BP Controls Gulf Message/Misogynist Informants Rule: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements/Bilderberg RULES

(EXTRA: If anyone could make a contribution to my PayPal account (or otherwise - contact me for further info), it would be sincerely appreciated as I've just gone off the cliff financially. I really appreciate everything that my kind readers have done for me in the past financially and otherwise. Now . . . back to your regular viewing.) Well, hot diggeddy dog! It's summer time and the living is not so easy (at least not down in the Gulf (or the Eurozone!)). And you thought the internet was invented by Al Gore (jest kiddin!) for you to gain information about the important events of the day? So does BP. In fact, they are purchasing all of it (information sites) that they can in order to help you understand what they are doing better. Or not. Your tax dollars at work! (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

"BP Buys Google, Yahoo Search Words To Control Spin" In their most tenacious effort to control the 'spin' on the worst oil spill disaster in the history, BP has purchased top internet search engine words so they can re-direct people away from real news on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. BP spokesman Toby Odone confirmed to ABC News that the oil giant had in fact bought internet search terms. So now when someone searches the words 'oil spill,' on the internet, the top link will re-direct them to BP's official company website. This would not be the first time that BP has tried to control information to protect the company's public image.

Although, of course, it could be the last if we had an actual sentient public in the U.S that minded such obvious manipulation. (Bernie Sanders has just proposed a measure to end more than $35 billion in tax breaks for the oil and gas industry. We'll see.)

(Election Update: Just when you thought it was almost all bad news (Rethug/Blue Dog women winning, etc.), we find out that Blanche Lincoln has "won" by using the Rethug trick of voter suppression/denial. Imagine that. The BradBlog is following everything and he's on this like a hawk (a peace hawk?). ActBlue is also a good place to visit.)

As we flagged last night, early reports today are that the concerns about the polling place fiasco in Garland County, Arkansas, have now "come to full flower."

Garland Election Commissioner Charles Tapp had unilaterally (without the vote of his two other commissioners) decided to reduce the number of polling locations from 42 during the general primary on May 18th, to just 2 for today's run-off primary.

The decision is expected to most drastically affect Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who did exceptionally well in the county during the general Democratic primary in his now-very-tight race against incumbent U.S. Senator Blanche Lincoln.

After Tapp had announced that an additional polling place would be opened last Saturday for early voting to ease the expected crowds today, he changed his mind at the last moment, and "hundreds of voters" are said to have shown up on Saturday, without being allowed to vote.

This is one of life's little epiphanies that is not hard to comprehend. Although you really don't want to. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements

In January 2009, activists in Austin, Texas, learned that one of their own, a white activist named Brandon Darby, had infiltrated groups protesting the Republican National Convention (RNC) as an FBI informant. Darby later admitted to wearing recording devices at planning meetings and during the convention. He testified on behalf of the government in the February 2009 trial of two Texas activists who were arrested at the RNC on charges of making and possessing Molotov cocktails, after Darby encouraged them to do so.

The two young men, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, each faced up to fifteen years in prison. Crowder accepted a plea bargain to serve three years in a federal prison; under pressure from federal prosecutors, McKay also pled guilty to being in possession of “unregistered Molotov cocktails” and was sentenced to four years in prison.

Information gathered by Darby may also have contributed to the case against the RNC 8, activists from around the country charged with “conspiracy to riot and conspiracy to damage property in the furtherance of terrorism.” Austin activists were particularly stunned by the revelation that Darby had served as an informant because he had been a part of various leftist projects and was a leader at Common Ground Relief, a New Orleans–based organization committed to meeting the short-term needs of community members displaced by natural disasters in the Gulf Coast region and dedicated to rebuilding the region and ensuring Katrina evacuees’ right to return.

I was surprised but not shocked by this news. I had learned as an undergrad at the University of Texas that the campus police department routinely placed plainclothes police officers in the meetings of radical student groups — you know, just to keep an eye on them. That was in fall 2001. We saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, watched a cowboy president wage war on terror, and, in the middle of it all, tried to figure out what we could do to challenge the fascist state transformations taking place before our eyes.

At the time, however, it seemed silly that there were cops in our meetings — we weren’t the Panthers or the Brown Berets or even some of the rowdier direct-action anti-globalization activists on campus (although we admired them all); we were just young people who didn’t believe war was the best response to the 9/11 attacks. But it wasn’t silly; the FBI does not dismiss political work. Any organization, be it large or small, can provoke the scrutiny of the state. Perhaps your organization poses a large threat, or maybe you’re small now but one day you’ll grow up and be too big to rein in. The state usually opts to kill the movement before it grows.

And informants and provocateurs are the state’s hired gunmen. Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations.

A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.

Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away.

To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements.

Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence[1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles.

We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils — secondary issues — that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues — racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression — are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

Please read the rest of this incredibly astute article, and lift up your heads to the stars. Then, please consider reading the article below. For a real wake-up call. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Scott Roeder's Religion

Posted by Sarah Posner

Amanda Robb, who is a niece of Dr. Barnett Slepian, the abortion provider murdered by an anti-abortion zealot in 1998, has a new investigative report in Ms. magazine demonstrating how Scott Roeder, who killed Dr. George Tiller at church last year, did not act alone. It's crucial to read the whole thing, but in a nutshell, through jailhouse interviews and other sources Robb documents how Roeder crossed paths and received help from groups like Army of God (which explicitly supports killing abortion providers) and Operation Rescue, which is less explicit. Operation Rescue's Troy Newman issued a statement after Tiller's death condemning the violence and claiming that his group "has diligently and successfully worked for years through peaceful, legal means" to end abortion.

Army of God, Robb reports, has a manual which asserts, "Whosoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed [Gen: 9-6]… we are forced to take up arms against you." Operation Rescue, which moved its headquarters to Witchita for the sole purpose of targeting Tiller at his clinic, home, and church, provided aid and inspiration to Roeder, according to Robb: Roeder first stalked Tiller at his Wichita church, Reformation Lutheran, in 2002, the year Operation Rescue moved there. Operation Rescue had already begun demonstrating at the church, and on the group’s website Newman had announced plans to gather at Tiller’s clinic, church and home.

Also that year, Roeder says he went to lunch with Newman and asked him about using violence to stop abortion.

Robb: What did you say to him?

Roeder: Oh, something like if an abortionist — I don’t even know if it was specifically Tiller…was shot, would it be justified? … And [Newman] said, “If it were, it wouldn’t upset me.”

According to Roeder’s trial testimony, he became an active and regular participant in Operation Rescue events. He told me he has donation receipts, event T-shirts and a signed copy of Newman’s 2001 book, Their Blood Cries Out, to prove it. During an Operation Rescue event at Dr. Tiller’s clinic in 2007, Roeder posted on the Operation Rescue website:

“Bleass [sic] everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to bring as many people as possible to attend Tillers [sic] church (inside not just outside) …”

Moreover, when Roeder was apprehended for Dr. Tiller’s murder, news cameras photographed a piece of paper on the dashboard of Roeder’s car: It contained the phone number of Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s senior policy advisor, who served two years in prison for conspiring to bomb abortion clinics in 1988. Roeder also told me that Sullenger was present at the lunch with Newman where they discussed “justifiable” homicide, and that Newman had given Roeder the autographed copy of his book just three months before Roeder killed Tiller when Roeder visited Operation Rescue headquarters. Sullenger was there as well, Roeder said.

Newman denied knowing Roeder, or ever meeting him. Yet his book, as Robb points out, is premised on the notion of "bloodguilt," that those who allow abortion are guilty and deserving of God's punishment. In one section, he cites Deuteronomy 21 for the statement that "God's order of law requires that the person directly responsible for murder should pay with his life, lest the land and its inhabitants be brought under the heavy hand of the Lord."

He cites this passage to show why Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh deserved the death penalty, but he then segues to a lamentation that "there is nothing being done today to expunge the bloodguilt for the babies being murdered in abortion mills." Elsewhere, in an appendix titled "Bible Study," in a section claiming that the "shedding of innocent blood is murder," Newman writes, "the death penalty for murder is not to be repealed," (citing Numbers 35:29-30) and "all killing is not murder." Capital punishment, self-defense, and just warfare, he maintains, are not murder. Newman was honored earlier this year at the annual Blogs for Life, and spoke at an event at the Family Research Council.

And if you didn't think the Tea Partyers were just recruiting you for the ever-present collection plate gathering, and you can stand one more testimonial, there is Joanna Brooks' fantastically illuminating artistry in reporting what the MSM will never tell us. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Who Says the Tea Party isn’t a Religious Movement?

Posted by Joanna Brooks (Joanna Brooks grew up in a conservative Mormon home in the orange groves of Orange County, California. Now, she's an award winning American religion scholar and writer.)

Is the Tea Party a religious movement? Last week here at RD, Lou Ruprecht said no, while I said it's not so simple.

For the Mormon sector of the movement (including Tea Party icon Glenn Beck), I explained, the Tea Party taps into a powerful and distinctive complex of Mormon beliefs about the divinity of the U.S. Constitution and the last-days role of righteous souls from the Rocky Mountains in saving it from destruction.

An even more provocative explanation of the specifically religious features of the Tea Party in the Book of Mormon belt comes from Doe Daughtrey, a doctoral candidate in religious studies at Arizona State University.

According to Daughtrey, especially in the last three or four decades, institutional Mormonism has deemphasized or discontinued some distinctive metaphysical doctrines and practices dating from our faith's early connections with Anglo-American folk magic and mysticism. This demystification of Mormonism results in large part from LDS Church leaders' pragmatic desire to evangelize and establish the faith more effectively beyond the religion's American Western ethnic core.

But this "disenchantment" or "secularization" has left many multi-generational Mormons longing for the intensity of our old identity as "peculiar people."

Daughtrey writes: In a secularized, routinized, or demythologized Mormonism (which looks more like mainline Protestantism than the mystical tradition established by Joseph Smith), the religion is missing that distinctiveness, that tension of persecuted otherness.

Beck and the Tea Party movement reenchant the experience of being Mormon . . . or at least they reawaken the Mormon cultural memory of prophetic millennialism.

Beck, a convert to Mormonism, recalls the strident prophetic voice that distinguished Mormonism from 19th-century Protestant groups. Many Mormons have a long cultural memory of persecution. Though they may welcome their church’s modern emphasis on their similarities to other religionists, I believe there remains a longing in them for the 'peculiar people' identity conveyed by the divisive prophetic voice and the historical experience of conspiracy.

I know, I know, I promised that the above was the last one, but I lied.

You should not hang up, however, until you take a gander at the article below on the just-passed Bilderberg Conference - don't worry - the info is still current. After all, they are determining your life. (I mean, come onnnn. What do you think we're paying them to do? Plenty of Shock Doctrine for Everybody!) Now you remember Paul Krugman's warnings, don't you? And doesn't this make you just a little bit suspicious about the MSM puppet shows we are fed all the time? Awww come on! I'm certainly a little more assured that we are correct in voting to be led by the Right Honorable Timmy Geithner and his bestest mentor Larry Summers (both courtesy of the Robby Rubin classical school of Chicago Economics - NOT). And don't forget why we experience all that immigration of "cheap labor" foreigners. There is a reason they need to leave their home countries. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Plunged into Chaos: Europe on the Eve of the Bilderberg Conference

The Bilderberg group will convene in Sitges, Spain, a resort community 30 km from Barcelona, on June 4-7. As usual, the information is supplied by James Tucker and Daniel Estulin who revealed that this year the issues topping the agenda of the club's meeting will be the global recession and the approaches to provoking such economic breakdowns that can help justify the establishment of a full-scale world economic governance.

Intending to prolong the global economic downturn for at least another year, the Bilderberg group hopes to take advantage of the situation to set up a “global ministry of finance” as a part of the UN. Though the decision was actually made at the group's meeting in Greece last year, according to Tucker the plan was torpedoed by US and European nationalists” (for the Bilderberg group, “nationalists” is a generic term for all nationally-oriented forces espousing national sovereignty and statehood).

All year since the last meeting, representatives of the global executive management have been convincing the public across the world to embrace a “new financial order”. The idea recurred in the statements made by N. Sarkozy, G. Brown, and the freshly elected European Council President H. Van Rompuy, but – against the backdrop of a relatively harmless phase of the crisis - the activity remained limited to psychological conditioning and no practical steps have been taken.

As Jacques Attali wrote quite reasonably in his After the Crisis, Europe has no right to demand a reform of the global financial architecture as long as it can't organize the institutions that would meet its own needs. The debt crisis in Greece that currently puts in jeopardy the entire European financial system provides a pretext for drastic measures, and both the crisis and the measures are vivid illustrations of the strategy that employs chaos to reorder the existing arrangements.

The deliberately generated chaos is tightly controlled by financial institutions, major banks, and hedge funds and serves as an efficient mechanism of governance and social restructuring. The financial attack against Greece promptly evolved into onslaught on Euro and – as it became clear – the developments correlated marginally with the structural shortcomings of the Greek economy.

The intensity of the crisis that momentarily posed a threat to the economic and even political integrity of the EU cannot be explained solely by the appetites of faceless financial players. There had to be more serious reasons behind the situation, and to an extent the objectives pursued by those who shaped it can be understood from the statements made by G. Soros.

He maintains that the EU owes its current difficulties to the European (especially German) politicians' reluctance to move on, that huge problems await Europe unless it starts developing, and that a kind of a European Monetary Fund helping fight budget deficit must be created.

In other words, Europeans are forced to choose between the collapse of the Eurozone and governance centralization. Jacques Attali laid out a specific centralization plan. It is suggested that the EU countries create their own institutions to monitor the activities of financial operators. It is also proposed that they should set up a European creditor of a new formation that – while not being linked to Europe's central and investment banks or governments - would guarantee assistance to viable local financial institutions, buy into their assets, and extend loans under specific terms.

Attali further advocates the formation of a European ministry of finance that would immediately be empowered to hand out loans from the name of the EU, and the creation of a European Budget Fund with a mandate to oversee the budgets of the countries whose cumulative dept totals over 85% of the GDP. He warns that an even severer crisis should be expected otherwise.

Under the US pressure, A. Merkel finally consented to tough measures (purportedly, Sarkozy even threatened that France would revert to national currency in case she held her own), and early last May EU finance and economy ministers signed an agreement on the mechanisms of budgetary stabilization in the Euro zone, which envisaged the establishment of a Euro 60b safety pillow fund to urgently rescue countries battling with their public finances and the allocation of Euro 440b in guaranteed loans.

The IMF also pledged Euro 250b in the case of need. The money is meant for sovereign debt bailouts in the Eurozone, a mission which – for the first time in its entire history – the European central bank will also undertake.

Steps facilitating financial transactions were announced by central banks across the world including the US Federal Reserve which will urgently inject US dollars into the European Central Bank as well as into British and Swiss banks. The above can be regarded as the first phase of progress towards centralized European monetary administration.

It is unclear so far how exactly the “grand architects” see the world financial governance and what role they plan to give to existing financial institutions like the IMF. The options on the table range from building totally new institutions to – as, for example, suggested by Attali – using the IMF as an authorized supranational regulation center run by a G-24 board.

Importantly, once again we are witnessing the creation of mechanisms of centralized supranational control over national economies, and the crisis acts as a catalyst for a guided fast transition to tighter integration within the EU, which is necessary to build a close-knit Western bloc.

The plan imposed on Europe by elite financial circles implies countering the indebtedness problem with the help of new borrowings, which will exacerbate rather than remedy the budget problem. According to Eurostat data, in 2010 the Eurozone sovereign debt will grow from 77.7% to 83.6% of the GDP.

Moreover, it is widely held in the expert community that the indebtedness figures for Greece, Portugal, and a number of other EU countries are unrealistically low and do not reflect the actual proportions of the problem. Experts from Lombard Odier, a Swiss bank, estimate the bulk of Greek bad debt at 875% of its GDP, which means that to meet its obligations the country would have to invest – without any foreseeable returns – an amount exceeding its GDP by a factor of 8.75.

The situations in Poland and Slovenia are even more alarming – in their cases the debt to GDP ratio is 15 and 11 respectively. The corresponding average over the Eurozone is 4.34, and in the US – 5. Leaving structural problems untouched, the mitigation measures are paving the way for the supranational institutions advocated by mondialist Attali.

On May 21, the EU finance ministers adopted at a meeting chaired by European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet and European Council President H. Van Rompuy the German plan of much greater budgetary coordination including penalties for states that break the EU budgetary rules. The sanctions will include suspending the voting rights of repeat offenders, withholding the funding for infrastructural development, etc.

It was also proposed to subject national budgets to EU screening prior to their being debated in national legislatures. A report will be prepared by June 17 – notably, the date of the EU summit – outlining a common Eurozone policy. Other, yet more ambitious projects like full control over Eurozone national budgets by a triumvirate comprising the European Commission, the European central bank, and the Euro Group are also discussed.

The downsides of the rescue packages are the worst part of the problem. Invoking the threat of financial collapse, the EU countries serially introduced extremely unpopular austerity regimes with salary and pension freezes for state employees, welfare cuts, increased retirement ages, etc.

Greece was the first but not the only country affected. The German government plans to cut spending by Euro 10b annually in 2011-2016. France abolished the annual pension for low-income families. Under the IMF pressure, Spain is launching a comprehensive reform including pension indexing freeze, pay reductions and employment cuts in the state sector, the abolition of payments to support families with recently born children, etc. Great Britain, Italy, and others are following the lead.

The consequences of the measures are hard to gauge considering that Europe is already facing serious poverty and unemployment problems (the unemployment has reached 10% of the economically active population and continues to grow, and at least 80 mln people are currently below the poverty line).

Most likely, the shadow world government - the Bilderberg group – will administer to the public the doze of social problems carefully calculated to enable the elites “to offload troubled assets”, retain control over the situation, and divert protests from the actual sources of problems that trigger them.

From Russia's perspective, the conclusion is obvious: any deepening of its integration into the “free” Europe strengthens the financial and informational control over Russia exercised by the global elites seeking to strip it of the status of an independent geopolitical player.

(Olga Chetverikova, Ph.D. in History, is Assistant Professor at Moscow State Institute of Intentional Relations of the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation.)

Too bad for us all. Except for those very wealthy few lucky enough to have played the right cards in the fixed casino. No. Not I or anyone I know. Suzan _____________