Organized Suppression: Difference between revisions

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* [http://forum-network.org/lecture/lucifer-effect-how-good-people-turn-evil Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil] (Video lecture.) | April 2, 2007 | Philip Zimbardo writer, professor emeritus, Stanford University
* [http://forum-network.org/lecture/lucifer-effect-how-good-people-turn-evil Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil] (Video lecture.) | April 2, 2007 | Philip Zimbardo writer, professor emeritus, Stanford University
: Philip Zimbardo helps us understand what causes people who began life with good intentions, to discard them. Philip Zimbardo is internationally recognized as the "voice and face of contemporary psychology" through his widely seen PBS-TV series, ''Discovering Psychology'', his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, ''The Stanford Prison Experiment''.
: Philip Zimbardo helps us understand what causes people who began life with good intentions, to discard them. Philip Zimbardo is internationally recognized as the "voice and face of contemporary psychology" through his widely seen PBS-TV series, ''Discovering Psychology'', his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, ''The Stanford Prison Experiment''.
=== Media Manipulation ===
* [http://endthelie.com/ End The Lie]
: Mainstream media outlets are nothing short of propaganda machines, perpetuating the illusion of the two party system in American politics while keeping the public lulled into passivity. Democrats and Republicans are following the same Corporatist-Globalist warmongering agenda both domestically and abroad. Only when the average American starts finding out about the real issues and the constant misdirection perpetuated by the media can we take our country back from the few and give it to the sovereign people to whom it belongs.


== Surveillance State: It's privatized, ubiquitized and it's ''watching you''. ==
== Surveillance State: It's privatized, ubiquitized and it's ''watching you''. ==

Revision as of 13:22, 17 December 2011

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.
-- Frederick Douglass[1]

Take Action!

Why Your Voice Must Be Suppressed

The Occupy movement has sparked an extraordinary battle of ideas and is catching fire across the world. The movement has achieved a radical shift in the way we think about our politics. The massive level of public support for ending corporate and banker capture of our governments is growing, for obvious reasons: a growing number of the 99% are feeling the pain normally relegated to the most marginalized in our society.

Politicians and the police are continuously bought off to protect corporate interests. Today they are forcibly evicting the peaceful protesters from public spaces and discrediting the movement in the media as "dirty hippies" and "violent criminals" with no clear agenda. It's not hard to see why they're nervous: the occupiers have sparked a vital battle of ideas, and the corrupt, elite 1% stand to lose everything.

It's been three years since the financial crash exposed the greed and recklessness that drives our financial system and destroys our economies. We are losing jobs, homes, and benefits, yet politicians continue to throw public money to keep big banks afloat to speculate and hand out fat bonuses. The 1% get their way every day, through massive spending on lobbyists, revolving door networks with current and former politicians and using the media to spread threats and fear.

Enough is enough! We know ordinary people working together can shake even the most entrenched powers -- we've seen it over and over this year. In the last two months the occupiers' message has resonated in homes, bars, and workplaces everywhere -- people are speaking out against the rotten financial and political systems that wreck our democracies. Even the corporate-owned media is forced to examine some of the abuses of power that many thought would remain invisible and unshakable.

Change is in the air. From Madrid, to Rio, to New York, to Portland, ordinary people have rolled up their sleeves and jumped in to help wherever they can. Now it's time for the 99% to show that this movement is truly global and represents millions speaking with one clear and powerful voice.

When police come the occupiers chant "you cannot evict an idea whose time has come." The only way to silence the billions of us across the whole world who make up the 99% is if we allow our voices to go silent. That choice is ours.

Shopping To Kill: Among the rapidly dwindling rights you still have.

Black Friday turned into a black mark against American shoppers as riotous crowds brawled over video games, waffle irons and towels, drawing international condemnation and even raising questions about the state of humanity.
Violence erupted at Black Friday sales across the U.S. with one bargain-hunter left critically injured after being shot during a robbery and 15 other people injured when an angry shopper used pepper spray.

Organized Crackdown

It turns out one of the 18 leaders who sat in on the call was Portland Mayor Sam Adams. The calls, according to Adams, were organized "to share information about the occupying encampments around the country."
The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality
A memo from a prominent corporate lobbying firm to the American Bankers Association proposes an extensive public relations campaign — including opposition research into key movement figures and an elaborate media strategy — designed to discredit the movement.
"Recent statements from Mayor Sam Adams office deny collaboration between U.S. Mayors, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to coordinate violent attacks on Occupy encampments last weekend. These statements are in direct contradiction to what Mayor Sam Adams told city and police liaisons during a liaison meeting with the City of Portland on November 7th."
If you thought the recent crackdowns of Occupy encampments across the country was more than a coincidence, there is a good chance you were right...
Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. According to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

Organized Terror

The clearest example of an American police state that acted like so many other police states is its use of preventive detention. In one example—extraordinary rendition—all the government has to do amounts to accusing anyone of anything related to terrorism, and this was a sufficient reason to seize and ship individuals elsewhere to be tortured. The use of torture, unfortunately, is an all- too- common practice used by democracies that have degenerated into police states. Torture as state policy simply means that a police state is exercising total domination over the minds and bodies of those identified as enemies of the state.[2]
By means such as “zero tolerance” policies in public school systems, to “no knock” warrants, to snooping on and control over employees private lives by corporate employers, to the war on the Bill of Rights that is the so-called war on drugs, to the brutal suppression of constitutionally granted rights to free assembly and free expression by militarized police forces, to the unconstitutional killing of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals abroad by predator drone attacks-daily existence within the nation has become more repressive, less inclined to the acceptance of the moments of creativity and uncertainty inherent to freedom. In fits and starts, by law and deed, the U.S. has moved closer in the direction of a panopticon-prone, brutality-leveling, waking authoritarian nightmare than a democratic republic devoted to erring in the direction of the ideals of justice and liberty.

An analyst informs that the US has its army on standby against the Occupy and student movement as the economic situation in America deteriorates day by day.

Rodney Shakespeare: The authorities though are getting nervous and even vicious toward the protesters. The army is being readied to move in. A law will allow the US government to disappear anybody[3] - there's fascism for you. They may censor the internet; and there are demands for war to hide the true situation.
¶ And the reason for all this is in fact the overall economic situation. If you start with Europe where the Euro could be weeks even days away from collapse, that could result with the sovereign debt of Europe being defaulted. That will mean billions even trillion of payments by the USA banks, which hold the derivatives or the insurance. But they don't have the money to pay.
¶ Recently the Bank of America moved 70 trillion - that's 70 trillion dollars worth of derivatives to a Bank of America commercial holding company, which is government insured. Now, 70 trillion is larger than the global economy.
¶ So if you put it all together the USA is getting very very nervous that the whole thing is about to blow up and of course at that point the protests and demonstrations in the USA will multiply by a factor of perhaps three or five and they are getting ready to go in with a fascist suppression.
¶ The protesters are actually representing not just deep unease, but the nasty reality of 20 percent unemployment overall with a 40 percent unemployment amongst youth groups, blacks and Hispanics - As for the homelessness, it is hidden. Homelessness is now out in the woodlands and scrublands away from general perception, but it is rising very fast as is also the number of people who are on food stamps.
¶ So it is not just a question of the courage of the protesters - and they are being brave - it's that the situation is deteriorating very rapidly. And the authorities can see that not only the nitty gritty detail of the population is getting worse, but they can see that the overall banking collapse is getting worse. So one way or another the authorities are showing signs of vicious as a prelude to what will be panic. And I'm afraid with panic will come irresponsible violence.[4]
Al-Qaeda, Occupy and You: London police are already attempting to link the Occupy Movement to Al-Qaeda.[5] And you were silly enough to wonder why U.S. Senators just passed a bill to declare the entire world "a battlefield."[6]
London Metropolitan Police has categorized Occupy London Stock Exchange anti-capitalist protestors as a domestic terror group alongside those that are termed foreign terror threats including al-Qaeda.
¶ Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes!
¶ In a stunning move that has civil libertarians stuttering with disbelief, the U.S. Senate has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Bill of Rights in America.[7]
¶ The National Defense Authorization Act is perhaps the most traitorous act ever witnessed in the Senate, and the language of the bill is cleverly designed to make you think it doesn't apply to Americans.
¶ The detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn't limited to foreigners. It's confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas' Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — "U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority."
¶ The passage of this law is nothing less than an outright declaration of WAR against the American People by the military-connected power elite. If this is signed into law, it will shred the remaining tenants of the Bill of Rights and unleash upon America a total military dictatorship, complete with secret arrests, secret prisons, unlawful interrogations, indefinite detainment without ever being charged with a crime, the torture of Americans and even the "legitimate assassination" of U.S. citizens right here on American soil!
¶ If you have not yet woken up to the reality of the police state we've been warning you about, I hope you realize we are fast running out of time. Once this becomes law, you have no rights whatsoever in America. — no due process, no First Amendment speech rights, no right to remain silent, nothing.
¶ The US senate does not want us to speak. Even now orders are being shouted into telephones and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?
¶ Cruelty and injustice...intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance, coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told...if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

Indefinite Detention: Architecture of a Fascist State

Maybe you're the kind of person who always wanted some thug to snatch you off the street and throw you into a dungeon where you'll suffer indefinite detention without charge or trial provision. Then again, maybe Senate Bill 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill,[8] is not really your "cup of tea."[9] Either way, why did Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) draft a bill in secret, which was then passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing?[10]
Despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year’s staggering take topped the charts, next year’s orders are up 400 percent over the same period. This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.
In today’s Mayberry, Andy Griffith and Barney Fife could be using grenade launchers and a tank to keep the peace. A rapidly expanding Pentagon program that distributes used military equipment to local police departments — many of them small-town forces — puts battlefield-grade weaponry in the hands of cops at an unprecedented rate.
So much for innocent until proven guilty. So much for limited government. What Americans are now facing is quite literally the end of the line. We will either uphold the freedoms baked into our Constitutional Republic, or we will scrap the entire project in the name of security as we wage, endlessly, this futile, costly, and ultimately self-defeating War on Terror.
Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: They don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that.
Under Sections 1031 and 1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2012, the United States Congress has proposed to give the Department of Defense the explicit power to take civilians into military custody, detain them indefinitely with no charges or trial. Well hidden in the 682-page long National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Bill under the title ‘Detainee Matters’[11] has received tragically sparse coverage in the American national media, widely-read national newspapers and broadly-watched national television channels blocking the existence of this impending legislation described by rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as a draconian piece of law.
The Senate has advanced a controversial measure that would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect without charge or trial anywhere in the word, including the United States.
The Senate is set to vote this week on a Pentagon spending bill that could usher in a radical expansion of indefinite detention under the U.S. government. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect — anywhere in the world — without charge or trial.

Terror suspects in America could be held in prison indefinitely – without charge or trial. The military will be able to take custody of alleged terrorists virtually without question. Critics say this would be a stark violation of human rights. The controversial National Defense Authorization Act, which was met with criticism from human rights activists, faced a presidential veto, but since last month Obama has retracted his warning.

Totalitarian Psychology

“Planning is one of the tools of social power... Schedules mark beginning points, end points, phases, transitions, linear sequences or cyclic returns... The fuller the schedule, the less time that remains for unplanned incidents, deviations, the wasting of time. The more dense the temporal grid, the more intensive the use of time. Planning determines the smallest moment; it knows only maximum rapidity, precision, effectiveness. Schedules guarantee effectiveness and provide a criterion for its monitoring. In its factorylike organizational form, the (concentration) camp resembles other disciplinary institutions that gain stability by regimenting everyday temporal sequences. But absolute power has only a limited interest in a rigid institutionalization of time. It regularly departs from the standardized time tracks it has instituted. As in any formal system, the regulation of time is an effective technology of power... Terror alternates between planning and disorder; between regulation and assault... By reserving for itself the choice of deviations and special times, power secures its rule over time. The temporal law of absolute power is not calculability, but the free variation of tempo, the shift between duration and abrupt suddenness, hectic rush and waiting, rest and shock.”
Philip Zimbardo helps us understand what causes people who began life with good intentions, to discard them. Philip Zimbardo is internationally recognized as the "voice and face of contemporary psychology" through his widely seen PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment.

Media Manipulation

Mainstream media outlets are nothing short of propaganda machines, perpetuating the illusion of the two party system in American politics while keeping the public lulled into passivity. Democrats and Republicans are following the same Corporatist-Globalist warmongering agenda both domestically and abroad. Only when the average American starts finding out about the real issues and the constant misdirection perpetuated by the media can we take our country back from the few and give it to the sovereign people to whom it belongs.

Surveillance State: It's privatized, ubiquitized and it's watching you.

In an 18-minute video clip posted to YouTube, security researcher Trevor Eckhart demonstrates Carrier IQ’s software as it records virtually all keystrokes. It’s shown logging encrypted Web searches, text messages and more. Carriers who install Carrier IQ’s software on cellphones can presumably watch what their subscribers are doing on their phones as they do it. Says Eckhart, “So, instead of seeing dropped calls in California, they now know ‘Joe Anyone’s’ location at any given time, what he is running on his device, keys being pressed, applications being used.”
The openness of the internet is threatened[12] by bills like SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate. The long arm of the law is bending toward clamping down on sharing, collaboration, and innovation whether through overt censorship measures like those contained in these bills, or through the courts in the ever-growing and increasingly burgeoning patent system. The few attempts by government to actually serve the interests of consumers are foiled at every turn. The Consumer Protection Bureau has been all but strangled in its crib.[13] It’s all part and parcel of the same system, whether we’re talking about food libel laws, patent-trolling,[14] internet censorship,[15] indefinite detention in the War on Terror,[16] or no-knock SWAT raids,[17] the pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters[18] -- the law is increasingly tilted against the individual and against freedom.

See Also

Front Groups

Links

References

  1. The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress
  2. State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush | Andrew Kolin (Book excerpt.)
  3. Senators Demand the Military Lock Up American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window
  4. Breaking News - US set to use army to put down protests
  5. Occupy London's anger over police 'terrorism' document: A notice sent out to businesses in the City of London has listed the protest movement among groups such as al-Qaida and Farc
  6. Occupied America: Senate bill 1867 would allow U.S. military to detain and murder anti-government protesters in American cities
  7. SB 1867, Worldwide Indefinite Detention and the Senators Who Betrayed You
  8. Military Detention Versus We the People
  9. Urge the Senate to Oppose Indefinite Military Detention
  10. Senate panel pushes ahead with defense bill over White House objections on terror suspect plan
  11. Dear Majority Leader Reid (Letter to the Senate majority leader from several signatories.)
  12. How Congress and the Entertainment Industry Plan to Kill the Internet and How Citizens, Reddit Users, and a Few Senators Are Fighting Back
  13. Senate Republicans block Obama nominee to head consumer financial protection office
  14. Do Patents Kill Innovation?
  15. SOPA denounced by Internet founders, CEOs in letter
  16. The National Defense Authorization Act is the Greatest Threat to Civil Liberties Americans Face
  17. Iraq War Veteran, Jose Guerena, Killed by Arizona SWAT Team
  18. Police Should Condemn, Not Defend, Excessive Use of Force at UC Davis