March for Eight Billion Lives: An Interview with Riva Enteen

An Interview with Riva Enteen

March 28, 2018

by Ann Garrison 

  

March for Eight Billion Lives: An Interview with Riva Enteen

 

“Of course we support the cause of protecting lives, but there is an exceptionalism to believing it only applies to American lives and especially white lives.”

Organizers of the upcoming Women’s March on the Pentagon are calling on the Democratic Party-sponsored Women’s March and March for Our Lives to expand their message to include the eight billion lives on the planet, all of which are imperiled by US weapons and wars. I spoke to Riva Enteen, a former National Lawyers Guild Program Director and a member of the steering committee for the October Women’s March on the Pentagon.

Ann Garrison: Riva, how would you like to see the March for Our Lives message expanded?

Riva Enteen: We must expand the message in two ways. First, we must acknowledge that US wars and domestic gun violence are intertwined. Our military budget is obscene, and the majority of Democrats voted with Republicans to give both Trump and the Pentagon more money than they asked for this year. Three Republican Senators joined the five Democratic Senators who voted against the $700 billion 2018 military budget. This has normalized carrying and using guns, which now include military-grade weapons on our streets. ?

“Gun control should begin at the Pentagon.”

Secondly, we have to be concerned with all lives, from Florida’s Stoneman Douglas High School to Yemen. The US military is by far the largest arms dealer in the world, and it’s common knowledge that much of its weaponry ends up with those that our government calls “terrorists” and claims to be fighting. The US calls the terrorists it arms “rebels,” as in Syria, or “friends and allies,” as in Israel and Saudi Arabia. Gun control should begin at the Pentagon.

The endless “War on Terror” emerged after 9-11, which became the excuse for war as a constant, not an aberration. Until we rein in the US’s determination to exert hegemony over the whole world, we will continue to see blood spilled here while, at the same time, our missiles rain down on innocents in the name of specious “humanitarian intervention” and stopping terrorism. There is an irony to the US invoking the term “humanitarian intervention,” as it publicly abandons and scorns international law, bombing civilians and even hospitals.

AG: I counted ninety geographically distinct manifestations of the Democratic Party promoting their participation in the March for Our Lives, and all the march and voter registration logos and banners were blue. Your thoughts on that?

RE: The Democratic Party contained the message and excluded the call for peace, just as they did with the two Women’s Marches. It is counter-intuitive that a women’s march and a students’ march wouldn’t talk about peace, with the US at war in at least seven countries and no end in sight. But the Democrats, who promoted the Women’s Marches and the March for Our Lives, are a pro-war party. Peace is not on their agenda. War is a bi-partisan policy because, according to Wall Street, war is good for business, and that’s who controls our government.

At the beginning of his second term, after the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Obama said that he would address gun control and sounded convincing. A year earlier, in 2011 he had bragged, “In fact, my administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners—it has expanded them, including allowing people to carry their guns in national parks and wildlife refuges.”

“It is counter-intuitive that a women’s march and a students’ march wouldn’t talk about peace, with the US at war in at least seven countries and no end in sight.”

Attempts to limit the size of gun magazines, expand background checks of gun buyers, and ban gun sales to buyers on terrorism watch lists all failed to pass under Obama, when he had a Democratic House and Senate, from January 2009 to January 2013, and when he had a Democratic Senate, from January 2013 to January 2017.

Stand-your-ground laws, which George Zimmerman successfully used in his defense for killing unarmed Trayvon Martin, have expanded to more states, even though Obama lamented that if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.

AG: The March for Our Lives and the Women’s Marches have enormous corporate and celebrity support as well as the Democratic Party’s. They’re able to hire all kinds of staff to work full time on networking and turning out their huge crowds. Can you imagine getting any of that kind of support for the October Women’s March on the Pentagon?

RE: Of course we imagine getting support from all peace-loving people. Unfortunately, most corporations benefit from war so they would not support the cause of peace. We do believe there are celebrities who will step up to the plate and do the right thing, because the stakes are so high. This march commemorates the 1967 March on the Pentagon, which included celebrities such as Norman Mailer getting arrested.

AG: The Pentagon now admittedly has more money than it can figure out how to spend, so its surplus weapons go to militarize the police who are most aggressive in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Anything you’d like to say about that?

RE: Military grade weapons have no place in domestic neighborhoods, not in the hands of police officers, veterans with PTSD, or civilians. People from other countries are shocked at what we allow on our streets. The normalization of killing includes domestic massacres perpetrated with these military-grade weapons.

As to police killings in Black and Brown neighborhoods, it remains open season, just as it did under Obama, even when Black Lives Matter was at its strongest. I guess we can hope a precedent was set by South Carolina cop Michael Slager’s second degree murder conviction for shooting Walter Scott— an unarmed Black man—in the back.

AG: Some March for Our Lives supporters are likely to get defensive and ask whether you’re refusing to support their cause. What would you say to them?

RE: Of course we support the cause of protecting lives, but there is an exceptionalism to believing it only applies to American lives and especially white lives. In a promotional video that Democracy Now played repeatedly during their broadcast of the Washington, DC March for Our Lives, former US soldiers said that they’d learned how to put assault rifles to good purpose in US wars, but didn’t want them aimed at US citizens.

Isn’t it time to stop aiming those guns—and our missiles, fighter jets, and drones—at the rest of the world? My mother was a member of Women Strike for Peace, founded in 1961 with the slogan “Stop the Arms Race, Not the Human Race,” and that has never been more true.

Women, the givers of life, are confronting the Pentagon in Washington, DC, October 20-21. We hope that all peace-loving people will consider this a chance to make a stand for peace. There will be local antiwar actions springing up, as they did during Occupy, so keep your ear to the ground, and watch for updates on our website and our Facebook page .

 

[Riva Enteen is a former Program Director of the National Lawyer’s Guild, and a current member of the steering committee for the Women’s March on the Pentagon, who lives in South Lake Tahoe. She was also chair of the first KPFA Local Station Board. She can be reached at rivaenteen@gmail.com .]

[Ann Garrison is an independent journalist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. She can be reached at @AnnGarrison or ann@kpfa.org .]

LISTEN: Colonialism and Gender Today

kpfa.org

March 27, 2018

Against the Grain

Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism, Part 2

Black Agenda Report

February 1, 2018

By Bruce Dixon

SlutWalk Toronto & Vancouver Dyke March Announce Official Partnership with Sex Trade Lobby

Feminist Current

August 1 2017

By Meghan Murphy

“It is concerning that two events aimed primarily at women (that purport a connection to feminism) have partnered with lobby groups promoting prostitution as an empowered choice.”

 

From early on, SlutWalk has expressed a capitalist, libertarian approach to the sex trade that refused to criticize its misogynist and racist foundation, instead presenting prostitution as gender neutral, empowering for women, and “a job like any other.” But to explicitly partner with an organization that exists primarily to promote sex work as work, to the point that they endorse “youth sex work” and have argued that consent laws harm prostituted children, takes this pro-prostitution position to another level.

In their 2011 “Youth at Work” issue, Shameless magazine published an article by Phoenix Anne McKee, who was working with Maggie’s Toronto to create a guide for “youth sex workers.” She positioned child prostitution as a viable “choice” and argued that men who buy sex from exploited children should be decriminalized, writing, “age of consent laws pose a risk to the safety of youth aged 14 and 15 who decide to engage in sex work.” McKee, who was prostituted at the age of 14, also argued that the sex trade “helped [her] out in [her] life.” She points to Maggie’s as the organization that helped her understand that prostitution is not a bad thing, but an empowering thing.

Considering SlutWalk has particular appeal to young women, it is extremely concerning that this upcoming march is partnering with an organization that promotes prostitution as an empowered choice, not just for women, but for girls.

Beyond this, Maggie’s has worked to silence and smear feminists who criticize the sex trade. In 2015, the organization launched a petition to have me fired and no-platformed, due in large part to my writing (published then at rabble.ca, a Canadian progressive online magazine) in opposition to the sex trade. The petition authors made numerous libelous statements about my words and my work, labeling me as “racist,” a “bigot,” “transmisogynistic,” and “whorephobic.” While, ultimately, I was not fired from my job, the petition and willingness of this organization to publish lies about and work to silence women who make feminist arguments against objectification and male violence against women further cemented their anti-feminist and anti-democratic politics.

On July 29th, the Vancouver Dyke March, an annual event that works toward “greater visibility, pride, and community engagement for queer women and their allies” announced that the Grand Marshal for the 14th Annual Vancouver Dyke March was Sex Workers United Against Violence (SWUAV).

Like Maggie’s, SWUAV is a lobby group that advocates for the full decriminalization of pimps, johns, and brothel-owners. In 2007, the non-profit group filed a constitutional challenge to Canada’s prostitution laws, and has worked with Pivot since then to fight for the decriminalization of johns.

In 2014, SWUAV and Pivot co-published a report called, “Criminalization of Clients: Reproducing Vulnerabilities for Violence and Poor Health among Street-Based Sex Workers in Canada,” which argued against the “criminalization and policing of sex buyers.” In 2016, SWUAV and Pivot partnered with Maggie’s, as well as a number of other pro-sex industry lobby groups, on a submission to the UN Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which argued it was the criminalization of johns — not the men themselves — that endangered prostituted women. The submission presents prostitution as a source of “economic empowerment” for women and attacks Canada’s new, hard fought for feminist legislation (the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, also known as Bill C-36), which decriminalized prostituted people and criminalized exploitative men, demanding the new laws be repealed. Shockingly, the submission also goes to great lengths to downplay trafficking, saying there is “little evidence of trafficking in Canada,” that numbers are exaggerated, reports sensationalized, and that trafficking is not a pressing problem in Canada, despite numerous reports showing otherwise. Indeed, there is ample evidence connecting the trafficking of Asian women to “massage parlours” across Canada; and Indigenous girls and women, in particular, are trafficked within Canada’s borders. Yet the submission states, “In the vast majority of situations, Indigenous women do sex work independently and voluntarily.”

To imply that marginalized women and girls are voluntarily choosing prostitution of their own free will, that it empowers them, and that men should not be held accountable for exploiting these women and girls is deeply unethical. To deny the problem of trafficking in order to advocate towards the full decriminalization of prostitution, when it is common knowledge that trafficking increases in countries that legalize prostitution, is similarly unconscionable. Both Maggie’s and SWUAV have shown themselves to be working in the interests of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy in their efforts to normalize and expand the sex trade. They have also demonstrated opposition to feminists and women’s rights. That two events purporting to center women and women’s empowerment have officially partnered with such demonstrably unethical and anti-feminist groups is deeply troubling.

[MEGHAN MURPHY IS A FREELANCE WRITER/JOURNALIST AND FOUNDER/EDITOR OF FEMINIST CURRENT. SHE HAS BEEN PODCASTING AND WRITING ABOUT FEMINISM SINCE 2010 AND HAS PUBLISHED WORK IN NUMEROUS NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING NEW STATESMAN, VICE, AL JAZEERA, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, I-D, TRUTHDIG, AND MORE. MEGHAN COMPLETED A MASTERS DEGREE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF GENDER, SEXUALITY AND WOMEN’S STUDIES AT SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY IN 2012 AND LIVES IN VANCOUVER, B.C. WITH HER DOG.]

This Reconciliation is for the Colonizer

Indigenous Motherhood

June 13, 2017

By Andrea Landry

“Indigenous based child-rearing in today’s generation resides in watching the restoration of unfaltering kinship in our Indigenous family systems unfold and allowing that to reside in the raising of our children with the knowing of who they are, and where they come from, wildly and unapologetically.”

Artwork by: Votan Henriquez 

This settler-colonial reconciliation branded by the government is artificially sweetened with handshake photo-ops and small pockets of money buying out silence on real issues.

The fad and conversation of reconciliation that our people are playing a role in is immobilizing “leadership” and converting indigenous peoples into colonially operated marionettes.

This type of reconciliation is a distraction.

Instead of being idle no more, we are “reconciling some more” with present day Indian act agents whose hands are choking out our voices for land, water, and our children’s minds.

This type of reconciliation is for the ones who want to be “friends” with the Indians for land commodification reasoning, for the ones who whisper the words “im sorry” as they watched the priests and nuns rape our children, for the ones who shut their eyes and turned away when genocide was bleeding into their forts, for the ones who defy Treaty daily- without remorse, and it’s for the ones who beat you, apologize, and beat your daughter and their daughters in the coming years.

This type of reconciliation is for the professors at universities who are pro-Trudeau and believe “decolonizing” universities looks like mandatory Indigenous studies classes yet those very same professors still belittle, marginalize, and see themselves better than, smarter than, and superior to every indigenous student in their classes, shaming them for their brown skin and indigenous minds.

This type of reconciliation is for the professionals in work-spaces who want to aid in repairing the settler-Indigenous relationship in their work places but when an Indigenous women brings her children into that space because her sitter didn’t show up that morning, the mother will be told that her children need to leave because they’re laughter doesn’t line up with colonial workplace standards.

This type of reconciliation helps elderly white woman carry their groceries to their vehicle, but later follows a single indigenous woman with 3 children in the store, aisle after aisle, under the suspicion that she will shoplift.

This type of reconciliation will have dollars for moccasin making and small “cultural” events, but those accounts will be “out of money” the moment those events begin to engage in conversations and action around indigenous liberation, sovereignty, and nationhood.

This type of reconciliation sponsors powwows through companies like Potash and Shell, hoping the 1000 first place special will buy out a few hundred acres of indigenous land more easily.

This type of reconciliation claims residential schools are over but maintains a superior and oppressive power dynamic between settler adults and indigenous children at its own convenience.

This type of reconciliation declares “no foul play” to the bodies of young indigenous youth found in the riverbanks in this country’s most racist cities but later claims they celebrate the lives of indigenous peoples.

This type of reconciliation organizes a national inquiry for missing and murdered indigenous women but neglects to do any actual work by configuring the timeframe to benefit the colonizer and showing that bringing justice to murdered indigenous women is something that can go on summer vacation.

This type of reconciliation invents a “new nation to nation relationship” and teaches our people that the only way we can access our treaty rights is if we have a status card, completely negating from the truth that we, as indigenous peoples, do not need a new “nation to nation relationship,” as ours is with the crown “as long as the sun shines, grass grows, and water flows,” and those status cards have nothing to do with our treaty rights.

This type of reconciliation was born by the colonizer’s TRC and will die on the very same shelves as those documents in the halls and walls of colonial buildings. For their benefit.

This type of reconciliation claims they are not racist but makes degrading comments about the braids on your sons and the skin of your daughters in public spaces.

This type of reconciliation will say it wants to bring justice to our women but is raping the very land our mothers were birthed on for generations.

This type of reconciliation will say there are no funds for following through with Jordan’s principle, none for the lack of clean drinking water in communities, zero for decreasing the price of food in northern communities, and nothing for the mouldy housing and schools that indigenous children must learn in everyday, but will spend half a billion dollars on Canada 150 – a birthday party founded and based upon genocide.

This type of reconciliation claims to “love” indigenous peoples but expects your indigenous child to sing “oh Canada” in their classroom every morning, standing up.

This type of reconciliation is “making space” for indigenous peoples in writing and editorials but later compiles money together to create an appropriation prize.

This type of reconciliation is “putting an end” to indigenous young people killing themselves but only provides enough money for communities to bring in guest speakers and concerts rather than full time therapists equipped with all the tools needed to aid young people in full-blown crisis.

This type of reconciliation “seeks” to decrease the numbers of indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system but will place a young indigenous male in solitary confinement for 4 years for no real reason other than being an Indian in “Canada.”

This type of reconciliation wants to build better relationships with indigenous peoples but is building better ways to commit treason, genocide, colonization, and prejudice with nice hair and a smile of lies.

This reconciliation is for the colonizers.

This is a time of pseudo-reconciliation for continued colonization.

This reconciliation is colonization, disguised with dollar signs and white-skinned handshakes.

This reconciliation is not our reconciliation.

Because.

The only reconciliation that exists for us, as Indigenous nations, is the reconciliation we need to find within ourselves and our communities, for agreeing and complying to this madness for so long.

The only reconciliation that exists for us, is the reconciliation needed to forgive our families, our loved ones, for acting like the colonizer.

The only reconciliation we need. Is a reconciliation that doesn’t involve white skinned handshakes and five dollar handouts for our lands.

The only reconciliation we need is indigenous reconciliation. Free of money. Handshakes. Photo-ops. Inquiries with summer vacations. The continued rape of our women, our girls, our lands, and our babies. Highway of tears and roadways of fears. The continued murder of our women, our girls, our lands, and our babies. Free of shaming our boys out for being indigenous boys with indigenous hair. Free of shaming our girls for being indigenous girls with indigenous skin. Free of support for the colonizer’s version of indigenous “culture,” yet no support money for liberation. Free of supremacy. Trickery. Fake it til you make it syndrome. Indian agents. Sir John A Macdonald governments disguised as Trudeau. Colonial chiefs. Free of the continued manipulation, colonization, degradation, and humiliation of Indigenous people. Free of colonially written documents claiming to “save” us, viewing us always, as victims. Free of the lyrics of Oh Canada for breakfast for our children.

Instead of us living in times of reconciliation, we are living in times of recolonization.

And it will only happen if we allow it.

This reconciliation is for the colonizer. And we need to leave this conversation.

We need to reconcile with ourselves. With our families. With our nations.

For our babies.

Because I want our children to to learn about our own liberation, rather than the colonizer’s reconciliation.

And I want our children to know that
Indigenous liberation will always overthrow colonial reconciliation.

Because having our homelands is more important to me than a photo-op and handshake with government officials named Trudeau.

[Andrea Landry is Anishinaabe from Pawgwasheeng (Pays Plat First Nation) but currently resides on Treaty Six territory in Poundmaker Cree Nation. She holds a Masters in Communications and Social Justice from the University of Windsor. Full bio.]

HOW U2’S 2017 JOSHUA TREE TOUR ACCLIMATES AMERICAN THEOCRATIC FASCISM

#U2TheJoshuaTreeTour2017 Tampa

The Raydiant Labyrinth

November 1 2017

This essay is intended to deal with two elements: it delineates the political agenda of the latest U2 tour, and highlights that there are socio-religious roots introduced in conjunction with that political agenda, which actually present the doctrinal basis for theocratic fascism in the United States as “good”, -and both of these elements are absorbed by the sum audience as “good”. This geopolitical juggernaut was not only put forth to “entertain” the US buying public, but introduced abroad.

Here is Frank Zappa discussing what he viewed to be the greatest existential danger to the United States, -“theocratic fascism”. I’d like to offer this distinction: what Zappa is describing, -when theocratic doctrine becomes legally codified for a nation as its version of morality, is not theocratic fascism. That is the first and most fundamental signifier of a functioning theocracy. Theocratic fascism is when theocratic ideology integrates itself so fully into the prevailing culture (mainly by way of its leadership) that it begins implementing itself in foreign and domestic policy through that leadership, with the domestic public acculturated enough to its tenets and dictates that they are either unconcerned or full believers themselves. The way to innoculate the public is through culture. Below is a more extended clip of the exchange with Frank Zappa that led to this quote:

And now, onto our essay.

Part I: I Never Saw a U2 Tour That I Didn’t Like

Maybe I should have been happy to see U2 do #Canada150 (our 150th birthday). -Nope. And by “do”, I mean the pejorative.

“I like the PR implications of the framing of this performance for impact domestically in Canada even less than I like its intended framework of effect as per the US audience. ONE was a wee bit too deliberate a song selection and this whole intro in that context was tooled as a PR gift to our PM personally to help him domestically, in the light of sanctioning a certain pipeline [and then some] and tacitly supporting military presence to force its construction if need be. We do know how U2’s ONE/RED billionaire sponsors do loathe their indigenous pipeline protests against their investments. It was called #NoDAPL. #askU2 #U2 TheJoshuaTreeTour 2017” – Pamela Williams

“Blame it on the Rain“ Bono’s gifted intro to our PM and our country (which was more of a calculated gift to our PM than it was to our country), that was turned into an American political football in the same light, purely in terms of a contrast in leadership (given Bono’s disturbing depiction of Trump the entire #U2TheJoshuaTreeTour2017 for “Exit” every night) is to be found here, segueing at 0:45. That in its own right might not be too much of a problem. But this is #Canada150, -right? And Bono calculated it for all of this effect, in light of his equally calculated effect with the present tour. Given the population ratio, you might say he calculated it for its partisan effect on his American audience by a proportionate population ratio of about 10 to 1. Sounds about right. And its calculated effect domestically? -That I have a bigger problem with. We’re getting the exact same tour in Canada that Americans are getting in the USA, btw, so the calculated effect was equally intended on both sides of the border.

-That’s right folks. U2 and Co. took their partisan-ly political US framed tour cross border complete with all its ode to Americana (with the expected cornucopia of American neuroses), and performed it in full as if it were fully applicable and appreciable to a Canadian audience. Makes perfect sense now. Even the PR inbuilt into #Canada150 was informed by this lexicon and designed to play and convey to both audiences of the paying faithful cross-border. And, -that’s right folks. This is U2?s present current notion of creating an international show based on universal appeal, basically proselytizing America to the world. The Pentagon (or military brass Bono is now thanking live in concert for attending and for their service abroad) must be absolutely jizzing themselves. This is where U2 have ended up to commemorate their 30 years.

I have pulled out the aspects of U2’s #U2TheJoshuaTreeTour2017 that play into the aspects of the Canada150 performance and put them here as a summary dealing solely with that (for the repeat intro I apologise in advance). -Seeing U2 “do” #Canada150 was leavened by the fact that I just saw what they do for the USA every day by seeing them in Tampa. On the scale of patriotic patronage, if you will, this diminishes Bono’s and Edge’s personal effort by appearing in this one-off to commemorate a different country in orders of magnitude of hundreds to one. Having seen the tour in the US, and being aware that it’s being performed this same way in Canada due to the screen montage always being the same, as well as the general formula, (though Bono’s personal touches and twists do doll up the entire thing as an American homage from start to finish when performed in the States), greatly alters your perspective.

This got its start as a comment on U2’s #Canada150 appearance that got waaay out of hand, as it really became all about what it was like to witness them in Tampa. Despite all this negative analysis that I’ll put down to political (and some religious) awareness (I’m in no way remiss to possess), let me state outright that despite having this aspect of awareness, I still really did enjoy the show throughout, and not even this could sink it for me. There’s just no way on earth I would have paid for it. -And then reality began to sink in. To quote the comment:

“So, first flavor of FB censorship is that in viewing this, all negative comments on U2 have been filtered out. I can’t see them for this reason. Bono is a major, invitation only Facebook investor. Facebook’s working overtime for him.

I may appreciate that they showed up and did this, but then I have seen #U2TheJoshuaTree2017 despite boycotting it, (as in friend of a friend got gifted), which throws it into a very different form of relief. -Having seen them perform this tour in the USA is enlightening, semi-automatic machine guns on law enforcement aside. Basically the entire concert is one giant PR BJ for the USA.”

“Sunday Bloody Sunday” which began existence about The Troubles now commemorates the blowback (shout-out for Manchester, London (and Kabul) @3:15)  from Obama and Hillary’s excellent Libyan adventure, but utterly disassociated from the adventure, solidarity evacuated of all culpability. Thus are our military war crimes expiated as opener, the sole lens being that of shared victimhood.

Unsurprisingly, “One Tree Hill” was dedicated to the Orlando Pulse Night Club massacre, again, without any attendant context of how that transpired. –You don’t say.

A Syrian refugee infant washed to shore on the Mediterranean in ‘Pride” (@1:11) who represented hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, was equally rendered a non sequitur. U2, having so offended the nation that would vote for Trump and having been so offensive as to tell them to vote for the losing side, turn “Pride”, the ode to civil disobedience, MLK’s martyrdom and the Civil Rights movement, into a bread sop bipartisan embrace of the American right and left (sacrificed to polarization to divide a nation election 2016) starting at 2:30, going on to exhort the audience that the Dream (MLK’s, or the American one that executed him?) -is still alive and kicking. [Stuff like this makes me wonder if he might even possibly be right, doubly so as this take-back of the flag will have to be bipartisan.]

U2 have bent over backwards to create a non-stop homage to all things America to woo all those sensitive snowflake consumers back post election, seeing as it was the first time ever they took a side during an election. (‘Pride” opens with “all come, to look for America” ), -can’t upset the money cart. It covers every banality and subverts the band’s spirituality to make it an unadulterated homage to the American golden calf (which they’re actually proselytizing in Canada itself as well as every country).

Above: U2 concert montage featuring Morleigh Steinberg

-The above (hyperlinked) video for the song “Trip Through Your Wires” doesn’t give you this implication sufficiently so let me explain. This song was Bono’s first foray into the notion of a feminine Holy Spirit, but it was nascent rather than articulate at the time; -he delineated this with subsequent releases (proven in my book from public record, –namely the songs themselves). Instead of an open spirituality for this song what we have is an entire big screen video montage dedicated to Edge’s wife Morleigh alternating between her American flag bikini and painting the American flag to provide an object as per the song’s lyrics, -thus the spiritual rescuer is personified not as something Godly/spiritual redemption, but rather, -the band’s rescuer is portrayed as being America in the feminine.

On the other hand there is a word for this type of staged formulation wherein the sacred is substituted for the non-sacred as object as the sum of performance art. It is called sacrilege, but the audience are far too infantilized to be aware of the nature of the merger, which I’m only asserting as being the case because this wasn’t about one song, but was vested by the concert’s entire content, as interspersed with the unending obeisance to America, Bono had the audacity to simultaneously claim that attending the concert was the same as going to Church (at 2:30). That’s only true if God is your object. The sum of the show in no way has God as object. It has America as its object. Basically the waters are so deliberately muddied there is no difference to be had at this point, which is the essence of the problem. In the Old Testament, the substitution of any object in the place of God as an object of veneration or worship is idolatry, and God put it in the top 10 commandments of sins not to commit.

“In God’s Country” is deftly turned into a personification of the United States with one line shift to “she thinks her only gift is gold” at 1:45. The elimination of ambiguity (or inverted shift, depending on your take) is the elimination of all meaning, except the one option to be taken in the literal, -and that’s a problem. God’s country is Heaven, -or God’s Creation, depending on your angle. The lyric shift deftly designates America as God’s country. This belief that America is uniquely God’s country on earth is rooted in its self conception going back to Plymouth; “Manifest Destiny” and American “exceptionalism” are founded on the assertion, which means the invocation is not something akin to asserting the nation as perhaps, uniquely Godly or virtuous, it is accessing a loaded interpretation with a vast body of thought and consequences that lie at the very root of the American psyche.

Americans generally have no clue “exceptionalism’s” present secular incarnation formed its roots in “one nation under God”. Exceptionalism first had to arrive at a religious justification for itself (that was the doctrine of “manifest destiny”). “As originally used in the US, Manifest Destiny was the idea that God had given the United States a mission to expand their territory throughout North America. Three basic ideas underlie the concept of manifest destiny. First is a belief in the righteousness and superiority of the Christian moral values and institutions of the United States. The second is a belief in the responsibility of the U.S. to spread these for the benefit of the world and to fulfill God’s wishes. The third is the faith that God has blessed the country to succeed and every success confirms that blessing. The term Manifest Destiny was revived in the 1890s as a justification for US international expansion.”

For Bono to invoke America as God’s country puts him squarely in the mindset of both the neocon (G. W. Bush -who resurrected manifest destiny, the religious brand of American exceptionalism to invade Iraq) and neoliberal camps of ideological thought (“Obama is likely the most strenuous advocate of American exceptionalism on the left today” (see review that has interview with the author of “American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion”, John Wilsey) and “city on a hill” Hillary). Note that this author has two views of American exceptionalism, with the theological version being the (euphemistic in the extreme) “closed” (dark, supremacist and dangerous) version, which, however lightly he’s treading, is what Bono is invoking. It’s so interesting what territory you have to range in order to be bipartisan in the USA. Both sides believe in American exceptionalism, the question is simply at what latitude. Witnessing the fruits, it appears the differentiation between “closed” (theological) exceptionalism and “open” (secular) exceptionalism are virtually indistinguishable in terms of foreign policy as bloodbath. And when Hillary on the campaign trail invoked American exceptionalism with “shining city on a hill”, it was the equivalent of a wet kiss campaign smack to the “closed” (theological) voter-ship, the true believers. (Bono flirts with the best.)

It has interesting roots: “manifest destiny” doctrine was a reference point for Hitler to formulate an existent justification for “Lebensraum”; -basically, if they can justify illegal land expropriation of other sovereign nations by claiming God destined the land for them and making the mandate essentially unlimited, then why on earth can’t we? (This was not the only ideological justification where the Nazis resorted to the USA as a template, they also studied and sourced its race and immigration laws, as well as its reservation system in devising concentration camps.) Manifest Destiny was the ideological justification the United States used to genocidally cleanse the West. It went beyond, as it was quoted as justification for the annexation of the Phillipines (loverly -still cluelessly referenced as an outstanding figure in history), as well as to illegally annex Hawaii. It was used to threaten Canada more than once (“54:40 or Fight”), in the argument that the colony had no right to exist in the face of America’s Godly dispensation as the conquistador of democratic ideals for the entire North American continent. While fundamentalist, it is a uniquely American condition, and would by and large otherwise be regarded as (again) sacrilegious in any Protestant reformist movement’s antipathy to the material -apart from those migrating spawn of the Puritans who were, thanks to the evolution of manifest destiny doctrine from their unique “New Israel” Calvinism, more than prone to dispensationalism (and look where that got us).

Now what’s interesting is that the countermanding Old Testament refutations that repeal present day Zionism (which is sanctioned in Christian minds by the doctrine of dispensationalism, and such repeals in the Bible do likewise to Divine mandated American exceptionalism) lie primarily in the female testaments, particularly those of Rahab and Ruth (the above “look where that got us” link references both Rahab and Ruth for the Biblical doctrinal refutation of dispensationalism, but in addition in my refutation there’s Esther and other elements). Even within Zionism itself it is Biblically (Talmud) refuted, as in the manner in which Zionism may have God’s mandate to fulfill itself has been hotly contested, meaning “this country [Israel] is ours by God’s decree because we alone are God’s people” could have moral constraints in its attainment, -and by the argument the Rabbi is alluding to in the above link, -could only be obtained morally.

I’m speculating that perhaps the only nations fundamentalist enough to come up with an equivalent notion to America’s religious version of Manifest Destiny (if more virulently) might be the ISIS Caliphate, the present Jewish State, the Taliban, the Saudi monarchy (if it considers itself a Divine Monarchy) and Iranian theocracy. Hopefully now that I have laid out some of the US’s own doctrinal background and pointed out some of the other entities that presently hold this same brand of belief, -you can begin to register what is actually being accessed by Bono’s invocation of America as “God’s Country”, otherwise put as, just how perilously Bono is flirting when it comes to how he’s defined his ultimate object for this present tour. Present doctrinal implementations of “God’s nation”, namely American dispensationalist doctrine conferring this to Israel, is how you’ve arrived at unconditional support for a form of Zionism that attacks your First Amendment rights; obviously US support for Israel is geo-strategic, but that’s not the basis for the delusion feeding the religious aspect of Christian support, which tips US support. Not exactly good bedfellows to keep with this sort of domestic influence. As for their international influence, prepare to dig your own grave, make that sooner rather than later.

Why would it be considered healthy to unconsciously invoke this sort of underlying doctrine in performance art in the collective psyche of your receptive audience (you could not find a more passively receptive audience in terms of band trust), -when this is their historical (and present -as in NYT bestsellers make their bread and butter on this s***) -resonance? This allegation is made, of course, on the basis that we are dealing with a professing Christian believer, so the question is simply -in the context of this presentation, what sort of belief is he presenting? As you can see the answer has disturbing undertones. Ironically, the doctrine of dispensationalism was conceived by an Irishman, and so by and large were Sheela na Gigs. Bono seems to have a difficulty choosing between the two (pretending to proffer both), -when they are mutually exclusive. This I find even more disturbing about it.

While Bono and U2 made the whole set of #U2TheJoshuaTreeTour2017 climax in the third act on feminism and #herstory, and Bono introduced the tour by stating that we are dealing with the rise of universal feminine consciousness in all of humankind and thus the show is deliberately celebrating that (in this Rolling Stone interview), -his embrace of the notion of “God’s Country” as a nation that exists on earth is utterly in opposition to the feminist elements that appear in the Old Testament itself, whose existence in the Bible provide a direct antithesis to precisely this brand of fundamentalism. (I demonstrate how this exists under my above self-referenced hyperlink.) It’s like he’s literally betraying his own belief system right in front of you, -in the name of America. It’s like inverting the element of feminism found in the two monotheisms (Judaism and Christianity) to force it to embrace its very opposite (literally the opposite of what he himself is professing his combined belief system to be, if his feminism is at all grounded in Christianity) and substituting the Whore of Babylon, not as an removed object, but rather sold to the receptive audience as an internalized self-image that is utterly false. The idol/image exists in terms of themselves as a form of self-worship. Adoration of their false perception of their country is adoration of themselves in terms of their self-regard for what that country is, by the simple fact that their internal perception of their country simply has no bearing on reality.

In fact the show is providing a deliberate substitute for reality. As such, it is purely a figment of their own perception that receives their veneration, -a self created image designed to buttress the self in terms of providing them with a good perception of themselves. In this manner the object of veneration Bono and the band have designed for this tour is not external but interior and purely self serving, for what Bono presented them with as the subject of honour was not God, but America as “God’s Country”, -namely themselves. Moreover feminism in the Bible introduced the very opposite of the notion of any nation on earth asserting itself to be “God’s Country”. The Book of Esther introduced the very concept of secularism, the separation of Church and State, and Rahab introduced the elemental idea of individuals joining God’s people via faith as opposed to being designated by ethnic tribalism, -namely who they descended from or their nationality. The idea of “we and we alone are God’s nation on earth, and it is this earthly nation, and it gives us this dispensation” is of course the ultimate merger of Church and State.

I have one last additional point to make on this, and it is purely anecdotal. The only other place I have witnessed this deliberate muddying of arch-types in order foster a somewhat religious emotional attachment to nationhood (namely the deliberate cross over between Church, State (being by default the US in this instance), and Christ-like Hero mash-ups relayed in terms of Sacrifice (with a healthy dollop of Mother thrown in) is in present Hollywood movie incarnations I would frame as propaganda, and speculate are tooled if not by the Pentagon as such then definitely by someone else at the level of psy-ops. There’s no doubt the Pentagon tools Hollywood movies, and I would speculate heavily on many incarnations of Marvel (I’m referring here to a DC Comics movie), as Marvel script modifications are explicitly referenced in the promotion of this book, by authors that have documented the minutiae management of scripts and production on over 1800 Hollywood films by the Pentagon (not surprised at all).

Part II: Just What, Exactly, are you Hijacking Feminism For?

Wonder Woman is a hero only the military-industrial complex could create – Jonathon Cook

“Is it any surprise that in the Hollywood-Pentagon world of Wonder Woman, the values of a female superhero sound exactly like those of the military men who run the West’s wars?

Now roll on “Wonder Woman 2: Time to Intervene (Humanely).”

That DC Comics productions also provide a platform of this nature is getting obvious, -especially when it comes to co-opting feminism as a platform in presenting “humanitarian intervention“. This is exactly what just happened with Wonder Woman, and is what is being presented for this U2 Joshua Tree Tour, -as the climax of the entire show is the track “Ultraviolet” as a video montage to feminist figures (inaugurated by the #herstory hashtag which featured in Hillary Clinton’s campaign), and featuring Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Laura Bush and both her daughters, and Madeleine Albright (“the price is worth it” “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other“) as some of these leading lights, – not to mention the vicechair of (RED sponsor) Bank of America, Melinda Gates (from whom ONE and RED obtain the bulk of their sponsorship), and Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook on ONE’s Board of Directors). Then there’s (climate deaf) Oprah. Basically we’re dealing with the interspersal of neocon and neoliberal politburo figures and First Ladies (banging a war criminal makes you a leading feminist), all of whom exist in tacit sanction of the perpetual war time state under the premise of the “war on terror“, with actual feminists and female activists.

Maybe if I provide an even balder sample of “cred appropriation” al la feminism for Hillary, leading architect in the destruction of Libya, using the exact same concept, it will begin to dawn on you why this is a bad employ of art. (-As in it really is just a bald faced attempt at credibility appropriation, which just happens to serve very well as propaganda; if you don’t think art is utilized for such, you’re daft.) The use of all these leading feminists’ names to form a portrait of Hillary (the above “balder” hyperlink) subsumes these women’s entire legacy as feminists responsible for change as if it has culminated in one individual and they provide her source; they become nothing more than merely a device wholly suborned in service to her in terms of her image. This is especially laughable when you consider Hillary’s latest attempt to blame everyone and anyone over herself for her election loss was to state that her failure to obtain white women’s vote was their fault, in a manner that was deeply sexist. (It’s even more laughable as Hillary stated it was Sheryl Sandberg (one of Hillary’s election campaignenabling prospects for Treasury Secretary) who told her this was the cause; -basically calculus to get away with using sexism, by cred appropriating the author of “Lean In” feminism. (Sheryl couldn’t be sexist!) Sheryl, btw, doesn’t have a clue when Facebook’s advertising is illegally racist.) If you want to know why lauding the philanthropically connected as leading feminists is equally dubious, I’ve provided a decidedly unpleasant list as to why ONE/RED and the largesse they depend upon is deeply problematic (scroll down). Multiplying this concept as providing equivalency for multiple women (for an aggregate that tacitly sanction and/or promulgate the war on terror ideology, to boot), as well as having the audacity to promote members and financiers of your own lobby group/consumer activism charity in the same token (“Lean In” authorship does not a feminist activist/ theoretician who changed society make), in no way improves the situation. It’s the same cred appropriation, just more broadly applied, making the appropriation that much worse. It got decidedly sicker depending on what country you happen to inhabit.

Above: Chrystia Freeland and Mary Robinson (of the Richard Branson and Purpose B Team)  highlighted in U2 montage. Women who serve empire are interwoven with radical feminists in order to reframe what constitutes feminism. Venues such as this serve as unique functions for achieving conformity and acquiescence utilizing the psychology of crowds. #SoftPower

For “Ultraviolet” video montage performances in Canada, U2 featured Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, who is responsible for these sorts of policies. Stepping up Canada’s defense spending by 70% was lauded as a personal coup for her and Defence Minister Harjit Sanjian, when it was a reflex genuflection to Trump’s public demand that NATO members up their military spending a week earlier. Incidentally this is the same woman who will helm our NAFTA renegotiation with the United States, so perhaps ass-kissing is just how you do business post reality TV presidency. NAFTA’s most fascist aspect is of course, already off the table. Not that this bothers her (nor do the specific resource issues to do with our water and oil that abrogate Canada’s sovereignty; namely the dangers of the proportionality clause Mexico was wise enough to reject, which destroys our energy sovereignty).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, greets Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde during arrivals of G-7 leaders and Outreach guests at the G-7 summit at Schloss Elmau hotel near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, southern Germany, Monday, June 8, 2015. G-7 leaders, in a second and final day of the conference, were set to tackle the difficult issue of climate change and fighting terrorism. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)/VLM102/741893071685/1506081055

It is clear that the resounding silence by Canadian Jewry on her Nazi heritage is a tacit trade off for her unconditional support of Israel, as well as her active policy record mirroring their desires for the Middle East via Canada’s foreign policy, including her absurd public announcement with respects to the arms increase that Canada must make its foray into world stage “humanitarian interventionism”, due to the advent of “isolationist” Trump. Our Prime Minister has been rendered unable to differentiate when he’s using Nazi slogans to greet national leaders (Ukraine’s, so maybe he isn’t).

Chrystia Freeland visited Ukraine to attend the Euromaidan protests, speaking publicly there in March 2014. She continued her unremitting journalistic support for the Ukraine revolution, utterly immune to what happened in both the Maidan and Odessa. Her control of Canadian foreign policy emulates these consequences in terms of utter servility to American interests, to the point of selling out our country (while literally scare-mongering NAFTA negotiators with the historical preludes to WWII to coerce ratifying the deal). As for the results in the Ukraine, they are decidedly predictable.

-Half of Trudeau’s cabinet is women. This was U2’s #herstory political pick for Canada, the biggest militarist to ever hit the post. A better shoe horn to inaugurate Cold War II/WW III could not have been contemplated, and that’s due to her Nazi heritage. In light of the fact that Bono as Mac Phisto used to call Mussolini’s grand daughter while touring Italy (then a party member of the MRI), declaring “I’m back [as in the Devil’s back]”, in much the same vein of antagonism he was calling Bush Sr. at the White House every night in North America (1992/93), -you’ve come a long way, baby.

Jonathon Cook presents the segue way that when Wonder Woman was scripted, it was probably deliberately tooled to parallel and create additional feminist confluence and credo for that incumbent humanitarian interventionist, Hillary Clinton, for whom the presidency appeared assured. Such surety certainly put Trudeau adrift. Not only is the similitude between the ideologically platformed (propaganda scripted) “Wonder Woman” and U2’s set a little too close for comfort, the developments in Hollywood/Marvel/DC Comics show this attempted management of the public psyche via “art” is already a program. The question then becomes, why have U2 lent their entire artistic trajectory to the self-same program for this tour?

The difference between what looked like a DC Comics foray into sublimating arch-types, and Bono’s present foray is that with DC’s apparent effort these notions were being somewhat toyed with, while simultaneously cracking deep insecurities you might call population touch stones that make the audience susceptible and accessible. Bono, on the other hand, has been tooling this operation on America’s crowd-mind as high art for three decades, and has now presented them with their golden calf in full form, -themselves. DC Comics/Pentagon may have absolutely nothing on him but it likewise appeared on cue in almost perfect prep form. Like I said, they must be jizzing themselves. Hollywood’s comparative effort toying with such notions, (if it could be a considered notion, and I don’t know), is child’s play. Bono’s is a perfectly calibrated collective release that follows the redemptive/worship cycle without an iota of culpability, repentance, sacrifice or depth of faith. U2 accesses those collective insecurities about themselves on the plateau of national id at a level of somnolence that is practically unconscious, basing it on a completely false sense of honesty, substituting a panacea for the kind of relief you’re supposed to get from truthful introspection that jars you awake.

To make the point of just how complete this is, near the end of the concert in Tampa Bono pointedly thanked US military servicemen in attendance for their work and service abroad after broadcasting a Syrian refugee, -in the same week American white phosphorus was used on civilians in Raqqa  and civilian deaths due to US intervention there peaked. There’s US bases in a country where no war has been declared in violation of international law. When “humanitarion intervention” was first conceived and began its faulty legal tread, U2 were broadcasting live out of Sarajevo civilian’s eye-witness accounts of NATO bombing during their POP Tour. They were warned to cease in no uncertain terms, and complied. What a reversal in twenty years.

Above: “Jo Cox, an ambitious Labour MP who had fervently lobbied the U.K. Parliament for further British intervention in Syria” [source] highlighted in U2 montage.

Every use of the sublime and sentiment for #U2TheJoshuaTreeTour2017 was banality imbued by what should have been glaring hypocrisy, some were just more lethal than others. Bono claimed that hearing this Syrian refugee espouse America as “civilised”, as her wish of where to live, the American Dream, is some sort of velvet delivered “kick in the balls” for the American audience. So utterly kid gloves he made it completely disassociated by his obeisance to the American military in attendance in the same token, and completely defanged the framed intent of “Bullet the Blue Sky” with this offering to boot, which was presented as being about the militarization of the US population (again, America complete with all of its neuroses was proselytized in Canada, -as if this somehow is our thing or our shared introspection).

-Let’s take a tour tooled solely to and about America on the road and have other nations pay for the privilege of listening to an entire album as an ode to one country that’s completely overbearing on their existence regardless. I mean, it only attains a measure of relevance because America truly is this overbearing upon the world. And gains full tilt irony if not absurdity given U2 lauded Canada’s lockstep foreign minister, (the one who’s completely aping US foreign policy -reliably weighing in on Venezuela; with Canada now implementing sanctions against Venezuela at her behest) as their #herstory political figure for Canada, -with the additional audacity to label a proponent of a Ukrainian nationalist (neo–Nazi) takeover of a democracy “feminist”. (Basically Trump is elected so even those Nazi military supporters have a way to look good, if not be praised for taking control, which they already have. You can condemn Nazism at home and attend their independence day celebration abroad, -and even arm them, all in the same week, and no one even blinks. If you don’t think glorification of Nazism was a problem for Ukraine’s government, remember this vote. Yes, it is a problem for them, with national heroes like these. You’d also deserve to be served with the reminder that this s*** is not new, and has more than a little to do with the US being forced to bear Wall Street’sconsequences, which had the usual contrivance of domestic support. It is a salient point that the consequence brought about no correction.)

“The support of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine is part of a longstanding relationship.” – Michel Chussodovsky

“What is this celebration of independence if you have other people’s troops on your main square?” -apres le parade, the bases.

That Canada’s soldier’s are leading this parade in front of Mattis has a great deal to do with Chrystia Freeland. (US Secretary of Defence Mattis‘s military nick name as a general was “Mad Dog” for a reason (Fallujah war crimes). CIA contracting, WaPo owning neoliberal plutocrats have no problem consorting with un-prosecuted war criminals promoted to Secretaries of Defence, effectively normalizing this precedent.) Her position in providing these troops has even more to do with the United States, as it was USA’s orchestration of the Ukrainian coup under the tenure of the Democrats that even puts a Nazi Ukrainian nationalist descendent in the universe of having a “useful” resume for attaining a Foreign Affairs post in a purported Liberal government (with no prior political or diplomatic experience whatsoever; she was a journalist with a stratospheric rise, winning a Liberal nomination in 2013, attaining a Ministerial post in 2015, assigned Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2017). As for Freeland’s adjunct’s counter threats as per Russian disinformation providing her background and the danger of ever airing such speciously sourced information (the obeisant press gave her a lot more than that), it pays to look at the source.

Again, the USA’s ability to leap off the lemming cliff into unreality rather than come to terms with what its own democratic process means about itself is unleashing untold damages across the diplomatic world, which includes, in this instance, a Foreign Affairs Minister with Nazi heritage getting blanket avoidance of any consideration or examination of how her past might be implementing itself through Canada’s present. US machinations abroad affect the entire world. The convenience of U2’s world tour as performance art as ode to the USA abroad at this moment, and that they’d consider it valid to publicly laud Chrystia Freeland as part of that package, cannot be understated, given the Obama/Clinton administration’s involvement in Ukraine. U2 are enabling rather than challenging. They arrived in Canada and tacitly implied we bow to these masters of the universe on foreign policy, -that this is not bowing, -that behaving in this manner on the world stage, surrendering your foreign policy dictates to a foreign power, accepting Nazi backgrounds into your cabinet who provide unconditional tactical support for regimes more virulently racist than the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, is leading “feminism”. Chrystia Freeland represents unconditional support “for a [Ukraine] government that outlawed its country’s third largest political party and that has made it illegal to be critical of Nazi collaborator ‘nationalists’ in its past.”

“The Story of Charlottesville was Written in the Blood of Ukraine” – Counterpunch

“America’s Ukraine Hypocrisy” – Strategic Culture

Wonder what Omaima (U2’s big screened representative Syrian refugee) would have thought of all this? Bono thanking the US military for their participation while American white phosphorus rained down on Raqqa and over 500 civilians were killed by US forces there and in Mosul in the same period? Could there be a worse euphemism I can use, than “overbearing”? That’s Bono’s notion of a velvet touch that works like a kick in the balls, right there, her outright love of those delivering phosphorus and killing her people -rest assured not one audience member felt it, and it’s framed so they never would. They are viewing it through the optic of “humanitarian intervention”, -viewing her admiration as originating in her recognition they bring salvation via their military, and all introspection stops there. After all he thanked them himself while they were killing her countrymen.

U2 also big screened a token Native American (starts at 1:14). No mention, of course that their ONE/RED billionaire sponsors are majorly invested in the Dakota Access Pipeline and thus invested in the mass use of rubber bullets and tear gas on those Americans throughout 2016. #NoDAPL They certainly weren’t on the side of right with this one. Bear in mind Bono took the opportunity of #Canada150 to bald-facedly brand promote his lobbying organization, ONE, whose financial backbone is provided by these DAPL investors. That is the only purpose the song “One” now serves in being in the #U2TheJoshuaTreeTour2017 set, it’s there to provide a chance for Bono to segue this lobby organization. That connection was lost on no one who’s been watching the band, or indeed our Prime Minister. That was the reason for its choice, a calculated little piece of brand synergy bromance for the faithful.

Call it a win-win, between our PM wearing ONE t-shirts, -and Bono promoting him on the band’s Facebook page for responding financially to ONE. I suppose those with mutual interests in state suppression of pipeline protests bed well together, considering ONE’s financing and our PM’s position towards First Nations is to bring in the Canadian military to enforce pipelines for Texas multinationals shat out of Enron’s carcass (Kinder Morgan, whereas another of these offshootsis responsible for helping to bankrupt our public utility BC Hydro) if their construction is blockaded, -blockades that will be spear-headed by those who’ve inhabited Canada for tens of thousands of years. Welcome to #Canada150.

To have U2 open this “Native American” video montage with the feminine-ly and Revelation-ally loaded red moon as a symbol is just doubly insulting. It’s like a cue signal: we’re going to enter a “spiritual” interlude in this concert, and present you with American Native spirituality to signify our “deep moment” is inclusion and includes one-ness with the Earth; -when this is precisely the element subject to complete and total erasure with this tour. Native Americans “present” in apparent homage whilst U2’s ONE/RED sponsors were in actuality having them brutalized to force through their investment, the Dakota Access Pipeline, when the pipeline has been adjudicated as illegal, -a point I was very clear on (not that this stopped Trumptopia from counter-suing over it, claiming water protectors are terrorists). -I’m not claiming U2’s DAPL investor sponsors were direct orchestrators of this state violence  (nor the adjunct unleashing of the private “surveillance industrial complex“, using private mercenary security contractors outsourced from the occupation of Iraq); -they were merely silent investors who controlled even the #NoDAPL protest itself to protect their financial interest. Who finances your lobby group makes it performance art as lie perpetrating the lie to hide the bodies underneath it all. (U2 usedto know about those, and brought them to light. Now they hide them for their sponsors.)

Both the use of the Syrian refugee and this usage of a Native American are in fact performed inversions that perform no other exercise than to betray the truth in the collective minds of the audience by hiding it utterly, and giving them a feel good substitute in evasion of the existent barbarism being exacted upon these peoples in the name of “America”. America has no place for Native American spirituality invoking protection of an earthly place, they just exacted retribution for the sake of U2’s sponsor’s investments (investments RED and ONE in turn are dependent upon financially) to the tune of over 700 arrests, many of whom they kenneled like dogs, many of whom were injured (as well as being subject to hours of water jets in sub-zero temperatures), to terminate their resistance on this very notion, namely their integrated belief in the sacredness and health of their land and water. (Specifically this was the substance of the court case launched by the Yankton Sioux, that the pipeline’s implementation was a violation of their religion. Of course this was rejected by the court. The issues of endangerment to the tribes’ drinking water and lack of a environmental impact study did stand up in court.)

Having watched U2 fellate America with these bromides for ticket sales sort of blows any national commendation they might make, since they do this in such a spirit of flaming hypocrisy and their obeisance is inversely related, it appears, to the level of of the lie required.

U2 are doing patriotism for the money. Not only will they sell you your self image for the money it’ll make them (when it is this far divorced from reality and the performance is in fact tooled to divorce you this far from its realities, what you are in fact being sold is not patriotism, but your own self-image of patriotism), they’ll do it while utterly immunizing you to your real sins; -their trade on mutual idolatry apparently inversely commensurate to how much you manage to consume the world. And it costs their target market more than it would to purchase either a therapist or a hooker, whereas attending Church is free.

This is what U2 have deliberately reduced themselves to in the effort to maintain their target market, offering them their own brand of personal idolatry in exchange for payment. Idolatry is not an arcane concept in this light. Without it, how would we have arrived at conceptualization that gave us the distinction between love, and love of a false image? Would you recognize that what you’re being sold, and in fact directing your homage to, is your notion of what America means, as opposed to reality, which is the equivalent of having your own self-image, as it attaches and defines itself via your sense of patriotism, -sold to you? That this fake conscience wash is the sum of your purchase? -The worship of a false image is in the top ten commandments of worst sins to commit. In terms of the delusions and complacency being enabled in the minds of literally millions of people with this (deliberately) conflated performance art, this is not a small issue. In other words my perspective on what the commandment may have been meant for has to do with the psycho-social inferences I’d develop from witnessing this; -analysing it in terms of self identity and its manipulation.

U2’s stances are not principled, but rather a sanctioned neoliberal branding process of how many ego strokes they’ll provide -that are in turn a commensurate win-win for the band financially, if not philanthropically. They rewarded Trudeau handsomely with a politically loaded #Canada150 performance for handsomely stepping up Canada’s aid on ONE’s prompt, -and of his own volition, stepping up on Syrian refugees, -curiously a campaign promise he managed to keep. Canada just got officially endorsed for voting the “right” sort of identity politicking, militarist, pipeline/tar sands sanctioning neoliberal to the helm, –a public-private partnership idealogue (-a must), -who’s already inveighed he’ll arrest First Nations’ Chiefs if they dare to engage in civil disobedience against the Trans Mountain pipeline sought by a Texas based foreign multinational (that’s documented in Part IV), you know, the kind that gets a pass despite lying on every significant domestic election platform he ever made (you can scroll to the bottom of this page for a list). You know, the kind perfectly willing to be Trump’s b****. A bit of ONE PR surely helps on that count, -at least if you’re Liberal. So does the cover of the Rolling Stone, -and they’re using precisely the same juxtaposition Bono framed for Trudeau for #Canada150 in announcing “One” (the article, while appearing in the August issue, was actually published online June 26th, five days before #Canada150). -Just in case you remain skeptical that this messaging is being framed across media in concert when it comes to retention of neoliberal power.

“Stop swooning over Justin Trudeau. The man is a disaster for the planet.” – Bill McKibben

Canada isn’t the sole target. The target is the EU, at precisely this moment, to gloss over the irreparable harm The United States is committing against their allies economically. The target is Macron’s France. (Astonishingly the exact same young neoliberals produce the exact same talking points to destroy western civil liberties that are the product of the sum of our entire history for the sake of nations who choose to define themselves by ethnic tribalism as grounds for brutality, occupation and indigenous displacement, and when their approval ratings are not so sound because they are utter failures as progressives (being the true neoliberals that they are), Bono is there, like magic.) Take a look at the timing of Bono’s visit with Macron with respects to the latest Russian sanctions ratified by Congress with the express neutering of the President, sanctions so severe for the energy sector they could easily be taken as grounds for war (nor were they appreciated by NATO allies -Germany announced they were illegal). The timing of U2’s “ode to America” Joshua Tree European tour, complete with schmoozing the “right” neoliberal heads of state (right when their popularity in the polls was at an all time low), was truly impeccable. Again, NATO/Pentagon could not have asked for a better US PR platform in light of their terrible destabilization of the EU given the flood of refugees out of Syria and their deliberate destabilization of North Africa (Libya, on the EU’s doorstep), not to mention the costs to the EU of their sanctions regime. How opportune to have a entire set that climaxes with the “Miss Sarajevo” appeal to take these refugees in, without any attribution of responsibility for why they’ve come (and therefore who should be providing refuge), but rather an entire setlist dedicated to honouring rather than challenging the architect of such suffering in the global Great Game, at exactly the moment they punish the EU economically to sever energy ties to their dependency, -Russia.

Hillary Clinton poses with members of the anti-Vladimir Putin punk rock group Pussy Riot, 2014.

The greatest target, however, is Americans themselves in the cultivation of complacency; -in light of the social engineering exercises being undertaken by U2’s billionaire sponsors under the guise of philanthropy (scroll down to the questions), -not to mention U2’s philanthrowashing provides cover and avoidance of the (continued) fraud and other nefarious outcomes of their billionaire sponsors’ investments. (The miscreant, Wells Fargo’s shares are a nest egg for RED/ONE due to Gates Foundation’s being 55% bankrolled by Berkshire Hathaway shares.) Who needs to penalize or replace executives when the philanthrowash media fix is already in by direct funding? (ONE/RED funder Warren Buffett has majority control of Wells Fargo at over $28 billion. He could vote for it.) Nor is the financial dependency of ONE/RED to be taken lightly considering the buckets of cash (literally over $100 billion) Warren Buffett has at his disposal to lobby say, for this Republican piece of legislation, considered “the equivalent of Republicans handing out a get-out-of-jail-free card to Wells Fargo and to Equifax”. Wells Fargo was culpable enough in the mortgage fraud that precipitated teh 2008 financial crisis, to have been hit with a consequent fine of $1 billion.

But the graduation here is witnessing U2 embrace not just philanthrowashing for the US elite, but actively enabling its military ambitions as well by conditioning acceptance of “humanitarian intervention”, and acculturating acceptance of the consequent refugee and terrorism crisis. They did this employing a religious ideological root: stealth assimilating George W. Bush’s “Manifest Destiny” brand of faith into their concert and proselytizing it en masse, in inverse and utter violation of their prior presentation of their own professed faith. No wonder Bush is handing Bono awards.

Part III: How to Dog Whistle US Theocratic Supremacy to Millions -And Get Away With It

No one would have dreamed this would be the end of U2’s Joshua Tree trajectory, given “Bullet the Blue Sky” has conveyed opposition precisely to Reagan’s dispatch of US military support to prop up military dictatorships in central America (despite the fact that they were engaged in massacres prior to receiving aid), and the use of domestic military proxies abroad in civil wars that were in fact funded and deployed by the US (the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua – which begat the Iran-Contra scandal), -a brand of South American intervention neither Obama nor Hillary really graduated from; Canada’s been on board since Aristide. Bono wrote the song based on being in El Salvador at the time of Reagan’s terror campaign by military aid in Central America (again, see this Rolling Stone article, conveniently bereft of any details, like the fact that when Bono conceived the man peeling off dollar bills, he envisioned Reagan). Now he praises the presider in chief, Ronald Reagan, in contrast to Trump, relating his “open door” allusion of America as the city of light on a hill (barf-blat 101 @ 22:40 for those with a memory, or any sense of historical continuity). -If that’s not a direct betrayal of one’s own world view, then what is?

“I have a kind of love-hate relationship with America. I love the place, I love the people. One of the things I hate is that such a trusting people could have put their trust in a guy like Ronald Reagan,” Bono said in a 1987 radio interview. “There is no question in my mind that the people of America, through their taxes, are paying for the equipment that is used to torture people in El Salvador. In my trip… I met with mothers of children who had disappeared. They have never found their children went or where their bodies were buried. They are presumed dead.”

World views of course can change. But when it comes to artistic integrity, the song’s very essence as testament to lives lost all these decades has been utterly inverted in the obfuscation of why, which is a total betrayal of its incarnation. It was born to bear witness; re-contextualizing the song in a setlist framed on total obeisance to America thirty years later is a direct artistic betrayal to the loss of life expressed in it, and so is commending Ronald Reagan for a quote. Ronald Reagan’s policies were directly responsible for that loss of life. How cheapening is it, for example, to reframe this song in terms of who to vote for in an election when it’s about people being murdered by their own governments with American military assistance; -as if who’s at the presidential helm of the United States in any way alters their world wide blood mongering? Doesn’t retooling the song to reflect on the militarization of the US domestic populationeffectively erase the bloodshed being carried out covertly in their name, when that was what the song was about? The song is no longer about those murdered in El Salvador with the aid of US military equipment. It has now been officially Trumpified. By giving the song a villain in the context of a US election, Bono has evacuated the evils committed abroad by the United States in the minds of his collective audience, as well as giving them the misperception they can resist merely by checking a ballot. Were the song shifted in the interest of retaining its relevancy in terms of the bloodshed it actually signifies, it might have been re-tooled to address Libya or Syria (which can’t happen, of course, if your morality compass is now possessed of a partisan filter).

The implications of Bono’s public appreciation of Ronald Reagan’s statement are far worse for someone with the working Biblical knowledge he possesses. Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill” imagery with all its gates open was a dog whistle to his religious constituents with their fascist religious belief in American exceptionalism, namely manifest destiny. It originates from a speech by Puritan (soon to be Governor of New England (and founder of Boston)) John Winthrop (remember that’s where the Calvinist trajectory that gave us Manifest Destiny took root and disseminated to the rest of the colonies). While it is easy to see that the speech has been turned into a political football by manifest destiny adherents (witness our NYT besteller), it is imbued with the seeds to take it there, as both Matthew 5:14 and Psalm 48 are recognized as the Biblical source of the phrase “city on a hill” (as in, it’s obvious Jesus Himself was self-referencing his own Torah). Psalm 48 invokes Jerusalem (on Mount Zion – very loaded term).

Those with religious knowledge duly take note that the political re-invocation of the phrase is, depending on whether your brand of American exceptionalism is “open” (secular) or “closed” (religious), also deliberately designed to imbue the United States with overtones from Revelations that invoke the New Jerusalem, basically invoking Manifest Destiny for those who read their bible and know how Jerusalem was strategically situated, -and anyone who took the time to bible study with the Shalom group (Bono) knows that. Did the Puritans arriving in the New World believe this about themselves (that they were the “New Israel” or “New Jerusalem”)? –Yes. Yes they did. For the religious manifest destiny American exceptionalist, this is a veiled way of invoking that the “New Jerusalem” of the End Times (i.e., God’s Country) is in fact America. There’s no doubt which side of the exceptionalism coin Ronald Reagan was catering to with this statement. Reagan came to power on the constituency he targeted (then labelled the “new Christian right”, -as if they had gone anywhere, in fact his core base might be better labelled End Times Evangelists), -the exact same constituency that endorsed and gave us Donald Trump, -and tells him his pugilist approach (he’s the first sample for the word’s definition) to North Korea is endorsed by God. It was the exact same constituency that formed GW Bush’s real time Presidential Prayer Team, who were fed topics over an e-mail mailing list to pray for on Bush’s behalf every few weeks.

This deserves a reckoning for Bono, firstly because the pretension of there being such a difference between Reagan and Trump when they targeted the exact same voting base (and Reagan’s ascendancy was integrally related to its political resurgence), is wholly deceptive and puts it in a facetious light (Trump Trumpifies everything, trivializing origins, either by his clownish adoption or by making the originators look so much better), -plus, Bono the Biblical knows full damned well how religiously and politically weighted the phrase actually is, as he’s used it precisely in terms of its religious coinage in his own lyrics. (-Um, a song where Bono uses God’s Old Testament name that’s never supposed to be uttered has the lyric, “Take this city, A city should be shining on a hill”, which means he has explicitly used the exact same phrase in its Jerusalem-Zion religious framework, namely, he’s using the allusion for the ascendency of God’s people in the End Times as a rebirth. In the Christian interpretation, this is the Church restored in the End Times.) Ascribing “shining city of a hill” to the United States is a veiled way of signifying that the true latter day Church on earth is in actuality the United States. This is as far as you can ultimately go in the belief in Manifest Destiny.

Yet in quoting Reagan’s use of it, Bono deliberately treats the “city on a hill” as just being wonderfully transracial (-seriously(?!)), which is true deception of the woefully ignorant, when manifest destiny was the ideological device to expedite an exceedingly brutal form of nationalized white supremacy, and that’s what the phrase was expressly pulled out to cater to in Reagan’s employ (!), -namely its existing adherents.

“In the 1980 presidential election, Falwell’s moral majority helped propel Ronald Reagan into the White House. Reagan knew what his God-fearing demographic really wanted, which is why he kicked off his campaign with a stump speech supporting states’ rights at a fair in rural Mississippi. ‘States’ rights’ had been a rallying cry for Southern segregationists for decades, and in case anyone missed the coded message, Reagan delivered that speech just 7 miles from where three civil rights workers had been murdered in the 1960s. On the campaign trail, and many times while he was in the White House, Reagan also did a lot of grousing about ‘welfare queens.’” – “Does God Believe in Trump?” – Newsweek -What Newsweek found unfit to print when it came to H. W. Bush.

-Yup. In fact what Reagan was doing by explicitly making the statement a transracial one was avoiding how racist it was in its implementation throughout America’s history; he was forced to do so or he’d have no possibility of ever resurrecting it. He had to try and take it back to its first utterance by John Winthrop, detach it from its legacy. This was actually Reagan’s strategy for retaining American exceptionalism (namely if we pretend it was transracial or make it so, perhaps we can manage to justify its use for further bloodletting, and promptly headed for Central America and the Iran-Contra scandal). It’s a have your cake and eat it too win-win, because in doing so he was appealing to and picking up all those fundamentalist religious believers for whom the concept never evolved in the first place. This is the same strategy as attempting to secularize it, when it is simply impossible to whitewash a legacy that bloody, -except of course that it worked. Indeed Ronald Reagan proved serviceable in white-washing and transitioning a great many things, presiding over the transition from covert operations for regime change (which had fallen out of favour due to public opprobrium) to much the same manipulation of the domestic affairs of other nations via foreign aid. (Which is why Bono to this day proves exceedingly useful.)

“Under Obama, the US has extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa. Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.” – “This Week the Issue is not Trump. It is Ourselves” – John PIlger

Secondly, Bono deserves remonstrance because by quoting Reagan to Trump’s religious far right constituency, with their knowledge of Bono’s Biblical awareness, Bono is in fact doing the exact same dog whistle Reagan performed for the “new right”, -namely he’s catering directly to Trump’s Christian (so fundamentalist they’re fascist) constituency himself (the proof of this is how he’s presently tweaking the lyrics live on tour in the US). Beyond that, his lyrics catalogue is public knowledge; -in other words, the problem lies in the fact that with “Yahweh” he used this exact same phrase religiously, -and already transferred something very similar to the city of New York, so the religiously literate can see that he’s actively made this transfer himself by arriving at Reagan’s ascription of this phrase to the United States and agreeing with it, whether the secular audience is too religiously illiterate to notice this or not. I can assure you, the Biblical are not. The evangelical fundamentalists who brought Reagan to power (who Bono used to use the song “Bullet the Blue Sky” to castigate for their appeals for money from their flock) are Trump’s fundamentalists. But  today Bono’s hawking the most extreme range of fundamentalism (flirting with graduation into theocracy) those fundamentalists could ever possibly hope to achieve in subverting the nation on tour every night in the US. He considers this bipartisan behaviour, when his public rehabilitation of Reagan (in full knowledge of his deeds, which he used to sing against every night of the original 1987 Joshua Tree Tour) is in fact part of a political media program to justify the current neocon/neoliberal alliance. Not to mention the fact that for Bono this “bipartisanship” is his effort to maintain ticket sales.

This is how you’ll naturally transmogrify if you begin inhabiting the same hemispheres as “Manifest Destiny” George W. Bush in your laudable but wholly hogwash belief that your behaviour is somehow bipartisan bridgemanship. Bono’s now philanthropy smarming “shock and awe” war criminals to rehabilitate their image (participation in the same media project) for inflicting a permanent climate of genetic deformaties in countless women’s wombs, the result of a war whose proponents were directed to lie to get us there, who is culpable in the death of perhaps a million people and responsible for the geo-strategic collapse of the Middle East into ISIS. No matter, his wife is canonized in U2’s current incarnation of “Ultraviolet” as a leading feminist (what the hell did she do for feminism is a fair question -?), and so are his daughters, an especial irony when you consider that regression into such deep fundamentalism means retrenchment of the sexual repression and suppression inbuilt by design into all three monotheistic faiths, the Abrahamic religions. Anyone in service to fundamentalism that transgressive at the top of leadership, whether they uptake its attendant baggage in its entirety (or not), is still serving to regress the entire nation by normalizing such fundamentalism (something Bono should take to heart, especially since its normalization under Bush has now handed us over to the Drumpf).

-You care about feminism? Then you don’t normalize fundamentalism by letting it offer you awards for humanitarianism. I don’t think there could be a more obvious indicator of the consequences of fundamentalism’s normalization than Trump’s subsequent (more like consequent) election as the next Republican victor after Bush. Sexism came out of the closet. The exact same concern can be said about racism: you don’t like it? -Then don’t normalize fundamentalist ideology that historically deliberately muddled religion and nationhood together in a manner that institutionalized white supremacy internationally as a pretext for annexation and colonial enterprise. And bloody hell, don’t attempt to secularize it in the pretension that American “exceptionalism” has somehow transformed itself into something good. Better yet, U2, you don’t take the most basic tenet that historically has been (and would be) used to define US theocratic statehood on a national tour and turn it into a concert experience for your facile paying audience. How’s them apples? (You might think these conclusions aren’t supported yet, bear with me, we have yet to reach the end.)

Yes, and the Clintonistas think Bono’s on their side because he told them to vote for her twice, and Trumpifies “Exit” on tour every night. They should take note that U2’s entire setlist for this tour was tuned to Reagan’s “shining city of a hill” dog whistle to woo the biggest, most extreme religious alt-right sector in Trump’s constituency for the whole #U2TheJoshuaTree2017 tour. Basically Bono’s choice quote of Reagan (who used it more often than that) more or less cinches the deal. How he’s tooling the present setlist shows he knows exactly what he’s doing with this and fully understands the religious/supremacist undertone -he’s employing it himself, -to take money from their pockets. -Clinton adherents should be looking to their pockets likewise. They are only on the same side in the sense that Clinton herself is fully willing to go there, for votes (aka acquisition of power), whereas Bono does it for the money, and the power base manifest destiny/American exceptionalism ideology provides amounts to no more or less at present and throughout history than an exercise in self-deception to exonerate the consequence of wholesale wanton international bloodshed via the dispensation “we’re special”. It is possible Bono is so fully into self-deception he thinks this adoption is a benign one, and holy purposed, -they all do, after all. They all did, even when it was their grounds for embracing genocide via starvation in the name of progress. (And you’d have thought U2 knew all about that one too. Priceless.)

I am not here to argue the point of whether or not the settling of the West amounted, at times, to genocide (think of the big picture). I think the fact that this starvation programme (perhaps more luridly) took place concurrently in Canada (also) for the sake of a railroad (completed in 1885) takes a lot of wind out of US sails in debate, -especially given US foreign influence/intervention with Canada at the time on behalf of Mr. Starvation himself, Sir John A. Macdonald, -who took US military assistance to stop any attempt at integrational parity for the peoples of the West in suppressing the Northwest Rebellion (1885), meaning it was the United States who helped bring to fruition his execution of Riel with their gatling gun invention’s first ever usage on a population. -In all probably this just means that the US is better as a nation at self-deception. (I have yet to see any airing of the recognition that the same policies taking place cross border concurrently heftily increases the probability of genocidal intent since it was done in concert.) Better yet, when it comes to complicity in genocide, the US provided the (first ever) machine gun the size of a small cannon (via US naval support) that put a swift and short end to the Rebellion, which made Macdonald’s western pogrom of starvation assured. -That was why the US supplied military support.

“The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will have to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization are ridiculous…” General William Tecumseh Sherman (-Yes, he was named after a Chief who fought against the United States during the war of 1812, and the above attitude, his value to the US in cleansing the West (as well as in the Civil War), was why the USA named the largest tree in the world (by volume) after him.)

This was not simply a one-off for the sake of settlement/displacement, the United States fully believed manifest destiny meant graduating internationally to water torture. One has only to examine American frolics on the international stage with respects to the Phillipines, Puerto Rico, and Guam (how the US handled the acquisition of Spain’s colonies in war, 1889), Korea (1882), and Japan (1905) to realize the USA’s domestic ambitions of expansion and intervention in that period were in all probability hardly benign either.

The same can be said of aiding and abetting the only Prime Minister who used “aryan” in the Canadian House of Commons in debate as a member during that period, the longest running Prime Minister (who was also the longest running Aboriginal Affairs Minister, and laid the groundwork “for basically every institution now blamed for the horrid state of Ottawa-aboriginal relations: The Indian Act, Indian Residential Schools and an over-bureaucratized Department of Indian Affairs”), -with a gatling gun in suppression of a (mixed race and religion, predominantly Catholic) indigenous rebellion, -to force the conditions of the West’s incorporation into Canada along fault lines of religious and ethnic dominance, namely WASP supremacy, -as if this was a good thing.

In terms of land divestment and control this had massive ramifications with respects to Native American disenfranchisement, which had been approached quite differently in terms of Francophone/Catholic -> Metis integration in Canada historically, -as opposed to proceeding in the framework of British property law (the only point of reference in the US), -meaning land ownership was modelled on the architects of “the highland clearances” (which resulted in half of the privately owned acreage in Scotland being owned by 0.008% of the population), -plus Britain’s personal (and brutal, with antiheroes like Kett and Winstanley (the Levellers)) several hundred years campaign of enclosure of the commons (the outcome being that half the country is owned 0.06% of the population), -not to mention they set the colonial trend of genocidal responsibility in both the Irish and Indian famines. -Now check out what land ownership means in Canada thanks to the British, -who’s #1 and why. “Queen Elizabeth II the largest landowner on Earth.” –Canada is by far the biggest reason. Disenfranchisement never lived this large in the history of the planet, and what that’s meant for the hinterland under provincial administration is unhindered continual resource rape carnage so vast it is viewable from space. -And yes, you would think that might make the Crown vulnerable as Canada ratifies UN DRIP. After all, the Crown claims 94% of the Province of British Columbia is public Crown Land, yet the Crown only negotiated Treaties for parts of Vancouver Island and the Peace River Valley – Treaty 8, which is the basis of the court case against the Site C dam. This means the vast bulk of BC Crown land is unceded territory for which there were and are no Treaties ever negotiated with the people who first lived on the land. -Seems like a problem…. -A Treaty negotiations process was initiated in the 1970’s; -only one treaty negotiation has reached conclusion so far. Settling this discrepancy has barely begun.

-A tad more relevant to Canadian existence than who the USA elects in a given election year…. colonization, and what it means for the land to be held in this form of trust (namely the office of Queen, and an interesting bit of legal fiction, namely the Queen not of Great Britain, but of Canada): “Crown land, in its Canadian legal conception, belongs to the Canadian Crown [over 86% of the country]. The Queen of the United Kingdom has had no legal relationship whatsoever to land situated within Canada’s borders for many decades, although the Queen of Canada has, and does. When the Crown sells Crown land, it does not require the Monarch’s signature to effect the conveyance, but instead that of one of her Canadian Ministers, or their designate.” -Talk about the biggest heist of the land from those that lived on it, that the world has perhaps ever witnessed. It bears mention that this form of land monopoly is exceedingly effective for resource extraction in the form of wholesale resource rape, and exceedingly easy to control. –How ironic, but the reason she’s “Governor” of the Church rather than “Head” is because English theologians were not stupid enough to attempt a manifest destiny hijack of the Church where they equated England’s monarch with either Christ or the Pope; -they merely claimed ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the nation itself, rather than the Pope. America in proclaiming its personal Godly dispensation offered no such distinction. In doing so, they led by example.

“We’ll take away its character of an Asiatic steppe, we’ll Europeanize it. … As for the two or three million men whom we need to accomplish this task, we’ll find them quicker than we think. They’ll come from Germany, Scandinavia, the Western countries and America. …There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins. If these people had defeated us, Heaven have mercy! But we don’t hate them. That sentiment is unknown to us. We are guided only by reason. …All those who have the feeling for Europe can join in our work.” – Adolf Hitler’s optimistic prospectus on the invasion of Russia, 1941 –  “Columbus Day is the Most Important Day of Every Year” – The Intercept -Compared to the Crown’s, Hitler’s campaigns of land disenfranchisement were not so very different in scope. And he took his tips, and expected accord, because of how the West was won under the auspices of Manifest Destiny, not to mention how the Queen’s colony come Dominion carried it out, and where it stood at the time. It’s not looking very different at present, is it? What does “europeanize” mean, exactly?

I don’t have to haul up history to point out American “exceptionalism” when it trolloped about the globe as an ideological crutch in doctrinal form for these aspirations wasn’t exactly benign. Whenever it was aired, it spoke for itself. Here’s the thing, the very conflation Bono is employing in performance art right now, (invoking America as God’s country) was and is theology so bastardized it beggars contemplation. Bono can offer no excuse that he is simply referencing John Winthrop in a benign idealization of the country as a beacon of Christian virtue that must hold itself to account. That is not what he’s presenting live in concert right now. The man who carried out the conflation of America as the Church to perfection historically (you guessed it, O’Sullivan), was the very man who coined the term “manifest destiny”, setting the stage for the war with Mexico one year later (1846). Check out their national anthem at the time: it sounds no different than a Psalm. It was tooled, literally, to equate “[e]xpanding the territorial domain of the United States [as] an act of homage to the King of Kings [God]”. (The American anthem that came into permanent adoption was not without a racist couplet that is conveniently omitted, and was composed during a battle initiated by a US attack on the colony of Canada, -the war of 1812.)

“Without the slightest apparent sense of incongruity, O’Sullivan adopted language given by Christ to conceptualize the church, and used it to convey divine approval for the territorial expansion of the United States.” (O’Sullivan did this by invoking the United States exclusively as the national manifestation the God’s holy Church on earth, by robbing language by, for and about the Church and using it to personify to America instead. This conflation is the same as believing the entire worldwide Church does not exist. It’s either that or you’re again engaging in another strain of doctrinal BS, on top of what it takes to justify that your nation is actually the true Church on earth manifesting God’s Divine purpose through “democracy” implemented by overwhelming physical force.)

-Bono is invoking his collective, receptive American audience as the Church every evening he performs in the US on this tour, –by virtue of their being American. Not by virtue of their being the Church. It is the exact same act of substitution performed by O’Sullivan and others, with the active potency of applying that live to audiences of tens of thousands where they participate in this as an experience. The substitution takes place in their minds. It is this very act of designating America as the Church, that one simple shift, that shifts the framework and orientation from perceiving the nation as a functioning democracy to orienting it on theocratic fascism. Very participation in that perception is participation in the ultimate merger between Church and State, as an assimilated perception. Yet millions upon millions of adoring US fans identify this tour as a wonderful experience. If any surveys were conducted and you discovered just how high of a quotient of U2’s fan base identify attending their concerts as being a religious experience at times, you’d find this conflation terrifying. Face it, the only way there is to have fascist theocracy doctrine be assimilated (if not quite consciously, and yes, the only rational root for such is an existent doctrine, no matter how screwed up it may happen to be) is through millions of people experiencing it as a good thing. The Devil could not have designed this stealth introduction any better. No one gives a rat-fink if you tell people how to vote when you’re serving the deeper level of proselytizing their ideology so that it’s assimilated by those exact same voters. Call it an end run in an end game. The purpose is better served overall. What better success could you have than to have the most basic tenet of theocratic fascism assimilated as an experience by a bipartisan, irreligious audience, -with the audience being none the wiser? It’s an attempt to baptize those fundamentalist fundamentals in the minds of the younger Democrat voter-ship, using the rejection of Trump to enshrine them at the bipartisan level, thereby retaining them as the Republican party implodes on its own absurdity and the Empire’s nakedness becomes apparent. Again this is active participation in a concerted propaganda campaign to invert what it means to be a Democrat.

To treat the receptive audience as the Church on tour (by saying so, literally, by personifying America as object in repurposed religious oriented songs, and making America the sum object of the performance), is to cross the line between invoking American exceptionalism (the belief that America’s special attainment springs from its inclusive, trans-racial republic and democratic ideals) to invoking manifest destiny (God-given dispensation to the Church as America). The conflation and impact in the minds of his audience is the same and done with intention. When they are not distinguishing the import religiously, they are distinguishing it patriotically, which is the ultimate intention/substitution that manifest destiny set out to perform to begin with. The very intention is to substitute Godhood with the United States as the ultimate interlocutor, in order to sanction “exceptionalism”. If you integrate God with the US by claiming the US is God’s nation exclusively on earth with a Divine mandate to expand globally in the name of God’s purpose, you are not going to God. You have no distinguishable differentiation of purpose. America First. This is literally the last thing the planet needs, and indeed Americans need to see in concert. And exactly like Reagan, this is an all inclusive exercise of having your cake and eating it too where you divest nothing that was previously poisonous in the dispensation, but deliberately take that with you in order to increase the potency and give it strength to buttress the utter faultiness of its conception.

To succeed in secularizing manifest destiny has been the agenda for a long time, namely to arrive at the pretext that their mandate to intervene militarily across the earth is based in their inception as an inclusive democratic republic. To have a concert that elicits what is in fact a religious sourced emotional experience in terms of American exceptionalism in the minds of literally millions of Americans, with the secular audience being none the wiser that this is what they indeed experienced, successfully transfers that emotional power to a secular belief framework for American exceptionalism. Since it must justify itself on the legacy of deeds, secular American exceptionalism has no rational basis. This performance art successfully transfers the plane of experience to being an emotionally based belief precisely when it can no longer succeed morally or rationally in secular form. (It was a doctrinal failure to begin with. They can’t acknowledge the original doctrine was BS, because they’d be forced to question whether it ever had grounds to be evolved rather than rejected.) This is perhaps the pinnacle of what propaganda could ever hope to achieve in terms of disassociating emotion from its idealogical source or framework even while exacting it, putting it at greatest utility. Those conscious of the experience for what it is are nigh in their entirety believers (either the religious or secular varietal) for whom the performance simply provides massive emotional reinforcement of their failed ideologies. The beauty of this ploy is you’re going to assimilate American exceptionalism via U2’s performance art whether you believe it religiously, or secularly, or none of the above. It takes all comers. It was even proselytized internationally (probably in stealth mode, i.e., only the secular varietal of American exceptionalism was readily apparent outside America’s own borders, which is what you’d witness if Bono himself is not doctoring his own lyrics; -yes, this is all subject to what Bono feels empowered to sing on any given night and how he moderates the show in the moment; -ego tripping never had it so good).

Even more disturbing is that Bono is proselytizing the religious mindset of the present leadership, -namely Trump’s cabinet choices of the generals (with the (WaPo) liberals openly advocating for military control of the executive through what are supposed to be civilian cabinet choices to control the military). Bear in mind that we’ve now entered the generation where the furthest career experience embarks on Gulf War I. We’ve entered the generation that has never participated in a legitimate war, and on this foundation of illegitimacy is merely self-perpetuating, assuming daylight robbery of over 50% of the American tax base annually must by all means be increased. As of Gulf War II, these generals were participating in a war initiated by a President due to his belief that the war was Divinely purposed, i.e., his predication was mixed and from his vantage, based primarily on theocratic fascism, -and these generals themselves believed in this war. The three generals’ collective religious/ideological mindset is so analogous that these self-same observations were made at the outset:

“In the process, one radical idea will be pitted against another: American exceptionalism, armed to the teeth and empowered by war-lovers (some deeply involved in an evangelizing Christianity) against Islamic jihadist extremism. Rather than a “clash of civilizations,” it’s a clash of warring creeds, of what should essentially be seen as fundamentalist cults. Both embrace their own exceptionalism, both see themselves as righteous warriors, both represent ways of thinking steeped in patriarchy and saturated with violence, and both are remarkably resistant to any thought of compromise.

Put another way, under Trump’s team of “civilian” warrior-generals [we’ve had the substitution of McMaster for Flynn since this was written], it looks like the crusades may be back — with a vengeance.” – William J. Astore:  “The Crusades Are Back, With a Vengeance”

Would the Clintonista, liberal audience be thrilled to learn they were being soft-peddled these religious values, those values resplendent in the soft coup? Trump did not arrive here by choice, but in the effort to prevent an intra-governmental insurrection against his presidency. (How priceless, we have arrived at the killer of democracy’s true face; -it’s the exact same bipartisanface. ) If you think “soft coup” is hyperbole, consider this choice quote by Japan’s Defence Minister: “I think Washington has not decided … The final decision-maker is [US Defence Secretary] Mr Mattis … Not the president.” That’s right, it’s Mad Dog who decides if America goes to war with North Korea. There, you see, #fixedit! By the time of his first speech to the UN, Trump had transformed into a raving interventionist. Magic!

With U2 presently at the pulpit, ticket purchasing liberals are not only openly advocating and supporting the soft soup because U2 have presently equated evil in America with the incarnation of President Trump, they’re assimilating the soft coup’s most extreme brand of religious fundamentalism without knowing it, which they absolutely adore so long as it castigates Trump on tour every night. America got a partisan Democrat token slap on the wrist in terms of a re-tooled Trumpian version of “Exit”, (which again, U2 have the nerve to proselytize, as if America’s problems are our problems), -the re-tool of a song that was originally about a suicide. This is spine-snapping in its illogic, in light of catering to the religious fascist aspects of the Trumpian voter-ship (together with the Trumpian leadership), -unless you’re in have your cake and eat it too territory, namely the money to be had in executing a “bipartisan” performance, and you’ve found the perfect solution in exemplifying the infinitely permutating superiority complex, aka American exceptionalism, which is really the trojan horse for American fascism, with the religious variant inarguably existing as theocratic fascism. The liberal Democrat ticket buying public was incapable of registering that the doctrine Bono was flirting with the entire tour in the US (equivocating America as the Church) is more extreme than either G. W. Bush or Trump’s most evangelical generals (or indeed, any of these evangelical ministers, who do not get into what their notion of a return to a being a Godly nation actually means), -could ever dream to dare to air. Even Paula White (who compares Trump to Queen Esther and says Trump is president due to God) could not go that far, and her belief system is considered laughable and subject to mockery by purported liberals, -liberals who had no problem attending this concert.

It is one thing to declare God gave you the presidency, or that God has ordained your war in Iraq (because you happen to believe in Armageddon, (just like Reagan did -see 6); -bear in mind that if you implement a war on the basis of this belief as opposed to moral/geo-strategic necessity for the sake of defence, you have already succeeded in implementing theocratic fascism in terms of international warfare), or to have a pastor endorsing your bluster and asserting God is condoning your destruction of North Korea. We are now opining the values of theocratic fascism in public because enough of a critical mass in the voter-ship are perceived to believe in it; they have the same values enough that the press is not afraid to quote these values, as it was this value system represented that won the presidency. It’s not like these individuals don’t exist when a Democrat happens to win the presidency; -the Democrats are enabling by virtue signaling the same constituency. -Can’t win an election without being an exceptionalist.

“One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. ‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,’ said Obama”.

“According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.” – “This Week the Issue is not Trump. It is Ourselves” – John PIlger -not to mention he handed Israel the largest military aid deal in US history.

It is another graduation entirely to make the indistinguishable implication of treating America as if it’s God’s implementation of the Church on earth (God’s country on this earth, in substitution of the existing Church). Bono is presenting the final ascendency, the existential basis of theocratic fascism, -literally how the state itself would create its definition and ascribe its powers as a theocratic fascist Christian state. He has hijacked feminism, which is absolutely antithetical to this within the faith to the extent of dismantling it doctrinally, to this end. As per my opening definition, U2 have hijacked feminism in service to theocratic fascism, its very biblical antithesis.

The question should be raised, at the very least, what exactly did Bono himself intend with these deliberate iconic mergers and this ode to America international tour? He should have been duly obligated to clarify his position, and offered the opportunity to tacitly divorce himself from these historical and present realities, were this not a society of somnambulists. It is worthy of scrutiny. Letting this tour pass unnoticed and un-noted puts him in the position of serving as enabler to ideology and policies loathed by bulk of U2’s fanbase. It is a worthy question who appreciates that more, but I doubt the band does in comparison to the powers serviced by what now passes unobserved as perhaps the most effective propaganda art hijack every accomplished. He should at least be offered a last chance to save his own soul.

In other words, Bono would not be performing as a useful tool to this doctrine if anyone had the awareness to take note and question this merger, which would surely put him in the position of articulating his intentions and disavowing it using the path provided by John Winthrop, if people were broadly aware enough to have addressed it in social media. Were it a matter of public record, Bono would have no choice. It is our choice what we adhere to and what does not pass muster. This does not deserve to and it beggars belief that U2 got away with it. That is your greatest indicator of inculcation into the prevailing culture that theocratic fascism has already accomplished. It is already so culturally inoculated that this tour, tooled in this manner, passed without a single eyebrow cock. It may be that U2 themselves are so culturally inoculated they were themselves this foolish, but somehow I doubt it. Bono should be obliged to restore the phrase back to its origin and divorce its attendant baggage, if he’s going to honour it with the sum of a tour. I hope this essay has thrown into adequate relief that the machinations of the right wing are not your sole danger in the US, if such so called Democrat electioneers are getting a pass when the theme for their entire tour can be effectively analysed as active advocacy for the doctrinal foundation of theocratic fascism, which had no problem passing muster providing it identify itself as art to the American public.

U2’s Bono promoting the United Nations “Global Goals” – which in reality is the financialization and privatization of nature, global in scale via payments for ecosystem services. #NaturalCapital #PES

Why do you think these litmus tests are performed on the population? Their success, namely that they pass without incident, provides a green light to proceed further over the brink, because they show this level of theocratic fasicm is already tacitly embraced by a paying audience; -whether that’s due to awareness or ignorance does not matter. In the case of U2’s foray, this litmus test as tour was inflicted on the Western world (North America and Europe, and now South America), -and no one blinked. -At least not out loud, an indicator they’re sufficiently cowed and by and large deluded. Europeans should duly take note when they’re attached militarily to a nation so possessed of grandiose delusions en masse. It’s either that or they’re too stupid to notice them played out right in front of their faces when the auteur is a rock band. Instead, the U2 ticket buying fan base in Europe were all too happy to see a setlist dedicated to another country’s “exceptionalism” performed inside their borders, -as if this was perfectly normal, -if it was fed to them by the same rock band.

In the context of their evasions and invasions, for “Exit” U2 might as well have hung an effigy in a ritualized personification of evil within the banal confines the audience was barely prepared to tolerate, let alone contemplate, purely as an exercise of avoiding the real evil, which arguably could be the reason Trump’s in power in the first place, a convenient effigy at which to hurl spite that utterly avoids any culpability for the mechanisms that would deign to give him power, namely how infantilized does a voter-ship have to become to choose a reality TV president (or even better yet, believe that he’s attained this position due to God).

(Paula White was forced to walk that back by saying the same about bipartisan and recent presidential candidates (an option generously provided by WaPo), -which in actuality just broadens the premise to bona fide theocratic fascism, -with “Where do you draw the line on world leaders being assignated by God?”, being the fair question. -Consider the range of answers that are possible here: 1) Godly dispensation of the presidency only applies to America, i.e., she believes in America as a theocratic fascist state, -it’s either that or her answer could be 2) to restrict this Divine dispensation to only what we regard as the Christian West or all Christianized states (Israel is a given, as in Israel First for the bulk of the evangelicals who espouse dispensationalism, with Eastern Orthodox exclusion, naturally, God forbid she have to say the same about Putin), -i.e., the answer is racially bifurcated but only to the extent it is politically expedient, and would actually mirror what the doctrine of dispensationalsm permits as Christian or, 3) does she truly believe globalized theocratic fascism is already in place and applies to every despot on this earth, as in every leader put above us rules by God? -Welcome back to the premise of Divine Monarchy. This theological imbecilism receives hundreds of milllions in donations and meets weekly with the current president. It’s reasonable to surmise not one of the answers she could possibly provide would be sound, but no one asks.)

How ’bout what Bill Clinton did, and the subsequent monopolistic corporate control of private media? Did it actually raise culture? How and why has this been arrived at, if not for the regulatory dismantling of the state for wholesale resource predation and untrammeled pollution, coupled with the rollback of workers’ rights? In other words Trumptopia presents itself as the great external IT (perhaps a juxtaposition of these two images will help throw into relief what he serves to normalize, -yes, see, he normalizes her, the neoliberal who was catering to the exact same constituency as Reagan in the exact same way, the neoliberal who advocated starting WWIII as part of her campaign platform. He normalizes war criminals, and this is because he is tacking foreign policy even further as an Israel first dispensationalist, which is baldly constituency strategic in his case, but this hardly matters; the only hope is that the tail is now out in the open as America embarrasess itself in front of the entire world, but hey, withdrawal from UNESCO was also performed by Reagan. Bear in mind that Trump’s irrational posturingover JCPOA (the joint nuclear accord with Iran, the EU, Russia and China) was emulating Paula White’s personification of Trump as comparable in the present day to Queen Esther, as the dispensationalists are duly serving Israeli foreign policy interests and have hijacked the Biblical story as an analogy for present hostility with Iran. Netanyahu himself used the Biblical history of Queen Esther on Obama in the appeal to have him act the same (framing the attack of Iran by the US as a matter of life or death for state of Israel), literally hijacking the one Bible story that hearkens the development of the first secularized state that allowed more than one faith (Persia). Fundamentalism is now hijacking foreign policy initiatives, though it’s not like this is new (G.W. Bush started an unjustified war on this pretext). It’s just graduating to the level of nuclear.

Trump is literally the best thing that could have ever happened to the neoliberals (who are so little different their alliance is with the neocons, which has including the media effort to whitewash their historic theocratic fundamentalists). Only a raving clown could have diverted from this implacable truth of why they lost, and made them actually look somehow palatable. The pied piper strategy may have failed election 2016, but it gave “Democrats” the capacity to resuscitate themselves for the next grab for power, election 2020, when they should have just crashed and burned. Trump constitutes the perfect Reality TV distraction, conveniently presenting a funnel for a useless array of #resistance (attenuation by anger, russophobia and civil strife), whilst simultaneously providing another complete exorcism of introspection on the nation’s completely bipartisan catalogue of sins (nigh indistinguishable militarism abroad, etc.). Nothing gets done during Hate Week(s). And everyone, it seems, can’t get enough of Hate Week. All this bombast and bluster is so infinitely more important than ecological holocaust.

“I’ve always believed in working across the aisle … but there’s a bully on the bully pulpit and silence is not an option” – Bono

Culpability for this state of affairs includes the willingness to adopt a pied piper strategy in order to win; -by an utterly corrupt DNC U2 instructed you to vote for after they deliberately contained and castrated Bernie Sanders. The problem is more rooted in the dual party system’s policy framework at home and abroad’s continuity in either guise, no matter what the cost to national integrity and democracy, -and for what, exactly? Why is it the USA can never, ever have a Corbyn? (Nor Canada, for that matter?)

Why would you continue to ingratiate an audience complacent in a state of affairs that is so patently over the edge it has unhinged itself from reality’s mainframe? When that is the real situation, displacement of culpability can only be achieved in curating a framework of villainy for mass consumption. U2 provides. They do it for no more or less than the money it makes them. This is basically the knee jerk reflex they must now provide indicating they still stand (strongly) with the voting constituency they told how to vote. This is their pass at integrity. Discomfort need not apply.

Happy 4th, oh ye deluded. (This page and the writing were initiated and by and large concluded on the 4th. Silly me, -thought that was it.) U2 now performs to insure you stay that way. This is displacement in totality as art as emotional exorcism, -in a curious way total evacuation of what America meant and what it means to be an American, for theocratic ideology serves in every way and all of its purpose to rob you of your liberties. You might call it the infantilized version passed off as the deep while you’re unconsciously on the brink of losing it forever at the level of ecological suicide, served to you by your very own military. Viva la #resistance! Thirty years ago you attended a U2 show in order to wake up. Now you attend to absorb circumscription of thought. Better yet, without even realizing it, you get a dose of the doctrine behind theocratic fascism that literally desires the End of the World, -and you love the taste. -Maybe it’s time Americans register that when you engage in war within a fundamentalist framework, that single factor above all is what makes you a target of fundamentalist terrorism; -for fundamentalism will identify, correctly, fundamentalism, and inevitably arise more virulenty to embrace combat, for the combat is on those terms. G. W. Bush crossed that threshold. You may have a problem with him, -but this concert is indication that you embrace and enjoy fundamentalism as a religious experience if it means idolizing your own country as a way to feel good about yourself. You will not be aware of the difference; -if fundamentalism’s tenets are introduced to you stealthily in a form you happen to like. If it’s not identifying itself as a raving evangelist you’re too clueless to identify what fundamentalism actually is. And that was the “beauty”, if you will, of this tour’s success.

-With friends like this, who needs enemies -? It is not longer “good” to be in U2’s good books, in other words. Not if you’re aware of the benchmarks of their esteem. But it will always reveal the metrics and calculus of a win-win.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” – Noam Chomsky

U2 provides.

 -As tepid as an election campaign. What a reversal on the umbrella in 20 years.

 All those broken Trudeau electoral campaign promises (not even listing the privatization matter and (continued) roll back of Canada Post):

Justin Trudeau Just Broke a Major Campaign Promise (Electoral Reform) – Time

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: 500 Days of Trudeau’s Broken Promises – desmogcanada -lists six, -including failure to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, Liberal pipeline approvals, failure to improve environmental assessments (this was due to Conservative revocation and weakening of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act), granting indigenous nations veto power over resource projects, and adequately addressing climate targets

Why the appointment of Bill Blair is the harbinger of the New Prohibition – Marc Emery (on marijuana legalization)

Bill C-51 Anti-terrorism law: Why the Liberals aren’t amending it – The Globe and Mail (it got a reboot, not revokation as promised. Why?)

Feds leave 99 per cent of lakes, rivers unprotected – The Council of Canadians – not only did the Liberals fail to restore the Navigable Waters Act, but also the Fisheries Act -significant because the two were just about the only legislation protecting freshwater bodies (i.e., if they were fish bearing)

Change the House of Commons Standing Orders to end practice of using inappropriate omnibus bills to reduce scrutiny of legislative measures. – trudeaumeter – This was huge, second only to electoral reform perhaps. It was how Harper took out the Fisheries Act. -Broken.

Trudeau government on defensive after approving “carbon bomb” – Observer – Trudeau approves Pacific Northwest LNG plant in the Great Bear Rainforest, which was so economically dodgy with such a dodgy foreign multinational it collapsed in its own right.

STATEMENT

August 26, 2017

To all-

It has come to our attention that a respected leader of our small online enclave has betrayed the trust many people have instilled in him over the past years.  We are stunned at these revelations like everyone else.  It was with much internal debate and emotional pain that we decided as a group that we had to release the information to the community.  Although this form of information is not our usual forte as we are collectively concerned about overriding issues, such as leaving some form of a natural world above all else, it was something so stunningly vile that we had no other choice but to present it to the community as our conscience would not allow us to conceal this from the public.

Since this decision, which is something we thoroughly debated due to its seriousness, there is much online discussion regarding to what degree his transgressions can be described as terrible and even if they should be in the public due to the personal nature of the correspondence.  From this perspective, this person and his supporters have pointed to the fact that the behavior between himself and the woman in question was of a consensual, private nature, and should be of no concern to the wider community.  We believe this argument falls short for three critical reasons which should be considered both separately and collectively.

The first reason is one of ethics, which is separate from legality.  The word ethics is defined as “a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct.”  Most professional organizations have codes of ethics, which participants must adhere to in order to remain in good standing.  In regards to its specific ethical standards, the American Psychological Association states “your psychologist shouldn’t also be your friend, client, or sex partner.  That’s because psychologists are supposed to avoid relationships that could impair their professional performance or harm their clients. One type of relationship that’s never acceptable is a sexual relationship with a current client.“

This person has taken on several roles, which in combination provide the framework for producing potentially serious ethical concerns.  As a recognized authority in the field of climate science, this person’s words contain the weight of authority for many.  His carefully worded prognostications of a coming end of human existence on the planet, though backed by his scientific understanding,  nonetheless have the ability to produce a state of anxiety, uncertainty, and despair in those who accept his perspective.  This person acknowledges this on his website, stating that “Because the topics of his presentations sometimes induce despair, Guy became a certified grief-recovery specialist in January 2014.”

The combination of his pursuits, as a climate scientist predicting the end of life as we know it, and grief counselor, puts him in the unique role of both producing or exacerbating the effect of anxiety or despair in an individual, as well as creating the context through which that despair is then addressed.  His audience, of which we have been a part, consists of individuals often marginalized by our larger society that ignores the very real warnings of catastrophic  climate change.  The views shared by many in our numerous and varied Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE) groups have produced not simply a sense of despair about the future, but also a sense of isolation from our immediate communities and families.  Solace is then sought out within the NTHE community, under the banner of this person’s scientific findings.

While in many ways natural responses warranted by our current situation, this combination of despair, confusion, and isolation, none the less set up the potential for the exploitation of those who acutely feel the desperation and disorientation of abrupt climate change, and have nowhere else to turn for answers.

And this is the reason for the need for ethics and ethical boundaries.  This person is in a position of authority with direct influence over the mental, emotional, and in some cases physical and monetary lives, of those who exist in a state of vulnerability.  This is a state which he has helped to facilitate and of which he profits from in his personal life.  To then use that position, as this person has done, to engage in sexualized relations with women by way of administering a self-serving “healing” to individuals who are going such traumatic personal experiences, is a violation of ethical boundaries.  From a purely ethical perspective within a narrowly focused context of a professor/student and grief therapist/client context, the exact content of these relations, which will justifiably elicit revulsion in many by themselves, is not the primary concern.  The mere existence of these relations under such power dynamics, whether consensual or not, is at best ethically compromised, simply because of the potential  for abuse that exists, even if no actual abuse can be conclusively identified.  As the revelations of women who have come forward and expressed their pain with regard to these relationships continues to grow, this strongly indicates that emotional abuse and the abuse of power were at play and their claims should be taken with utmost seriousness. At the most basic level, it is because these abuses could take place that professional boundaries and codes of ethics are established and why we should reject this person‘s behavior.

In that vein, the truth of the matter is that whatever grey area there may potentially be is no longer up for debate due to his repeated and lengthy record of attempting and succeeding in taking advantage of women in a vulnerable position emotionally due to the disheartening mental and social effects of personally accepting the ongoing Sixth Great Extinction (of which humanity will be one of its victims, as well as its singular cause).  As one of the admittedly unfiltered and honest voices concerning this present set of circumstances with few people having the sphere of influence that he has in our small community,  the unethical manner in which he used this trust for nefarious sexual ends repeatedly has left us no other recourse but to do everything in our power to stop him from continuing the same behavior.

This then leads to the second critical point.  While the argument has been made that in regard to his relations with one particular woman, the content is irrelevant because of its consensual nature, this defense rings hollow.  To use an analogy: while living in a free society one may be legally permitted to hold racist beliefs and freely associate with other racists, a member of the NAACP would  nonetheless rightfully oppose its leader if they were later discovered to be a member of the KKK.  Such an association would clearly violate the spirit and mission of an organization promoting racial justice, and in the duplicity of core beliefs in the leadership, it would  also indicate a threat to the structural integrity of the organization and potentially its members.  It would not matter whether the current leader had joined the KKK after being first approached by a klansman, or if the leader started a chapter on his own.  The compromise would be clear.

Similarly, the content of his interactions with one woman in question, no matter how they came about, indicated the willingness of this person to engage in, perhaps initiate, rape fantasies  and other degrading and sexually objectifying dialogues that are not congruous with the core values of a significant number of members of the Near Term Human Extinction Support Group and its associated community.  This incongruity is borne out in the fact that he has spoken out specifically against patriarchy on his regular online radio program and in innumerous public forums and presentations, but has engaged in fantasies of rape and sexual enslavement, which represent the most extreme form of patriarchy, regardless of how that interaction began.   Therefore, the problems surrounding the content of his interactions are twofold.  They are contained in both the degrading, misogynist verbiage itself and the fact that such interactions represent a betrayal of trust relating to the public image of a respect for life and an opposition to patriarchy that he has cultivated in the public eye to his personal benefit.

The destruction of the Earth, the underlying concern of the various NTHE support groups, is the direct result of human and environmental exploitation, a core element of which is the domination of women where females are treated as property to be used  like much of the natural world, mere objects for male gratification.  Thus the move from more egalitarian, hunter gatherer societies into stratified agricultural and industrial societies, which culminated in today’s planet devouring global civilization which this person critiques, entailed the objectification and commodification of women.  To participate in such objectification and fantasies of female subjugation with a potential member of the NTHE community no less, goes beyond hypocrisy.  It signifies that in regard to what this person believes and values, he cannot be trusted.  And given the context, as suggested in the above analogy, this duplicity threatens both group integrity and potentially the safety of its members.

Perhaps some would say that the way in which the information was obtained makes us no better and even worse than the perpetrator, as there are many online accusations of this being the case.  However, we didn’t go out seeking this information, even if we are greatly appreciative of it since it allows us the opportunity to stop any future manipulations by someone in a leadership position.  It was brought to us and we made the difficult decision to use it for the greater good of stopping any further occurrences – our decision superseding any disparaging things said about us individually or collectively.

Ultimately, the fact of the matter is that none of the individuals who became privy to this information have an axe to grind with this person. Actually, this is quite the contrary.  We are all people who had a great amount of respect and admiration of him as a scholar and a person.  It wasn’t until recently that those who possessed such a tremendous amount of respect for this man started questioning his motives outside of the irrefutable science and his singular desire to provide it to the public.  Sadly, this recent incident dispelled any doubts in our minds regarding much of his endeavors.

We are a small community of activists.  Most of what we know to be true in this world in regards to the state of affairs of the planet are things that are not accepted by the mainstream world, even though they are playing out in real time and disaffecting humanity at this very instant and with growing intensity.  As it is difficult to find any sources of solidarity, be it local or globally, once this disparate group of human beings find comrades or leaders (of which there are even less), we tend to cling on to them in great desperation as they are truly few and far between.

As this is the case, the people who come to us and try to find a community of some sort to explain to them what is going on or just commiserate about the ongoing travails of this global society are the picture of vulnerability during their greatest hour of need.  Hence, it is unethical, even predatory, for anyone to take advantage of these people while they are most defenseless.  As some people are trying to construe this as just a single, solitary case,  the fact of the matter is that this has been an ongoing pattern for awhile now and has reached a point where someone must step in and stem the tide of abuse this man is committing on this tiny yet venerable group.

As such, it begs the question how long can people righteously withhold  what they know to be the truth when it comes to this man’s interaction with the members of such a small group, an already victimized sect who find very little acceptance in general society?  Can we, as supposedly moral people, just sit back idly and allow this type of behavior to continue unabated since it is the path of least resistance to stay silent?  As the response from this tight knit community has ranged from outrage to acceptance, the outcome of this revelation is of no real importance as biases abound as to the acceptance of this information.  Since that is the case, the only thing of barometric significance is apprising the people of the truth to keep them from harm, which was our singular reason for the release of this information.

Although we are cognizant that all of us have personal transgressions and no one is perfect, the predatory nature of this individual makes him a threat to both those who may be accepting of his advances and, most importantly, those who are not.  If the interaction is one of consent amongst equals, it is not the business of us as individuals or as a group to intercede at all.  But, when there is a blatant disregard for the welfare of the people  in an attempt to serve the lascivious desires of one man, then that is something that must be addressed by those who are in power to do so by any means necessary.

This brings us to the third and final critical point.  Not only was there a sordid psycho-sexual aspect of what took place that was against everything this man professed to be of a personal nature as a leader of a social movement, he also betrayed the confidence and trust of another intellectual leader and comrade in the movement, where, based on his documented language, it is a legitimate concern as to whether or not he would have been an actual physical threat to her if he had the opportunity.  With this third and final critical piece, his actions go beyond purely professional ethical violations and public misrepresentations of core values which demonstrate a willingness to degrade and objectify women.  His discussion moves into the realm of creating a physical environment that justifiably feels unsafe to core members.  As previously mentioned, there are other cases of women who have begun to voice their own troubling experiences, which at this time we cannot provide further details.

Therefore, even though we have all had an immense amount of respect for this man over the years, the recent events show he isn’t worthy of being in a position of influence and power over others, as he has abused it in the past, is abusing it presently and will assuredly continue this behavior in the future if no one attempts to at least stop him.

Although we are understanding that people will still hold their opinions about the veracity of the evidence against this man and come away absolving him of all guilt in this series of events, the primary thing we hope to accomplish is to warn those who are in the community about the ulterior motives of this man.  Once people are provided all the evidence, it is up to them to make a personal decision if they wish to continue their relationship with this person, be it personal and/or professional.  We aren’t here to tell anyone what to do in any aspect, as freedom of thought and choice is something we believe in and respect.  However, we would be remiss if we didn’t provide people the total knowledge they need to make informed decisions.

As we know that many people will consider our revelation as being divisive and a planned attack for some fantastical reason that has no basis in reality, we can only say we received this information through no attempt on our part and will receive no reward for releasing it.  Once we became aware of it though, there was no other recourse but to bring it to the public sphere, as the ongoing pattern of behavior was spiraling out of control. There will be those who will cast aspersions against our character and accuse us of somehow profiting in some way from this event, even though this is anything but the case.  Still, there will be many people who will consider us turncoats, paid informants, subversives and every other form of accusation as to our motives.  Yet, we will almost assuredly lose more favor and receive heightened scorn through providing this information than any other outcome.  No matter what blowback we receive though, it is worth it to us to receive a mountain of negative response rather than live with the unconscionable act of staying silent in the face of knowing malfeasance.

We welcome all queries about the veracity of the information since the specific evidence is part of the public domain and not under our supervision.  We have nothing to hide and will vociferously defend our decisions in this matter since to be silent in this regard is criminal, if not legally, then definitely morally.

We are greatly appreciative of the support from our online community in bringing this to the fore.

Thank you.

Michael  Sliwa, Host of the radio show Nature Bats Last from August 2014 to May 2017

Derrick Jensen, Deep Green Resistance

Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance

Cory Morningstar, Wrong Kind of Green

Forrest Palmer, Wrong Kind of Green

Luke Orsborne, Wrong Kind of Green

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Psychiatrist, researcher, teacher, and author Judith Herman:

“Authoritarian, secretive, sometimes grandiose, and even paranoid, the perpetrator is nevertheless exquisitely sensitive to the realities of power and to social  norms. Only rarely does he get into difficulties with the law; rather, he seeks out situations where his tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired. His demeanor provides an excellent camouflage, for few people believe that extraordinary crimes can be committed by men of such conventional appearance.  The perpetrator’s first goal appears to be the enslavement of his victim, and he accomplishes this goal by exercising despotic control over every aspect of the victim’s life. But simple compliance rarely satisfies him; he appears to have a psychological need to justify his crimes, and for this he needs the victim’s affirmation. Thus he relentlessly demands from his victim professions of respect, gratitude, or even love. His ultimate goal appears to be the creation of a willing victim. Hostages, political prisoners, battered women, and slaves have all remarked upon the captor’s curious psychological dependence upon his victim. George Orwell gives voice to the totalitarian mind in the novel 1984: “We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.”

 The desire for total control over another person is the common denominator of all forms of tyranny. Totalitarian governments demand confession and political conversion of their victims. Slaveholders demand gratitude of their slaves. Religious cults demand ritualized sacrifices as a sign of submission to the divine will of the leader. Perpetrators of domestic battery demand that their victims prove complete obedience and loyalty by sacrificing all other relationships. Sex offenders demand that their victims find sexual fulfillment in submission. Total control over another person is the power dynamic at the heart of pornography. The erotic appeal of this fantasy to millions of terrifyingly normal men fosters an immense industry in which women and children are abused, not in fantasy but in reality.”

FINAL-STATEMENT-AUGUST-26-2017-final-revision

The Scent of a Wildflower

August 22, 2017

by Serena Marie Raphael

The dark veil is lifted, light floods in through your eyelids, that red glow signalling to open them. Not to hesitate, but seize that opportunity to look the fuck around. See the bullshit, look at it, directly. Challenge them. The fake, superficial rubbish they’re peddling. The word drugs they’re slinging. Dealing to consumer, war addicts. Hatred, fear and human flesh they feed of. The bones of the Earth they crave to continue this parasitic, self destructive nightmare.

You scratch out the duct tape, you can see. The lacerations that cover you, evidence of a life lived under empire, a child of imperial slavery. Scars of indoctrination, bruises, marks and damaged tissue cover you like scales.

The fresh blood weeps from open wounds. The moment you see, she has them too. The same gashes and gouges. Open cut pits, fractures and industrial shrapnel, broken limbs and septic symptoms which ache her. Killing her. We feel each other, our connection based on torture this culture carries out. On the skin and bark, evidence of abuse visible.

Teeth marks of educators and faux guardians, imitations of nature. Hold on to the veil, pull it down, torch it. Cut into it, as you pull it down with clenched fists to the point of drawing blood with your nails. Once you have it within your hands you tear it, shred it apart, knowing each split equates to acknowledgment. Exposed as a fucking lie, the awareness is liberating. Freeing. Myths, war lord propaganda perpetuated by culture to maintain the hierarchy of power.

The fables and fantasies told to me crumble away to the expose steel bars. The powerful awakening reality, motivation to blossom into a critical thinker. Fierce contemplator. Empire rebel.

Raining questions fall like confetti, covering me softly, with but one staring back at me. Forcing me to critically ask, how do I resist?

As Arundhati Roy said, “once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out.”

It’s burning holes in me. I refuse to stand in line, take orders from above, place the veil back and mindlessly follow hollow shells. Frantically tearing down my life, piece by piece, I needed to strip myself down, feeling naked and exposed. Fragile to the truth, I found my emotional umbilical cord back to nature. I needed to shed away cultures latches. Firstly, I had to accept responsibility for my life, own up to my being, human animal consumption, my existence on Earth, my privilege, in a commonwealth occupied land, responsibility for my actions, words I speak, steps I take, relationships with nonhumans and humans, love for natural communities and personal behaviour.

I’m in a jail cell, bars so high I can’t see where they end. What do I do? How do I act towards the jailer, my cell mates? How do I act? Steel and concrete encapsulates me, humans with guns guard the halls. How do I act in captivity?

Time is too short, I will not allow them to separate me from my mother. Resist the “one way for all” mindset that as an individual animal I must resist the herd mentality and acknowledge my being as independent.

They cannot control my spiritual love, regardless of the bars the build and threats they shout. As prisoners, they will not break the love and spirit for the wild and education. This form of resistance comes with learning, or rather unlearning, washing away the lies dominant culture lacquered within me, listening to new languages, ways to connect, surviving on her terms, letting go, embracing every second. Noting time as the sun moves through the trees, speckled light determines my biological clock. The digital devices that screams at me, tossed into the ether.

Breathing her air in deep, fully within my lungs, expanding my ribs, her peppermint oils coat my insides. As my vulnerability becomes my strength, the natural paced view of her splendour. Silent pondering wander becomes my daily endeavour. Gradually covering myself in her scent of wild flowers and gum. Smells of soil, ocean salt, sweat and southern precipitation. Mental understanding, acknowledging my misconceptions and fear. Fear of judgement and failing, not living up to the idealistic activist hallmark. But rather, be me, my authentic emotional self, naturally wearing my own skin.

It continues, never ending turns and bends, inclines almost break you, the trail curves on. And so, I keep walking. For that is my stride. Trekking into the unknown, she takes my hand. Holds me close. I feel her, around me, next to me, touching my hips. She kisses my skin with rain from the heavens above. Rain that smells foreign, as it falls and soaks me. Saturated in nature’s unfiltered aroma become my signature. No pen name, no separation from her.

She begins to transform me into something that is her. I am an animal. Wandering through her wild, her crazy, and the untamed, no fences or road marks. These paths have no names. My civilised is fading away, disappearing with every step I take, deeper with her. I can’t feel alone, I’m never alone. Bird’s fly above me, kangaroo’s beside me, emus running in front of me. The soil supporting me, and the wildflowers befriending me. She guides me into her embrace.

I’m home.

I’m starting to understand her story, how she speaks through the breeze, the whisper of the leaves, the rustle. A flow the sounds becomes my interpretation of a new language. My teacher’s, brother’s and sister’s. the relationship I need, the balance. I will earn her trust by bleeding for her, my skin is hers, by walking with her. I will feel her, as she feels me, her beauty.

Attracted to the sound of cascading water, I follow…

[Serena Marie Raphael is a 25-year-old Veterinary Nurse inhabiting Western Australia: life-long anarchist, radical ponderer, critical thinker, student of life and wilderness. She is a contributor to the  critical thinking collective, Wrong Kind of Green.]

AVAAZ: The Globe’s Largest & Most Powerful Behavioural Change Network [Part I]

July 27, 2017

By Cory Morningstar

Avaaz Investigative Report Series 2012 [Further Reading]: Part I • Part II • Part III • Part IV • Part V • Part VI

This series builds on Cory Morningstar’s previous writing and research tracking the connecting lines of networked hegemony that exist between the elite funded NGOs that dominate the non profit industrial complex. Here Morningstar sharpens her focus on key individuals involved in rebranding business-as-usual and a particular Fifth Avenue address to expose the roots of the false narratives favored by the financial elites. Ongoing regime change, climate reformism, financialization of nature and the ‘new economy’ come under Morningstar’s lens making very clear that Avaaz is the propagandizing seat of smart power for those who would have us continue, in sweet delusion, consuming the earth to death. — Australian activist Michael Swifte

Foreword:

In 2012-2013 I wrote an investigative series titled Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War. I introduced the series began as follows:

“The Ivy League bourgeoisie who sit at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex will one day be known simply as charismatic architects of death. Funded by the ruling class oligarchy, the role they serve for their funders is not unlike that of corporate media. Yet, it appears that global society is paralyzed in a collective hypnosis – rejecting universal social interests, thus rejecting reason, to instead fall in line with the position of the powerful minority that has seized control, a minority that systematically favours corporate interests.

This investigative report examines the key founders of Avaaz, as well as other key sister organizations affiliated with Avaaz who, hand in hand with the Rockefellers, George Soros, Bill Gates and other powerful elites, are meticulously shaping global society by utilizing and building upon strategic psychological marketing, soft power, technology and social media – shaping public consensus, thus acceptance, for the illusory “green economy” and a novel sonata of 21^st century colonialism. As we are now living in a world that is beyond dangerous, society must be aware of, be able to critically analyze, and ultimately reject the new onslaught of carefully orchestrated depoliticization, domestication of populace, propaganda and misinformation that is being perpetrated and perpetuated by the corporate elite and the current power structures that support their agenda. The non-profit industrial complex must be understood as a mainspring and the instrument of power, the very support and foundation of imperial domination.”

In 2014 I wrote an article titled SYRIA: Avaaz, Purpose & the Art of Selling Hate for Empire. This article focused on the Avaaz sister org. Purpose, a for-profit public relations firm in New York City that specializes in behavioural change for many of the largest corporations and institutions on the planet. Specifically it focused on the campaigns Purpose created to foster public acquiescence (and even demand) for a war on Syria following the complete annihilation of Libya in which Avaaz played a vital role for the elites they serve. From that moment, independent journalist Vanessa Beeley (with much assistance from a handful of journalists and ordinary citizens) dedicated her life to exposing the Purpose creation “the White Helmets”, for what they are: a terrorist group operating under the clandestine cloak of humanitarianism, financed by the UK government and USAID. Other journalists and ordinary citizens pursued the truth against a sea of propaganda created in order to foment yet another illegal war and occupation. Women played an extraordinary role in this struggle against imperialism and hybrid NGOs. The goal was for NATO states to destroy and capture Syria at any and all costs.  The non-profit industrial complex has played a vital role in the efforts to achieve this goal, which have failed, in large part to the courageous Syrian Army.  How many countries have succeeded in staving off the most powerful imperial forces in the planet for 6 years? I would like to think those who pursued the truth – in a now dystopian world where the truth is despised – also contributed to empire’s epic fail.

This new series goes further. This research will demonstrate how Avaaz was not only utilized for empire’s illegal destabilizations, but created to provide such a framework for the “responsibility to protect” – Responsibility to Protect (R2P) serving as the doctrine for war under the guise of humanitarianism. This research will demonstrate that the key co-founders of Avaaz and Purpose – must be considered intelligence for both U.S. and Britain – groomed since Harvard (and perhaps even prior to Harvard). This research identifies Harvard as ground zero for the implementation of imperialist foreign policies – to be achieved via war – under the guise of humanitarianism. And what a guise it is. The most vital purpose of the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC) has not been to destroy the ecocidal economic system that enslaves us while perpetuating and ensuring infinite wars. Rather, the key purpose of the NPIC is and has always been to protect this very system it purports to oppose from being dismantled. Hence the trillions of dollars pumped into the NPIC by the establishment.

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Avaaz full page ad in the New York Times. June 18, 2015, Avaaz: “In today’s New York Times, a call on President Obama for life-saving action in Syria. Join the campaign for a targeted No Fly Zone here:avaaz.org/safezone”

Those at the helm of Avaaz and its sister NGO, Purpose, continue to froth at the mouth for war on Syria. The February 2017 Oscar win for White Helmets (a Purpose creation) demonstrated we have reached a new level of insanity in the West. Also relevant, on April 29, 2017, a second People’s Climate March took place in Washington, D.C. [Full partner list] which will be brought into the fold at a later point in this series.

Today, drowning within a post-modern spectacle, it is past time to revisit who and what institutions are behind today’s manufactured movements. Thus, a fresh look at both Avaaz and Purpose, and their formidable ties to 350.org, is nothing less than imperative.

At a time in which the global economic system continues to teeter close to stall speed, where Earth’s natural resources are to be depleted by the year 2030 which is less than 13 years away (more than enough reason for lunatics to propose colonization of the planet of Mars as an actual viable solution) and where wars over sand and other scarce commodities are a growing reality, the commerce of hatred is a much sought and growing area of expertise. Hate is a hot commodity. Celebrity fetish, an apparent global contagion exported from the West, is being further utilized to manufacture and distribute hate. The behavioral economics of hatred, in the 21^st century, has become a fine-tuned art. Perhaps no NGOs (with exception of Amnesty International & Human Rights Watch) are better at manufacturing the supply of hate than Avaaz and its for-profit sister NGO, public relations firm Purpose.

“Culture of Exuberance: the total complex of beliefs and practices associated with the opportunities for expansive life in the Age of Exuberance; a culture founded upon the myth of limitlessness”  — Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change 

Shifting Baseline Syndrome

The recent Oscar award given to the White Helmets documentary is a simple extension of the growing utilization of celebrity to re-brand wars as humanitarian interventions and the manufacturing of movements. Simply put, celebrity is a deliberate creation for the building of acquiescence, to acquire/expand capital and power. Celebrity fetish also serves as a key tool of distraction and the further devolving of whole societies (via the glorifying/marketing of shallowness, excess and narcissism), while many feature-length films and documentaries are behaviour modification instruments created/financed in order to propagate false narratives for a naïve consumer society that aversively upholds white supremacy, one of many Western ideologies driven into the psyche of the collective citizenry. Today, brands, ideologies, and even invasions of sovereign states, achieve authenticity through association. Thus, celebrity has become as vital a tool for empire as the NGO itself. Together they are akin to nuclear fusion.

The Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a concept formulated by Daniel Pauly in 1995. It results in “a drift away from true natural conditions, and as a consequence a change in perception of ecological change varying from generation to generation.” The digital sphere (social media, celebrity) continues to displace our physical sphere (nature, family, community) while the biological becomes more and more irrelevant in the minds of the conditioned. We become empty vessels to be re-made in the image of corporatism. Today’s shifting baseline has not only made nature irrelevant altogether (of value only if we assign monetary value, “fighting” for “clean energy” replacing fighting to protect nature), it has brought us to the brink of complete collective insanity.

As recognized by Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum, (2016), “new patterns of consumer behavior (increasingly built upon access to mobile networks and data)… The Fourth Industrial Revolution, finally, will change not only what we do but also who we are.” [Source]

Today’s 21^st century powerhouse NGOs have proven successfully that hate can be neutralized, and even be turned into adoration, as demonstrated by Avaaz co-founder, MoveOn.org. In a world of make-believe where lies are preferred over truth, charismatic warmongers of the past (Barack Obama) are embraced while vulgar warmongers in the present (Donald Trump) are crucified among the allegedly “unbiased left”. Branding supersedes reality straight across the board.

In the age of post-modern spectacle and modern-day dystopia, environmentalism and humanitarianism are nothing more than egregious misnomers. In the age of 21^st century post-truths –  the capture of the public’s emotions is more than adequate for ensuring truth, logic and reason remain completely irrelevant. Hence, whether it’s selling war or selling the financialization of nature, the art of selling – without ever actually disclosing what it is that you are selling, has become a key strategy for selling the unthinkable. Tapping into hate is today a key marketing ploy for selling everything from “clean energy” (the fossil fuel industry is the enemy rather than parasitic capitalism itself) to payments for ecosystem services (strategically exploit the very real contempt for externalities only to sell the financialization of nature) to illegal invasions, occupations and war (demonize the democratically elected leader of the sovereign state, create falsehoods such as the Syrian army are on a murderous rampage, murdering their own people/families). If you can sell the hate, you can sell the war.

Two Heads of the Same Coin: Avaaz/350.org

But, before we delve into the history of Avaaz in addition to its powerful collaborations and influential allies, it is critical to understand  the incredibly close alliances between many of the most prominent NGOs that comprise the non-profit industrial complex. In many instances the NGOs at the top of the NPIC hierarchy, simply create (or absorb) clone sub-NGOs. They are all essentially one in the same – but utilize different methods to attract different audiences (and cultures) to achieve one shared goal: protection and expansion of the current capitalist economic system. Such is the case of Purpose, which is comprised of/manages The B Team , The Rules and a stream of others. The loyalties and interconnectedness of those at the helm of the empire’s lapdog NGOs are powerful. Thus, you will never witness May Bouve, 350.org’s current executive director, speak out against Avaaz’s push for war on sovereign states in the Middle East, as Bouve herself sits on the board of Res Publica – the co-founding organization of Avaaz. You will never witness Naomi Klein criticize Avaaz nor 350.org (both founding NGOs of GCCA/TckTckTck), for their many crimes against humanity as Klein serves on the board of 350.org, alongside Avaaz co-founder Ricken Patel who serves on the 350.org International Advisory Council. The interlocking directorate serves as an insurance policy for ensured and infinite self-censorship. The fact that many of these positions are given/held with no compensation is all the more telling. The lure (and appeal) for the appointee is strictly to gain further access.

Above – Section A. Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, and Highest Compensated Employees from the 2014 990 form of Res Public (Avaaz/co-founder of Avaaz)

A June 19, 2006 Res Publica job posting (“Senior Staff for Global Version of MoveOn.org”) listed the countries of geopolitical interest that Res Publica’s new NGO (Avaaz) would be focused on. Since this time, many of these countries listed have undergone so-called “coloured revolutions” (Egypt, Tunisia) while others listed by Res Public, are today annihilated (Libya) or under attack (Yemen, Syrian Arab Republic). The starting salary was listed as $60-80,000 per annum plus benefits package. The 2006 description for what would be Avaaz is as follows:

“The organization will begin with 20 full time staff located in 6 countries and a much larger number of volunteers, and will follow an ambitious growth path. It will launch with 700,000 members spread across 148 countries. An Advisory Board for the project comprises politicians, diplomats, activists and celebrities from around the world.”

Of great interest is those who were involved at the inception of Avaaz. At the Thirteenth Session of the United Nations Conference of the parties, which was held in Bali on 14 December 2007, we find the following representatives of the Avaaz foundation on the List of Participants document (p. 5), which include  “Mr. Jonathan Warnow Junior Climate Campaigner, Ms. Gillian May Boeve, Junior Climate Campaigner, Ms. Kelly Blynn, Research Associate and Mr. Jameson Henn,  Research Associate” – all founders of 350.org. ^[1] [“Observer organizations marked with an asterisk (*) in this document have been provisionally admitted by the subsidiary bodies.”]

From left to right: “Jamie Henn, Communications Director, 350, organizers of the world’s largest climate action on October 24; Ricken Patel, Executive Director, Avaaz, the world’s largest digital campaigning org, with 3.5M supporters; Ben Margolis, Campaigns Director, TckTckTck, an open campaign involving 220+ global NGO partners. At Fresh Air Center facilitated by tcktcktck for bloggers, downtown Copenhagen. 14 December 2009.” flickr, Tcklive

Sustainable Development World Leaders Invited to Paris Agreement Signing Ceremony, April 22, 2016. United Nations, December 10, 2015: Left to right: Michael Brune, Executive Director, Sierra Club, Christian O’Rourke, Development Director for Earth Guardians, Ken Berlin, President and CEO of the Climate Reality Project, May Boeve, Executive Director, 350.org, UN Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Al Gore, Chairman The Climate Reality Project, Emma Ruby Sachs, Deputy Director, Avaaz, Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director, Greenpeace International,  Yoca Arditi-Rocha (back row, right of Naidoo) Our Kids Climate, Usha Nair, Climate Leader, Global Gender and Climate Alliance, and Karuna Singh, Director, Earth Day Network India. Flickr

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Richard Branson’s The B Team is Purpose

“And yet, it is obvious that the opportunities that come from addressing climate change are equally staggering. Research by the We Mean Business Coalition shows that returns on low carbon investments average close to 30%, not only in the cleantech sectors but across all sectors in every corner of the world. These investments will drive growth and employment, spur innovation and reduce the risk of climate disruption. The truth is that economic growth and environmental protection go hand-in-hand, and one is impossible without the other.” — Mark Kenber, CEO, The Climate Group and Board Member, *We Mean Business, World Economic Forum, January 22, 2015

The B Team was incubated by Virgin Unite, the foundation arm of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, which had previously incubated such organizations the Elders and the Carbon War Room. In October, 2012, Branson and Zeitz (ex-CEO of Puma) announced the formation of The B Team. It has since grown to include 23 “leaders” ^[1] which includes Kathy Calvin (President and CEO of the United Nations Foundation), Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, Mary Robinson, Secretary of The Elders and President of the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice, Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of the Tata Group, and several others of elite status. ^{[Source] [Full List]}  

Although seven co-founders of We Mean Business are identified, We Mean Business is actually a coalition that in 2016 represented 300 corporations:

 “A unified front of leaders came together to demonstrate business demand for progressive climate policy. The B Team joined BSR, CDP, Ceres, The Climate Group, the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to establish We Mean Business, a network of more than 300 companies working within a common platform to amplify business support for bold climate action and policies.” — The B Team Progress Report June 2013 – June 2016, p. 11 [Source]

Today the We Mean Business coalition represents 590 corporations ($1 trillion US total revenue), and 183 investors (representing $20.7 trillion US in assets under management). [Source: We mean Business website]

In addition to this exponential growth, in June 2017, Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010-2016, has joined The B Team.

Here, it is imperative to reflect. The grotesque Global Call for Climate Action (GCCA /TckTckTck) campaign that sabotaged the most vulnerable nations in 2009 at the fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) in Copenhagen, was a creation of the global advertsing firm Havas Worldwide for the United Nations. The objective of the campaign “was to make it become a movement that consumers, advertisers and the media would use and exploit.” The first two NGOs to sign on to the TckTckTck campaign were 350.org and Avaaz. – two of the founding NGOs of the GCCA (with it’s inception dating back to 2006-2007). With an “overall budget of USD 6.8 million – over 95% of which came from foundation funding – the GCCA was undoubtedly the most well-funded global climate campaign of 2009.” [Source] In 2015, Havas and the United Nations, convening partners of the Earth To Paris Coalition, would again partner with select  NGOs (Avaaz, 350, Ceres, We mean Business, Global Citizen, The World Bank group and The Nature Conservatory to name a few) in order to announce and promote the “Paris agreement”.

“Earth To Paris community — There is reason for celebration. At the COP21 United Nations conference in Paris today, officials from nearly 200 countries reached a new agreement to address the threat of global climate change…The afternoon has been filled with hugs, tears, and standing ovations at Le Bourget…”  — COP21 Coup D’état – A Toast to Our Annihilation, Dec 12, 2015

Life in the champagne circuit: In this photograph taken by AP Images for Avaaz, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, center left, accepts the ‘End the War on Drugs’ petition from Avaaz Executive Director Ricken Patel, center right, accompanied by Richard Branson, right, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, left, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, Friday, 3 June 2011

Considering that foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, et. al. strategize for the protection/expansion of hegemonic power years and, more often, decades in advance, in addition to the most recent events of 2007-2009 (the creation of GCCA/TckTckTck), one could reasonably hypothesize that the United Nations, in servitude to Annex One Nations, elites and the world’s most powerful corporations, is paramount in the creation of and the fostering of the very NGOs and the liberal left’s beloved “environmental leaders” (whores for imperialism). As this series will demonstrate, those that dominate the NPIC are very deeply embedded in, and very heavily nurtured by, the United Nations. The carefully chosen and groomed sycophants that reside at the helm of the NPIC spoon-feed the citizenry (identified merely as consumers or human capital) exactly what the architects of destruction have longingly prepared for: the perpetual servitude and enslavement of the populace, global in scale. Yet, the necessary acquiescence for such servitude is not given by all. Certainly not the downtrodden, the working class or those that comprise the bottom of the food chain in the global capitalist economic system. The NPIC targets a specific demographic – a privileged, predominantly white, upper/middle-class populace, whose appetite for knowledge has been replaced with an appetite for celebrity fetish and irrelevant prattle.

Further in this series we will explore at length the rebranding of the GCCA/tcktck website which has been redesigned  in the image of Purpose. The new strategy for the “Purpose-esque” re-branding of GCCA is undoubtedly in no small part due to who now serves as  the vice-chair of the GCCA Board of Directors:  Phil Ireland of Purpose Europe, “where he helps shape and implement new progressive movements to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.” ^[bio]

Ireland serves on the board of GetUp. MoveOn, the US version of the Australian GetUp! is a founding NGO of Avaaz.

The “B Team Experts” include the aforementioned John Elkington, Heather Grady, Senior Fellow, Global Philanthropy for Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors; Alexander Grashow, Clinton Global Initiative, Jeremy Heimans, co-founder of both Avaaz and Purpose, Mindy Lubber, President of Ceres (350 divestment partner), Hunter Lovins, President, Natural Capitalism Solutions, David Jones, co-founder of One Young World, former CEO of Havas Worldwide and creator of the TckTckTck campaign.

On February 23, 2017 The B Team announced its further expansion (and theft) into Africa:

“The launch of The B Team in Eastern Africa kicks-off a broader global campaign, in which The B Team will organise regional platforms around the world to increase the number of company leaders who are willing and able to ‘step up” and lead this transition.

 

The announcement comes on the heels of the release of a new report, produced by the Business and Sustainable Development Commission, which provides substantial evidence of the massive global economic opportunities that can be unlocked by new business models focused on addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

 

The commission reports that achieving the SDGs will be worth at least US$1.1 trillion by 2030 for the private sector in Africa, potentially creating more than 85 million new jobs, with affordable housing accounting for more than 13 million of these jobs…

 

Business – which has contributed to many of these ills – is also an indispensable actor in resolving them.

 

The potential prize for business to align their business goals with the SDGs is significant. The Business Commission identified 60 sustainable and inclusive market “hotspots” in just four key areas (energy; cities; food and agriculture; health and wellbeing) that could create at least US$12 trillion in business value by 2030 – equivalent to 10 percent of forecast GDP – and generate up to 380 million jobs, mostly in developing countries like ours.”

#BeyondDavis

In the following two paragraphs, the two hyperlinks (purpose.us2.list-manage.com…) make clear that both The B Team and #BeyondDavos (“Copyright © 2015 Purpose, All rights reserved”) are campaigns driven/managed by Purpose:

The B Team unveils ‘Plan B’
The B Team unveiled its highly anticipated ‘Plan B‘ for business – a roadmap for creating companies that benefit people and planet – and invites business leaders ready to take on the challenge to join The B Team.

#BeyondDavos Kicks Off
Over 200 thought leaders from a variety of industries and causes united to kick-off the #BeyondDavos coalition to ensure that critical social, economic and environmental opportunities continue to be discussed after the meeting with concerned leaders around the world.

From the same LinkedIn page [Day 3 (Wednesday) #BeyondDavos Daily, January 22, 2015]:

“Purpose CEO, Jeremy Heimans, says, ‘This is a fresh opportunity to continue sharing and learning about each other’s important social campaigns and how they each are already contributing to the new Sustainable Development Goal conversation.'” [Emphasis added]

Here it is important to note Jeremy Heimans (co-founder of both Avaaz and Purpose) concerted effort to not only promote the sustainable development goals (the financialization/privatization of nature), but to also create/lend legitimacy to the Purpose creations, The Syria Campaign and the White Helmets, a UK/USAID financed NGO that works alongside terrorist groups Al Nusra and ISIS:

“Nobody exemplifies the courage needed to protect fundamental human rights better than Syria’s White Helmets. Today, the #BeyondDavos coalition will host them along with other Syrian activists in a discussion about their critical humanitarian efforts in one of the world’s most deadly conflict zones.” — #BeyondDavos hosts Syria’s courageous White Helmets

“The discussion brought together leading voices from the international NGO community, including Dr. Ken Roth from Human Rights Watch; Dr. Annie Sparrow; the Syrian Civil Defence (the “White Helmets”), volunteer rescue workers who have saved more than 12,500 lives from under the rubble of barrel bomb attacks; and experts in the field of public mobilization including Tim Dixon from The Syria Campaign. ” — Purpose website

[Further reading: SYRIA: Avaaz, Purpose & the Art of Selling Hate for Empire, September 17, 2014]

Above: Excerpt from the book Digital Citizenship and Political Engagement. The Challenge from Online Campaigning and Advocacy Organisations. Chapter six, Entrepreneurial Leadership Styles

Above: Purpose requires storytellers. The art of “storytelling” will be discussed at length further in this report.

From the Purpose website, February 2, 2015: Purpose and Here Now featured in The Guardian:

“In addition to being a participating partner of the #BeyondDavos coalition, a group of leading organizations committed to social impact, including The B Team, Global Citizen, Here Now, Omidyar Network, Purpose, and We Mean Business, Purpose’s senior leadership also added to The Guardian‘s international coverage of the Annual Meeting. Jeremy Heimans, CEO of Purpose, and Paul Hilder, Executive Director of Here Now, were recently featured in a Guardian piece where they discussed the importance of corporate sector commitment towards combating climate change. In Davos, two things were apparent to Jeremy and Paul; 1) The surprising amount of corporations publicly announcing their efforts to curb climate change; 2) How little, if any, participatory involvement they sought from their consumers. In the article, which you can read here, the two advocate for corporations to actively engage their consumer base in this fight, with the hope of simultaneously strengthening their clean-energy message and boosting their respective brands.”

Here it is critical to note that Here Now is a creation of Purpose. Paul Hilder, a co-founder of Avaaz and SumOfUs EU advisory board member, serves as executive director of Here Now. ^{[Hilder background]}

Nigel Topping is the CEO of We Mean Business. Topping is Executive Director of CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project), “a global NGO which has brought together 655 of the world’s investors, representing assets under management of over $78 trillion, to engage with over 6000 of the largest public corporations on the business implications of climate change.” ^[Source]

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks as philanthropist Bill Gates looks on during the Global Citizen Concert in Montreal, Quebec, September 17, 2016. / AFP / Geoff Robins

The following address for the #BeyondDavis Coalition on the aforementioned LinkedIn page, has important significance:

Our mailing address is:

Purpose

115 5th Ave

6th Floor

New York, NY 10003

In May of 2015 the Ford Foundation awarded a 700,000 grant ^[2] to “The B Team Headquarters Inc.” . The location listed for The B Team Headquarters Inc. is: 115 5th Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10003, United States. This is the address belonging to Purpose.

The #BeyondDavis campaign is included in The B Team Progress Report June 2013 – June 2016, (p. 7, “Our Journey”).

On a separate note, the grant is for work toward appointing corporations as the driving force in society [“General support to build partnerships in fostering leaders to help redefine the role of business in society as a driving force for social, human rights, environmental and economic advancements. Geographic Area Served: Asia/East Asia/China; Middle East; North America”] ^[Source]

In 2016 The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded 900,000 grant to The B Team for “[F]or A Project To Promote Norms On Open Contracting, Reduce Tax Loopholes, And Track Sustainable Development Goals Progress.”

From the website:

“This grant supports two streams of their work: first, galvanizing the private sector in support of country-level implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals; and second, fostering transparent and responsive governance by promoting global norms and standards on open contracting, open governance, and fair international tax practices.”

To be clear, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is the very mechanism to implement the financialization of nature, global in scale.  ^[Source]

In the “About the Grantee” section:

Grantee Website

bteam.org/

Address

115 5th Avenue, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10003

Again, this information identifies The B Team as the address of Purpose.

The Rockefeller Foundation also identifies The B Team Headquarters as the address of Purpose:  115 5th Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10003

https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/our-work/grants/b-team-headquarters/

The Rockefeller Foundation address as identified for Purpose to which it granted 1,660,000 in 2016:

The New York State Corporation Search website also identifies The B Team Headquarters as the address of Purpose:

*Further reading on The B Team: McKibben’s Divestment Tour – Brought to You by Wall Street [Part XVI of an Investigative Report] [A Revolution of Capitalism]

The April 26, 2017 article #BornB: A Conversation about Leading Businesses with Purpose reported that The B Teams BornB event was to take place at The B Team headquarters (@thebteamhq):

“We’re heading to #London today for @thebteamhq‘s #BornB event! Stay tuned for live updates!”

The B Team event was streamed live on March 30, 2017 at the offices of Unilever: “More than 100 entrepreneurs from the UK and Europe joined us at the Unilever offices for the conversation and thousands more tuned in online via Facebook Live…”

One might question if The B Team has any real life headquarters, anywhere in the real world, at all. The event highly publized to take place at “The B Team headquarters” took place at the offices of Unilever. Yet, this is hardly a surprise if we take into account that The B Team uses the PR firm Purpose (sister org. of Avaaz) for all grant money and legal correspondence. One can safely speculate that The B Team is fully operated by the public relations firm Purpose, after all, this is just one function of Purpose as a public relations firm. This speculation can be given further assurance by the repetitive language of the word “purpose” that absolutely saturates most all B Team materials. Consider that within the aforementioned article the “buzz word” (according to the B Team) “purpose” appears 33 times in a single post.

“Join The B Team for a Conversation About Purpose-Driven Leadership“

 

“#BornB: A Conversation about Leading Businesses with Purpose“

 

“We are pleased to present, in partnership with Unilever, a conversation that gets to the heart of what it means to be a purpose-driven business leader. ” — Ethical Markets Website

 

“Great to be with creative entrepreneurs exploring purpose-driven models to mitigate risks & secure long-term growth” — March 30, 2017, Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever

Here, three things are certain. 1) The quintessential goal for both corporations, being assisted by NGOs that comprise the NPIC is to secure long-term growth, 2) that The B Team headquarters in London is actually Unilever (whose CEO Paul Polman is a “B Team leader”), 3) that The B Team headquarters in New York is identified as Purpose. Avaaz/Purpose co-founder Heimans is publicly identified as a B Team expert. Unilever is a key client of Purpose. Here we can use the catch phrase “all for one, one for all” [“Each individual should act for the benefit of the group, and the group should act for the benefit of each individual.”] [Source]

“Under the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, Unilever is meeting its ambition of decoupling environmental footprint while increasing its positive social impact. Its sustainable living brands are growing 30% faster than the rest of the business and delivered nearly half its total growth in 2015.” — Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, The B Team Progress Report June 2013 – June 2016, p. 11 [Source]

The Rules – is Purpose

In the October 8, 2015 article, Global Goals – The Party’s Over, The Rules, an NGO with a radical veneer that was founded by Purpose, gives the false impression that they oppose the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

“Now we want to go straight to the top of the UN with an open letter telling them that their plans [SDG] do not represent the best interests of the world’s majority. Join Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges and others in signing an open letter to the UN and global decision makers below.”

Yet, as disclosed in the aforementioned grant information, The B Team (which is Purpose) received at minimum one grant (700,000) specifically to advance the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Rules also identifies its address as the same one belonging to its founder, Purpose:

115 5th Avenue, NY, NY, 10003, USA

Avaaz/Purpose co-founder Jeremy Heimans and Alnoor Ladha, Executive Director of The Rules, founding partner and the Head of Strategy at Purpose | Image courtesy of The Advertising Age

“Successful social initiatives that create real social impact will need a combination of 20th century top-down persuasion—brands that tell the world their point of view through marketing and communications—with the tools of 21st century engagement: movements that provide the tools for advocacy, social involvement, distributed evangelism and self-organization. We hope these rules are a starting point for a greater dialogue about the role of brands in ushering in a new era of social change.” — Advertising Age, The New Rules for Purpose-Driven Brands, How Marketers Can Survive the Cause-Marketing Bubble, Jeremy Heimans, October 14, 2010

Alnoor Ladha is a founding member and the Executive Director of The Rules (/TR). His work focuses on “the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, storytelling, technology and the decentralization of power.” Prior to co-founding and directing The Rules, Ladha is a founding partner and the Head of Strategy at Purpose. Ladha serves on the board of Greenpeace USA board where its Executive Director, Annie Leonard, has co-founded Earth Economics – yet another NGO to assist and exploit the global financialization of nature (payment for ecosystem services) now well underway behind closed doors:

“Earth Economics, with the support of our Community Partners and Advisors, maintains the largest, spatially explicit, web-based repository of published and unpublished economic values for ecosystem services. With generous funding from our sponsors, in 2012 Earth Economics began porting our internal database to a web-based service. The Ecosystem Service Valuation Toolkit (EVT) portal was launched at Rio +20 in June 2012. The Researcher’s Library and SERVES were previewed at the ACES Conference in December 2012.”

The elites financing The Rules is par for the course:

“We receive financial support from a variety of sources including through crowdsourcing, the Novo Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the New Venture Fund, the Joffe Charitable Trust (UK), and the Wallace Global Fund. We do not accept money from governments or corporations.” [Source]

Novo Foundation is Warren Buffett, Open Society is George Soros, Joffe Charitable Trust is Oxfam and Order of the British Empire, Wallace Global fund is a product of the Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company. To state ” we do not accept money from governments or corporations” is meaningless.  Very few so-called environmental NGOs receive money directly from corporations . This is what foundations were created for.

“If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do, partly by drugs, partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by passing the sort of rational side of man, and appealing to his subconscious, and his deeper emotions, making him actually love his slavery. I mean I think this is the danger that actually  people may be in some ways, happy, under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy.”  — Aldous Huxley interview by Mike Wallace, May 18, 1958

End Notes:

[Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.]

Edited with Forrest Palmer, Wrong Kind of Green Collective.

Conservation’s Friends in High Places: Neoliberalism, Networks, and the Transnational Conservation Elite

November, 2011

The Nature Conservancy’s “Nature Matters” Gala, hosted in NYC on June 2, 2014 honored Disney and The Butler Conservation Fund as leaders in conservation. Photographed: Kevin Callahan (Disney), Beth Stevens (Disney), Mark Tercek (TNC), Gil Bulter (Butler Capital Corp.), Jay Rasulo (Disney), Dan Harris (Disney-ABC News)

“Fifteen of the twenty-six board members at The Nature Conservancy are or have been directors of large transnational corporations, as have twenty-six of thirty-six board members at CI and thirteen of twenty-one at WWF-US. In all cases, directors with a corporate management background have displaced and now greatly outnumber those with biological training or other “technical” backgrounds. In addition, these NGOs each have a business council, made exclusively from corporate directors, to advise the board of directors.”

Download the paper:

Conservation’s Friends in High Place

[George Holmes bio: “I am a human geographer interested in biodiversity conservation, particularly protected areas. My current work engages with geographies of conservation in the anthropocene, with a particular interest in rewilding and synthetic ecosystems. I am positioned halfway between the humanities and biological literatures on this subject – I am more interested in the politics of how people try to do conservation in the anthropocene, and what the implications of this are.”]