Arundhati Roy: Things that Can’t be Said, Tamed Tigers & the Missionaries of the “New Economy”

“Grow Rich – Help Others” – “Indian Children’s Role Model – Uncle Bill: School children wear masks to celebrate the birthday of ‘Uncle Bill’ , the Microsoft founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates on the occasion of his 60th birth anniversary celebration in Chennai.” October 29, 2015 [Source]

WKOG admin: In the May 11, 2015 article Life in the Celebrity Circuit author Jay Taber writes:

“The American aristocracy has long fostered activist charades as a prophylactic against democracy, but the wholesale choreography of fossil-fueled puppets is unprecedented. Arundhati Roy’s blurb on the cover of This Changes Everything is thus particularly disturbing.

I wonder what kind of incentive was provided to Roy. What we know is that Arundhati is bright enough to comprehend Naomi Klein’s fraud, and that her name on the cover of Klein’s book functions as a shield for Naomi, and increases her prestige among the 350 cult.

Roy already has significant prestige herself, so the question is why she would publicly support a vapid sell-out who is undermining what Roy purportedly stands for. Was it bribery, extortion, or a misguided sense that Klein’s Wall Street-funded revolution could be hijacked by socialists? It doesn’t make sense.”

After reading the provocative interview published on November 30, 2015 (excerpts below), Taber’s questions are more compelling than ever. Do “the things we can’t talk about in a civilised society, if you’re a good, domesticated house pet” include discussing the role of appointed “leaders” within the non-profit industrial complex, who ultimately serve to protect both capital and state? We have found that this is a critical issue that no one with far reach on “the left” will touch (Hedges, Pilger, etc.).

“The structure and organisation of the climate cartel can be compared to a toadstool. 350.org is the cap of the fruiting body, very visible, poisonous, and laden with spores, This Changes Everything (TCE); book, social movement, and documentary form the stalk expanding and reinforcing key messages, and TckTckTck/Global Call for Climate Action (GCCA) – a coalition of 20 key international organisations including 350.org, Avaaz, WWF, and Greenpeace form the mycelium stretching vast distances and connecting to other fruiting bodies and other vast networks. The soil it has grown from is the NPIC with it’s phalanx of institutes and think tanks feigning care for the earth while plotting the future for the oligarchs.” —Metrics as a Proxy for Social Change: The Climate Cartel, Impact Funding, and the Abandonment of Struggle [Source]

In the interview below Roy states: “When you look around and see how many NGOs are on, say, the Gates, Rockefeller or Ford Foundation’s handout list, there has to be something wrong, right? They turn potential radicals into receivers of their largesse – and then, very subtly, without appearing to – they circumscribe the boundaries of radical politics.”

So what do we make of Roy’s glowing endorsement of Klein’s book (and film) project financed by the very elites Roy so articulately deconstructs?

Consider that Susan Rockefeller is the Co-Executive Producer of the documentary film This Changes Everything and founding partner of Louverture Films, the production company for the documentary film This Changes Everything in partnership with The Message Productions, LLC / Klein Lewis Productions. The fiscal sponsor of this endeavour was New York-based Sustainable Markets Foundation (SMF). SMF is financed by foundations such as Rockefeller Family Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Energy foundation, Park Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Schmidt, Global Wallace Fund, Tides, etc. In addition, Tides receives millions in funding from Warren Buffett laundered through the Buffett family Fund NoVo. [Source: Financing “The Message” Behind Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ Project]

For now, we will leave the last word to Roy who states in the interview below: “We’re all being managed, and we don’t even know it… They have so much money, they can fund everything, very bad things as well as very good things – documentary films, nuclear weapons planners, gender rights, feminist conferences, literature and film festivals, university chairs…anything, as long as it doesn’t upset the “market” and the economic status quo.”

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Tiger Approaching a Waterhole, Kotah, c. 1790. Watercolor and opaque watercolor

AlterNet

November 30, 2015

by John Cusack and Arundhati Roy

Excerpt from part 1: John Cusack in conversation with Arundhati Roy.

JC: So, what do you think? What do we think are the things we can’t talk about in a civilised society, if you’re a good, domesticated house pet?

AR: (Laughs) The occasional immorality of preaching nonviolence? (This was a reference to Walking with the Comrades, Roy’s account of her time spent with armed guerrillas in the forests of central India who were fighting paramilitary forces and vigilante militias trying to clear indigenous people off their land, which had been handed over to mining companies.)…

Excerpt from Part 2: “We Brought You the Promise of the Future, but Our Tongue Stammered and Barked” by Arundhati Roy

“Our tragedy today is not just that millions of people who called themselves communist or socialist were physically liquidated in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, not just that China and Russia, after all that revolution, have become capitalist economies, not just that the working class has been ruined in the United States and its unions dismantled, not just that Greece has been brought to its knees, or that Cuba will soon be assimilated into the free market – it is also that the language of the Left, the discourse of the Left, has been marginalised and is sought to be eradicated. The debate – even though the protagonists on both sides betrayed everything they claimed to believe in – used to be about social justice, equality, liberty, and redistribution of wealth. All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony – Lifestyle Wars….

But seriously – what is one couple doing with that much money, which is just a small percentage of the indecent profits they make from the corporation they run? And even that small percentage runs into billions. It’s enough to set the world’s agenda, enough to buy government policy, determine university curricula, fund NGOs and activists. It gives them the power to mould the whole world to their will. Forget the politics, is that even polite? Even if it’s “good” will? Who’s to decide what’s good and what’s not?…

JC: What is the meaning of charity as a political tool?

AR: It’s an old joke, right? If you want to control somebody, support them. Or marry them.
(Laughter)

JC: Sugar daddy politics….

AR: Embrace the resistance, seize it, fund it.

JC: Domesticate it….

AR: Make it depend on you. Turn it into an art project or a product of some kind. The minute what you think of as radical becomes an institutionalised, funded operation, you’re in some trouble. And it’s cleverly done. It’s not all bad…some are doing genuinely good work.

JC: Like the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)….

AR: They have money from the Ford Foundation, right? But they do excellent work. You can’t fault people for the work they’re doing, taken individually.

JC: People want to do something good, something useful….

AR: Yes. And it is these good intentions that are dragooned and put to work. It’s a complicated thing. Think of a bead necklace. The beads on their own may be lovely, but when they’re threaded together, they’re not really free to skitter around as they please. When you look around and see how many NGOs are on, say, the Gates, Rockefeller or Ford Foundation’s handout list, there has to be something wrong, right? They turn potential radicals into receivers of their largesse – and then, very subtly, without appearing to – they circumscribe the boundaries of radical politics. And you’re sacked if you disobey…sacked, unfunded, whatever. And then there’s always the game of pitting the “funded” against the “unfunded,” in which the funder takes centrestage. So, I mean, I’m not against people being funded – because we’re running out of options – but we have to understand – are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Or who’s the dog and who is you?”

JC: I’m definitely the dog…and I’ve definitely been walked.

Bengali scroll painting. Painted scroll on paper mounted on cotton. Murshidabad School, Eastern India, 19th C.

AR: Everywhere – not just in America…repress, beat up, shoot, jail those you can, and throw money at those whom you can’t – and gradually sandpaper the edge off them. They’re in the business of creating what we in India call Paaltu Sher, which means Tamed Tigers. Like a pretend resistance…so you can let off steam without damaging anything.

JC: The first time you spoke at the World Social Forum…when was that?

AR: In 2002, I think, Porto Alegre…just before the US invasion of Iraq.

JC: In Mumbai. And then you went the next year and it was….

AR: Totally NGO-ised. So many major activists had turned into travel agents, just having to organise tickets and money, flying people up and down. The forum suddenly declared, “Only non-violence, no armed struggles….” They had turned Gandhian.

JC: So anyone involved in armed resistance….

AR: All out, all out. Many of the radical struggles were out. And I thought, fuck this. My question is, if, let’s say, there are people who live in villages deep in the forest, four days walk from anywhere, and a thousand soldiers arrive and burn their villages and kill and rape people to scare them off their land because mining companies want it – what brand of non-violence would the stalwarts of the establishment recommend? Non-violence is radical political theatre.

JC: Effective only when there’s an audience….

AR: Exactly. And who can pull in an audience? You need some capital, some stars, right? Gandhi was a superstar. The people in the forest don’t have that capital, that drawing power. So they have no audience. Non-violence should be a tactic – not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massiveviolence…. With me, it’s been an evolution of seeing through these things.

JC: You begin to smell the digestive enzymes….

AR: (Laughing) But you know, the revolution cannot be funded. It’s not the imagination of trusts and foundations that’s going to bring real change.

JC: But what’s the bigger game that we can name?

AR: The bigger game is keeping the world safe for the Free Market. Structural Adjustment, Privatisation, Free Market fundamentalism – all masquerading as Democracy and the Rule of Law. Many corporate foundation-funded NGOs – not all, but many – become the missionaries of the “new economy.” They tinker with your imagination, with language. The idea of “human rights,” for example – sometimes it bothers me. Not in itself, but because the concept of human rights has replaced the much grander idea of justice. Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum – all we are supposed to expect – but human rights aren’t enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

October 8, 2015, BBC: Can you cost the Earth? Play our fun game and find out.

JC: The term human rights is, or can be, a kind of pacifier – filling the space in the political imagination that justice deserves?

AR: Look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example. If you look at a map from 1947 to now, you’ll see that Israel has gobbled up almost all of Palestinian land with its illegal settlements. To talk about justice in that battle, you have to talk about those settlements. But, if you just talk about human rights, then you can say, “Oh, Hamas violates human rights,” “Israel violates human rights.” Ergo, both are bad.

JC: You can turn it into an equivalence….

AR: …though it isn’t one. But this discourse of human rights, it’s a very good format for TV – the great atrocity analysis and condemnation industry (laughs). Who comes out smelling sweet in the atrocity analysis? States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence – so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only – or well that’s excessive – usually, the resistance.

JC: So the term human rights can take the oxygen out of justice?

AR: Human rights takes history out of justice.

JC: Justice always has context….

AR: I sound as though I’m trashing human rights…I’m not. All I’m saying is that the idea of justice – even just dreaming of justice – is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust – and then tries to make it more accountable. But then, of course, Catch-22 is that violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

JC: …as there’s no other way of implementing those policies except violently.

AR: No way at all – but talk loud enough about human rights and it gives the impression of democracy at work, justice at work. There was a time when the United States waged war to topple democracies, because back then democracy was a threat to the Free Market. Countries were nationalising their resources, protecting their markets…. So then, real democracies were being toppled. They were toppled in Iran, they were toppled all across Latin America, Chile….

JC: The list is too long….

AR: Now we’re in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodeled to be market-friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to instal democracies. First it was topple them, now it’s instal them, right? And this whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility – it’s all part of a New Managed Democracy. In that sense, it’s all part of the same machine.

JC: Tentacles of the same squid.

AR: They moved in to the spaces that were left when “structural adjustment” forced states to pull back on public spending – on health, education, infrastructure, water supply – turning what ought to be people’s rights, to education, to healthcare and so on, into charitable activity available to a few. Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It’s a way of managing public anger. We’re all being managed, and we don’t even know it…. The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against “corruption” and for “transparency.” They want the Rule of Law – as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardise a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment. Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely – unimpeded – around the world today is money…capital.

JC: It’s all for efficiency, right? Stable markets, stable world…there’s a great violence in the idea of a uniform “investment climate.”

Democracy Masquerade: Uniform investment climate. A phrase interchangeable with Massacre.

AR: In India, that’s a phrase we use interchangeably with “massacre.” Stable markets, unstable world. Efficiency. Everybody hears about it. It’s enough to make you want to be pro-inefficiency and pro-corruption. (Laughing) But seriously, if you look at the history of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller, in Latin America, in Indonesia, where almost a million people, mainly Communists, were killed by General Suharto, who was backed by the CIA, in South Africa, in the US Civil Rights Movement – or even now, it’s very disturbing. They have always worked closely with the US State Department.

JC: And yet now Ford funds The Act of Killing – the film about those same massacres. They profile the butchers…but not their masters. They won’t follow the money.

AR: They have so much money, they can fund everything, very bad things as well as very good things – documentary films, nuclear weapons planners, gender rights, feminist conferences, literature and film festivals, university chairs…anything, as long as it doesn’t upset the “market” and the economic status quo. One of Ford’s “good works” was to fund the CFR, the Council of Foreign Relations, which worked closely with the CIA. All the World Bank presidents since 1946 are from the CFR. Ford-funded RAND, the Research and Development Corporation, which works closely with the US defence forces.

JC: That was where Dan worked. That’s where he laid his hands on the Pentagon papers.

AR: The Pentagon papers…. I couldn’t believe what I was reading…that stuff about bombing dams, planning famines…. I wrote an introduction to an edition of Noam Chomsky’s For Reasons of State in which he analyses the Pentagon papers. There was a chapter in the book called ‘The Backroom Boys’ – maybe that wasn’t the Pentagon papers part, I don’t remember…but there was a letter or a note of some kind, maybe from soldiers in the field, about how great it was that white phosphorous had been mixed in with napalm…. “It sticks to the gooks like shit to a blanket, and burns them to the bone.” They were happy because white phosphorous kept burning even when the Vietnamese who had been firebombed tried to jump into water to stop their flesh from burning off….

JC: You remember that by rote?

AR: I can’t forget it. It burned me to the bone…. I grew up in Kerala, remember. Communist country….

JC: You were talking about how the Ford Foundation funded RAND and the CFR.

AR: (Laughs) Yes…it’s a bedroom comedy…actually a bedroom tragedy…is that a genre? Ford funded CFR and RAND. Robert McNamara moved from heading Ford Motors to the Pentagon. So, as you can see, we’re encircled.

JC: …and not just by the past.

AR: No – by the future, too. The future is Google, isn’t it? In Julian Assange’s book – brilliant book – When Google Met WikiLeaks, he suggests that there isn’t much daylight between Google and the NSA. The three people who went along with Eric Schmidt – CEO of Google – to interview Julian were Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas – ex-State Department and senior something or other on the CFR, adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. The two others were Lisa Shields and Scott Malcolmson, also former State Department and CFR. It’s serious shit. But when we talk about NGOs, there’s something we must be careful about….

JC: What’s that?

AR: When the attack on NGOs comes from the opposite end, from the far right, then those of us who’ve been criticising NGOs from a completely different perspective will look terrible…to liberals we’ll be the bad guys….

JC: Once again pitting the “funded” against the “unfunded.”

AR: For example, in India the new government – the members of the radical Hindu Right who want India to be a ‘Hindu Nation’ – they’re bigots. Butchers. Massacres are their unofficial election campaigns – orchestrated to polarise communities and bring in the vote. It was so in Gujarat in 2002, and this year, in the run-up to the general elections, in a place called Muzaffarnagar, after which tens of thousands of Muslims had to flee from their villages and live in camps. Some of those who are accused of all that murdering are now cabinet ministers. Their support for straightforward, chest-thumping butchery makes you long for even the hypocrisy of the human rights discourse. But now if the “human rights” NGOs make a noise, or even whisper too loudly…this government will shut them down. And it can, very easily. All it has to do is to go after the funders…and the funders, whoever they are, especially those who are interested in India’s huge “market” will either cave in or scuttle over to the other side. Those NGOs will blow over because they’re a chimera, they don’t have deep roots in society among the people, really, so they’ll just disappear. Even the pretend resistance that has sucked the marrow out of genuine resistance will be gone.

Read the full article at Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/world/john-cusack-and-arundhati-roy-things-can-and-cannot-be-said

Dec 05

2015

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Breakthrough Energy Coalition Nuclear

FLASHBACK | China Syndrome

Skookum

February 24, 2006

by Jay Taber

Aerial of Three Mile Island with crippled reactors, April 2, 1979

When I was in college in the early 1970s, I did research on nuclear-related carcinogenic medical statistics for the people who ultimately stopped the proliferation of plants in Washington state. Later in that decade it was revealed that two of the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) plants, halted after construction, had life-threatening structural deficiencies due to fraudulent x-rays submitted by the contractor in order to omit the required steel reinforcement for the massive concrete structures and thence pocket substantial profits on the bid.

Later yet, watching the movie China Syndrome, I was reminded of this simple fact about nuclear energy: it’s a boondoggle for heavy industry at taxpayers’ expense–always has been–and with that amount of public funds on the table, it will always attract crooks. So when I heard our President Enron and Vice President Halliburton recently touting a resurgence of nuclear plant construction, let’s say I was more than a little sceptical about it’s viability, even under the best of circumstances–circumstances that gave us the (pre-Chernobyl) most-contaminated-site-on-earth Hanford Nuclear Reservation across the Columbia River from where I grew up, as well as the meltdown at Three Mile Island.

This morning on NPR, I listened to a nuclear sceptic debate a nuclear apologist, and learned about both improved technology and the still-unsolved waste storage dilemma, as well as nuclear power’s unavoidable vulnerability to sabotage. I also learned that each plant in the US requires a billion dollars annual government subsidy just to operate, waste disposal and management issues aside.

And I almost learned about a recent failure of the most modern of designs built in France before NPR’s host scrambled to commercial and then went to the phone-in calls immediately afterward. Seems like the WPPSS fiasco all over again; let’s hope it doesn’t get as far along toward criminal catastrophe as it did last time.

Nov 30

2015

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B corporations carbon capture and storage Carbon Tracker Initiative CCS Grantham Institute Impact Philanthropy Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis Metrics Stranded Assets Project Unabated coal

Metrics as a Proxy for Social Change: The Climate Cartel, Impact Funding, and the Abandonment of Struggle

Wrong Kind of Green Op-Ed

November 30, 2015

by Michael Swifte

Metrics as a proxy for social change. That’s what the climate cartel trades in. What do metrics mean to the cartel? Funding. Impact philanthropy demands short time frames for outcomes and metrics to show what has happened in the messaging sphere. It’s an economy of attention aimed at behaviour change, false consciousness, and the enfeeblement of intellect. Money speaks most loudly in the messaging sphere. The struggle for peace, for an end to imperialism and the patriarchy, for true protection of the earth? These struggles, none of which can be abandoned, don’t optimise metrics or please the funder’s networks.

Yes. The climate cartel trades in metrics and messaging, and in the business of attention metrics amplification is the driver of innovation. But it is innovation within the constraints, party lines, omissions, and debilitating conflated logics passed down from the funders and their networks. The ambitious and self censoring go-getter devotes their intuition, their deeper senses to navigating their way to success, a success defined by the satisfaction of amplification lust. They give themselves to an horrendous discipline honed at the behest of the funders, their networks, and their many projects.

The Non Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) incubates a constantly expanding web of think tanks, institutes, NGOs, public thinkers, B corporations and media organs that serve to buttress the climate cartel’s messaging. They do much of this with silence, lines of inquiry best left alone, language that need not be unpacked lest some pointed questions get asked in the wrong places. They are blessed with amplification, access to the messaging sphere, and the certainty of support from allies within the NPIC including the liberal media.

“Goldman Sachs to Invest $150B in Clean Energy by 2025” | Image credit: Goldman Sachs [Source]

Clean energy? This term is a euphemism happily embraced by the climate cartel and the liberal media. It’s used to mask the fact that ‘clean energy’ is an all-of-the-above strategy as long as some abatement/offsetting is involved.

100% renewable energy.? While this is a popular catch cry promoted by the climate cartel and their associated social movements, it comes with limited articulation of the obstacles that need to be surpassed to achieve it. The climate cartel maintain a firm silence on the greatest threat to achieving 100% renewable energy, the embedding of carbon capture and storage as a mitigation strategy within the modelling and assumptions on which our carbon budgets are based. This is a particularly diabolical manipulation that has everyone including governments and fossil fuel corporations working towards a massive explosion in new industrial and energy generating fossil fuel plants supplying CO2 for industry and undersea storage.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Stranded Assets Project, Carbon Tracker Initiative, and the Grantham Institute have all done their part to create a picture of a coal industry in structural decline, at risk of collapsing , and incapable of existing within our carbon budgets. Through their messaging they intimate that political will should see governments rejecting coal fired energy generation, but the reality is that they’ve done more than anyone to help develop a future for fossil fuels. The Grantham Institute is particularly important as it has developed and quietly disseminated plans for carbon capture and storage in the UK and Europe with their ‘Bridging the Gap’ report. While, the climate cartel lauded Carbon Tracker and the Grantham Institute for their ‘Unburnable Carbon’ report which established the idea of carbon budgets embraced by UN climate negotiators and fossil fuel industry leaders alike, they’ve stayed silent about the Grantham Institute’s material support for the ambitions of Shell and their plans for new gas plants and North Sea CO2 storage.

Unabated coal? There is a clear party line which is understood by the mainstream and liberal media along with the think tanks and NGO mouthpieces. It is aimed at masking the energy directions embedded in the modelling assumptions behind our carbon budgets – never unpack the political will for carbon capture and storage. UK Energy Secretary Amber Rudd’s recent speech on a “new direction” for UK energy policy specified a commitment to phasing out “unabated coal”, yet the media interpreted this as a commitment to a complete coal phase out. My questions to key pundits and mouth pieces about why the word “unabated” was excluded from headlines and escaped examination were left unanswered. Some perfectly valid questions. Why did Amber Rudd specify unabated coal? Why did Chancellor George Osborne, just a week later, drop funding for carbon capture and storage in favour of nuclear power? The answer to both questions is that pushing hard with objectionable nuclear power helps manufacture consent for the negative emissions technologies that will keep fossil fuel interests happy. The classic neo-liberal push. Calling for ‘clean coal’ suddenly looks a lot more reasonable.

The structure and organisation of the climate cartel can be compared to a toadstool. 350.org is the cap of the fruiting body, very visible, poisonous, and laden with spores, This Changes Everything (TCE); book, social movement, and documentary form the stalk expanding and reinforcing key messages, and TckTckTck/Global Call for Climate Action (GCCA) – a coalition of 20 key international organisations including Avaaz, WWF, and Greenpeace form the mycelium stretching vast distances and connecting to other fruiting bodies and other vast networks. The soil it has grown from is the NPIC with it’s phalanx of institutes and think tanks feigning care for the earth while plotting the future for the oligarchs..

Susan Rockefeller, Co-Executive Producer of the “This Changes Everything” documentary film and founding partner of Louverture Films, LLC. Louverture is the production company for the documentary film “This Changes Everything” (with The Message Productions, LLC / Klein Lewis Productions ). Photo: Rockefeller at her home on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, New York, on Sept. 8, 2015. Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)

The title of this piece derives from a talk ‘Does art change the world? Lessons from the emerging field of ‘impact producing” given by Katie McKenna the engagement lead for TCE. Her candid acknowledgements that the “foundations” did their“due diligence” in asking for proof of “social change” when considering funding, are quite telling. I am left with three key questions. How has the imperative to achieve significant and particular metrics shaped the project? Who stands to benefit from reducing centuries of struggle down to the imperative to reduce CO2 emissions?

Links:

Amber Rudd’s speech on a new direction for UK energy policy

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/amber-rudds-speech-on-a-new-direction-for-uk-energy-policy

TckTckTck: The Bitch is Back

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2015/11/28/tcktcktck-the-bitch-is-back/

Financing “The Message” Behind Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ Project

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2015/10/02/financing-the-message-behind-naomi-kleins-this-changes-everything-project/

Bridging the gap: improving the economic and policy framework for carbon capture and storage in the European Union

http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publication/bridging-the-gap-improving-the-economic-and-policy-framework-for-carbon-capture-and-storage-in-the-european-union/

Unburnable Carbon

http://carbontracker.live.kiln.it/Unburnable-Carbon-2-Web-Version.pdf

We Suspect Silence. Nobody gets paid to look at this stuff: Selling Us the Poison and the Remedy

https://wesuspectsilence.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/nobody-gets-paid-to-look-at-this-stuff-selling-us-the-poison-and-the-remedy/

UK to close all coal power plants in switch to gas and nuclear

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/18/energy-policy-shift-climate-change-amber-rudd-backburner

Oct 28

2015

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CERA Communications in Conflict Indigenous Nations Mandates from God Netwar Public Good Project Tea Party Wall Street

Public Good Project: Shining a Light on the Blind Spots that Aid Hate Groups

PUBLIC GOOD PROJECT NEEDS YOUR HELP

SAN FRANCISCO, CA October 8, 2015 – Public Good Project — an investigative research network in the US and Canada — has been defending democracy for 21 years. Our volunteer researchers, analysts and journalists have led the pack in fighting the fascism, racism and fraud that threaten both civil society and indigenous nations. To keep our free public service available, though, we need your help.

Collaborating with IC Magazine, Public Good Project has provided key information on the convergence of Wall Street, the Tea Party and CERA — the “Ku Klux Klan of Indian country” — constituting the industrial-sponsored terrorism called Wise Use. As IC Editor-in-Chief and Public Good correspondent John Schertow remarked, “Defending democracy isn’t something we do as a career; we do it as a duty.”

Public Good and IC Magazine have had a unique and productive relationship. For instance, our research published at IC in April 2013 was first in world media to expose a nationwide campaign by CERA to terminate American Indian tribes. In July 2013, we collaborated with IC Magazine and Wrong Kind of Green collective to publish Communications in Conflict, an introduction to the topic of netwar.

In the very near future Public Good and IC will team up again to produce Mandates from God, a groundbreaking documentary film about white power, Indigenous Peoples and fossil fuel export.

Help us continue our vital work. Make a donation today!

Link to fundraiser: http://igg.me/at/publicgood/

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Contact
http://publicgood.org/contact-2/

Oct 28

2015

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Intercontinental Cry Public Good Project

Public Good Project: Intrepid and Indispensable

Intercontinental Cry

October 27, 2015

by John Ahni Schertow

With Wise Use fascism on the rise, and both mainstream media and Wall Street-funded NGOs cowering in fear, Public Good Project has been indispensable in illuminating this urgent threat, and intrepid in demonstrating how to combat it. Our work as volunteer journalists at IC Magazine has benefited immeasurably from the penetrating insight of Public Good researchers and analysts.

Public Good has just eight days left to raise the funds it needs to continue helping us drive a stake through the heart of this public relations monster of the power elite.

Head over to Indiegogo now to pitch in http://igg.me/at/publicgood/

[John Ahniwanika Schertow is an internationally recognized editor and publisher, a self-taught web developer and an award winning journalist of Kanienkehaka and mixed-European descent. For the past nine years, Ahni has served as the driving force behind Intercontinental Cry, an online magazine which he also founded. As a poet and freelance journalist, Ahni has been featured in the Guardian, Toward Freedom, the Dominion, Madre, Earth First, Swerve Magazine and several other publications. In 2011, Ahni won a Project Censored Award for his coverage of a coordinated military attack on Samburu Pastoralists in north central Kenya. In addition to his work as a journalist, Ahni provides a wide range of support to individuals and organizations around the world. He is frequently approached for his opinion and extensive knowledge of Indigenous struggles. Ahni is a regular guest on CKUW’s weekly radio program Warning Shots; a correspondent for the Public Good Project; and the Coordinator of the IC Translation Project. Email: intercontinentalcry [at] gmail.com Twitter: @indigenous_news]

Dec 19

2014

newWKOGadnim

Uncategorized

Esalen Institute

Spiritual Sweat | Esselen Nation Accuses Esalen Institute of Playing Indians

Monterey County Now

December 18, 2014

by Kera Abraham

Esselen Nation Tribal Chairwoman Louise Ramirez blesses the Monarch Grove Sanctuary in Pacific Grove in September, leading participants in a prayer in the Esselen language.

Hummux Anax is pretty sure he got burned because the sweat lodge ceremony started in the north.

“A lot of people think that’s not right – the sun rises in the east,” he says. “We sang a song that should have invoked the water spirits, but it invoked the fire spirits.”

He stepped out of the dark, steaming sweat lodge and tripped over the altar, a mound of earth arranged with feathers, jewelry and a forked stick representing male and female.

Someone had placed the altar too close to the lodge door, Hummux says. He fell in the ceremonial campfire and “turtled out” on its concrete base, flames licking his pale skin.

It was bad. He slathered on some aloe and left the Esalen Institute, heading up Highway 1 to the Community Hospital of Monterey Peninsula. The burns crossed his back and both wrists in a dragging pattern. The healing involved months of excruciating debridements, as medics stripped off the dead skin.

Hummux Anax means fire hawk. It is his Esselen Indian name. He says it’s his legal name, too: just “hummux,” on his Social Security card and everything. His birth name is very Anglo, as boring as Bill Perkins, and he asks me not to use it.

Hummux got his Esselen name from Tommy Little Bear Nason, an Esselen descendant whose family has lived for generations in the Carmel Valley foothills his ancestors called Xasáuan. Nason has also been a spiritual adviser to Esalen Institute for more than 30 years.

According to Hummux, Nason gave Esselen names to him and about 90 other non-Indians after leading them on vision quests in the wilderness. Nason “adopted” 14, the most committed, into the Esselen Tribe he created in the early 1990s. He calls himself the tribe’s spiritual leader.

Hummux is one of those adoptees. Three more are Mac Murphy, son of Esalen Institute co-founder Michael Murphy, who became Shekes Anax; Rudy Proctor, a retired credit union manager, who’s called Wingte Tihikpas; and actor Woody Harrelson. Proctor says singer Joan Baez, who’s been part of Esalen’s inner circle since the ’60s, is in the tribe, too, but the musician’s publicist won’t confirm it.

Nason authorized Hummux, Proctor and a couple others to lead sweat lodge ceremonies at Esalen, the New Age retreat center jutting over the Pacific Ocean in south Big Sur. The ritual is heavily based in Native American traditions, including what Murphy describes as “inter-tribal” songs and prayers – including Esselen, Lakota and Cherokee.

Participants heat stones in a campfire, then move them inside the lodge, drop them into a central hole and pour water on top, creating hot steam in which they bake, drip, sing and pray before re-emerging into the outer world. Some of the lodge leaders have described the ceremony as sacred and secret, but it follows a general formula that comes up in a Google search of “sweat lodge.”

The Esalen ceremonies got especially popular after the lodge was moved to its current location above Hot Springs Creek in 2003. One organizer estimated 2,000 people took part between 2007-2011.

“Then we got tired of it,” Hummux says, “and it went to hell.”

No doubt countless people felt cleansed, even transformed, in the Esalen sweat lodge. Participants have described how the ceremony connects them with Mother Earth and with all of humanity in a profound experience of oneness.

But it was as if some destructive force was activated around the time Hummux got burned. It radiated out to divide the larger Esalen community. It infuriated the chair of the Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen Nation, destroying the tenuous peace between her tribal group and the retreat center. It drove a wedge deeper between the nearly 700-member Esselen Nation and Nason’s Esselen Tribe, which he says includes 68 members of his extended family.

The tension drills down to the question of cultural appropriation, when appreciation for traditions that aren’t one’s own becomes something more offensive. People have different interpretations of where exactly that line lies, and when the Esalen sweat lodge crossed it – if it ever did.

This isn’t just an issue between Esalen Institute’s mostly white, well-off clientele and the Esselen Indian descendants. Legally, the question of who can claim Esselen heritage affects construction projects across Monterey County. From a larger social perspective, it’s a portrait in contrasts. As Native American communities across the American West struggle with issues like radiation poisoning, widespread poverty and high suicide rates, a New Age utopia in Big Sur markets itself under an American Indian name.

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The June 2014 workshop “Summer Solstice Tribal Journey and SpiritDance Retreat” invited prospective students – in Esalen parlance, seminarians – to “dance, sweat, sing, pray, meditate, and relax together as one global tribe.”

It cost $405-$1,750 for the weekend, depending on whether participants slept on the floor of common spaces or opted for plusher accommodations.

Proctor, one of the workshop leaders, is described as a “tribal elder” with a theological background in “Native American, Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Buddhism and mystic traditions.”

Proctor isn’t claiming to be Esselen. He’s not promising an authentic Native American experience. But some critics within the Esalen community still accuse him of being a “plastic shaman” or engaging in “spiritual colonialism.”

These phrases come from discourses bigger than Big Sur. They come from Native American groups actively fighting the New Age romanticization of their culture; and from scholars like San Jose State ethno-historian Alan Leventhal, who shoots a quick opinion by email:

“Tribal knowledge and participation has to be earned by both tribal members and outsiders; otherwise it constitutes colonial theft of tribal traditions.”

Critics pressured Proctor and his adopted siblings to stop calling themselves part of the Esselen Tribe. He re-branded their identity as a less formal offshoot: the Ekae Tribe, inspired by the Esselen word ike, which he says roughly translates to, “It’s all good.”

Except it wasn’t.

Instead of quelling the criticism, Proctor’s launch of a website – http://ekaetribe.org – inflamed some Esalen folks, who felt there was egregious cultural appropriation going on. Around 2012, Proctor took it down.

“It was so misunderstood,” he says. “We had people writing to us, saying, ‘How dare you call it a tribe?’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, do you know what the definition of a tribe is? People who do things together.’”

When the Esselen Nation confronted him, he stopped even calling it a tribe. “It’s a fraternity,” he says. “We’re just brothers and sisters who say ike to each other.”

On May 11, 2012, Proctor wrote a long email to Esselen Nation Chairwoman Louise Ramirez. “I am called Wingte Tighaaro Tihikpas by many. The name given to me by my parents is Rudolphe Keith Proctor Jr., the name given to me by my ancestors is Yonagooska Aniwahi Clark Keith. I am three bloods – Tslagi-yi, African and Anglo,” Proctor’s email began. “I am not a medicine man or a shaman. I am an elder.”

Some excerpts from what follows: “When we go to this site we ask permission of your ancestors to sing the songs,” he writes. “We introduce our ancestors to your ancestors for healing. The site by itself is where your ancestors put their garbage and it could be called holy and sacred by some and I respect that opinion. To me it is a 6,000-year-old Esselen ancestor site where human beings come today to pray and sing and talk to God, Great Spirit. Yes it is truly sacred… We are not playing Indian and such a thought should bring shame to the bearer…

“Yes we pray on your ancestral land, yes we are learning your language. I failed to ask you (Esselen Nation) permission to do so, please forgive me I meant no disrespect. Permission was granted to me by your relative, Little Bear. Was he out of line?”

Four days later, Ramirez shot back, pointedly addressing her response to Rudolphe K. Proctor Jr.

“Colonialism is the process whereby the dominant society unilaterally takes what it wants from conquered indigenous peoples,” she begins. “Such is the case of your request and justification for taking our traditions and claiming to embrace them and teach them.”

The letter goes on to berate Proctor, dismiss Little Bear’s authority and staunchly oppose the ceremonies. Ramirez concludes:

“No doubt you will justify in your mind that what you do is enlightened and therefore beneficial to all, and you will proceed as a member of the dominant colonial society to not respect our position, but instead just take what does not belong to you and your group and claim it as your own. If you continue to do this and think this way, then you are truly blind, and spiritually dirty and bankrupted. Aho!”

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Further complicating the issue: There might be bones.

The Esselen Indians lived in southern Monterey County, including Big Sur, for thousands of years, numbering about 1,200 at the time of first European contact in the 1600s, according to Gary Breschini of Salinas firm Archaeological Consulting. Radiocarbon dating puts Esselen people on the Esalen Institute property up to 5,500 years ago.

“Esalen is so sacred,” Nason says. “It’s at the very Western edge of the universe.”

The Esalen sweat lodge perches above the bank of Hot Springs Creek. Esalen staff moved it there from another location in 2003. It doesn’t look like much – just a humble stick frame next to a concrete fire pit. (Participants cover the frame with thick fabric or skins for the ceremony.)

What’s in the soil beneath the lodge is a matter of speculation. Esalen crews didn’t do any digging to build it. But most agree the lodge is on top of, or close to, a midden deposit: a place where Indians discarded their empty abalone, mussel and limpet shells. It’s also fairly close to a known Esselen burial ground, which Ramirez prefers we don’t identify precisely, as the sites can attract vandalism.

According to Breschini, the two midden deposits at Esalen cover up to 10 percent of the property. Whenever Esalen Institute undertakes construction on or near a cultural site, he says, an onsite archaeologist monitors the digging. For the past 20 years, that’s been Breschini.

Before that, in the absence of strict regulations, Esalen workers likely dug up any number of prehistoric bones and artifacts. (Folks active in Esalen’s online community share rumors of human bones found in several spots throughout the property.) “They were probably just reburied somewhere else,” Breschini says.

Under today’s state laws, if human remains are discovered on a construction site, the property owner must stop work and notify the county coroner. If the remains are determined to be likely Native American, the coroner notifies the Native American Heritage Commission, the state agency entrusted with protecting Indian cultural sites. The commission then appoints the “most likely descendant” to recommend how to handle the remains.

Breschini says no bones have been uncovered at Esalen in his time there. “We’re trying to limit the amount of digging they do anywhere near the two known [cultural] sites,” he says.

That doesn’t stop the rumors. In 2012, Hummux says, he saw a backhoe digging through a midden to build a handicap parking space near the sweat lodge. After he notified the county, Breschini was called in to monitor the grading. He says he found only minimal impacts – certainly no human remains.

But the incident shows just how intensely some Esalen insiders were opposing the sweat lodge by that point. Hummux felt Proctor had taken over the ceremony and was turning it into a spectacle, “taking liberties with the medicine.” Nason, meanwhile, had booted Hummux out of the Esselen Tribe he’d once adopted him into, saying he’d taken his authority too far.

Hummux began to see the whole sweat ceremony as tainted, tracing back to the lodge’s relocation above Hot Springs Creek.

Even Breschini had misgivings about the new placement. In a 2003 letter to consultant Bud Carney, he advises against the new spot, warning new charcoal from the ceremonial fires could compromise prehistoric deposits.

To prevent more damage, he writes, the lodge should be removed and the area returned to lawn. Instead, an Esalen crew covered the fire pit with concrete.

That didn’t jibe with Nason. “We want direct contact with the dirt, with Mother Earth,” he says.

As Ramirez sees it, the sweat lodge’s location within an archaeological site – whether it sits on top of her ancestors’ bones, or close to them – is a direct affront to the Esselen Nation. She says she can’t force Esalen Institute remove the sweat lodge, stop doing quasi-Indian ceremonies or quit using her people’s language.

But she can be a bureaucratic pain in its ass.

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Rudy Proctor says his mom was a white Englishwoman and his dad a Jamaican-Cherokee military man. Proctor lived many of his younger years in Germany, where he studied world religions. Back in the U.S., he moved to Carmel Valley and became a manager of Monterey Credit Union.

Nason adopted him into the Esselen Tribe in the 1980s. Together they formed a now-defunct nonprofit, Window to the West, to help people recover from substance abuse in the wilderness. Another group they helped form, the Four Winds Council, represents a quartet of local spiritual institutions – the Esselen Tribe, Tassajara Zen Center, New Camoldoli Hermitage and Esalen Institute – and foments strategies to protect the wild.

For most of the past decade, Proctor says, he’s led two or three sweat lodges per month at Esalen, though he’s dialed back this year due to health problems.

Proctor is paid $95 per head for weekend workshops, $208 for week-long ones. When he comes down just to lead a sweat lodge, he’s reimbursed about $100 for his travel and the firewood. He lectures his seminarians on Esselen folklore along with Christian, Jewish and Gnostic teachings, focusing on common denominators.

“A lot of young people are looking for something, and they’re finding it in the old wisdom,” he says.

Students who did a certain number of sweat lodge ceremonies were eligible to do a vision quest in the wilderness, Proctor says. The group would trek into the mountains, make a center camp, and then Proctor would place each student alone inside a circle. They’d sit there for four days, as still as possible, equipped with only water and a tent.

“Strange things happen, because animals are not used to human beings being still,” Proctor says. “The buzzards want to know if you’re dead. And then you’ve got to deal with your mind. Who am I? I’m 4 million years of ancestry.”

Students who did four vision quests, one in each cardinal direction, were adopted into the Esselen Tribe – at least while Nason was involved.

It’s not unusual for Native Americans to adopt non-Indians they love, Nason says. But the adopting grated on Ramirez, who worries about New Agers co-opting her tribe’s heritage. “It doesn’t make them Esselen,” she says.

In some respects, the debate over the Esalen sweat lodge comes down to who has the authority to sanction it. Ramirez says it should be her, the chairwoman of the Esselen Nation.

But Esalen Institute leaders point to Tom Little Bear Nason. He’s the one who still lives on Esselen land. It was his father Fred, Nason says, who shattered the official belief the Esselen people were extinct. Esalen Institute leaders often say Little Bear sanctioned their sweat lodge.

What they didn’t know until now: Nason no longer gives the lodge his blessing.

He says he hasn’t led an Esalen sweat lodge, or a vision quest for Esalen seminarians, in many years. (He still leads lodges on his own land and vision quests for his own tribe, he adds.) The last time he ran a lodge at Esalen Institute – more than a decade ago, he says – he got spiritually sick, which made him physically sick and landed him in the emergency room.

“I don’t believe they’ve run the sweat lodge appropriately or traditionally, and I want no part of it,” he says. “I do not give them spiritual authorization to do ceremonies at that sweat lodge. It is at an inappropriate location on a sacred site.”

It’s not that Nason has a problem with non-Indians doing sweats. There are ways to go about it properly, he says, either by stripping out the Native American spirituality to make it a secular thing, like a sauna, or by accepting an invitation from an actual Indian elder and following that tribe’s traditional protocol.

“It shouldn’t be, ‘Oh man, I really want to do a sweat lodge, it’s tomorrow night,” he says. “We’ve been educating [Esalen Institute] to try to slow that down. Because that was rampant.”

A number of other things about the lodge bother him: Its alleged past use as a funding mechanism. The current location near the ancestral burial site. The non-traditional practice of bringing women and men into the lodge naked together. The rapid clip of development on the archaeologically sensitive property.

Nason says he’s never vocalized these concerns publicly before. “They’re going to get very upset with me when I say that,” he says, “but that’s the hard truth.”

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Mac Murphy, the Esalen co-founder’s son and a member of Proctor’s tribe, says Little Bear has been a mentor. When I relay Nason’s current stance, he sputters.

“That’s such bullshit,” he says. “I’m sorry, I’ve been dealing with these politics inter-tribally – with Rudy, with Louise, with Little Bear. He supports us.”

When he speaks in the Esselen language, Murphy says, he does so in reverence to the Indians who once lived on his family’s property. “It helps me connect with the land,” he says. “I have never experienced a ceremony that culturally appropriates Native Americans or pretends to be them.”

Esalen Institute President Gordon Wheeler says the sweat lodge is only made available to people taking certain workshops or month-long internships, and ceremonies are led by a half-dozen people specifically approved by the Esalen leadership.

This is a place that specializes in spiritual cocktails, mixing Tantra and Buddhism and yoga and something called “ecstatic dance.” Crossing cultural boundaries, splicing Eastern religions with Western mentalities, exploring the mind and spirit – these things are Esalen Institute’s M.O., and Wheeler says his board is committed to doing it respectfully and transparently.

“We’re the people who brought Boris Yeltsin to the West,” he says. “We believe there’s a higher intentionality that can unite people, and we reach for that.”

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Ramirez hasn’t spoken with anyone affiliated with the Esalen Institute since their 50th anniversary celebration in 2012, when her communications with the center’s administration broke down.

She says she declined an invitation to give a formal blessing, but Wheeler thought she was coming. He publicly introduced her at the Joan Baez concert on Esalen’s main lawn. That’s when he realized, with some embarrassment, she wasn’t there.

Both Ramirez and Wheeler say they’ve unsuccessfully attempted to contact the other since. Maybe the glitch was as innocent as a wrong email address, but damage was done.

“They wanted the acknowledgement of our tribe but really do not care about my people,” Ramirez emails me. “There is nothing I can do.”

Maybe not in connection with the sweat lodge. But there are a few things Ramirez can do to make her objections known. Earlier this month, she wrote a letter to Monterey County planners and the Native American Heritage Commission, protesting a proposed addition to one of Esalen’s lodges. That project, she writes, is within feet of a relocated midden and within a half-mile of a known burial site. She asks that her organization, Esselen Nation, be consulted every step of the way, from project notices to handling of artifacts.

A truce is possible, Ramirez says, but the path to reconciliation starts by moving the sweat lodge and ending Proctor’s ceremonies. “Nobody’s going to make him change who he is until Esalen Institute stops making money off of him,” she says.

Peace with Little Bear Nason seems closer at hand. “I don’t hate Tommy,” she says. “I think they’re using him, too.”

She has invited Nason to join the Esselen Nation. Nason says he might consider it, if it didn’t threaten his family’s trust allotment in Ventana Wilderness.

Regardless, he says, he now supports Esselen Nation’s bid for federal recognition: “I just don’t want to fight.”

To all the non-Esselens reading this, Ramirez offers one simple phrase from the Esselen language. Words refuting the historians who called her people extinct. Words challenging the federal government to recognize her tribe. Words rejecting heat-induced hallucinations of mystical Indian approval.

“Let ka lai,” she says.

“We are here.”

Nov 27

2014

newWKOGadnim

Uncategorized

Capitalism Co-optation Shuswap First Nations

Shuswap Chief’s Salary Highest in Country

Warrior Publications

October 31, 2014

Chief Paul Sam’s take-home pay higher than prime minister’s at more than $200,000

OTTAWA — An elderly B.C. First Nations chief and his ex-wife, along with one of their sons and a grandson, received more than $4.1 million in remuneration over the past four years.

Shuswap First Nation Chief Paul Sam, 80, gets a tax-free salary that has averaged $264,000 over that period to run a tiny reserve near Invermere, a resort community near the Alberta border. The Shuswap have 267 members, of whom just 87 live on the reserve. His son, Dean Martin, is doing even better, with an average annual salary of $536,000 over the four years, running a band corporation that operates various businesses on and near the reserve.

The figures were provided this week to The Vancouver Sun by disgruntled Shuswap members who are challenging in next month’s election a family that has ruled for more than three decades.

A dissident councillor, who earns $57,700 annually, said she was unaware until recently that Chief Sam and the only other councillor, ex-wife Alice Sam, 82, were earning such lofty salaries.

“We had no idea. We are absolutely disgusted,” Barbara Cote told The Sun Thursday while vowing to reform band finances if she’s successful in a bid to take control of council.

Cote’s concerns got backing Thursday from the office of Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt.

“Our government expects First Nation band councils to use tax payer dollars responsibly and for the benefit of all community members,” Erica Meekes, a spokeswoman for the department said in a statement.

“Community members have asked for an explanation of the salaries of this chief and councillor. They deserve that explanation.”

Both Cote and Tim Eugene, another candidate in next month’s election, say they want to take over council and bring in reforms to ensure both disclosure and a greater distribution of funds to cover education and culture programs, child care, and home renovation.

They said some community members have gone without water and electricity in the winter, but were unable to get help from the band.

For the most recent fiscal year, Chief Sam and his ex-wife both reported salaries of about $202,000, their lowest in the four years. The chief’s top salary was just slightly less than $300,000 in 2010-11, while the top year for Alice Sam, 82, was 2011-12 when she had about $242,000 in remuneration.

Even the $202,000 figures make them the highest paid politicians on an after-tax basis — not only among First Nations leaders across the country, but also among all Canadian politicians, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper earns $327,400 plus a $2,000-a-year car allowance. Premier Christy Clark has a $193,532 annual salary.

“To take home $202,000 off reserve you would need a salary of $330,000,” according to CTF B.C. spokesman Jordan Bateman.

Their sons, Dean Martin and band media relations spokesman Gord Martin, said their parents’ hard work and longevity justify having salaries higher than a prime minister who presides over an economy that produces just under $2 trillion in goods and services annually.

Shuswap First Nation Chief Paul Sam gets a tax-free salary that has averaged $264,000 over the last four years to run a tiny reserve near Invermere. Prime Minister Stephen Harper earns $327,400 plus a $2,000-a-year car allowance, but after paying taxes, he would take home about $202,000 of that. File photo. Photograph by: shuswapnation.org , Handout

“With all due respect to Harper and to everybody else, I don’t think they’ve been in power for 34 straight years,” Dean Martin, chief executive officer of Kinbasket Development Corp., said in an interview Thursday.

“To be … the leader of a nation, and we’re not just a band, we are a nation, and to lead it for 34 years, is something totally unheard of, I don’t care in what political field you’re in.”

He also noted that his father is the band manager, while his mother is the bookkeeper, so both have jobs beyond political duties.

The recently released figures show that Dean Martin makes the most money in the family, with $765,651 in remuneration in 2010-11 that included $54,498 in travel expenses. The total fell to $410,730 in 2011-12, and $431,549 in 2012-13. Figures for the latest fiscal year for Dean Martin weren’t available.

Martin said the high salaries are justified because the family has brought considerable economic development to the community, with assets that include a golf course and resort, a new supermarket, a Tim Hortons, a hardware store, and real estate development for non-Aboriginal residents.

“I’m not embarrassed about what we’re doing,” Martin said.

The band takes in considerable government revenues, including just over $900,000 in the 2013-14 years from the federal Aboriginal affairs and Health departments.

Martin’s late son Randy, an elected councillor, earned $276,012 in 2010-11 and $301,341 in 2011-12. He died early in the 2012-13 year during a trip to Las Vegas, having already earned $35,159 that year.

Bands are only recently making salary details public in response to legal requirements under the First Nations Financial Disclosure Act, passed last year by the Harper government over the objections of the New Democratic Party and the Liberals.

The CTF’s analysis of that data indicated that the highest paid B.C. chief last year was Ron Giesbrecht, of the Kwikwetlem First Nation, who recorded $914,219 in income. That was an apparently isolated incident relating to a controversial $800,000 bonus Giesbrecht received in connection with a single land transaction with the B.C. government.

The 16 other top salaries highlighted by the CTF, among the salaries of hundreds of chiefs and councillors, were mostly in the range of just over $100,000 to a high of $123,033 for Cheslatta Carrier Chief Richard Peters. The exception was Osoyoos Chief Clarence Louie, one of B.C.’s most entrepreneurial chiefs, who pulled in $147,369.

Nationally, no other chiefs or councillors topped the $200,000 mark, according to the CTF.

Chief Sam, according to one band member, moved to Canada from the U.S. not long before being elected chief 34 years ago. When he came to Canada his surname was changed from Martin to Sam, but his son refused to explain why the change was made.

Update (November 8, 2014) – Shuswap reserve chooses new council after spending became key issue in band election:

http://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/shuswap-reserve-chooses-new-council-after-spending-became-key-issue-in-band-election/

Sep 17

2014

244

newWKOGadnim

350.org / 1Sky, Amnesty International, Avaaz, Earth Day Network, Human Rights Watch, Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Occupy Wall Street, Pacifism as Pathology, Purpose [Public Relations Arm of Avaaz], TckTcktck Partner: Meet 'The Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change', The International Campaign to Destabilize Syria, Uncategorized, Whiteness & Aversive Racism, World Vision

#withSyria Avaaz Behavourial Change Branding David Petraeus FIDH Front Line Defenders Human Rights Network Human Rights Watch Marketing Myanmar Netwar Psyops Purpose Reporters Without Borders Social Engineering Syria Syrian Civil Defence The Syria Campaign Tom Perriello White Helmets World Bank

SYRIA: Avaaz, Purpose & the Art of Selling Hate for Empire

September 17, 2014

by Cory Morningstar

“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.” — From the article Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part I, Section I, Sept 10, 2012

The organization Avaaz was instrumental in building public approval for the No Fly Zone for the illegal invasion of Libya in 2011. The NATO-led destabilization/illegal war in Libya resulted in the annihilation of a formerly sovereign country that has since descended into brutal chaos. Tens upon thousands of Libyans died and the most savage ethnic cleansing that the mind can imagine has been widespread. The destruction of Libya has been nothing less than a full-scale bloodbath.

Above image from the Avaaz website: “Libya No-Fly Zone: As Libyan government jets drop bombs on the civilian population, the UN Security Council will decide in 48 hours whether to impose a no-fly zone to keep Qaddafi’s warplanes on the ground.” [Emphasis in original] [Further discussion of the flag within this Avaaz image can be read in the epilogue.]

Above image: Avaaz takes credit for the implementation of the Libya No Fly Zone. [Further Reading: “Did Libya’s Citizens Demand Foreign Intervention?” A ridiculous question, yet according to Avaaz, the answer is yes.]

When Avaaz rolled out the same rinse, lather and repeat campaign for the seizing of Syria, the public did not fall prey as easily. The campaign failed. Below are three separate links to the Avaaz campaign calling for a no-fly zone over Syria.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130609103019/http://www.avaaz.org/en/syria_the_last_straw_a/ (June 4, 2013) (Avaaz utilizing the “chemical attack” that has since been discredited.)

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/syria_the_last_straw_0/ (June 14, 2013) (Avaaz alleges a “rape crisis” committed by soldiers of the Syrian army – the same tactic used to incite hatred against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi that was later discredited.)

http://web.archive.org/web/20130825092136/https://secure.avaaz.org/en/syria_no_fly_zone/ (Again, utilizing the “chemical attack” that has since been discredited)

Of the Avaaz campaigns pressing for a no-fly zone (air strikes) over Syria that flourished in June of 2013, at least two employed the use of chemical weapons to incite fear and hatred toward the Assad government. It does not take much stretch of the imagination to consider Avaaz had inside knowledge of the upcoming chemical attack that would take place in outer Damascus approximately 10 weeks later. Considering Avaaz co-founder Tom Perriello’s connection to the Obama administration and its well known war criminals, it is entirely plausible that Avaaz was churning out propaganda that would lead up to and sensationalize a false flag attack.

Photo: Avaaz co-founder and Congressman Tom Perriello with war criminal, General David Petraeus (far left). Under this Flickr photo the caption reads: “Passing the Baton, United States Institute of Peace” [2009] [Photo: Jon-Phillip Sheridan | Source] [In July, 2011, “General David Petraeus was approved as CIA Director by both the Senate Intelligence Committee and then the full Senate, whose vote was an astounding 94-0, astounding because this is a man who was deeply implicated in war crimes, including torture.” Source] [Welcome to the Brave New World – Brought to You by Avaaz, Sept 13, 2013]

The August 30, 2013 article “On the Eve of an Illegal Attack on Syria, Avaaz/350.org Board Members Beat the Drums of War” documents Avaaz links imploring a no-fly zone on Syria – both public links have since been removed. The article also featured 350.org board member Van Jones calling for air strikes on Syria. (Adding twisted irony, Van Jones also serves as co-founder and executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. The co-opting of deceased civil rights revolutionaries to advance the goals of hegemony has become common practice within these foundation-financed projects.)

Screenshots of an email from co-founder of Avaaz, Ricken Patel to Avaaz subscribers dated August 27, 2014 can be found here (1) and here (2). The email from Patel represented a last-ditch effort to garner support for a no-fly zone as the US prepared to launch an attack on Syria.

One year earlier, in 2012 Avaaz was allegedly sponsoring fabricated videos of civilian massacres, to back deeper foreign intervention in Syria. Fact-checking and videos appear to collaborate these claims.

Jump forward to 2014.

In the September 8, 2014 article Pentagon Planning Points to Possible Anti-Syria US Military Campaign, author Stephen Gowans observes:

“Now, it appears that Washington is on the cusp of pressing ahead with its planned campaign of military action. The New York Times has reported that ‘Pentagon planners envision a military campaign’ to destroy ISIS ‘in its sanctuary inside Syria’ that could last ‘at least 36 months.’ According to The Wall Street Journal, airstrikes would support anti-Assad fighters unaligned with ISIS, who would be bankrolled by $500 million in US funding, and backed by a global coalition, including the UK and Australia, that would ‘provide a range of assistance, including humanitarian aid and weapons.’ These countries could also join the United States in an air-war over Syria.”

It should not be considered a coincidence that at the same time, a polished, sophisticated and highly financed “Save Syria” campaign is being created in the board rooms of the Empire’s favourite Harvard boys.

Where, under the organization Avaaz, the public hasn’t acquiesced to an air strike on Syria, the New York public relations firm Purpose Inc. has stepped in.

Purpose is a for-profit enterprise that is marketed to appear like a non-profit. Their area of expertise is behavioural change.

“[Purpose] has a non-profit arm, which incubates protests and accepts donations. This is cross-subsidised by its for-profit arm, which makes money in a variety of ways. It sells consulting services to big companies such as Google and Audi, and to charities such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.” – The Economist

GetUp, Avaaz and Purpose co-founder Jeremy Heimans, 2010.

Purpose Inc.: The Crème de la Crème Agents of Behavioural Change

Purpose | Avaaz Co-Founders

Vision: “Purpose is a global initiative that draws on leading technologies, political organizing and behavioral economics to build powerful, tech-savvy movements that can transform culture and influence policy.”

Avaaz and GetUp co-founders Jeremy Heimans (CEO) and David Madden [2] are also founders of the New York consulting firm, Purpose Inc.

Avaaz was created in part by MoveOn, a Democratic Party associated Political Action Committee (or PAC), formed in response to the impeachment of President Clinton. Avaaz and MoveOn are funded in part by convicted inside-trader and billionaire hedge fund mogul, George Soros.

Avaaz affiliate James Slezak is also identified as a co-founder and CEO of Purpose at its inception in 2009.

The secret behind the success of both Avaaz and Purpose is their reliance upon and expertise in behavioural change.

While the behavioural change tactics used by Avaaz are on public display, double-breasted, for-profit Purpose, with its non-profit arm, sells their expertise behind the scenes to further the interest of hegemony and capital. Whether it be a glossy campaign to help facilitate yet another illegal “humanitarian intervention” led by aggressive U.S. militarism (an oxymoron if there ever was one), or the creation of a new global “green” economy, Purpose is the consulting firm that the wolves of Wall Street and oligarchs alike depend upon to make it happen.

Make no mistake, the Yale (for example, Avaaz co-founder and former U.S. Representative *Tom Perriello) and Harvard graduates that comprise the “Avaaz boys” (many having been groomed by McKinsey and Company) are considered “the dream team” by the globe’s most powerful capitalists, including those at the United Nations and the World Bank. Avaaz co-founder Andrea Madden works for the World Bank in Burma [Myanmar]. Her husband is Avaaz co-founder David Madden who has taken up residence in Burma. [March 23, 2013: Western Media Celebrates Faux Progress in Myanmar] Madden has co-founded a marketing firm, Parami Road in Myanmar: “Our clients are mostly international companies entering Myanmar and they demand an international standard of work.”

“After years of isolation, Myanmar is opening up. Opportunities abound. However international companies have little experience here and local firms have little experience working with them. Parami Road meets this need.” – Parami website

Another key co-founder of Avaaz is none other than pro-war, pro-Israel, U.S. Democrat Tom Perriello, former U.S. Representative (represented the 5th District of Virginia from 2008 to 2010) and founding member of the House Majority Leader’s National Security Working Group. As demonstrated in the 2012 investigative report on Avaaz, Perriello’s curriculum vitae, built upon privilege within elite circles, is quite extensive.

[*Full profile on Avaaz co-founder Tom Perriello: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section I [Link]

The former Managing Director of Partnerships for “Purpose” is Marilia Bezerra. From 2006 to 2011 Bezerra held an integral position within the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) executive leadership. As Clinton Global Initiative director of commitments, Bezerra led the redesign of member engagement and commitments services into a year-round operation. From 2007 to 2008, Bezerra held the position of sponsorship manager of the Clinton Global Initiative where she directly managed five major sponsorship accounts, including Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Procter & Gamble, valued at over $2 million dollars. From 2006 to 2008, Bezerra held the position of Commitment Development Senior Manager for the Clinton Global Initiative. In 2009, Bezerra was Deputy Director of Commitments for the Clinton Global Initiative.

One should note that in the case of many NGOs, on 990 tax forms it appears as though those at the helm are paid minimally, if at all. Rather than salaries, many founders of institutions make immense fees via consulting services where their names are not identified on 990 forms. In the case of Avaaz, co-founder Ricken Patel does take a salary (approx. $190,000.00 per year) plus consulting fees. Consulting fees must be considered the bread and butter of many “progressives” whose incomes rival CEOs of multinational corporations. The salaries and incomes are incredible when one accounts for the fact that many NGOs, such as Avaaz, rake in millions of dollars in donations from well-intentioned and hard-working citizens who are at or below the poverty line.

[Full profile of Ricken Patel: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section I [Link]

Purpose Inc. (with its co-founders) is a favourite of high-finance websites such as The Economist and Forbes and sells its consulting services and branding/marketing campaigns to Google, Audi, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many others that comprise the world’s most powerful corporations and institutions. In 2012, it raised $3m from investors. “Ford Foundation, which has given Purpose’s non-profit arm a grant, reckons it is shaping up to be “one of the blue-chip social organisations of the future.” ^[^Source^] Purpose, like many other foundations, such as Rockefeller (who initially incubated 1Sky which merged with 350.org in 2011), also serves as an “incubator of social movements.”^[^{Further reading on Purpose}^]

Heimans, the Avaaz front man of Purpose, is a darling of the high-finance corporate world. “In 2011, Jeremy received the Ford Foundation’s 75th anniversary Visionaries Award. The World Economic Forum at Davos has named him a Young Global Leader, and the World e-Government Forum has named Jeremy and Purpose co-founder David Madden among the “Top 10 People Who Are Changing the World of the Internet and Politics.” [Source]

The New York public relations firm Purpose has created at least four anti-Assad NGOs/campaigns: The White Helmets, Free Syrian Voices [3], The Syria Campaign [4] and March Campaign #withSyria.

White Helmets / Syrian Civil Defence on Facebook and Twitter
The Syria Campaign on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

“Who are we? Three years after the peaceful uprising in Syria, politicians and the media have largely forgotten what the UN calls ‘the greatest humanitarian tragedy of our time.’ But we haven’t.” — Front page of “The Syria Campaign” and the “White Helmets / Syrian Civil Defence” website

The March Campaign #withSyria | Over 130 Partners

Purpose’s March campaign #withSyria website (which doubles as a hash tag for Twitter) partners include: Open Society Foundation (George Soros), Amnesty International, Christian Aid, Care, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and many more of the largest “humanitarian” NGOs within the non-profit industrial complex which makes up a billion dollar industry. [Full list of partners: http://marchcampaign.withsyria.com/partners0]. Utilizing the consumer culture’s celebrity fetish to sell war (and the illusory “green economy“) is a vital marketing strategy of Purpose. In the case of #withSyria, famed street artist Banksy has reworked his “Young Girl” famed graffiti stencil in support of the campaign. On the main page of this website the behavioural change strategists at Purpose promote a slick, emotive video of a white child (in America) slowly becoming traumatized by the violence in Syria. No doubt, Purpose’s marketing executives have taken this avenue because they know that the majority of Euro-Americans with privilege simply are not moved by images of suffering children that are non-Caucasian. Non-White children being slaughtered by imperial states became normalized for most Euro-American citizens long ago.

And of course corporate media is not far away to promote the cries for war peace. Consider today, on September 17, 2014, ABC “reports“:

“What if we could reverse the explosion of a bomb? A group of 130 organizations from around the world, known collectively as the ‘With Syria’ campaign, released a video Wednesday that shows just what that would look like. The campaign hopes to bring attention to the violence in Syria. (video) Warning: Contains disturbing imagery. In the video, the act of a bomb exploding near children playing is reversed: The blood returns to their heads, the children stand back up, run in reverse and continue the game they were playing. A message says, ‘We can’t reverse what’s happened in Syria, but we can change how the story ends.'”

Indeed Purpose is being paid to bring about the ending that the elites have hired them to ensure.

“Even more impressive than her military, America has built the most sophisticated propaganda machinery the planet has ever seen.” – Garikai Chengu

Free Syrian Voices partners include Amnesty International, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, FIDH, Front Line Defenders, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and “other international, regional and Syrian organizations” – which conveniently go unnamed.

Such emotionally charged campaigns are critical tools for empire. They have become critical (and successful) in building the acquiescence required for “humanitarian interventions” (aka regime change with extensive “collateral damage” thrown in for good measure).

“In the IC Magazine publication Communications in Conflict, is noted a new form of psychological warfare termed ‘false hope.’ False hope, as a tool for subverting social movements, is unparalleled in its effectiveness. What once was crudely accomplished through political repression, censorship, educational indoctrination and misleading propaganda, is now supplemented, if not surpassed, through vertical integration of the non-profit industrial complex. Where Wall Street once had to rely on threats and bribery to intimidate or corrupt social movements, it now has a vast army of neoliberal foundations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social media at its disposal.” — Jay Taber, False Hope, September 6, 2014

It is important to note that Purpose is a for-profit business strategically presented as though it is a non-profit (similar to the Change.org petition site). This begs the question of who is financing the Syrian campaigns. The fact that a group of wealthy elites from Harvard living privileged lifestyles in New York City (and abroad) decide, via glossy marketing campaigns, who will live or die on the other side of the world is the ultimate representation of whitism and racism – an egregious affront to people everywhere. [Further reading on Purpose]

“If there is any doubt concerning the nefarious undertones of subversiveness in these NGO dealings, [National Endowment for Democracy] NED founder reportedly said the following in the 1990s: ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’ What was once done at night under the cloak of ‘imperialism’ is now done during the day under the guise of ‘humanitarianism.'” — WKOG 30-point Primer

The many facets of Purpose:

1) Purpose (tax identification number 68-0607622) is a for-profit certified B-corporation “that uses an innovative model to pool some of the world’s leading experts and practitioners in order to fund, launch and accelerate the growth of new social movement organizations.”

2) Purpose Action (tax identification number 45-2451509), the non-profit arm of Purpose, is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit advocacy organization “focused on changing policy.” Purpose Action Board of Directors includes Brett Solomon, executive director of Access, former campaigns director at Avaaz, former executive director of GetUp! ^[5]

3) Purpose Foundation (tax identification number 27-3106760) is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization “focused on education and changing culture.” ^[6]

4) Purpose Campaign (tax identification number 68-0607622) “Develops social and consumer movements.”

US Military Utilize NGOs to Induce Pacification & Advance Western Ideologies on Iraqi Citizens

The video below captures highlights from the 2004 Princeton Colloquium on Public and International Affairs and should that be at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs – The Role of NGOs in Global Governance and Society. Attention to the title is key: “NON-governmental organizations in global GOVERNANCE.” [Note the use of the term “guerrilla” (4:13) in describing any citizen/person resisting the occupation/assault by US military on Iraq soil.] Since the filming of this video, accelerating regime change operations are being conducted by Western militaries, hand in hand with Western NGOs throughout the globe. [See more: http://www.interventionism.info/en/Re…]. In essence, NGOs have become an indispensable instrument of destabilization and regime change for imperial states and hegemonic interests. NGOs also serve as the primary agents to implant neoliberal policies and western ideologies in targeted states to advance and protect the interests of the NGOs’ funders.

The Hate Campaign

The June, 2012, Avaaz “Good Versus Evil” campaign for the Rio Summit. Above: A downloadable poster as found on the Avaaz Press Centre published in the Financial Times. Vilification: Note the dark cast/ugly sky behind the leaders Avaaz would wish you to believe are “evil,” versus the light and sun shining through over the Imperialist, obstructionist “leaders” that Avaaz is attempting to convince you are “good.”

“‘You have to investigate the supply of hatred,’ Glaeser continues. ‘Who has the incentive and the ability to induce group hatred? This pushes us toward the crux of the model: politicians or anyone else will supply hatred when hatred is a complement to their policies.'” — The Behavioural Economics of Hatred

Heiman’s work been recognized in publications like The New York Times and The Economist. In The Economist, Heiman states he chose his career path when “in 2001, a college student named Eli Pariser created an online petition calling for a multilateral response to the ‘9/11 terrorist attacks.'” Over a decade on, with civilian deaths that amount to millions, I’m sure the Iraqis are most grateful. It must be noted that Eli Pariser, too, is a co-founder of Avaaz and Co-Founder and Executive Director of MoveOn.org (Avaaz founder) PAC.

Above: The Syria Campaign, Non-profit Organization, created by Purpose, launched March 7, 2014.

“We were afraid the regime would fire another rocket, as they always come back to the area of attack when people come to rescue to bomb them, so we started evacuating people in a hurry so no more lives would be lost. This picture was taken then! That boy holding my neck like that was one of the moments in which I knew why I am a civil defender!” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

Purpose Inc. strategically employs images, carefully worded text and slick video that provoke intense emotion. Key language includes children, refugees, regime, and their work “in the most dangerous place in the world.”

“A year ago today, the Syrian government used Sarin gas against its own people killing over a thousand, many of them children. The world was outraged and demanded Assad destroy his stockpile of chemical weapons. Today chlorine gas is still being used on civilian neighbourhoods, rolled out the back of helicopters in rusty ‘barrel bombs.’” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm, Image by Designer : FaDi zyada whose work is also featured on the Heinrich Von Arabien Foundation website. This same website features an absurd photo of Syrians holding up a poster that features a “thumbs up” illustration for USA and the UN.

[***Reference list for deconstructing the myth that Syrian army + “dictator” used chemical weapons in August 2013 by Susan Dirgham: http://australiansforreconciliationinsyria.org/reference-list-chemical-attack-in-damascus-august-2013/]

Exploiting the death of Syrian children to provoke air strikes and military aggression demonstrates that such agencies go to any extreme to further American foreign policy. Note that the very carnage described above: “killing over a thousand, many of them children” is par for the course for the U.S. military, which carries out such atrocities on innocent civilians, including children, on a daily basis, all over the world. But don’t expect an Avaaz or Purpose campaign against the Obama Regime any time soon. They will be too busy under the guise of their NGO MoveOn, working on his re-election.

The following quote represents the real purpose of Purpose:

“The media may have turned away from what’s unfolding daily in Syria but today we all have the tools to tell the world the truth. Please share widely and remember the children of Syria in your thoughts today.”

The lapdog media have not turned away, but much of the public has. It’s the job of Purpose to employ netwar methods (“a form of low intensity conflict, crime, and activism waged by actors using social networking services” according to Wikipedia) on the public (targeting Euro-Americans) that will instill hatred toward the democratically elected Bashar al-Assad.

“It’s past time for President Obama to present a plan for dealing with the humanitarian crisis in Syria.” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

“Today we remember the more than 1,300 who lost their lives in the Ghouta chemical weapons attacks. Let’s also remember those +150,000 who face torture and death while being detained.” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

Let’s not mention Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and a mile long list of the Obama administration’s involvement in torture, shall we? Syria certainly demonstrates that the first casualty of war (in this case a destabilization effort) is truth. The following excerpt is from the article Foley & Sotloff’s Reporting Show Why the US Should Stop Its Proxy War on Syria, which lays bare that “both journalists documented the reality of Free Syria Army”:

“While in Turkey Sotloff broadcast news of Syrian rebels being found and arrested with chemical weapon Sarin gas. He used Twitter to send out the Turkish news report. That was in May, three months before the August 21 2013 chemical weapons deaths in outer Damascus. The Syrian rebels were arrested by Turkish police but quickly released, giving evidence to claims of Turkish government support for Nusra. Sotloff was puzzled why the mainstream media was not giving this event coverage.”

“This Thursday marks the one year anniversary of the chemical weapons attack that took the lives of over 1,000 Syrians. Since then tens of thousands more have been killed by different methods. Starvation is one. But the international media and world leaders still haven’t come together to put an end to it.” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

Above image: Another call for “world leaders” to “come together to put an end to it.” Yet while Purpose may cry crocodile tears over the starvation of Syrians, Avaaz has asked for tough sanctions against Syria. Purpose and Avaaz want to “have their cake and eat it too” – while Syrian lives are destroyed by the oligarchs that both Purpose and Avaaz serve.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130911002219/https://www.avaaz.org/en/syria_end_the_terror/

The High Gloss Veneer

The following video highlights human rights investigator and award-winning journalist, Keith Harmon Snow, detailing the corrupt NGOs and their portrayal of Africa in order to illicit funds. Snow must be considered one of our finest Western reporters for obtaining true independent, grassroots news from the continent of Africa. Within the lecture, Snow discusses the psyops/propaganda strategically orchestrated behind the “Save Darfur” campaigns/movements which, in 2004, began to saturate the populace. At the helm of this “movement” was “The Center for American Progress.”

The Center for American Progress is closely connected with the same players that founded and financed Avaaz. Today, with Avaaz at the forefront, the non-profit industrial complex has been appointed trusted messenger of a grotesque and disturbing ideology; nothing less than a complete reflection and validation of the U.S. administration’s rhetoric intended to justify the annihilation and occupation of sovereign states under the false pretense of “humanitarian intervention” and “responsibility to protect.” [7]

“The Syrian government has been dropping ‘barrel bombs’ on civilian areas despite a UN order to stop, targeting schools and hospitals. Those too poor to flee their homes can only hope that if the bomb drops, the White Helmets will be there to help get them out.… Let’s tell the world about the White Helmets and help get them the support they need.” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

“Know multiple languages? We need you! Help us get as many eyeballs on the Miracle Baby video by translating the subtitles into as many languages possible here: http://bit.ly/1tKSmrz” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

Firms and agencies such as Purpose write and develop the scripts and design the sets. They bring the stories to life, strategically exploit and manipulate our emotions, ultimately ensuring we come to accept and partake in their politically acceptable means of discourse – discourse sanctioned (and financed) by the empire.

“Syrians welcome Iraq’s Yazidi refugees into their country with warm meals, giving them their clothes and in some cases opening up their homes.” – Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

The above quote is representative of perhaps one too many spin doctors, for who is allowing Iraq’s Yazidi refugees into Syria, if not the Assad government? Indeed, Assad’s government has accepted more refugees per capita than any other country in the Middle East.

“In the wake of Robin Williams’ death, the people of Idlib remember the actor/comedian with a quote on freedom.” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

This image takes absurdity to a new level. Recap: In the midst of being bombed, starved, and rained on by chemical weapons, Syrians take time to pay homage to an American actor/comedian (because the love of the America that is destroying the Middle East is so great), by quoting a line from a genie in a bottle from a scene in an animated Disney movie and creating a banner in the English language.

“Understand what this infographic says, and you’ll understand why The Syria Campaign exists. And why you and your friends need to join. http://bit.ly/VlYOsi” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

In the infographic above, Purpose deliberately keeps the stats limited to 2014. Otherwise they would have to visualize the millions of Iraqi citizens who have been murdered due to the U.S. illegal war and occupation in Iraq. Further, Purpose gives no attention to the deaths in Ukraine, Honduras, Libya, Haiti, Congo (millions) and all of the other countries being decimated by Imperialism and foreign interference.

“Tell Obama we need a plan set forth to address the worsening humanitarian crisis in Syria. bit.ly/1nITTtO” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

The message is clear. Purpose wants the green light for military intervention in Syria, well-cloaked under the guise of humanitarianism – an oxymoron if there ever was one.

“How were you to know you were approving posts from one of the world’s most violent dictators? A man who’s ordered the dropping of bombs on hospitals and primary schools?” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

“Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has been re-elected and he can thank Facebook for being a propaganda platform.” — Purpose Inc. Marketing Firm

“It is critical to note that the imperialist powers (inclusive of the UN) do not criticize or demonize or withdraw their support from such leaders on any ethical or moral ground. Denunciation of state leaders and emotive language is merely theatre. Rather, the imperialist states strategically set out to destroy any state leader that is unwilling to be controlled by US interests and foreign policy. A case in point is unwavering support of the Saudi royal family responsible for atrocious human rights violations to which the imperialist countries turn a blind eye.” (from Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part I, Section I)

The Behavioural Change Dream Team:

· Full profile of Jeremy Heimans: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section II [link]

· Full profile of David Madden: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section II [link]

· Full profile of James Slezak: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section III [link]

Further reading on behavioural change: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section II [link]

Further reading on Avaaz and Purpose: This Changes Nothing. Why the People’s Climate March Guarantees Climate Catastrophe

+++

Epilogue

Consider that the colour of the national flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya (from 1977 to 2011; The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya) was pure green in colour. Unlike the one featured in the Avaaz campaign. The green colour traditionally symbolizes Islam. In Libya, green was also a colour traditionally used to represent the Tripolitania region (commonly referred to as Tripoli) that NATO forces fought to seize. The iconic green flag was chosen by Libyan leader/brother Muammar Gaddafi to symbolize his political philosophy (after his revolutionary Green Book). On 10 March 2011, France was the first state to recognize the council as the official government of Libya, as well as the first to allow the Libyan embassy staff to raise the red, black, green and white flag that would replace the green flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya. On 21 March, the “new” flag was flown by the Permanent Mission of Libya to the United Nations and appeared on their official website … this flag, which reigned prior to the Libyan Jamahiriya, is now the only flag used by the United Nations to represent Libya. According to the following UN statement: “Following the adoption by the General Assembly of resolution 66/1, the Permanent Mission of Libya to the United Nations formally notified the United Nations of a Declaration by the National Transitional Council of 3 August 2011 changing the official name of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya to “Libya” as well as a decision to change Libya’s national flag to the original.” [Wikipedia]

On August 24, 2011 it is reported by yet another mouthpiece for empire that:

“As Libyan rebels take over, embassies worldwide have been replacing the old Libyan flag with a new one…. But starting in February, a new flag – red, black, and green with a white star and crescent in the center – has been hoisted at Libyan embassies around the world, from Switzerland to Bangladesh. It is the same flag being flown by the jubilant rebels themselves as they descend on Tripoli.”

In the article, the words “U.S. funded mercenaries” have been replaced with “the jubilant rebels.” It would be well worth investigating who ordered, manufactured and paid for thousands of these new flags (prior to or commencing in February of 2011) and ensured they would replace the national flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya that flourished from 1977 to 2011.

Further Reading:

· The Grotesque and Disturbing Ideology at the Helm of Avaaz, March 7, 2012

· Sostenere il governo USA senza saperlo: il grave esempio di “Avaaz,” March 8, 2012

· SPEAKING TRUTH: A Profound Message to Avaaz from Poet Gabriel Impaglione of Argentina, March 12, 2012

· Argentine Journalist Stella Calloni Denounces Avaaz | Latin American Unions Follow Her Lead, March 12, 2012

· Avaaz: Empire Propaganda Mill Masquerading as Grassroots Activism, June 9, 2012

· Avaaz’s War on Syria: Soros Sponsored Sorrow Pleads for Foreign Intervention, June 14, 2012

· Rio Summit “Good Versus Evil” Advert Displays Blatant Racism and Imperialism at Core of Avaaz, June 22, 2012

· Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part I, Section I, Sept 24, 2012

· Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part I, Section II, Sept 24, 2012

· Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part I, Section III, Sept 24, 2012

· Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section I, Sept 24, 2012

· Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section II, Nov 1, 2012

· Welcome to the Brave New World – Brought to You by Avaaz, Sept 13, 2013

Endnotes:

[1] Jeremy Heimans on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyheimans

[2] David Madden on Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidmadden

[3] Job Detail for Social Media Intern, Syrian Voices Movement Job Location: Purpose Inc, New York, NY, 10176: http://jobs.climber.com/jobs/Media-Communication/New-York-NY-10176/Social-Media-Intern-Syrian-Voices-Movement/55687863

[4] Purpose is hiring: Join the Syria Campaign: http://www.purpose.com/were-staffing-up-on-the-syria-campaign/] [5] Purpose Action Board of Directors: Jon Huggett, founding chair of Social Innovation Exchange, former partner at The Bridgespan Group and Bain & Company; Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange.org and former senior director of media programs at GLAAD; Brett Solomon, executive director of Access, former campaigns director at Avaaz, former executive director of GetUp!; Douglas Atkin, director of community at Airbnb, former chief community officer of Meetup, author of The Culting of Brands; Andre Banks, executive director of Purpose Foundation, former strategy director at Purpose and former deputy director of ColorOfChange.org; Jeremy Heimans, co-founder & CEO of Purpose, co-founder of Avaaz and co-founder of GetUp! [Source] [6] Purpose Foundation Board of Directors: Carla Sutherland, research scholar at Columbia University’s Gender and Sexuality Law Center’s Engaging Tradition Project, former program officer at Ford Foundation and Arcus Foundation; Jeremy Heimans, co-founder & CEO of Purpose, co-founder of Avaaz and co-founder of GetUp!; Michael Evans, president of Moynihan Station Development Corporation and former chief of staff to the Lieutenant Governor of New York State. [Source]| Purpose Foundation’s organizational documents and annual reports on Form 990 can be found here.

[7] December 29, 2004: “Over two days in early December approximately three-dozen religious activists met at the Washington office of the Center for American Progress, a recently formed think tank headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta. The Res Publica-driven agenda for the closed-door gathering included sessions on “building the movement infrastructure” and “objectives, strategies and core issues.” Res Publica was founded by Tom Perriello, Ricken Patel and Tom Pravda. Avaaz was founded by Res Publica, MoveOn.org, Executive Director Ricken Patel, Tom Perriello, Tom Pravda, Eli Pariser (MoveOn Executive Director), Andrea Woodhouse (consultant to the World Bank) Jeremy Heimans (co-founder of GetUp! and Purpose), and Australian entrepreneur David Madden (co-founder of GetUp and Purpose). Avaaz co-founder Tom Perriello is now President and CEO of Center for American Progress. Perriello and Patel also co-founded and co-directed DarfurGenocide.org which officially launched in 2004. “DarfurGenocide.org is a project of Res Publica, a group of public sector professionals dedicated to promoting good governance and virtuous civic cultures.” Today, this organization is now known as “Darfurian Voices”: “Darfurian Voices is a project of 24 Hours for Darfur.” The U.S. Department of State and the Open Society Institute were just two of the organizations funders and collaborating partners. Other Darfurian Voices partners include Avaaz, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Centre for Transitional Justice, Darfur Rehabilitation Project, Humanity United, Darfur People’s Association of New York, Genocide Intervention, Witness, Yale Law School, The Sigrid Rausing Trust and the Bridgeway Foundation. Despite the carefully crafted language and images that tug at your emotions, such NGOs were created for and exist for one primary purpose — to protect and further American policy and interests, under the guise of philanthropy and humanitarianism. Of all the listed partners of DarfurGenocide.org, with exception of one located in London England, all of the entities involved are American and based on US soil.

CLARIFICATION (August 10, 2018): In an earlier version of this article, a sentence reads “Avaaz co-founder James Slezak is also identified as a co-founder and CEO of Purpose at its inception in 2009.” This was intended to read as it reads now: “Avaaz affiliate James Slezak is also identified as a co-founder and CEO of Purpose at its inception in 2009.” The article references the original researched bio of Slezak: “Full profile of James Slezak: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section III [link]”. The original research does not list Slezak as an Avaaz co-founder. We regret the error was not caught in the editing process. Further clarification Slezak co-foundered “Win Back Respect” with Avaaz co-founders Andrea Woodhouse (World Bank), spouse, David Madden (World Bank) and Jeremy Heimans (co-founder of MoveOn and GetUp!). Win Back Respect was supported/funded by MoveOn (co-founder of Avaaz) and Soros Fund Management. Soros Open Society Institute provided the original seed money for Avaaz. The fifth co-founder of Win Back Respect was Brian Vogt, Senior Advisor to the Partnership for a Secure America.

Sep 06

2014

newWKOGadnim

350.org / 1Sky, Avaaz, Foundations, Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Uncategorized

Black Panther Party Bobby Seale Pacifism Protest psychological self-therapy Self Defense

The Point of Protest

A Culture of Imbeciles

September 5, 2014

Photo: The legendary Bobby Seale speaks at Free Huey rally in Defermery Park (named by the Panthers Bobby Hutton Park) in West Oakland. “But government intimidation was nothing new. Named “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” by FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense stood at the vanguard of the most powerful movement for social change in America before being systemically destroyed by the United States government.” [Source]

Activism for social change — on whatever subject — relies on the sequential formula for success Research, Education, Organizing, Action. Social forums, convergences, marches and other forms of protest fall under the Education category.

Organizing for social change follows up on the awareness generated by educational events, and includes discussions of strategy and tactics that might be employed in applying the research used in educational venues. Once a plan is developed by organizers, educators and researchers, resources can be secured to implement the plan, using established social networks in mobilizing actions that accomplish the goals and objectives agreed on.

Action for social change might include engaging with a political party to elect candidates favorable to the plan, diplomacy with governing officials, and sponsoring initiatives and referendums that enact, modify or repeal public laws and policies. Other actions might include civil disobedience that confronts unjust laws and policies, as well as sabotage and armed insurrection under extreme social situations.

Protest is thus an interim step between research and organizing, not an end, but a means of generating awareness. Once awareness has been generated on a topic (as it was long ago on Climate Change), protest has outlived its usefulness, and organizing must get underway. Otherwise, protest becomes a form of entertainment, a spectacle, a means of amusement that achieves nothing important.

When protest is hijacked by covert agent provocateurs (i.e. Avaaz and 350), it becomes counterproductive, dissipating the energy of social networks, that should be applied to political organizing that leads to effective action. Protests that do nothing but make participants feel good are self-indulgent exercises; when these exercises become habitual, protest as self-expression becomes a form of psychological self-therapy, which should not be confused with political engagement.

Aug 23

2014

newWKOGadnim

Uncategorized

AFL-CIO Alternatives Canadian Peoples’ Social Forum (PSF) Capitalism Desjardins Caisses populaires Ford Foundation identity politics Neo-liberalism New Democratic Party (NDP) Rockefeller Brothers Fund World Social Forum

The Political Fraud of the Canadian Peoples’ Social Forum

World Socialist Web Site

August 20, 2014

By Carl Bronski

Thousands of people are preparing to travel to Ottawa this week to attend a pan-Canadian Peoples’ Social Forum (PSF) that is billed “as a space for social movements to meet and converge, for the free expression of alternative ideas and grassroots exchanges and for artistic reflections on a diversity of demands and aspirations.”

According to PSF campaign material, those demands revolve around opposition to “neo-liberal and neo-conservative policies in Canada based on the guiding principles of social justice, Original Peoples’ rights, sustainable development, international solidarity and participatory democracy.” One of the main slogans for the gathering is “Fighting Harper and Beyond.”

The Forum is a political fraud. It is aimed not at fighting for the independent political mobilization of the working class, but rather at its subordination to the ostensible “left” wing of the bourgeois political establishment. In the name of fighting Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government and the “neo-liberal” agenda, the trade unions, with the middle class left and pseudo-Marxist organizations in tow, are seeking to harness the growing opposition of the working class to the offensive of the ruling elite behind a campaign to defeat the Conservatives at the polls in 2015 and install a “progressive” government. That would mean a Liberal or New Democratic Party (NDP) government, or more likely a Liberal-NDP coalition.

A model for the political operation being prepared by these so-called progressive forces was provided by their near-unanimous support in December 2008 for a would-be Liberal-NDP coalition government committed to a continuation of Canada’s neocolonial war in Afghanistan and further massive tax cuts benefiting the wealthy. More recently, in this year’s Ontario election, under the pretext of preventing a Conservative victory, the unions and their middle-class hangers-on lined up behind the right-wing Liberal government of Premier Kathleen Wynne, which after its reelection announced an escalation of its policy of draconian social spending cuts and brutal attacks on workers’ rights.

This is no aberration. Since the 1980s, the unions have been engaged in negotiating the lowering of wages and benefits, the elimination of jobs, the curtailment of pensions, and the intensification of the exploitation of their members. A generation of workers has spent its entire work-life without experiencing a strike—or only losing strikes.

The unions have bowed with barely a peep to Harper’s strikebreaking legislation in a series of national disputes at Air Canada, Canadian Pacific Railways, and Canada Post. When the massive 2012 Quebec student strike threatened to provoke an eruption of working class opposition to the austerity agenda of big business, the unions moved to shut it down. The Quebec Federation of Labour wrote to the Canadian Labour Congress demanding that they provide no support to the students and the CLC gladly obliged.

Beginning in the latter half of the 1990s, when the Chretien-Martin Liberal government was implementing the greatest social spending cuts in Canadian history, many unions adopted a policy of “strategic voting” in national and provincial elections, i.e., a vote for the Liberals in most constituencies. Those still plumping for the New Democratic Party have supported the social democrats as they have lurched ever further to the right, imposing austerity wherever they hold office, electing a former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister (Tom Mulcair) as national leader, and emerging as enthusiastic cheerleaders for Canada’s participation in imperialist interventions and wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Haiti and Libya

So much for “fighting” the policies of the ruling class.

The PSF event is one of the many off-shoots of the World Social Forum, founded in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001 and dedicated to championing “counter-hegemonic globalization.” Opposing “neo-liberalism” but not capitalism, the Forum promotes the illusion that the ruling class can be pressured into returning to Keynesian policies and that the nation-state can be a progressive constraint on rapacious global capital.

The real issue, however, is that capitalism has broken down under the weight of the same contradictions that led in the first half of the last century to two world wars, the Great Depression, and the horrors of fascism. The great progressive potential of a globally integrated economy runs up against its domination by private corporations and the capitalist nation-state system. Only the abolition of this outmoded system by the united political struggle of the international working class can open the way for a harmonious development of the world economy to meet social needs, not the profit interests of a few.

The annual Social Forum meetings have, over the years, received the backing of a whole host of bourgeois governments, union bureaucracies and capitalist foundations including support from former right-wing French President Jacques Chirac, successive pro-austerity governments in Brazil, the European Union, the American AFL-CIO, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The four-day gathering in Ottawa is chiefly sponsored by trade unions and trade union federations from across the country. Other sponsors include aboriginal, feminist and non-governmental organizations, the Council of Canadians, and the Desjardins Caisses populaires, Canada’s sixth largest financial institution.

The organization of a Canadian PSF was initiated by Alternatives, a Montreal based non-governmental organization. Unfortunately, the “alternatives” that animate the organizers and sponsors of the event are squarely lodged within the existing capitalist socio-economic system. This is only underscored by the fact that they immediately sought the patronage of the pro-capitalist trade union apparatus.

There will, no doubt, be many in attendance who agree—and many who do not—that a radical, systemic change is needed in the face of the proliferation of imperialist war, social misery, authoritarianism, and ecological catastrophe. But those genuinely seeking a way out of the world capitalist crisis will be sorely disappointed by the thin political gruel on offer at the gathering.

“But you won’t find Naomi Klein writing the Libyan chapter of the “shock doctrine” (Gulf News, 26/10/2011)–Naomi Klein was too busy throwing her support behind a Canadian politician, Nathan Cullen, who voted in support of NATO’s intervention in Libya, with little regret.” – MAXIMILIAN FORTE

The Forum begins on August 21 with a rally addressed by the neo-Keynesian and “anti-globalization” activist Naomi Klein, and a march to Parliament Hill. That the rally and march are scheduled for a Thursday afternoon when most workers are unable to attend speaks volumes about the social forces the organizers are most interested in attracting. Indeed, it is expected that the largest contingents will come from officials from the trade union bureaucracy and the non-governmental organizations.

Over the ensuing weekend there will be almost 500 workshops. Aside from anarchist-minded groups promoting petty-production and portraying science and technology as the problem, and the seemingly obligatory sessions aimed at self-absorbed elements of the middle class—“Alternate Cures Rejuvenation Healing and Tibetan Monk Exercises,” “Urban Gardening,” or “Veganism, Anti-Colonialism and Animal Liberation”—the workshop line-up is peppered with sessions overseen by the various purveyors of identity politics intent on dividing the working class on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation.

Thus, the Niagara Queer People of Colour will advise attendees on their particularly specific perspective, an anti-racist group will discuss Caucasian “Fear of a Black Planet” and a number of sessions on the oppression of aboriginal peoples will seek to determine the extent of “settler” (a term referring to both the entire past and current non-Aboriginal population of Canada) “responsibility” for the genocidal policies of the ruling class. What is rejected outright in all these approaches is the central understanding that the principal “oppressed community” in Canada (and around the world) is the working class—black, white, native, gay, straight, male or female—and that only this class has the social power to break the stranglehold of big business over socio-economic life and to radically reorganize society in the interests of the majority.

The turn by those who want to fight the existing system has to be toward an international socialist program and the great challenge of assembling and educating a revolutionary movement with deep roots in the global working class. This is not a project to be undertaken lightly, but outside of that perspective there is no way to address the social disaster and danger of world war and ever-increasing global misery produced by the present system.

The Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site are fighting to overcome the crisis of working-class leadership and build a movement that will politically prepare and lead the working class in fighting for a workers’ government and socialism.

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