Posts Tagged ‘Manipulation’
Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine! – a must watch video
This Is A Must Watch Video
A brief and crucial history of the United States
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people” – John Adams – Second President – 1797 – 1801
Now is the first day of a new beginning.
Each one – Reach One- Each One – Teach One
Posted February 23, 2012 – Class War FilmsTranscript
Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine Nightmare and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity there is no awakening. Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of this era. For two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, good will, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry. America began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of its native people. Once solidly established, it grafted enslavement of another race onto that base. With those two pillars of state firmly in place it declared itself an independent nation in a document that nobly proclaimed the equality of all mankind. In that act of monumental hypocrisy America’s myth had its beginning. continue reading here “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” – Mario Savio – Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley on December 2, 1964.
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Hope: its infinite value and why it changes you from the inside out
Maybe this all seems self-evident to me because I worked with the CETA program in 1974 etc and saw many who had convinced themselves that sitting on the corner was what they wanted to do, instead sign up for subsidized training for real jobs that had a future. (Most had to sit on a waiting list for 6 months, then show up daily for another 6 months of training before job placement. And they did it.)
The Economist May 12th 2012 Hope springs a trap
An absence of optimism plays a large role in keeping people trapped in poverty
THE idea that an infusion of hope can make a big difference to the lives of wretchedly poor people sounds like something dreamed up by a well-meaning activist or a tub-thumping politician. Yet this was the central thrust of a lecture at Harvard University on May 3rd by Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology known for her data-driven analysis of poverty. Ms Duflo argued that the effects of some anti-poverty programmes go beyond the direct impact of the resources they provide. These programmes also make it possible for the very poor to hope for more than mere survival.
She and her colleagues evaluated a programme in the Indian state of West Bengal, where Bandhan, an Indian microfinance institution, worked with people who lived in extreme penury. They were reckoned to be unable to handle the demands of repaying a loan. Instead, Bandhan gave each of them a small productive asset—a cow, a couple of goats or some chickens. It also provided a small stipend to reduce the temptation to eat or sell the asset immediately, as well as weekly training sessions to teach them how to tend to animals and manage their households. Bandhan hoped that there would be a small increase in income from selling the products of the farm animals provided, and that people would become more adept at managing their own finances.
The results were far more dramatic. Well after the financial help and hand-holding had stopped, the families of those who had been randomly chosen for the Bandhan programme were eating 15% more, earning 20% more each month and skipping fewer meals than people in a comparison group. They were also saving a lot. The effects were so large and persistent that they could not be attributed to the direct effects of the grants: people could not have sold enough milk, eggs or meat to explain the income gains. Nor were they simply selling the assets (although some did).
Glencore: Profiteering From Hunger and Chaos
Updated: new links below
By Chris Arsenault *
DOHA, May 10, 2011 (IPS/Al Jazeera) – The rapid rise in prices for food, fuel and commodities has been disastrous for the world’s poor, including Indonesian market vendor Lia Romi. But it’s a bonanza for multinational trading firms such as Glencore.
While Romi has trouble feeding her family, Glencore – the world’s largest diversified commodities trader – is planning a $11 billion dollar share sale, likely the largest market debut ever seen on the London Stock Exchange.
“The price for our daily food has at least doubled in the past two years,” Lia Romi told Al Jazeera through a translator. “Food costs 100 per cent of my family’s daily income [of about $3]. I have nothing saved and I owe [money] from my [market stall] business.”
While Romi, and millions like her, worry about feeding their families, the initial public offering from the commodity speculating giant will create at least four billionaires, dozens worth more than 100 million dollars and several hundred old fashioned millionaires. Chief Executive Ivan Glasenberg is set to make more than nine billion from the share sale. And speculating on food prices is an important part of his wealth.
Controlling prices
Valued at about 60 billion dollars, Glencore controls 50 percent of the global copper market, 60 per cent of zinc, 38 per cent in alumina, 28 per cent of thermal coal, 45 per cent of lead and almost 10 per cent of the world’s wheat – according to information the firm disclosed prior to its share sale. It also controls about one quarter of the world market in barley, sunflower and rape seed.
“They are possibly one of very few mining companies that are price makers, rather than price takers,” said Chris Hinde, editorial director of Mining Journal magazine. “They are the stockbrokers of the commodities business [operating] in a fairly secretive world. They are effectively setting the price for some very important commodities,” he told Al Jazeera.
The firm employs about 57,000 people, generated a turnover of 145 billion dollars in the past year and has assets worth more than 79 billion. Glencore’s media department refused interview requests from Al Jazeera.
Based in Baar, Switzerland, where regulation is minimal, the company’s sprawling interests span Bolivian tin mines, Angolan oil, zinc producers in Kazakhstan, Zambian copper mines and Russian wheat operations.
“Glencore’s vertical integration really is unprecedented,” said Devlin Kuyek, a researcher with GRAIN, a non-profit international organisation working on food security.
“Glencore owns almost 300,000 hectares of farm land and it is one of the largest farm operators in the world. They are engaging in speculation on the grain trade and have immense market power,” he told Al Jazeera.
Global food prices have climbed recently, returning close to their 2008 peak, when bread riots swept parts of the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.
“A disturbing amount of price increases, I fear, is being driven by speculative activity,” Marcus Miller, a professor of international economics at the University of Warwick, told Al Jazeera. “Bets [on future price rises or declines] can become self-fulfilling if you are big enough to affect the market.”
LEFT AND RIGHT TOGETHER- Populism not Party!
By Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, Ret.,
National Commander, “The Patriots”
June, 2010
Patriotism and Populism
The United States is in trouble. We’re in danger of becoming a fascist dictatorship where big government and big business combine to rule, and where the people are considered just a source of labor. The marriage of government and the investor class has succeeded in exporting our jobs, importing illegal laborers to provide a pool of cheap labor, and driving down wages for all American workers, destroying the middle class. Their foreign and military policies have led us into unnecessary wars of aggression to gain raw materials and enhance profits of the global robber barons. Their trade policies have resulted in capital flight, job loss, trade deficits, and the ownership of much of our infrastructure by foreign interests.
We’ve gotten into this fix because our presidents, of both parties, have been servants of the global investors, and because our representatives in Congress, again of both parties, have abdicated their Constitutional responsibilities and subjected themselves to an imperial presidency.
A “patriot” is defined as one who loves, supports, and defends his country. The Latin and Greek roots refer to “father.” If, for a moment, we ignore the sexist nature of the ancient civilizations giving birth to the word, it is clear that to be a “patriot” is to have a parental love for the people of one’s tribe or nation. One cannot have a “patriotic love” for the corporations in one’s country or for its military-industrial complex, only for its people. Clearly then, those in our government who have served their corporate masters to the detriment of the people are not patriots, and have no claim to the word. The vast majority of Americans love our country in ways that equate to service to the people. We are the patriots. You can’t be a patriot without being a populist. Populism is patriotic.
Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution make it clear that the whole purpose of government is to serve and protect the people.. Ours is a government designed to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We, the Patriots, have a right and a duty to demand and to secure such a government. If those in power will not fulfill their Constitutional duty to serve the people, then we must remove them and replace them with those who will.
Propagandized in America- the chains of illusion
By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report May 10, 2010
part of a longer article: The Financial Oligarchy Reigns: Democracy’s Death Spiral From Greece to the United States
Part of the reason we are in this mess, and the main reason why the American people don’t even know what is happening to them, is that the illusion machine (television) has removed the American population tragically far from reality. The gap between the news we see on TV, and what is actually happening in the world today, is the most severe it has ever been. We have been bred to be completely removed from reality. As famed American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey once said, “We live exposed to the greatest flood of mass suggestion that any people has ever experienced.”
The American people need to understand that creating, manipulating and controlling public opinion through mass media propaganda is a science. As social psychologist Kelton Rhoads wrote in his study, Universal Persuasion, Everyday Influence:
“Make no mistake. There are legions of influence agents operating in our society. They thrive — they exist at the pinnacles of power — by getting you to think things and to do things they want you to think and do… Most people are either unaware of these influences, or when they are, vastly overestimate the amount of freedom they have to make up their own minds. But the successful influence agent knows that if he can manage the situation and choose the correct technique, your response to his technique will be as reliable as the springing of a mousetrap.”
People with power have used this science to divide and conquer the United States. In 1923, Edward Bernays, the Godfather of propaganda wrote: “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.” William Blum in Rogue State wrote: “Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.” Harold Lasswell in 1927 declared: “The new antidote to willfulness is propaganda. If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver. If it will not love, honor, and obey, it must not expect to escape seduction.”