So here we go with world politics and corruption being unmasked all over governments in this world. But worry not as zero hedge continues; ” Ironically, leading members of Rousseff successor Temer’s Brazilian Democratic Movement Party are under investigation for the same allegations that plagued many of Rousseff’s allies, meaning the public could turn against his administration as well. ”

It don’t matter who you vote for. It’s all the same but getting far worse by the day.

William Shakespeare and the New World Order: “Hell is Empty and all the Devils are Here”

And your thinking of going to the summer Olympics?

Valls and President François Hollande invoked article 49-3 of the French constitution, which allows them to impose a law if the Assembly does not vote to censure the government, forcing new elections, in 48 hours—that is, by the end of today. Three-quarters of the population opposes the draft law, which lengthens working times, undermines job security and allows bosses and unions to negotiate contracts violating the Labour Code.

Hundreds of protesters gathered Tuesday night in Paris in front of the National Assembly, whose staff barricaded the shutters, fearing a riot. Protesters denounced Valls’ decision as an “insult to the people,” shouting slogans such as, “Real democracy is here” and “National Assembly, assembly of capital.”

One thousand people marched across Toulouse shouting, “Toulouse, rise up,” and, “We don’t want this society,” but were blocked by a police cordon before they could arrive at the departmental PS headquarters. Protests of several hundred people also took place in Lille, Tours, Marseille, Grenoble and Nantes, where protesters clashed violently with police.

In Lyon, protesters shouted slogans against the PS in front of city hall, and later attacked a police station and ransacked a PS local section building. Another PS headquarters was violently ransacked by a few dozen protesters in Caen.

The PS government and the French bourgeoisie are hoping, however, that while these protests reflect anger felt by tens of millions of workers, they will not immediately provoke the eruption of a general strike by the working class, as in 1936 or 1968.

The daily newspaper Le Monde wrote, “Even though using article 49-3 immediately provoked a protest before the National Assembly, the government is betting that its parliamentary coup will not inflame the social climate. ‘The social movement and protests exist, but they are not currently growing,’ commented an associate of the head of state.’”

The events in France starkly highlight the significance of the deep crisis of political leadership in the working class. Workers and youth mounted mass protests against the law for over two months, it is overwhelmingly opposed by the population, and the general mood among workers in France and internationally is moving to the left, amid rising social anger with the entire political establishment. Yet a desperately weak and unpopular PS government, which is widely seen as a factotum for the banks, is on the verge of imposing a widely hated law by legislative fiat.

Central responsibility for this lies with the union bureaucracy and the pseudo-left parties close to the PS, like the New Anticapitalist Party, that mounted the #UpAllNight movement, which directed youth away from struggle against the PS and towards impotent meetings on various city squares. This demobilised the protests, blocked a campaign to mobilise broader layers of the working class against the Valls government, and handed the initiative for a time back to the PS. The PS then wasted no time in moving to ram the bill through the Assembly.

There will be powerful anger and opposition in the working class to attempts to use the labour law to undermine its wages and conditions, particularly given the antidemocratic methods the PS used to impose the law. The struggle of the working class against the PS and against similar governments across Europe is only beginning.

Yet it must be stated clearly that the PS is on the verge of succeeding in forcing the bill through the parliament. Unlike the #UpAllNight movement—whose media figurehead, nationalist economist Frédéric Lordon, has insisted that it does not matter whether or not the labour reform passes—the WSWS frankly warns that the labour law would be used to mount bitter attacks on working people.

Its passage would mark a significant setback for the workers and youth who have been fighting the bill, and constitute irrefutable proof of the necessity of a break with the existing organisations, which are tied to the PS and have proven completely bankrupt.

This includes the attempts by sections of the trade union bureaucracy and of the Left Front of Jean-Luc Mélenchon to promote illusions in impotent appeals to deputies of the National Assembly to halt or partially rewrite the labour reform.

Thus Mélenchon posted a Tweet on the labour law apparently calling for joint protests with right-wing forces and a motion of censure to bring down the PS government. He wrote, “To stop it, vote to censure. No reticence on disgusting measures faced with disgusting people. Yes, we need protests by a common front of those who refuse the bill. And now.”

A motion of censure presented by the Left Front and its allies failed last night, receiving less than 60 votes. Today, a motion of censure is being prepared by the right-wing opposition The Republicans (LR) party, though it appears unlikely to carry under conditions where fewer than 60 deputies from the Left Front and PS were willing to vote to censure the government.

Every indication is that the so-called rebel factions of the PS that have voiced mild and hypocritical objections to the labour reform are preparing to fall in line with the law and will not vote to censure the PS government.

Benoît Hamon, one of the leaders of the faction, said yesterday, “The right-wing censure motion, well, you have to understand that you may be in disagreement with Manuel Valls, but preferring [right-wing former President] Nicolas Sarkozy to Manuel Valls … it’s a bit hard to prefer that type of politics to the current government.”

The Valls government is reportedly threatening any PS deputy who votes the LR censure motion in the Assembly with expulsion from the PS.

On May 7th, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or German Economic News, headlined, “USA planen mit TTIP Frontal-Angriff auf Gerichte in Europa” or “U.S. Plans Frontal Attack on Europe’s Courts via TTIP,” and reported that, “America’s urgency to sign TTIP with Europe has solid reason: Megabanks must protect themselves from claims by European investors who allege that they were cheated during the debt crisis. … The U.S. Ambassador to Italy has now let the cat out of the bag on this — probably unintentionally.”

In this particular case, the megabank that’s being sued isn’t American but German, Deutsche Bank, which the U.S. Ambassador to Italy has cited as his example to defend, perhaps so as to appeal to Germans to protect their megabanks against lawsuits from foreign investors (such as Italians) who complain. In that case it was investors in the Italian city of Trani, population 53,000. The smallness of the city was an issue the Ambassador raised against the suit’s having been brought there.

Reuters headlined on May 6th, “Italian prosecutor investigates Deutsche Bank over 2011 bond sale”, and reported that, “An Italian prosecutor is investigating Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) over its sale of 7 billion euros ($8 billion) of Italian government bonds five years ago, an investigative source told Reuters. A prosecutor in Trani, a town in southern Italy, is investigating because Deutsche Bank allegedly told clients in a research note in early 2011 that Italy’s public debt was no cause for concern, and then sold almost 90 percent of its own holding of the country’s bonds.” The U.S. bond-rating agencies are also subjects in this suit, because Trani had relied upon their ratings of those bonds.

The Obama Administration (through its Italian Ambassador) seems thus to be saying, in effect, that unless TTIP is passed into law, Europe’s megabanks (and the U.S. bond-rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s and Fitch) will be able successfully to be sued by cheated investors, just as has been happening with such American banks as JPMorgan/Chase and Goldman Sachs in the United States, which — since TTIP hasn’t yet been in force anywhere, including in the U.S. — were forced to pay billions to cheated investors. Apparently, Obama would be happier if those suits had been impossible in the U.S. The argument here, though only implicitly, seems to be that TTIP is the way to protect megabanks and the bond-rating firms. It concerns specifically the selling of sophisticated derivative investments.

If this is the argument behind the remarks by Obama’s Italian Ambassador, John Phillips, he’s obliquely warning Europeans that unless TTIP gets signed, their megabanks might similarly be forced to pay billions to investors who were cheated. As quoted by Reuters, he said that, in the U.S., it’s “highly unlikely that such a case would be brought outside the major financial centers, where prosecutors have both jurisdiction and expertise in securities fraud prosecutions,” and that megabanks need the protection that’s provided by such prosecutors, since they possess “expertise in securities fraud prosecutions.” Phillips was clearly implying that small-city prosecutors (such as are allowed to prosecute such cases in Europe) aren’t such “experts,” as are needed in order to protect the megabanks. Reuters characterizes Phillips’s argument as asserting, “Italy’s justice system was deterring investors.” However, no clarification of the meaning of that statement was provided by Reuters.

DWN alleges that under the TTIP such a court-issue would probably not even have been raised but would simply have ended before an arbitration panel, in which the aggrieved investors exert no influence and where it would be almost impossible for these investors’ rights to be protected.

Another example is cited, where the German city of Pforzheim successfully sued, at the Federal Court of Justice, the U.S. megabank JPMorgan/Chase, and where that court allowed Pforzheim to seek “accumulated damages of 57 million euros.”

Under TTIP, a megabank fined this way might in turn sue the nation’s taxpayers to restore the megabank’s ensuing loss of profits. If the cheated investors win, taxpayers might thus end up bearing the cheated investors’ losses.Under TTIP, the fined company would be arguing that the law under which it had been fined is in violation of TTIP and thus constitutes a violation of that treaty, so that the violating government is obliged to be paying the fine — the law against fraud would itself be violating the fined company’s rights. If the three-arbitrator TTIP panel rules in the megabank’s favor, the government would need to pay the fine it had assessed against the bank, and no appeals court exists for any of these arbitration-panels’ rulings — these rulings are final. Obama and other proponents of that system, which is called ISDS for Investor State Dispute Settlement, say that it’s a more efficient way of handling such disputes. In international commercial affairs, it not only eliminates appeals courts, it gradually eliminates democracy, by fining the government into ultimate submission to these three-person panels of international-corporate-accountable arbitrators.

On the same basic idea, Benito Mussolini was praised for “making the trains run on time.”

*  *  *

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

The indigenous people of Canada were once a proud, strong and resourceful society; they needed nothing more than their own two hands and the land beneath their feet to survive. But since the arrival of the first settlers the portrait of the First Nations has gone through a dramatic transformation.

In 1876, the Canadian government of the time passed a piece of legislation simply dubbed “The Indian Act”. This legislation was enacted under the guise that it would protect the indigenous people of Canada, their rights and honour all treaties. But in truth, the ulterior motive behind the act was to give the Canadian Government the right to control and oversee the daily affairs of all registered natives. The Indian Act is an extremely outdated piece of legislation (if you couldn’t tell by the name) that has little or no bearing in today’s contemporary society. If there are no bands, cultural practices, reserves or natives than there are no native rights. This was the ultimate end-game of the government of the time. The Canada we know and love has neglected its indigenous people in the most tragic of ways; we have failed as a nation to uphold our promise. Many politicians have come and gone that claimed they would abolish the long-standing act, yet it remains part of Canadian legislation. One can’t help but wonder will we ever rectify these great atrocities?

Canadian-Indian residential schooling system

One of the most horrific chapters in Canada’s short history is the Canadian-Indian residential schooling system. The sole purpose of these “schools” was to rid the native children (as young as five) of any shred of identity that they had left. Residential schools date back as far as the 1870s; the last residential school in Canada didn’t officially close until 1996 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission). For nearly 130 years the Canadian Government systematically drained every ounce of cultural heritage out of these children. More than 150,000 indigenous children were placed in these schools, many by force (TRC). They were forbidden from performing any cultural practices and were banned from speaking their native tongue. Their cultural heritage slowly slipped away, much like their dignity, health and mental state.

They were taught to hate themselves, hate their family and to loath their culture. Many of the “students” were physically and sexually abused, tortured, raped and even killed. Numerous formers students reported being sexually-abused by priests in exchange for food. As many as 3,201 native children died while attending residential schools (TRC). That’s nearly 25 children a day that died in this debase education system. Residential schooling was not only appalling, but it was also extremely inadequate. Many former students realized they could barely read and write once they began attending public school.

In 1996, the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) took the Canadian Government and The Catholic Church to court on a class-action lawsuit—and won. This was the biggest class-action lawsuit settlement in Canadian history. The government and the Church were ordered to pay reparations to the First Nations and to establish a formal research-body to investigative the residential schooling system. In 2008 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was formed with a budget of $60-billion, over a five year period. After the TRC conducted interviews with more than 6,750 former students they came to a grim conclusion. The Canadian Government and the Catholic Church suppressed, abused, raped and killed natives for over 130 years—and the rest of Canada just sat idle and let it happen. Yes we can plead ignorance; yes we can say we had no idea—but that doesn’t make up for these horrific acts. No excuse can, not even in the slightest. The long lasting effect of residential schools has reverberated throughout the generations, taking a toll of their heritage, culture and overall well-being.

Making amends 

In ’08 the former Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper offered his apologies to the First Nations on behalf of Canada and remarked, “The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history”. Sorry Stephen, but your half-hearted, professionally-written apology does not make up for the last 130 odd-years of cultural genocide. Newly elected, Prime Minister Trudeau recently allocated $8.4 Billion of the 2016 budget to the First Nations of Canada. This new funding will be directed towards education, water-quality, housing, child welfare, with a strong emphasis on those living on reserves. But throwing money at the problem won’t make it go away. There needs to be an accountability system created for the spending of the $8.4 Billon. Too many times before funding has been misappropriated, abused and misused. This new spending will have a great impact on the First Nations and their lives if utilized resourcefully.

Reserves: Creating segregation

A great number of Natives have been reduced to living in environments (Indian reserves) that mirror third-world conditions. These horrible conditions are due to lack of funding or misuse of funds by corrupt native officials. In Recent years there has been a number of stories involving high-ranking chiefs stealing and embezzling money from their own communities. It’s bad enough that the indigenous have been wrong by the Canadian government, but now by their own.

As part of the Indian Act the Canadian government promised to construct “housing” for the natives to live in, on their own land. What they failed to mention is that they would be segregated from the rest of Canada based on their bands and race. Segregation creates nothing but crime, violence, drug-use and the deterioration of health, both mentally and physically. The First Nations don’t technically own the homes that they live in on these reserves. This causes a destructive pendulum effect. Owning your own home and property enables one to build equity and take out financial loans. Whether it’s for renovations, starting a new business or for personal use—no home means no loan. Therefore they are forced to stay in the reserves, in the 3rd world conditions.

Many natives struggle on a daily basis to make ends meet for themselves and their families. This type of environment creates an underbelly of crime, alcoholism and drug-use. Alcohol and drug-use on reserves is rampant, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. One of the most widespread issues plaguing reserves today is suicide. Suicide rates among the First Nations is at an all-time high, especially among youths. Many youths don’t see any way out of their current life situation—suicide seems like their only option. They are overwhelmed with a life of disparity, they’re lost and scared. The suicide rates among First Nations teens are almost 5-6 times higher than the average young Canadian (Health Canada).

Plagued by suicide

The Indian reserve of Attawapiskat, ON has been greatly afflicted by suicide in recent months. Much like other Indian reserves, Attawapiskat is in dire need of change. Their crumbling infrastructure, lack of funding, suicide rates and drug-use has created a dire situation. Since September 2015 the reserve has seen nearly 100 suicide attempts, mostly by those under the age of 18.  In April 2016 eleven young natives attempted to commit suicide together—in a suicide pack. This horrific incident was followed by another group suicide attempt in May. This sense of hopelessness and disparity is common among the Indigenous youth. This is a looming concern that needs to be immediately addressed by the Canadian Government and the First Nations.

A lasting impact

Years ago the First Nations were worried about being killed by the white man, disease and being taken away from their families. Now they must worry about drugs, alcohol, and suicide. Many First Nations have lost touch with their roots due to the cultural genocide cavaliered by the Canadian Government and the Church. But not all is lost, there are still hundreds of thousands of proud Canadian Natives that perform their cultural practices. It is more important now than ever before that the First Nations of Canada connect with the cultural roots, remain dedicated to their beliefs and support one another.

By Dillon Meilleur

The 9/11 attacks were billed by the Bush Administration as a “wake-up call” for the U.S., and neocons called it the new Pearl Harbor. But instead of it being an awaking, the American public was led further into blind ignorance. The event launched wars throughout the Middle East, energized by a strike-first doctrine which was supposed to bring unprecedented “democracy” to the region. Instead, the Middle East has now become as unstable as it was during WWII.

The penchant for Western governments to fund and train terrorist groups is now verifiable mainstream fact rather than being considered “conspiracy theory” as was the common accusation back in 2001. Pentagon papers outlining support for the formation of ISIS are available for anyone to read. The only disconnect that the public still seems to suffer from is that orthodox Republicans fail to recognize that the support for Islamic terrorism has been just as prevalent under Republican presidents (al-Qaeda) as it has been under Barack Obama. And, Democrats refuse to recognize that Barack Obama has been guilty of all the same criminal foreign policies they used to protest under George W. Bush.

There have been substantial economic consequences as well. The Iraq War alone is estimated to have cost around $2 trillion, with billions more in veteran benefits forthcoming. These numbers, of course, stop accounting for costs after 2010, when the war was deemed officially “over.” Costs continue to this day as the U.S. maintains its military presence in the region along with thousands of private contractors we rarely ever hear about.

The U.S. official national debt in 2001 was around $6 trillion. Today, the national debt has grown to more than $19 trillion. This astonishing debt accumulation is only partially due to combat operations in the Middle East; however, one must also consider the amount of interest owed on debts accrued.

There have also been numerous socio-political consequences post-9/11, including an ever expanding police state mentality which is reaching critical mass. The inevitable outcome will be open totalitarianism in the name of security, and rebellion in response.

Clearly, after 15 years of disastrous policy, it is time to admit that the U.S. response to 9/11 has damaged us far more than the actual attacks ever could.

Many of us in the liberty movement have studied the circumstances surrounding 9/11 extensively, including evidence indicating either government complicity in the attacks, or outright participation. Such a discussion is beyond the scope of this particular article, but I highly recommend anyone skeptical of U.S. government involvement in 9/11 look into the scientific data collected by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and see if your assumptions are not rattled.

Interestingly, the 9/11 truth movement may be partially vindicated in the near term as debate rages over the release of redacted and classified documents tied to the original government led investigation into 9/11. The problem is, the release of these documents is just as calculated as the original cover-up.

The fact that the involvement of the Saudi Arabian government in the events of 9/11 has suddenly hit the mainstream media this year is probably not a coincidence.

As I outlined in my article “The global economic reset has begun,” the U.S. economy has been protected since the credit crisis of 2008 by three pillars, and each of these pillars is now being systematically demolished.

The first pillar was fiat stimulus and quantitative easing. This pillar was removed through the Federal Reserve’s taper program.

The second pillar was the use of near-zero interest rates to funnel cheap or free money through overnight loans to banks and corporations which they then used in a long cycle of stock buybacks. This pillar is now being removed through interest rate hikes by the Fed, and stock buybacks will be dead before 2016 is over.

The third and final pillar holding up the U.S. economy is the dollar’s world reserve status — the dominance of the dollar around the world as the primary currency used in international trade.

World reserve status allows America to maintain extreme levels of debt creation and protects us partially from fiat hyperinflation. Because so many dollars are needed by overseas governments and corporations for international trade, the Federal Reserve has been able to perpetuate massive stimulus programs without all the money created immediately burying the U.S. system as what happened in Wiemar, Germany. The problem is, if the dollar ever loses world reserve status, the unknown amounts of dollars created by the Fed and held overseas will come flooding back to destroy the illusion of our currency’s value.

The dollar’s world reserve status is highly dependent on the fact that it is the petrocurrency; the vast majority of oil purchases around the planet are made only in dollars. In fact, most oil producing nations will not sell their stock unless dollars are used.

The dollar has enjoyed this awesome advantage primarily because of the relationship between the U.S. government and Saudi Arabia.

For now, Saudi Arabia is still the largest holder of oil production market share in the world. This market share has been declining somewhat recently due to falling global demand and more specifically falling U.S. demand, which has led to more vicious competition from other producing nations, including Russia and Iran.

Falling U.S. demand by itself has perhaps led OPEC nations to question the continued validity of the dollar as the petrocurrency. In November of 2015, the Saudi government hinted at the possibility that they might depeg from the U.S. currency entirely. This act alone would essentially destroy the dollar’s petro-status. The conundrum facing the Saudis was increasingly low and unstable oil prices to which the petrodollar adds a level of uncertainty. Mainstream analysts argued that Saudi Arabia may be forced to choose – either cut production to increase prices, or end the dollar peg and stabilize prices, by switching to a basket of currencies instead (Special Drawing Rights, anyone?!).

Obviously, after the engineered absurdity at the Doha meeting this month, there is absolutely no chance in hell that Saudi Arabia will commit to any substantial cuts in oil production. In fact, the Saudis have just announced that they may expand oil fields in order to increase production to even greater historical levels.

So, oil prices are going to remain low for now, and will probably fall exponentially if a battle for market share between Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia goes nuclear, as I have predicted. This would suggest that the Saudis will end the peg to the dollar within the next couple of years.

As I wrote in my article “Economic crisis goes mainstream; what happens next?,” an oil price panic could lead to conflict between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. and disrupt the petrodollar. And, this would precipitate the fall of the dollar’s world reserve status; meaning, the globalists would get exactly what they want — the death of dollar dominance and the rise of the SDR system under the IMF as a prelude to global currency and global economic governance. However, another catalyst from left field may be needed. A sort of black swan event… enter the 28-page “secret chapter” of the 9/11 congressional inquiry.

Supposedly, the documents are a bombshell linking the Saudi government directly to the 9/11 hijackers and exposing their aid to said terrorists. Despite Obama’s “peace offerings” to the Saudis, the White House is still said to be poised to release these documents to the public in the near term.

The Saudi’s have responded with extreme anger, and have openly threatened to dump their $750 billion in U.S. treasury holdings if the documents ever see the light of day. This would invariably end the Saudi peg to the dollar and thus end the dollar’s petrostatus, which would then expedite the end of the dollar’s world reserve status. It would be a catastrophe.

The set-up is perfect. The liberty movement gets some vindication that there was indeed a conspiracy surrounding 9/11, but the true scope of that conspiracy remains hidden as the Saudis take the brunt of the blame. The Saudis get an opportunity handed to them on a silver platter to kill the dollar peg, an action they have been planning for quite some time anyway. The U.S. government then becomes partly responsible (in the public eye) for opening the door to the destruction of the dollar, a process which the globalists at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Federal Reserve have been planning for decades. Then the IMF can swoop in post-crisis with the SDR basket system to replace the dollar’s world reserve structure.

We then have immense global economic change triggered by nothing more than a 28-page document, but predicated on years of careful staging, planning and choreography. Once again, the globalists have conjured a theatrical circus which they may use to end the American economy as we know it.

We will have to wait and see if the 9/11 documents are released, and if the Saudis follow through with their threats. But consider this; who really benefits in the end in the wake of these developments? Such a move would certainly only serve the interests of international elites in the long run.

By Brandon Smith

Why do people so often demand leaders and heroic figures? What drives the institutionalization of hierarchy, celebrity and geopolitical idolization? I believe this condition is caused by three factors – fear, ignorance, and apathy.

This is not to say that there are not people throughout history that are worth looking up to, or that looking up to a particular hero figure is wrong. Heroes and sometimes leaders can act as points of reference, helping us to aspire to greater personal accomplishment and extraordinary achievement. The problem is many historical figures labeled heroic are in fact monsters in masks paraded as saviors by history writers with agendas. Real heroes (in the past hundred years in particular) are most often unsung, and remain little known.

This is why the idolization of puppet leaders is so disturbing to those of us in the Liberty Movement. We witnessed the blind militancy of the so-called “right wing” in the support of George W. Bush after 9/11, only to be led into quagmire, economic despair, and a surveillance state based on numerous lies. We then had to witness the insane cult-like fervor of the so-called “left wing” as Barack Obama took office, only to continue and accelerate the same draconian policies of the Bush Administration while conjuring new methods for the division and destruction of American society and prosperity.

Yes, the Liberty Movement has examined every detail and is well versed in the horrors of the false Left/Right paradigm. Again, I’ll have to quote the ever useful elitist member of the Council on Foreign Relations and mentor to former president Bill Clinton, Carroll Quigley, on this particular issue, from his book ‘Tragedy And Hope’:

“…The argument of two parties should represent opposed ideas and policies, one perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinate and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method.”

What truly disturbs me is that our movement can be so awake and aware of the false left/right paradigm while remaining astonishingly naïve and short sighted when it comes to the false East/West paradigm. And once again, I have to attribute this naivety to a desperation for heroes caused by fear and apathy.

I have written on the reality that Eastern political interests are just as controlled by globalists as Western political interests for years. Readers can review the considerable amount of data and evidence I have collected on Russia and Vladimir Putin in particular and the ties between the East and international financiers and well known globalists in recent articles such as ‘Russia Is Dominated By Global Banks, Too‘, ‘False East/West Paradigm Hides The Rise Of Global Currency‘, and ‘The New World Order And The Rise Of The East‘.

In fact, I predicted almost every aspect of the current Syrian crisis based on the knowledge that the East versus West dynamic was purely an engineered conflict designed to diminish American power and economic influence through the use of planned chaos, and I did this years before events were ever triggered in the region.

I knew what was about to happen in Syria only because I understood one important fundamental – that there are no “sides” in any modern conflict, only proxies fighting on a global chessboard controlled by the same elitist interests. Syria represented a perfect catalyst for a planetary scale conflict triggered between East and West in way that could divert attention from internationalists. Modern war, whether through kinetics or economics, is almost always theater designed to distract and terrorize the masses, which are the true target of any conflagration.

We must set aside childish assumptions on war. Wars are not about resources. They are not about territory. They are not about the hegemony of any particular nation state. If you buy into such notions, you have been duped. No, war is about something much bigger. War first and foremost is a tool for the manipulation and molding of public psychology. As Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda said:

“The great enemy of any attempt to change men’s habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by inertia.”

War is meant to forcefully change the “inertia” of civilization, and thus, forcefully change the direction of civilization in a manner that benefits the engineers of the conflict.

One great threat to the mechanism of globalism and the elites behind it is the liberty movement, which is slowly but steadily growing in popularity and influence as America edges ever closer to economic and sociopolitical oblivion. As the U.S. is homogenized, harmonized, and brought down to third world status for the benefit of a one-world system, resistance continues to grow.

You see, one negative side-effect of the rush towards centralization and a single global power (often referred to by the elites as the “New World Order”) is that the harder the globalists push society toward their Utopian ideal, the more individuals (not controlled governments or political puppets) wake up to the threat. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The Liberty Movement is the equalizing reaction to forced globalization.

In order for the elites to neutralize the threat we present, they must either destroy us or co-opt us. I believe the East/West paradigm is being used in part to attempt the co-option of liberty elements.

Despite the fact that many liberty analysts are beginning to understand the nature of the false East/West paradigm and the truth behind the rise of Russia, the predictable escalation in Syria is energizing a strange brand of Putin-worship once again. Liberty elements WANT to believe that Putin is somehow in opposition to globalization, that he is somehow morally superior to the Obama Administration, and that Russia is on the side of right in the fight against ISIS and the evil Western empire.

They want to believe this because they are afraid – they are afraid that they are alone in the fight against the NWO. They are afraid that they will have to commit to personal sacrifice and struggle against a vastly technologically superior opponent. They are afraid that they alone will have to take responsibility for America’s destiny and that no great leader on a white horse is coming to blaze the path ahead of them.

Because of this fear, they sometimes commit the crime of cognitive dissonance in order to protect their false belief in a heroic Putin. They will ignore the fact that Putin is a long time friend of Henry Kissinger, the most publicly vocal proponent of the “New World Order, and that Putin describes Kissinger as his “trusted foreign policy adviser”.

They will ignore the fact that Russia’s primary economic adviser is none other than the hitman of the international banking syndicate, Goldman Sachs, and that Goldman Sachs has been deeply involved in Russia’s economic affairs since at least 1992, just after the fall of the Soviet Union.

They will ignore the fact that Putin and Russia have allied closely with the IMF (an institution supposedly dominated by the U.S.). Putin and the IMF are so intertwined that it was Putin who demanded that the IMF take over the management of Ukraine’s finances after the regional crisis began, and, it was the IMF that blatantly supported Putin’s call for a change in Ukraine’s bond status from private to “official”. Russia also demanded that Ukraine’s debts be repaid in Special Drawing Rights, the global currency basket which the IMF plans to use to replace the U.S. dollar as the world reserve mechanism.

They will also surely ignore the fact that Putin and the Kremlin have on multiple occasion called for the IMF to take over global management of the worlds financial systems through the implementation of the SDR as the new world reserve currency.

And of course, the fact that Russia is a member of the Bank for International Settlements and the BIS is the policy dictator of ALL central banking (do I really need to quote Carroll Quigley on the BIS yet again?) does not bode well for the affiliations and intentions of Russia as a whole, yet we are still bombarded in the liberty movement with platitudes on how Putin is “sticking it to the bankers”. No, I’m afraid not. According to the evidence, Putin is just like Obama: Yet another whore for the internationalists. Post all the pictures you want of the guy holding an uzi or finishing a judo throw, but his public persona does not fit reality.

The mainstream media in the U.S. has for the most part run on the narrative that Putin is the next Stalin, and if you are going to perpetuate a false East/West paradigm this makes perfect sense. But there is also a separate narrative being presented to the liberty movement and the rest of the world.

The talking points coming out of outlets like RT (Russia Today), a media machine controlled by the Russian government, has for the past few years stolen brilliant observations by American liberty proponents and repackaged them as video fluff. Most of these observations are negative in their view of U.S. government policy as well as central banking dictatorship, and they are also entirely correct. The problem is, RT does not apply the same standards of journalistic skepticism to the Russian government or its ties to the central banking cabal.

Time Magazine publishes pro-Putin articles naming him “man of the year” in every other nation where they have distribution, but removes these stories and covers when publishing in America.

The general American public is being sold on the idea that Putin is a calculating danger to global stability and that Western governments must become more aggressive to counter the threat. The rest of the world and the liberty movement are being sold on the image of a benevolent Putin and a Russia standing firm against the corrupt war machine of the West, but this image simply is not real.

The danger for the liberty movement in the near future is considerable. Our blind support of the false East/West paradigm makes us vulnerable to easy co-option, for if we as a movement are tricked into closely affiliating with Russia then we lose our identity as a force for American independence and become nothing more than an “Eastern created” faux revolution. Think it can’t happen? Mainstream media outlets are ALREADY building the narrative. The Atlantic was the first, with an article directly connecting “right wing” movements and “conspiracy theorists” in the U.S. with Russian influence and propaganda.

As the false East/West confrontation grows, the real purpose of such a crisis will become apparent. ISIS agents conveniently shipped out of Syria among millions of “refugees” before Russian forces finally decided to strike will wreak havoc in Western nations. Economic chaos will become prevalent.  The U.S. will lose the dollar’s petro-status as the East subsumes Eurasia.  Fear of another world war will haunt public perception. The ever uneducated and terrified mass majority will become far less tolerant of intelligent dissent. And, the Fabian Socialists infesting global institutions will suggest a clever solution to the problem they created – the dissolution of all sovereign nations and the complete centralization of governance into the hands of a select few to save humanity from such destructive divisions.

If you understand that a primary goal of globalists is to fully remove constitutional protections in America and assert a totalitarian framework, then you have to admit that a conflict with Russia is an excellent opportunity for them.  War fever makes men delirious and malleable, and outside threats make internal despotism more tolerable.

In the meantime, if the liberty movement refuses to treat Russia with the same x-ray vision it has used against western governments (a Russia clearly working with international financiers and globalist institutions) then we make it far easier for the elitist propaganda machine to paint us as Eastern backed traitors rather than freedom fighters down the road, thus crushing our chances at garnering increased support from the public and awakening new voices.

Mark my words, in the end we will not only be forced to rebel against centralization under our own criminal government; we will also have to rebel against criminal puppet governments everywhere. I have no doubt that when we see the ranks of the globalist enemy, there will be Russian faces standing right alongside Western oligarchs. Maybe then people will finally admit that the East/West crisis was a carefully crafted hoax all along.

Brandon Smith

So who is he?

His name is John P. Holdren, and he co-authored a book in 1977 in which he advocated mass sterilizations using the food and water supply, mandatory bodily implants that would prevent couples from having children, forced abortions for American couples trying to have too many children and a global police force to enforce population control.

Seriously.

This is Barack Obama’s top science advisor.

Holdren advocated these horrific proposals in the 1977 book entitled “Ecoscience”, which he co-authored with Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich.

When reports of Holdren’s book first started to surface, they were quickly dismissed by many because it just seemed so unbelievable that the top science advisor to the president of the United States would hold such bizarre beliefs.

However, once one blogger posted pictures of the pages of Holdren’s book up on the Internet, people started to realize that Holdren really did write these things.

Let’s take a look at some of the more shocking quotes from Holdren’s book.

On page 837, it is written that compulsory abortion would be perfectly legal under the Constitution of the United States:

“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

On page 786, the book says that single mothers should have their babies taken away by the government and that they could be forced to have abortions if the government decides that is best:

“One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.”

On pages 787 and 788, the book advocates the mass sterilization of humans by putting drugs in the water supply:

“Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.”

On pages 786 and 787, the authors discuss sterilizing women after their second or third child:

Involuntary fertility control

“A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

On page 838, the authors state their belief that there is nothing wrong or illegal about the government dictating family size:

“In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?”

On pages 942 and 943, the authors call for the development of a “planetary regime” that would control the global economy and enforce population control measures:

Toward a Planetary Regime

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.”

“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

On page 917, the authors advocate the surrender of national sovereignty to an armed international police force:

“If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”

The truly frightening thing, however, is that Holdren is not just one isolated nutjob. Rather, his views are an accurate representation of what is commonly believed among the global elite. They believe that the earth is way too overpopulated, and that if totalitarian measures are not taken it will have catastrophic consequences for the planet.

Those scientists who advocate eugenics and radical population control are funded and promoted by the global elite. In fact, prior to becoming Obama’s top science advisor, Holdren was the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The truth is that the global elite are absolutely obsessed with reducing the population of this planet, and it would be a huge mistake to underestimate their obsession with population issues. If you have any doubt about this fact, then you should read this article which we posted on a sister blog.

It is NOT acceptable for a member of the president’s administration to believe in mass sterilization, forced abortions for American women and a global police force. Please contact your representatives in Congress and ask them to call for the resignation of John Holdren.

Micheal Snyder

How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate – the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.
Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.
It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations, and of cynicism.
Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to “support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts”. Notice the “nongovernmental” – part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.

“We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”

And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to yet other organizations.
In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of numerous foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational materials, computers, faxes, copiers, automobiles, and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, etc. NED typically refers to the media it supports as “independent” despite the fact that these media are on the US payroll.
NED programs generally impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy, and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform, and growth; and the merits of foreign investment in their economy are emphasized.
From 1994 to 1996, NED awarded 15 grants, totaling more than $2,500,000, to the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an organization used by the CIA for decades to subvert progressive labor unions. AIFLD’s work within Third World unions typically involved a considerable educational effort very similar to the basic NED philosophy described above. The description of one of the 1996 NED grants to AIFLD includes as one its objectives: “build union-management cooperation”. Like many things that NED says, this sounds innocuous, if not positive, but these in fact are ideological code words meaning “keep the labor agitation down … don’t rock the status-quo boat”. The relationship between NED and AIFLD very well captures the CIA origins of the Endowment.
NED has funded centrist and rightist labor organizations to help them oppose those unions which were too militantly pro-worker. This has taken place in France, Portugal and Spain amongst many other places. In France, during the 1983-4 period, NED supported a “trade union-like organization for professors and students” to counter “left-wing organizations of professors”. To this end it funded a series of seminars and the publication of posters, books and pamphlets such as “Subversion and the Theology of Revolution” and “Neutralism or Liberty”. (“Neutralism” here refers to being unaligned in the cold war.)
NED describes one of its 1997-98 programs thusly: “To identify barriers to private sector development at the local and federal levels in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push for legislative change … [and] to develop strategies for private sector growth.” Critics of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, a socialist, were supported by NED grants for years.
In short, NED’s programs are in sync with the basic needs and objectives of the New World Order’s economic globalization, just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign policy.

Interference in elections

NED’s Statement of Principles and Objectives, adopted in 1984, asserts that “No Endowment funds may be used to finance the campaigns of candidates for public office.” But the ways to circumvent the spirit of such a prohibition are not difficult to come up with; as with American elections, there’s “hard money” and there’s “soft money”.
As described in the “Elections” and “Interventions” chapters, NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996; helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992; and worked to defeat the candidate for prime minister of Slovakia in 2002 who was out of favor in Washington. And from 1999 to 2004, NED heavily funded members of the opposition to President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to subvert his rule and to support a referendum to unseat him.
Additionally, in the 1990s and afterward, NED supported a coalition of groups in Haiti known as the Democratic Convergence, who were united in their opposition to Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his progressive ideology, while he was in and out of the office of the president.
The Endowment has made its weight felt in the electoral-political process in numerous other countries.
NED would have the world believe that it’s only teaching the ABCs of democracy and elections to people who don’t know them, but in virtually all the countries named above, in whose electoral process NED intervened, there had already been free and fair elections held. The problem, from NED’s point of view, is that the elections had been won by political parties not on NED’s favorites list.
The Endowment maintains that it’s engaged in “opposition building” and “encouraging pluralism”. “We support people who otherwise do not have a voice in their political system,” said Louisa Coan, a NED program officer. But NED hasn’t provided aid to foster progressive or leftist opposition in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Eastern Europe – or, for that matter, in the United States – even though these groups are hard pressed for funds and to make themselves heard. Cuban dissident groups and media are heavily supported however.
NED’s reports carry on endlessly about “democracy”, but at best it’s a modest measure of mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not economic democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers-that-be or the way-things-are, unless of course it’s in a place like Cuba.
The Endowment played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North’s shadowy “Project Democracy” network, which privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally charming activities. At one point in 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED “run Project Democracy”. This was an exaggeration; it would have been more correct to say that NED was the public arm of Project Democracy, while North ran the covert end of things. In any event, the statement caused much less of a stir than if – as in an earlier period – it had been revealed that it was the CIA which was behind such an unscrupulous operation.
NED also mounted a multi-level campaign to fight the leftist insurgency in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, funding a host of private organizations, including unions and the media. This was a replica of a typical CIA operation of pre-NED days.
And between 1990 and 1992, the Endowment donated a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers’ money to the Cuban-American National Foundation, the ultra-fanatic anti-Castro Miami group. The CANF, in turn, financed Luis Posada Carriles, one of the most prolific and pitiless terrorists of modern times, who had been involved in the blowing up of a Cuban airplane in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, he was involved in a series of bomb explosions in Havana hotels, and in 2000 imprisoned in Panama when he was part of a group planning to assassinate Fidel Castro with explosives while the Cuban leader was speaking before a large crowd, although eventually, the group was tried on lesser charges.
The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does supporting democracy. The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it destabilization.

Notes
The New York Times, June 1, 1986
Washington Post, September 22, 1991
NED Annual Reports, 1994-96
NED Annual Report, 1996, p.39
For further information on AIFLD, see: Tom Barry, et al., The Other Side of Paradise: Foreign Control in the Caribbean (Grove Press, NY, 1984), see AIFLD in index; Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration of Brazil (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), chapter 6; Fred Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America (monograph, San Jose, California, 1974) passim; The Sunday Times (London), October 27, 1974, p.15-16
NED Annual Report, November 18, 1983 to September 30, 1984, p.21
NED Annual Report, 1998, p.35
See NED annual reports of the 1990s.
Council on Hemispheric Affairs (Washington, DC), press release, June 13, 2002; Washington Post, November 18, 2003; NED Annual Report, 1998, p.53; Haiti Progres (Port-au-Prince, Haiti), May 13-19, 1998
New York Times, March 31, 1997, p.11
Washington Post, February 16, 1987; also see New York Times, February 15, 1987, p.1
San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1985, p.1
New York Times, July 13, 1998
For a detailed discussion of NED, in addition to the sources named above, see: William I. Robinson, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (Westview Press, Colorado, 1992), passim

In 2007, 19-year-old Ashley Smith killed herself. Prior to her death, she spent more than 1,000 days in what’s called “administrative segregation” — the Canadian euphemism for solitary confinement.

Smith’s death was supposed to be a wake-up call — an impossible-to-ignore signal that Canadian prisons were failing their mentally-ill inmates, and that our system of solitary confinement was terribly, indisputably broken.

“ The placement of federal inmates in solitary confinement is “cruel and usual punishment” in Canada’s prisons and should be severely curtailed, says a new editorial in the nation’s leading medical journal.” National Post

Instead, the government waited until the end of last year to finally issue a response to the findings of the coroner’s inquiry on Smith’s death. That response was essentially a restatement of Corrections Services Canada’s position on solitary confinement, with a few weak gestures towards improving the system.

The real meat of the coroner’s inquiry’s findings was ignored: specifically, the federal government flatly dismissed the recommendations that indefinite administrative segregation be abolished, and that long-term segregation not exceed 15 consecutive days. Apparently, “the Government is unable to fully support (those recommendations) without causing undue risk to the safe management of the federal correctional system.”

Safe management for whom, exactly? Because since Smith’s death, suicides and self-harm by inmates in administrative segregation haven’t exactly stopped.

Edward Snowshoe spent 162 consecutive days in segregation before he killed himself in 2010. He was 24 years old.

Over an eight-month period in 2012 and 2013, three inmates in segregation were found dead at Mountain Institution near Chilliwack.

According to the Office of the Correctional Investigator’s 2011-2012 annual report, “close to one-third of reported self-injury incidents (in federal prisons) occurred in segregation units.”

The John Howard Society of Canada and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association have decided that waiting for the federal government to update their policies on administrative segregation is a fool’s errand. Instead, they’ve filed a challenge in the B.C. Supreme Court alleging that solitary confinement, as used in Canada, violates several key provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This particular challenge isn’t exactly a surprise. As far back as 2011, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendéz named solitary confinement as a practice that can amount to torture. Mendéz told the UN General Assembly’s committee on social, humanitarian and cultural affairs that the practice of holding prisoners in isolation should be banned completely as a punishment technique.

Solitary confinement is being used to conceal the fact that our prisons – overcrowded and overburdened by the government’s tough-on-crime policies – cannot accomplish even the most basic aspects of what we expect them to do.

Corrections Services Canada has sidestepped that recommendation by claiming that administrative segregation isn’t used as punishment. Instead, in their response to the coroner’s inquiry on Ashley Smith’s death, CSC said administrative segregation is “an interim population management measure” used “to facilitate an investigation or to protect the safety and security of individuals and/or the institution.”

Sure it is. And of course, there’s no potential for abuse in a system where the final decision about keeping an inmate in isolation is left to the exclusive discretion of the prison head. Because we’ve refused to sign on to the UN’s Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, we don’t even require an independent review of decisions to keep inmates in isolation.

But how is it more humane to argue that segregation is being used as an “interim population management measure”? If it were being used as punishment, at least there would be some rational connection between behaviour and being placed in isolation.

Instead, inmates are placed in administrative segregation for reasons ranging from the ridiculous to the heartbreaking. The Toronto South Detention Centre, for instance, opened a year ago. The new mega-jail includes an infirmary and a 26-bed unit for patients with mental health problems – but neither one has been operative since the centre opened. As of this past December, 21 inmates with medical issues were instead being kept in segregation at that facility alone.

So prisoners could end up in segregation for the crime of catching the flu. At the same time, even CSC admits that prisons have become a last resort for people with mental illnesses who have come into contact with the law. In an over-taxed, under-resourced system, it’s inevitable that “problem” inmates will end up in segregation, instead of in treatment.

“Noting that there are 850 offenders in isolation on any given day — a 6.4% increase over the past five years — the editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal said the lack of stimulation and social interaction can lead to anxiety, depression and anger and increases the risk of self-harm and suicide.” National Post

This isn’t what a successful prison system looks like. For people without mental illness, too much time in solitary confinement can lead to mental health problems. For people with pre-existing mental illness, isolation can aggravate those issues. The result is a vicious cycle, in which troubled inmates are shunted to segregation, which aggravates their mental health issues, which makes them more likely to end up back in segregation in the future.

When one in four federal prisoners spends at least some time in isolation, clearly the goal of using administrative segregation as a last resort is not being met. Instead, it’s being used to conceal the fact that our prisons – overcrowded and overburdened by the government’s tough-on-crime policies – cannot accomplish even the most basic aspects of what we expect them to do.

Prison is supposed to be a punishment, yes – but it’s also supposed to be a place where inmates can be rehabilitated, where they can heal and prepare themselves to get their lives back on track. Leaving prisoners in isolation for weeks, months, even years, is punishment that rises to the level of being cruel and unusual; it’s certainly not a practice that promotes rehabilitation.

It shouldn’t take a court case to protect Canadian inmates from cruel and unusual punishment. We should be able to depend on our policy-makers to do that for us. In this case, our policy-makers clearly have abandoned that responsibility. Hopefully this court case will remind them of their obligations – to prisoners, and to the communities they’ll come home to once their prison terms are up.

Devon Black for iPolitics.ca

There is no greater natural resource on this earth than water. As the sustenance of all life, water keeps every living and breathing organism, every plant, every animal and every human being on this planet alive. In the same way that without air to breathe, without water we humans cannot sustain life for more than a few days.

Due to global warming, widespread drought and increasingly polluted water systems, the projected availability of clean freshwater in years to come to meet the rising demands of a growing global population is among the most daunting human challenges of this century. By 2015 a 17% increase in global water demand is projected just for increasing agriculturally produced food. By the same year 2025, the growing global population will increase water consumption needs by a whopping 40%. While oil played the keenly critical role during the twentieth century, water is being deemed the most valued precious natural resource of the twenty-first century.

As such, several years ago the United Nations declared access to clean drinking water a universal human right. Conversely, willfully denying it is considered a serious human rights violation that denies life itself. And any calculated decision denying people their universal right to life is nothing short of a murderous, shameful crime against humanity.

Despite the human air pollution that has long been dirtying our lungs, while also causing global warming, climate change and increasing catastrophic natural disasters, not to mention the growing global health hazard for us humans, the very thought of making clean air a precious commodity that can opportunistically be packaged and sold by the same corporations that have been ruining our air, that very notion would instantly be criticized, scorned and ridiculed.

Yet that is exactly what has been happening for the last thirty years now all over this planet with the earth’s preciously dwindling freshwater drinking supply. The World Bank has been financing global privatization of the earth’s water supply making clean water that is so necessary for survival an unaffordable private commodity for the poorest people on earth to even access. They are literally dying of thirst and disease because of greedy psychopathic corporate profiteers once again placing theft and greed over human welfare and life itself.

But then that is the globalist agenda – thinning the human herd down from near seven billion currently to as low as just half a billion. That means 13 out of 14 of us alive today according to their diabolical oligarch plan simply must die within the next few years. And what better way to rapidly kill off the human population than taking full ownership and control over the earth’s limited diminishing water supply.

More people on this planet are dying presently from waterborne disease from dirty water than are dying from all wars and violence worldwide combined. Every hour 240 babies die from unsafe water. 1.5 million children under five years of age die every year from cholera and typhoid fever due to unsanitary water conditions. These incredibly sad, alarming facts illustrate just how significant and critical a clean freshwater supply is to staying alive on this planet. Taking control over the earth’s clean water supply is achieved by turning water into a privately owned commodity that only the largest corporations and banks control. Simply making water unaffordable and thereby inaccessible to the poorest people on the planet is one extremely effective, albeit most sinister way to reduce the so called overpopulation problem.

Three primary ways that the human population decreases significantly every year is death caused by starvation and malnutrition (including lack of drinkable water) at between seven to eight millionpeople, diseases that kill between two to three million (with mounting threats of infectious diseases becoming pandemics) and upwards of near a half million dying each year from war.

Behind closed doors oligarchic globalists periodically meet and discuss what is best for humanity and the planet according to them and their megalomaniacal self-interests. For many years now this all important topic of water privatization and control as a convenient and most effective means of addressing the overpopulation problem has been regularly tabled for discussion… along with related topics like geo-engineering, GMO’s, vaccines, overuse of antibiotics, planned wars over oil and water, devising global policies designed to increase political destabilization, poverty and undermine economies, nuclear radiation and a host of other means for culling the human population.

Time Magazine reported how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been financing research at the University of North Carolina among 78 others to develop ultrasound infertility contraception techniques to sterilize male sperm. At a 2010 TED conference Bill Gates spoke openly of depopulating the total of 6.8 billion people living on earth by up to “10 to 15%” using both of his heavily funded vaccine and contraception programs that will render much of the global population infertile. Meanwhile, billionaire Ted Turner went even further, offering his public opinion to decrease the world population by 70% down to “two billion.” It too is on tape.

Calls to begin sterilizing the human population began surfacing back in the mid-1970’s with Henry Kissinger as former Secretary of State and high ranking Bilderberg member in his declassified National Security Council document (1974) entitled “The Implications of World-wide PopulationGrowth on the Security and External Interests of the United States.” This document emphasized highest priority given to implementing birth control programs targeting thirteen Third World nations mostly in South America. Extraordinary resources were allocated through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) pushing the carrot stick of additional financial aid to countries willing to enact sterilization and depopulation programs.

More overt evidence of the callous contempt that globalist oligarchs have toward us 99%-ers is captured in a statement written by Prince Phillip, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband in the forward of his book, “I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus” to reduce the human population. It seems readily discernable that an explicit globalist agenda for a New World Order openly propagated with repeated references by President Goerge Bush senior includes depopulation through various means, water control through privatization just one of many in the power elite’s arsenal.

Humans have been dying from lack of clean water for a long time now and will only continue dying at an even greater frequency if the plan to privatize water continues to unfold unchecked and without opposition. Fortunately forces have been mobilizing to combat water privatization. Just last week on the heels of the World Bank annual convening in Washington DC for several days ofconferencing, an international coalition of anti-privatization water rights groups from India and America sent a formal message calling on the World Bank to end its destructive practice of privatizing water around the world under the guise of developmental progress. The Bank’s DC meetings had been touting lies and disinformation in an attempt to paint a glowing report showcasing the so called efficacy and successes that turning water rights over to the private sector have accomplished in recent years. The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) as the planet’s largest funding source for water privatization provides loans and financing to Third World nations for private water management companies to take charge of municipal, regional and national water rights.

The director of a global advocacy group called Corporate Accountability International, Shayda Naficy, pointed out that 75% of expenses for running a water utility company should go to infrastructure. In nation after nation private companies have placed the priority of making a profit over the need to invest in necessary infrastructure to connect and adequately service water customers. In efforts to maximize cost efficiency as well as profits, water prices invariably go up and fast become out of reach for poorest customers. Cutting off the water supply to thousands of low income families unable to pay for their rising costs has become the all too frequent inevitable result. The World Bank’s 34 percent failure rate for all private water and sewerage contracts between 2000 and 2010 far surpasses its single digit failure rates in the telecommunications, energy and transportation industries.

Critics maintain that the public sector is far more accountable to its public constituents than private sector businesses that only answer to its board of directors to show sufficient profits. Corruption becomes commonplace. Additionally, a conflict of interest exists when the IFC acts as both a money lender and consultant to foreign municipalities in assigning no bid contracts to favored private water utility companies.

To best illustrate typical scenarios where water privatization is either not working or already proved a failure deserve close examination. The good news is that in recent years people in various parts of the world have been mobilizing successful efforts and campaigns to stop water privatization in their own backyards. Presently in a number of regions in India, citizens are banding together to confront and fight the myriad of problems with water privatization in their country.

Recently in Nagpur, central India’s largest city where the country’s first municipal partnership with a private utility company is being played out, major tensions have erupted. Three years ago the city signed a 25-year contract with Veolia Water to supply the city of 2.7 million residents with 24 hour-7-days a week water service. Instead unforeseen delays driving up prices manyfold along with unfair water distribution and frequent service breakdowns have led to widespread angry protests in the streets and charges of corruption. City officials point to a series of serious contract violations. Again cutting corners by refusing to invest in the needed infrastructure appears to be the primary cause for this failed project. The Corporate Accountability International’s 2012 report called “Shutting the Spigot on Private Water: The Case for the World Bank to Divest” cites a number of similar cases where privatization has proven ineffective.

Bold and empowered citizens in Bolivia in the year 2000 made headlines around the globe when they were victorious in kicking out privatized water there in the form of the Bechtel, the fifth largest private corporation on the planet. Impassioned protestors in Bolivia’s third-largest city managed to oppose Bechtel’s increasing prices and demanded that the company abandon its hold on their city’s municipal water supply, eventually driving the powerful scandalous giant out of the country. Though big business efforts to buy and control water rights in many Latin American nations have each had their turn in nations like Equator and Brazil, only Chile water services are privatized. Ultimately local residents virtually everywhere privatization has attempted to take hold has been met with such strong resistance from consumers who realize their private utility company has failed miserably in delivering quality service at affordable prices.

The story is always the same. That is why advocacy groups like Corporate Accountability International is proactively working toward educating governments and citizens worldwide to ensure water remains under the public domain. The exhaustive and expensive legal process of ending long term contracts and successfully removing privatized foreign corporations once established in a city, state or country is formidable. It is obviously in the best interests of people around the world to ensure privatization of their water supply never gets a local foothold in the first place.

Nestlé corporation’s marketing campaign targeted wealthy Pakistanis in Lahore, and its brand of bottled water ‘Pure Life’ became a status symbol for the rich. To bottle its product, Nestlé busily dried up local underground springs that subsequently caused the village poor unable to buy the bottled water stolen from their springs to end up consuming contaminated water. Nestlé went on to extracting water from two deep wells in Bhati Dilwan village, forcing them to turn to bottled water. A similar story emerged from Nigeria where a single bottled water exceeds the average daily income of a Nigerian citizen. Nestlé is notorious for draining local water supplies used to bottle its water brands, then charge unaffordable prices to the local population whose clean water supply was stolen from them.

Corporate Watch released a report exposing some of the unethical and illegal practices that Nestlé has long been committing around the globe, completely disregarding public health concerns while destroying natural environments to ensure huge annual profits of $35 billion just from water bottle sales alone. In Brazil’s Serra da Mantiqueira region where the groundwater is rich in mineral content containing medicinal properties, over-pumping has depleted its valuable water resources and caused permanent damage to the natural environment. and long-term damage.

Nestlé has also allegedly been involved in human trafficking of child slave labor. A BBC investigative report claimed that “hundreds of thousands of children in Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo were being purchased from their destitute parents and shipped to the Ivory Coast to be sold as slaves to cocoa farms.” Yet Nestlé likely bought the cocoa from the Ivory Coast and Ghana knowing it was produced using child slaves.

Finally, Nestlé owns or leases fifty spring sites throughout America. Nestlé controls a third of the domestic market for bottled water in the US. The company is notorious for unlawful extraction of spring water while engaging in price-gouging and reeking havoc in numerous communities. An example of the trouble Nestlé typically causes is Colorado where 80% of the citizens of Aurora were opposed to Nestlé’s presence, fully aware of the company’s terrible reputation for damaging communities and natural environments. Yet the city council voted in favor 7 to 4 to let the devastation begin and over the next decade Nestlé extracted 650 million gallons of precious Arkansas River valley water that went into its Arrowhead Springs brand of bottled water. For years the embattled townspeople of Aurora fought to rid the company predator from destroying their precious aquifers. Additionally, the plastic non-biodegradable bottles are major pollutants that stay toxically intact for a full millennium.

The cumulative grave effects of privatizing water as a global commodity are appalling. The underprivileged residents of Jakarta, Manila and Nairobi pay 5 to 10 times more for water than those living in high-income areas of those same cities. People living in the Third World slums even pay more for water than upscale New Yorkers and Londoners. This kind of unfairness and inequity is obscene. Women in places in Africa where privatized water is beyond their limit walk miles to obtain dirty water from rivers and then too often die along with their children from contamination and disease. Asian farmers are losing their livelihoods if they are unable to receive state funded irrigation. The human suffering caused globally by wealthy private corporations from North America and Europe exploiting people from Third World nations for pure profit is nothing less than pure psychopathic evil.

Taking on global privatization of water for the well being and greater good of the people is but an example of the monumental work that needs to be done. Only if informed, caring and committed human beings collectively come together worldwide to take a global stand against this gravest of life and death issues facing humanity can this oligarch agenda be stopped dead in its tracks. As global human rights activists it is up to us to end the global corporate malevolence and malfeasance from further damaging and afflicting our planet like never before. With the recent formal finding that Americans no longer live in a democracy but an oligarchy, as if we did not already painfully know, it becomes even more “formally” imperative now that we as ordinary citizens of the world take the vested interest in preserving life on our only planet before it becomes too late. It is high time we take back our planet once and for all from the oligarchic corporatocracy bent on insidiously making our earthly home increasingly uninhabitable for all life forms.

Mass extinction of plant and animal species that have thrived on this planet for millions of years is silently, invisibly taking place every single day right before our eyes. At ever-perilous stake now is our own human species as well as all living species inhabiting this earth, suffering at the hands of national governments that have corruptly co-opted with the banking cabal-owned transnational corporations and for too many decades been systematically destroying the richly diverse natural ecosystems of all earthly life forms on an unprecedented scale.

Since governmental co-opting with global fortune 500 corporations has been polluting and poisoning the earth’s skies, its waters, food sources and seeds for so long, global theft and destruction has us humans and all life forms teetering now on the brink of complete self-annihilation and extinction, human-induced for the first time on a massive never before seen scale. It is time to hold the oligarchy in the form of corporations responsible for all the damage they have reeked on this earth. No more grotesque “Abama-nations” of bank and Wall Street bailouts at taxpayer expense. Since the 99% in debt to the hilt have been squeezed dry, while the 1% have made this planet nearly unlivable as the only ones filthily richly profiting from their plundering this earth, the transnationals are the sole entities with the financial capital and means to clean up the very mess they created. It is only fair then that after an entire century of mucking the planet up at our expense, that they now need to finally be held accountable for repairing the destruction they directly caused and obscenely profited from.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former Army officer. His written manuscript based on his military experience examines leadership and national security issues and can be consulted at http://www.redredsea.net/westpointhagopian/. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in psychology and became a licensed therapist working in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now focuses on writing.