Dystopia Earth

It is like a scene from a dystopian science fiction movie. In the video, we witness the usage of a Long Range Acoustic Device.

The Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) is an acoustic hailing device and sonic weapon developed by LRAD Corporation to send messages, warnings, and harmful, pain inducing tones over longer distances than normal loudspeakers. LRAD systems have been used to counter piracy, as non-lethal crowd control weapons, and as communication devices.

According to the manufacturer’s specifications, the systems weigh from 15 to 320 pounds (6.8 to 150 kg) and can emit sound in a 30° beam at 2.5 kHz.^[1]

LRAD systems are used by maritime, law enforcement, military and commercial security companies to send instructions and warnings over distances, and to force compliance. LRAD is also used to deter wildlife from airport runways, wind and solar farms, nuclear power facilities, mining and agricultural operations and other industrial facilities. -Wikipedia

Athens, Wednesday, May 10, 2012

Mr. José Manuel Barroso
President of the European Commission

Dear Mr. President,

I am sending this letter, subsequent to the return of the exploratory mandate that the President of the Hellenic Republic had given me, so that I could ascertain the possibility of forming a Government which would enjoy the confidence of the Parliament, according to our Constitution. This letter follows that of February 21.

The vote of the Greek people on Sunday, May 6, politically delegitimizes the MoU/MEFP, which was co-signed by the previous government of Lucas Papademos and the leaders of the two political parties that had underpinned the government’s parliamentary majority. Together, those parties registered a loss of approximately 3.5 million votes, drawing just 33.5 percent of the total vote.

Please note that, prior to that, the MoU/MEFP had already been delegitimized in terms of its economic effectiveness. But it is not only that the MoU/MEFP has failed to meet its own targets. It has also failed to address both the structural imbalances of the Greek economy and acute social inequalities. SYRIZA has over the last few years brought to the fore these endogenous flaws. Our proposals for concrete reforms have been ignored by all the governments with which the European Union cooperated closely.

Please also note that, because of the MoU/MEFP policies, Greece is the only European country in peacetime to have been through five consecutive year of deep recession, up to 2012. More than that, the PSI [Private Sector Involvement in Greece's debt restructuring] has failed to credibly ensure the long-term sustainability of Greece’s rising public debt as a percentage of its GDP. Austerity cannot be the cure to recession. An immediate and socially just reversal of the downward trend of our economy is, thus, imperative.

We urgently need to ensure economic and social stability in our country. To this end, we need to undertake all the necessary policy initiatives to reverse austerity and recession. Apart from lacking any democratic legitimacy, the application of this “internal devaluation” program is leading our economy onto a catastrophic path, while at the same time annulling all the prerequisites for recovery. Internal devaluation has lead to a humanitarian crisis.

Therefore, we need to reexamine the whole framework of existing strategy if the threat to social stability and cohesion in Greece, and the stability of the whole eurozone, is not to be threatened.

The common future of European peoples is threatened by those catastrophic choices. We deeply believe that this crisis is European, and therefore the solution lies at a European level.

Kind regards,
Alexis Tsipras
President of the Parliamentary Group of the Coalition of the Radical Left
Vice President of the Party of the European Left

The Turkish daily Aydinlik said that suicide bombings represent a way of incitement carried out by the CIA and Mossad agents in Iraq, and are applied now in Syria, Lebanese daily Al-Benaa reported.

“CIA and Mossad agents have carried out – and still – various attacks in several countries including Iraq, Pakistan and Libya,” Aydinlik stated in a report published Monday.

The report made it clear that the agents have bombed mosques during the occupation of Iraq in order to incite Shiites against Sunnis and vice versa.

“Those agents have achieved their goal where most of their operations were targeting Shiite and Sunnite mosques. All bombings were declared suicide attacks, while the suicide bombers were announced killed, but the fact is contrary to what was claimed,” the daily added.

The newspaper pointed out that CIA and Mossad are adopting the same method now in Syria in order to thwart the plan of UN envoy to the country, Kofi Annan.

“Political analysts stress the suicide attacks level will increase in coming days in Syria, where the Mossad and the U.S. intelligence officials will be undoubtedly responsible,” the Turkish report stated.

“However, suicide bombs will be the most dangerous tools for incitement and chaos in Syria, but, unfortunately, the Turkish borders will be the rear front of those operations for they will host Mossad and CIA perpetrators, or in other words, possible to say, that Turkey is a partner of these planned operations against the administration of President Bashar al-Assad,” according to Aydinlik daily. -Stratrisks

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

Inverted totalitarianism represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated.” Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by “power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions,” Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people’s right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the “persons” agree to a “settlement.” Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not “admitting any wrongdoing.” There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on “American Idol.” Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.

Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world’s largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is “conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its conscience.”

“Inverted totalitarianism reverses things,” Wolin writes. “It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.”

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media’s censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

“It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today’s media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism,” Wolin writes. “Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of ‘the left wing of the Democratic Party,’ never of democrats.”

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country’s foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as “soft” or “unpatriotic.” The “patriotic” citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners. -Chris Hedges, Common Dreams, 2010