppet of corporate and banking interests that have transformed all the world's governments into vessels for the enrichment of a few. Most of us today are the subjects of what I call ballot box colonialism. Elections no longer give real accountability when so much key information about our real conditions is kept secret with the connivance of our corrupt mainstream media agencies. Many so-called alternative media are also involved in the cover ups. As I.F. Stone once said, the danger is on the left but the crackdown is on the left.
On the most rudimentary level, this pattern of elite control is revealed in the pattern of physical or professional assassinations of, for starters, Mossadeq of Iran, Kassim of Iraq, Lumumba of Congo, Sukarno of Indonesia, Allende of Chile, Nkrumah of Ghana, MLK and Malcolm X of USA, Aristide
of Haiti and on and on and on. Often the assassinations cleared the way for orgies of torture and murder by CIA-intalled kleptocrats like Mobutu in Congo/Zaire or Suharto in Indonesia. The job of these kleptocrats has been to eliminate opponents and protect the turf of the big transnational companies. Bush was thus less of an aberration than Charlotte Dennett and Bugliosi indicate in their interrelated books, both of which merit close attention.
With Bush we saw the ruling cabal's zeal to replace in public mythology a largely manufactured worldwide conspiracy of communists with a worldwide conspiracy of "terrorists" in order to to justify the continuation of the permanent war economy that has been the core business of US monopoly capitalism since 1941. The hugely lucrative war machine is the core operation of the money machine for the class that Bush and his dad and his Nazi-collaborator grandfather well personify. The recruitment of the bin Ladens by the Bushes to share in the spoils of war helps set the
background for the genesis of the fraudulent Global War on Terror. Too bad Charlotte Dennett and Vincent Bugliosi limit their analysis of the genesis of the fraudulent justification for war to the disinformation on weapons of mass destruction rather than getting into the nitty gritty of what is already on the public record about the lies and crimes of 9/11.
Let's remember that the architects and engineers of the project for the New American Century just built on ideas that were introduced by the propagandist Henry Luce, founder of Time-Life publications. Following in the footsteps of Nazi collaborator William Randolf Hearst, Luce's brand of psy op as journalism helped develop the process of making the media machinery on the capitalist side
of the Cold War a tool of elite oppression through the poisoning of public consciousness. When it comes to identifying and prosecuting the criminals most responsible for the war machine's most lethal incursions, the big media conglomerates (including now the BBC and the CBC) and the
so-called PR forms should be high on the list of culprits.
Long ago Edward Bernays pretty much identified where the so-called Public Relations business was taking us.Bernays began by selling cigarettes to women as "torches and freedom" before moving on to sell the US-directed coup in Guatemala by concocting the myth that the removal of the elected president Jacabo Abenz was based on a popular indigenous uprising against communism. Castro and Che derived many of their lessons from watching this process up close.
So let's continue the process of moving towards some sort of citizens' prosection of Bush and Cheney and Blair etc and their protectors, including those who failed to uphold the rule of law in Calgary in March of 2009. As I see it, there is a growing movement of people and peoples the world over who are no longer willing to tolerate the corporate plutocracy's continuing crime spree that menaces the future of every living organism on earth. Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave humanity a prelude of what to expect from the military-industrial complex and what to mobilize against as humanity entered in 1945 what Luce had dubbed in 1942 as the American Century. At this moment, when a new probable false flag con job is preparing public opinion for action against North Korea, hopefully we can find ways to coordinate our efforts of self-defense outside the United States with the most conscientious class of justice seeking activists inside the ailing superpower.
Cherio,
Tony Hall
Professor of Globalization Studies
24 May, 2010, Monterey California
Hi Folks;
I'm half way through Charlotte Dennett's brand new book, The People versus Bush. From it I'm learning a lot about the inside story of what has been happening within the United States to hold those legally responsible for the Bush brand of organized crime. I think Charlotte and Kristina Borjesson, Both of whom attended the Understanding Deep Politics conference, have started something that has a momentum we can continue to push forward, albeit now in a more
transnational, inclusive way. Their efforts tie in, for instance, with Splitting The Sky's attempted citizen's arrest of Bush in Calgary in March of 2009.
Kristina is an Emmy-winning investigative reporter who has been writing books about corruption and cover up in the mainstream media, including as practiced by her former employer, CBS. Kristina worked for Charlotte in her recent campaign when she ran for Attorney General of Vermont on a "Prosecute Bush for Murder" platform. I think this approach of continuing the initiative that Charlotte began, with her run for elected office, offers a more pointed way of proceeding than the rather diffuse shotgun approach we initiated on the last day of our retreat.
I think the murderous treachery of Bush together with the culture of impunity that protects him and the big corporate interests behind his cabal's brand of organized crime pretty much embodies all the problems we identified-- the captive corrupt corporate media conglomerates that cover up rather than expose, for starters, the lies and crimes of 9/11; the network of interlinked corporate interests that have become key agencies of state crimes against democracy and the environment as well
as against the victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity etc.
Perhaps our Manifesto could take the form of a notice of citizens' prosecution against Obama's Justice Department for its failures to enforce the rule of law against the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield cabal of war
profiteers. The Bush group set new precedents of lawlessness that the Obama regime apparently wants to maintain and build upon.
Our prosecution needs to link the crimes involved in the diversions and deceits of 9/11 to the bankers' cannibalization of the global economy as advanced during the Bush years and continued now in this time of the big Obama psy op. As I discussed with Ellen Brown, (author of Web of Debt), who was a speaker at the conference, I think the most logical place to dig for the connection between the lies and crimes of 9/11 and the massive derivative/accounting/insurance/hedging frauds is AIG, and especially the Maiden Lane companies set up by the Federal Reserve to do payouts to AIG's so-called counterparties on the company's most "toxic" assets.
This transfer of tax payers money included billions to the fraudsters at Goldman Sachs. The Maiden Lane transactions make the New York Fed perhaps the world's biggest dealer in the dubious variety of bets on bets on bets known as derivatives. Check out the scandals surrounding the Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI) to see the genesis of the privatized terror economy, an important undercover element of the financial debacle whose root sources have as much to do with bets on bets on bets on pipeline routes, regime change and drug deals as with subprime mortgages and government debt in Greece. AIG was one of the operations that moved into the vacuum of deep politics when BCCI went down.
I don't think the idea of an accountabilty movement (Charlotte's phrase) goes far enough. We want to address on a global basis as well as within our respective nations and peoples' polities the mechanics of the culture of impunity that makes such a sad hoax of the rule of law. Bush didn't start the turn towards massive state-sponsored criminality that has caused Charlotte and her mentor, Vincent Bugliosi, to make the case that Bush should be charged domestically with murder for lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and thereby taking the US to war on false premises.
The million or so killed in the name of anti-communism in Indonesia in the mid to late 1960s, for instance, just starts the litany of crimes against humanity directed ultimately by those that control the
executive branch of the US government, whether Democrat or Republican. The US executive branch, but especially the Commander in Chief, has long been a rogue and unaccountable operative responsible for global murders and mayhem on an enormous scale. This executive branch has
long been a puppet of corporate and banking interests that have transformed all the world's governments into vessels for the enrichment of a few. Most of us today are the subjects of what I call ballot box colonialism. Elections no longer give real accountability when so much key information about our real conditions is kept secret with the connivance of our corrupt mainstream media agencies. Many so-called alternative media are also involved in the cover ups. As I.F. Stone once said, the danger is on the left but the crackdown is on the left.
On the most rudimentary level, this pattern of elite control is revealed in the pattern of physical or professional assassinations of, for starters, Mossadeq of Iran, Kassim of Iraq, Lumumba of Congo, Sukarno of Indonesia, Allende of Chile, Nkrumah of Ghana, MLK and Malcolm X of USA, Aristide
of Haiti and on and on and on. Often the assassinations cleared the way for orgies of torture and murder by CIA-intalled kleptocrats like Mobutu in Congo/Zaire or Suharto in Indonesia. The job of these kleptocrats has been to eliminate opponents and protect the turf of the big transnational companies. Bush was thus less of an aberration than Charlotte Dennett and Bugliosi indicate in their interrelated books, both of which merit close attention.
With Bush we saw the ruling cabal's zeal to replace in public mythology a largely manufactured worldwide conspiracy of communists with a worldwide conspiracy of "terrorists" in order to to justify the continuation of the permanent war economy that has been the core business of US monopoly capitalism since 1941. The hugely lucrative war machine is the core operation of the money machine for the class that Bush and his dad and his Nazi-collaborator grandfather well personify. The recruitment of the bin Ladens by the Bushes to share in the spoils of war helps set the
background for the genesis of the fraudulent Global War on Terror. Too bad Charlotte Dennett and Vincent Bugliosi limit their analysis of the genesis of the fraudulent justification for war to the disinformation on weapons of mass destruction rather than getting into the nitty gritty of what is already on the public record about the lies and crimes of 9/11.
Let's remember that the architects and engineers of the project for the New American Century just built on ideas that were introduced by the propagandist Henry Luce, founder of Time-Life publications. Following in the footsteps of Nazi collaborator William Randolf Hearst, Luce's brand of psy op as journalism helped develop the process of making the media machinery on the capitalist side
of the Cold War a tool of elite oppression through the poisoning of public consciousness. When it comes to identifying and prosecuting the criminals most responsible for the war machine's most lethal incursions, the big media conglomerates (including now the BBC and the CBC) and the
so-called PR forms should be high on the list of culprits.
Long ago Edward Bernays pretty much identified where the so-called Public Relations business was taking us.Bernays began by selling cigarettes to women as "torches and freedom" before moving on to sell the US-directed coup in Guatemala by concocting the myth that the removal of the elected president Jacabo Abenz was based on a popular indigenous uprising against communism. Castro and Che derived many of their lessons from watching this process up close.
So let's continue the process of moving towards some sort of citizens' prosection of Bush and Cheney and Blair etc and their protectors, including those who failed to uphold the rule of law in Calgary in March of 2009. As I see it, there is a growing movement of people and peoples the world over who are no longer willing to tolerate the corporate plutocracy's continuing crime spree that menaces the future of every living organism on earth. Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave humanity a prelude of what to expect from the military-industrial complex and what to mobilize against as humanity entered in 1945 what Luce had dubbed in 1942 as the American Century. At this moment, when a new probable false flag con job is preparing public opinion for action against North Korea, hopefully we can find ways to coordinate our efforts of self-defense outside the United States with the most conscientious class of justice seeking activists inside the ailing superpower.
Cherio,
Tony Hall
Professor of Globalization Studies
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