Monthly Archives: October 2011

NeoPuritans push Public School on “Ritualists”

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From Murray Rothbard, “The Progressive Era and the Family,” Joseph R. Peden and Fred R. Glahe (eds.), The American Family and the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986).:

In the last two decades, the advent of the “new political history” has transformed our understanding of the political party system and the basis of political conflict in nineteenth century America. In contrast to the party systems of the twentieth century (the “fourth” party system, 1896–1932, of Republican supremacy; the “fifth” party system, 1932–? of Democratic supremacy), the nineteenth century political parties were not bland coalitions of interests with virtually the same amorphous ideology, with each party blurring what is left of its image during campaigns to appeal to the large independent center. In the nineteenth century, each party offered a fiercely contrasting ideology, and political parties performed the function of imposing a common ideology on diverse sectional and economic interests. During campaigns, the ideology and the partisanship became fiercer and even more clearly demarcated, since the object was not to appeal to independent moderates—there were virtually none—but to bring out the vote of one’s own partisans. Such partisanship and sharp alternatives marked the “second” American party system (Whig versus Democrat, approximately 1830 to the mid-1850s) and the “third” party system (closely fought Republican versus Democrat, mid-1850s to 1896).

Another important insight of the new political history is that the partisan passion devoted by rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans to national economic issues, stemmed from a similar passion devoted at the local and state level to what would now be called “social” issues. Furthermore, that political conflict, from the 1830s on, stemmed from a radical transformation that took place in American Protestantism as a result of the revival movement of the 1830s.

The new revival movement swept the Protestant churches, particularly in the North, like wildfire. In contrast to the old creedal Calvinist churches that stressed the importance of obeying God’s law as expressed in the church creed, the new “pietism” was very different. The pietist doctrine was essentially as follows: Specific creeds of various churches or sects do not matter. Neither does obedience to the rituals or liturgies of the particular church. What counts for salvation is only each individual being “born again”—a direct confrontation between the individual and God, a mystical and emotional conversion in which the individual achieves salvation. The rite of baptism, to the pietist, therefore becomes secondary; of primary importance is his or her personal moment of conversion.

But if the specific church or creed becomes submerged in a vague Christian interdenominationalism, then the individual Christian is left on his own to grapple with the problems of salvation. Pietism, as it swept American Protestantism in the 1830s, took two very different forms in North and South, with very different political implications. The Southerners, at least until the 1890s, became “salvationist pietists,” that is, they believed that the emotional experience of individual regeneration, of being born again, was enough to ensure salvation. Religion was a separate compartment of life, a vertical individual-God relation carrying no imperative to transform man-made culture and interhuman relations.

In contrast, the Northerners, particularly in the areas inhabited by “Yankees,” adopted a far different form of pietism, “evangelical pietism.” The evangelical pietists believed that man could achieve salvation by an act of free will. More particularly, they also believed that it was necessary to a person’s own salvation—and not just a good idea—to try his best to ensure the salvation of everyone else in society:

“To spread holiness,” to create that Christian commonwealth by bringing all men to Christ, was the divinely ordered duty of the “saved.” Their mandate was “to transform the world into the image of Christ.”1

Since each individual is alone to wrestle with problems of sin and salvation, without creed or ritual of the church to sustain him, the evangelical duty must therefore be to use the state, the social arm of the integrated Christian community, to stamp out temptation and occasions for sin. Only in this way could one perform one’s divinely mandated duty to maximize the salvation of others. 2   And to the evangelical pietist, sin took on an extremely broad definition, placing the requirements for holiness far beyond that of other Christian groups. As one antipietist Christian put it, “They saw sin where God did not.” In particular, sin was any and all forms of contact with liquor, and doing anything except praying and going to church on Sunday. Any forms of gambling, dancing, theater, reading of novels—in short, secular enjoyment of any kind—were considered sinful.

The forms of sin that particularly agitated the evangelicals were those they held to interfere with the theological free will of individuals, making them unable to achieve salvation. Liquor was sinful because, they alleged, it crippled the free will of the imbibers. Another particular source of sin was Roman Catholicism, in which priests and bishops, arms of the Pope (whom they identified as the Antichrist), ruled the minds and therefore crippled the theological freedom of will of members of the church.

Evangelical pietism particularly appealed to, and therefore took root among, the “Yankees,” i.e., that cultural group that originated in (especially rural) New England and emigrated widely to populate northern and western New York, northern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois. The Yankees were natural “cultural imperialists,” people who were wont to impose their values and morality on other groups; as such, they took quite naturally to imposing their form of pietism through whatever means were available, including the use of the coercive power of the state.

In contrast to evangelical pietists were, in addition to small groups of old-fashioned Calvinists, two great Christian groups, the Catholics and the Lutherans (or at least, the high-church variety of Lutheran), who were “liturgicals” (or “ritualists”) rather than pietists. The liturgicals saw the road to salvation in joining the particular church, obeying its rituals, and making use of its sacraments; the individual was not alone with only his emotions and the state to protect him. There was no particular need, then, for the state to take on the functions of the church. Furthermore, the liturgicals had a much more relaxed and rational view of what sin really was; for instance, excessive drinking might be sinful, but liquor per se surely was not.

The evangelical pietists, from the 1830s on, were the northern Protestants of British descent, as well as the Lutherans from Scandinavia and a minority of pietist German synods; the liturgicals were the Roman Catholics and the high-church Lutherans, largely German.

Very rapidly, the political parties reflected a virtually one-to-one correlation of this ethnoreligious division: the Whig, and later the Republican, party consisting chiefly of the pietists, and the Democratic party encompassing almost all the liturgicals. And for almost a century, on a state and local level, the Whig/Republican pietists tried desperately and determinedly to stamp out liquor and all Sunday activities except church (of course, drinking liquor on Sunday was a heinous double sin). As to the Catholic church, the pietists tried to restrict or abolish immigration, since people coming from Germany and Ireland, liturgicals, were outnumbering people from Britain and Scandinavia. Failing that and despairing of doing anything about adult Catholics poisoned by agents of the Vatican, the evangelical pietists decided to concentrate on saving Catholic and Lutheran youth by trying to eliminate the parochial schools, through which both religious groups transmitted their precious religious and social values to the young. The object, as many pietists put it, was to “Christianize the Catholics,” to force Catholic and Lutheran children into public schools, which could then be used as an instrument of pietist Protestantization. Since the Yankees had early taken to the idea of imposing communal civic virtue and obedience through the public schools, they were particularly receptive to this new reason for aggrandizing public education.

To all of these continuing aggressions by what they termed “those fanatics,” the liturgicals fought back with equal fervor. Particularly bewildered were the Germans who, Lutheran and Catholic alike, were accustomed to the entire family happily attending beer gardens together on Sundays after church and who now found the “fanatic” pietists trying desperately to outlaw this pleasurable and seemingly innocent activity. The pietist Protestant attacks on private and parochial schools fatally threatened the preservation and maintenance of the liturgicals’ cultural and religious values; and since large numbers of the Catholics and Lutherans were immigrants, parochial schools also served to maintain group affinities in a new and often hostile world—especially the world of Anglo-Saxon pietism. In the case of the Germans, it also meant, for several decades, preserving parochial teaching in the beloved German language, as against fierce pressures for Anglicization.

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, as Catholic immigration grew and the Democratic party moved slowly but surely toward a majority status, the Republican, and—more broadly—pietist pressures became more intense. The purpose of the public school, to the pietists, was “to unify and make homogeneous the society.” There was no twentieth century concern for separating religion and the public school system. To the contrary, in most northern jurisdictions only pietist-Protestant church members were allowed to be teachers in the public schools. Daily reading of the Protestant Bible, daily Protestant prayers and Protestant hymns were common in the public schools, and school textbooks were rife with anti-Catholic propaganda. Thus, New York City school textbooks spoke broadly of “the deceitful Catholics,” and pounded into their children, Catholic and Protestant alike, the message that “Catholics are necessarily, morally, intellectually, infallibly, a stupid race.”3

Teachers delivered homilies on the evils of Popery, and also on deeply felt pietist theological values: the wickedness of alcohol (the “demon rum”) and the importance of keeping the Sabbath. In the 1880s and 1890s, zealous pietists began working ardently for antialcohol instruction as a required part of the public-school curriculum; by 1901, every state in the Union required instruction in temperance.

Since most Catholic children went to public rather than parochial schools, the Catholic authorities were understandably anxious to purge the schools of Protestant requirements and ceremonies, and of anti-Catholic textbooks. To the pietists, these attempts to de-Protestantize the public schools were intolerable “Romish aggression.” The whole point of the public schools was moral and religious homogenization, and here the Catholics were disrupting the attempt to make American society holy—to produce, through the public school and the Protestant gospel, “a morally and politically homogeneous people.” As Kleppner writes:

When they [the pietists] spoke of “moral education,” they had in mind principles of morality shared in common by the adherents of gospel religion, for in the public school all children, even those whose parents were enslaved by “Lutheran formalism or Romish supersitition,” would be exposed to the Bible. That alone was cause for righteous optimism, for they believed the Bible to be “the agent in converting the soul,” “the volume that makes human beings men.”4

In this way, “America [would] be Saved Through the Children.”5

The pietists were therefore incensed that the Catholics were attempting to block the salvation of America’s children—and eventually of America itself—all at the orders of a “foreign potentate.” Thus, the New Jersey Methodist Conference of 1870 lashed out with their deepest feelings against this Romish obstructionism:

Resolved, That we greatly deprecate the effort which is being made by “Haters of Light,” and especially by an arrogant priesthood, to exclude the Bible from the Public Schools of our land; and that we will do all in our power to defeat the well-defined and wicked design of this “Mother of Harlots.”6

Throughout the nineteenth century, “nativist” attacks on “foreigners” and the foreign-born were really attacks on liturgical immigrants. Immigrants from Britain or Scandinavia, pietists all, were “good Americans” as soon as they got off the boat. It was the diverse culture of the other immigrants that had to be homogenized and molded into that of pietist America. Thus, the New England Methodist Conference of 1889 declared:

We are a nation of remnants, ravellings from the Old World. . . . The public school is one of the remedial agencies which work in our society to diminish this . . . and to hasten the compacting of these heterogeneous materials into a solid nature. 7

Or, as a leading citizen of Boston declared, “the only way to elevate the foreign population was to make Protestants of their children.”8

Since the cities of the North, in the late nineteenth century, were becoming increasingly filled with Catholic immigrants, pietist attacks on sinful cities and on immigrants both became aspects of the anti-liturgical struggle for a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon pietist culture. The Irish were particular butts of pietist scorn; a New York City textbook bitterly warned that continued immigration could make America “the common sewer of Ireland,” filled with drunken and depraved Irishmen.9

The growing influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century seemed to pose even greater problems for the pietist progressives, but they did not shrink from the task. As Elwood P. Cubberley of Stanford University, the nation’s outstanding progressive historian of education, declared, southern and eastern Europeans have served to dilute tremendously our national stock, and to corrupt our civil life. . . . Everywhere these people tend to settle in groups or settlements, and to set up here their national manners, customs, and observances. Our task is to break up these groups or settlements, to assimilate and amalgamate these people as a part of our American race and to implant in their children. . . the Anglo-Saxon conception of rightousness, law and order, and popular government. . . . 10

Read the whole article

Baptism as God’s moat… not all that workable

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It is really easy to think of the Church as God’s palace and, therefore, baptism as God’s moat.

(Especially if you realize that the record of Solomon building God’s “Temple” and then his own “Palace” is a somewhat arbitrary English addition to the text. In the Hebrew, Solomon simply first build’s God’s great house and then his own great house. So all the passages about the Church as Temple of God could just as easily be about the Church as Palace of God, even though the language is Greek rather than Hebrew at that point.)

Crossing a boundary marked by water is labeled a baptism: “our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Corinthians 10.1, 2).

And if crossing the Red Sea was a baptism, then so was the crossing of the Jordan, which included memorial signs and circumcisions at the next camp site (Joshua 3-5). And lets not forget the transition at the crossing of Zered. From Deuteronomy 2:

And we turned and went in the direction of the wilderness of Moab. And the Lord said to me, ‘Do not harass Moab or contend with them in battle, for I will not give you any of their land for a possession, because I have given Ar to the people of Lot for a possession.’ (The Emim formerly lived there, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim. Like the Anakim they are also counted as Rephaim, but the Moabites call them Emim. The Horites also lived in Seir formerly, but the people of Esau dispossessed them and destroyed them from before them and settled in their place, as Israel did to the land of their possession, which the Lord gave to them.) ‘Now rise up and go over the brook Zered.’ So we went over the brook Zered. And the time from our leaving Kadesh-barnea until we crossed the brook Zered was thirty-eight years, until the entire generation, that is, the men of war, had perished from the camp, as the Lord had sworn to them. For indeed the hand of the Lord was against them, to destroy them from the camp, until they had perished.

So as soon as all the men of war had perished and were dead from among the people, the Lord said to me, ‘Today you are to cross the border of Moab at Ar. And when you approach the territory of the people of Ammon, do not harass them or contend with them, for I will not give you any of the land of the people of Ammon as a possession, because I have given it to the sons of Lot for a possession.’

So crossing over/through water seems to be the way one gets into the Kingdom. This is related to baptism and fits into our moat analogy…

But it doesn’t keep enough people out to really qualify as a moat. Frankly, baptism is more like the drawbridge. The whole point of baptism is how many people that it includes.

1 Corinthians 10:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

If someone wants to start a movement, it is easy to see benefits in raising “the cost of admission” to make sure you get committed people and entice coinverts by the prospect of being able to count themselves heroes. But God doesn’t ask us to swim through deadly waters. He just invites us with a bit of Spiritual moisture.

The heroic effort comes later, mainly in the form of the challenge of welcoming and loving one another, even the “least.”

Bribing preachers in order to sell bonds

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George Peabody sold bonds in London. The bonds were issued by states to fund infrastructure projects. I’m sure these projects were done with complete transparency and accountability with zero corruption. Sure.

Eventually, the states learned that they had to raise taxes to pay on the bonds. Taxpayers didn’t like being forced into higher taxes due to past decisions in which they had no say. States eventually caved to taxpayers and repudiated debts. George Peabody, who was the beginning of what became the House of Morgan, had not yet invented the IMF to deal with these states.

So…

A hallmark of merchant bankers was that they vouched for the securities they sponsored. At first, Peabody merely sent letters to Baltimore friends, scolding them about the need for Maryland to resume interest payments. Then he tired of persuasion and rewarded reporters with small gratuities for favorable articles about he state. At last, in 1845 he conspired with Barings to push Maryland into resuming payment. They set up a political slush fund to spread propaganda for debt resumption and to elect sympathetic legislators, they even drafted the clergy into giving sermons on the sanctity of contracts. By means of a secret account, the two firms transferred 1000 pounds to Baltimore, 90 percent from Barings and 10 percent from Peabody–a strategy Barings duplicated in Pennsylvania. Most shocking of all, Barings bribed Daniel Webster, the orator and statesman, to make speeches for debt repayment.

Does this sound like oil is a rare substance or a plentiful but controllable resource that is kept cartellized?

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By the end of World War I the central place of petroleum in world strategy had become obvious, and the dramatic thirst of military operations had led to fears that there would be a global oil shortage, and to quick appreciation of the profits to be made in such circumstances. American companies, who had been unwilling to explore abroad when vast oilfields were being discovered at home in Texas and California, began to look overseas, and the American government began to use considerable political and economic pressure to try to force American companies into the European-dominated consortia in the Middle East. However, new fields came on line in the 1920s, and the big companies were soon worrying instead about an oil glut. By 1928 there were negotiations between BP, Shell, and Exxon* in a Scottish castle, and the so-called Achnacarry Agreement set out working principles to avoid competition at the marketing end of the oil industry. The agreement specifically excluded the US market because of its powerful anti-trust legislation, but there is no question that the companies had no intention of serious competition there if they could hammer out an agreement for the rest of the world.

The Economist of London praised the Achnacarry Agreement as “an example of the effectiveness of international cooperation in oil marketing.” The Economist was pleased with the “stability” of the prices of oil and gasoline, but it’s not clear whether the articles was written with the seller or the consumer in mind. Mobil, Gulf, and Texaco had joined the three founder companies by 1932, to make six. The results for producers were very rewarding: stable (but higher) prices gouged the consumer for decades, and “pirates” were dealt with summarily whenever possible.

With the Achnacarry Agreement in hand, each large company could feel that it would be able to negotiate a market share for its oil without seeing petroleum prices crash. The stage was now set for serious prospecting, and for staking out major oilfields, even though every company could see that it would not be in a position to pump all the oil that it found. After 1928, therefore, the era of the great Middle East oil strikes began, though Middle East production remained low.

In 1928 the six-year negotiations over Iraq were completed, and the Iraq Petroleum Company was re-divided. 5% went to the formidable Mr. Gulbenkian, and the other 95% was shared equally between the British (BP), the Dutch (Shell), the French (CFP, the Compagnie Française Pétrole), and a Rockefeller-controlled American group (Exxon + Mobil). The Iraq company was essentially set up as an accounting company, to share the production costs and the crude oil between the partners.

On June 1, 1932, Socal (now Chevron) struck oil in Bahrain, the first strike in the Arabian peninsula. In 1933 BP extended its Iranian lease for another 60 years. Gulf joined with BP to explore a Kuwaiti concession in 1934. But 1938 marked the major turning point in Middle East oil history: Gulf and BP struck the Burgan field in Kuwait, and Chevron struck oil in Saudi Arabia.

*I have used the modern names of oil companies in the discussion that follows to save confusion: thus, “Exxon” rather than “Esso”; I call the largest oil companies “the majors”.

Read the rest at OPEC and Crude Oil.

So what exactly qualified a person or persons as “pirates”?

See here and here for why I post this.

I don’t even know what country I live in, anymore

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WXIX 19 (CIN) Ben Swann on Anwar Al-Awlaki and the Constitution – YouTube.

And from Reuters:

Secret panel can put Americans on “kill list’

Wed, Oct 5 2011

By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.

The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.

Current and former officials said that to the best of their knowledge, Awlaki, who the White House said was a key figure in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate, had been the only American put on a government list targeting people for capture or death due to their alleged involvement with militants.

The White House is portraying the killing of Awlaki as a demonstration of President Barack Obama’s toughness toward militants who threaten the United States. But the process that led to Awlaki’s killing has drawn fierce criticism from both the political left and right.

In an ironic turn, Obama, who ran for president denouncing predecessor George W. Bush’s expansive use of executive power in his “war on terrorism,” is being attacked in some quarters for using similar tactics. They include secret legal justifications and undisclosed intelligence assessments.

Liberals criticized the drone attack on an American citizen as extra-judicial murder.

Conservatives criticized Obama for refusing to release a Justice Department legal opinion that reportedly justified killing Awlaki. They accuse Obama of hypocrisy, noting his administration insisted on publishing Bush-era administration legal memos justifying the use of interrogation techniques many equate with torture, but refused to make public its rationale for killing a citizen without due process.

Some details about how the administration went about targeting Awlaki emerged on Tuesday when the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing.

The process involves “going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president, but the National Security Council does the investigation, they have lawyers, they review, they look at the situation, you have input from the military, and also, we make sure that we follow international law,” Ruppersberger said.

LAWYERS CONSULTED

Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described.

They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC “principals,” meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval. The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said.

The officials insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

They confirmed that lawyers, including those in the Justice Department, were consulted before Awlaki’s name was added to the target list.

Two principal legal theories were advanced, an official said: first, that the actions were permitted by Congress when it authorized the use of military forces against militants in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001; and they are permitted under international law if a country is defending itself.

Several officials said that when Awlaki became the first American put on the target list, Obama was not required personally to approve the targeting of a person. But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals’ decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.

A former official said one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to “protect” the president.

Officials confirmed that a second American, Samir Khan, was killed in the drone attack that killed Awlaki. Khan had served as editor of Inspire, a glossy English-language magazine used by AQAP as a propaganda and recruitment vehicle.

But rather than being specifically targeted by drone operators, Khan was in the wrong place at the wrong time, officials said. Ruppersberger appeared to confirm that, saying Khan’s death was “collateral,” meaning he was not an intentional target of the drone strike.

When the name of a foreign, rather than American, militant is added to targeting lists, the decision is made within the intelligence community and normally does not require approval by high-level NSC officials.

‘FROM INSPIRATIONAL TO OPERATIONAL’

Officials said Awlaki, whose fierce sermons were widely circulated on English-language militant websites, was targeted because Washington accumulated information his role in AQAP had gone “from inspirational to operational.” That meant that instead of just propagandizing in favor of al Qaeda objectives, Awlaki allegedly began to participate directly in plots against American targets.

“Let me underscore, Awlaki is no mere messenger but someone integrally involved in lethal terrorist activities,” Daniel Benjamin, top counterterrorism official at the State Department, warned last spring.

The Obama administration has not made public an accounting of the classified evidence that Awlaki was operationally involved in planning terrorist attacks.

But officials acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.

For instance, one plot in which authorities have said Awlaki was involved Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner on Christmas Day 2009 with a bomb hidden in his underpants.

There is no doubt Abdulmutallab was an admirer or follower of Awlaki, since he admitted that to U.S. investigators. When he appeared in a Detroit courtroom earlier this week for the start of his trial on bomb-plot charges, he proclaimed, “Anwar is alive.”

But at the time the White House was considering putting Awlaki on the U.S. target list, intelligence connecting Awlaki specifically to Abdulmutallab and his alleged bomb plot was partial. Officials said at the time the United States had voice intercepts involving a phone known to have been used by Awlaki and someone who they believed, but were not positive, was Abdulmutallab.

Awlaki was also implicated in a case in which a British Airways employee was imprisoned for plotting to blow up a U.S.-bound plane. E-mails retrieved by authorities from the employee’s computer showed what an investigator described as ” operational contact” between Britain and Yemen.

Authorities believe the contacts were mainly between the U.K.-based suspect and his brother. But there was a strong suspicion Awlaki was at the brother’s side when the messages were dispatched. British media reported that in one message, the person on the Yemeni end supposedly said, “Our highest priority is the US … With the people you have, is it possible to get a package or a person with a package on board a flight heading to the US?”

U.S. officials contrast intelligence suggesting Awlaki’s involvement in specific plots with the activities of Adam Gadahn, an American citizen who became a principal English-language propagandist for the core al Qaeda network formerly led by Osama bin Laden.

While Gadahn appeared in angry videos calling for attacks on the United States, officials said he had not been specifically targeted for capture or killing by U.S. forces because he was regarded as a loudmouth not directly involved in plotting attacks.

 

At issue are the reported murders of 23 local farmers who tried to recover land, which they say was illegally sold to big palm oil plantations, such as Grupo Dinant, in a country scarred by widespread human rights abuses.

In July, a report by an International Fact Finding Mission was presented to the European Parliament’s Human Rights Sub-committee, alleging that 23 peasants, one journalist and his partner, had all been murdered in the Bajo Aguán region, between January 2010 and March 2011.

The deaths were facilitated by the “direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials,” the report said.

In some cases it cited “feigned accidents” in which peasants were run over by security guards working for two named palm oil businessmen. In other cases, the farmers were simply shot, or “disappeared”.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will be holding a hearing into the report on 24 October, and a delegation of MEPs will be visiting the region between 31 October and 4 November.

But because of a three-year gap between the stakeholder consultation process and the biogas project approvals, the CDM board recently ruled that the project had met the criteria of its mandate.

“We are not investigators of crimes,” a board member told EurActiv. “We had to take judgements within our rules – however regretful that may be – and there was not much scope for us to refuse the project. All the consultation procedures precisely had been obeyed.”

via Carbon credits tarnished by human rights ‘disgrace’ | EurActiv.

A glimpse of the dysgenictopia

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Here is the current modern liberal progressive official website of the Nobel Prize and its biography of one of its winners. I know it is long, but I’m reproducing the entire thing.

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet was born at Traralgon, Victoria, Australia, on September 3rd, 1899. He is the son of the Manager of the branch of the Colonial Bank in that town. He was educated at the Victoria State Schools and at Geelong College, completing his medical course at the University of Melbourne, where he graduated M.B., B.S., in 1922, and M.D., in 1923.

In 1923, Burnet went to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of the University of Melbourne to do research work on the agglutinin reactions in typhoid fever. He was from 1923-1924 Resident Pathologist at the Melbourne Hospital.

In 1926 he was awarded a Beit Fellowship for Medical Research and worked for a year at the Lister Institute, London.

In 1932 he spent a year at the National Institute for Medical Research, Hampstead, London. Otherwise, apart from many visits to various countries to give lectures or for other purposes, he has worked continuously at the Hall Institute in Melbourne.

In 1944 he became Director of this Institute and Professor of Experimental Medicine in the University of Melbourne.

It is impossible to give, in a brief space, an adequate idea of the range and fundamental importance of Burnet’s work. His work on the agglutinins of typhoid fever mentioned above was followed by the work on viruses for which he is nowadays justly famous. In 1935 he isolated a strain of influenza A virus in Australia, and subsequently did much work on serological variations of the influenza virus and on Australian strains of the swine influenza. He also published papers on variations in the virulence of influenza virus and on the mutation rates in it, which he calculated.

In 1946, in collaboration with W. I. B. Beveridge, Burnet devised a technique for cultivating viruses on the chorioallantoic membrane of chicken embryos and a method for determining the relative concentration of the material inoculated into these membranes by counting and statistically analysing the number of lesions that then appear on the membranes.

In 1947 he discovered, in collaboration with Stone, the receptor-destroying enzyme present in Vibrio cholerae, a discovery which led to the synthesis of neuraminic acid and to the demonstration, by Gottschalk and Cornforth, that purified influenza virus will quantitatively split the acetylgalactosamine neuraminic acid compound. Later it was shown that this enzyme derived from Vibrio cholerae can prevent infection by the influenza to a significant degree.

Burnet did much other important work on certain aspects of the prevention of virus infections and on important biological aspects of virus growth inside the cells in which they can live. He found that the filamentous forms of some viruses (e.g. those of myxoviruses such as those which cause influenza, mumps, fowl plague, and Newcastle disease) can be ruptured by suspending them in water, and suggested that their infectivity is limited to their tips, so that these filamentous forms can, as later work showed, be regarded as having an infective «warhead» composed of nucleic acid and a long tail composed of non-infective viral haemagglutinin.

Other aspects of Burnet’s work are his work on the surface properties of these filamentous forms, which are, he found, similar to those of cell surfaces, and his work with the haemagglutinin found in extracts of tissue infected with vaccinia, which can, he found, be precipitated by a saturated solution of ammonium sulphate and by cobra venom. He has also added much to our knowledge of the haemagglutination of red blood cells by various animal viruses, and has made contributions of fundamental importance to our knowledge of the genetic complexity of virus particles, and to the genetic interactions between related viruses which simultaneously infect the same cell and their relations to the transfer of neuropathogenicity. In addition, he has increased our knowledge of the inhibition of viruses by various substances, and of the complex details of immunological methods of studying viruses and of the immunology of viral infections.

Burnet has embodied his experience and experimental results, not only in numerous scientific papers, but in several books which show that he is a master, not only of a clear and attractive literary style, but also of lucid exposition of complex ideas and scientific facts.

Burnet received many honours and distinctions, among which the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London (1942), where he was awarded the Royal Medal in 1947 and the Copley Medal in 1959, and where he delivered the Croonian Lecture in 1950. He holds an honorary doctorate of the University of Cambridge, and was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1953. He was knighted in 1951, and in 1958 he received the Order of Merit.

Burnet married Edith Linda Druce in 1928. They have one son, Ian, and two daughters, Elizabeth (Mrs. Paul M. Dexter) and Deborah (Mrs. John Giddy).

Burnet was a co-winner of the prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1960. He died on August 31, 1985.

He was survived by millions of Asians that he tried to kill.

Missing from the description of this winner of the Order of Merit, was his attempt to get the Australian government to finance and implement biological pre-emptive warfare to cause genocide among all the brown people he felt would threaten Australia’s white citizens. Here are his own words, as reported in The Age:

Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions

While, Burnet was invited to write a report in response to the perceived threat of other countries developing biological weapons, the report in the age, “Burnet’s solution: The plan to poison S-E Asia,” makes it clear that he considered the weapons development to be necessary because of the menace of Asiatic population growth.

I’m getting the idea of preemption from the phrase “threatened invasion.” However, in 1998 he wrote something slightly different, according to the Age.

If anything, it is even more chilling that Burnet discouraged the idea that a biological attack would be a means of actually winning in a conflict. Rather, he encouraged the development of such a weapon in order to exterminate the defeated enemy and take all his land and resources:

The main strategic use of biological warfare may well be to administer the coup de grace to a virtually defeated enemy and compel surrender in the same way that the atomic bomb served in 1945. Its use has the tremendous advantage of not destroying the enemy’s industrial potential which can then be taken over intact. Overt biological warfare might be used to enforce surrender by psychological rather than direct destructive measures.

Perhaps someone can try to exonerate Burnet for claiming that introducing fatal diseases into Southeast Asia and destroying their food crops is merely a “psychological” form of warfare. But I don’t see it. You defeat them in battle, then you unloose fatal diseases (or food-destroying ones) and then take over the unmanned industry. I guess that would be a psychological problem for the survivors, but this proposal can hardly be reduced to psychological warfare.

Does this sound merely like psychological devastation to you?

After visiting the UK in 1950 and examining the British chemical and biological warfare research effort, Sir Macfarlane told the committee that the initiation of epidemics among enemy populations had usually been discarded as a means of waging war because it was likely to rebound on the user.

In a country of low sanitation the introduction of an exotic intestinal pathogen, e.g. by water contamination, might initiate widespread dissemination… Introduction of yellow fever into a country with appropriate mosquito vectors might build up into a disabling epidemic before control measures were established.

So what is my point?

The start date for these secret reports is 1947. We have just won a war against the Nazis and have treated them as some sort of unique eugenicist evil. Was it? Burnet grew up with the century and saw a tide of eugenicist literature. Did that all suddenly vanish into smoke with the embarrassment of Hitler?

Or did it morph?

One excerpt among many of this study performed under the direction of Henry Kissinger:

Bilateral population assistance is the largest and most invisible “instrument” for carrying out U.S. policy in this area. Other instruments include: support for and coordination with population programs of multilateral organizations and voluntary agencies; encouragement of multilateral country consortia and consultative groups to emphasize family planning in reviews of overall recipient progress and aid requests; and formal and informal presentation of views at international gatherings, such as food and population conferences. Specific country strategies must be worked out for each of the highest priority countries, and for the lower priority ones. These strategies will take account of such factors as: national attitudes and sensitivities on family planning; which “instruments” will be most acceptable, opportunities for effective use of assistance; and need of external capital or operating assistance.

For example, in Mexico our strategy would focus on working primarily through private agencies and multilateral organizations to encourage more government attention to the need for control of population growth; in Bangladesh we might provide large-scale technical and financial assistance, depending on the soundness of specific program requests; in Indonesia we would respond to assistance requests but would seek to have Indonesia meet as much of program costs from its own resources (i.e. surplus oil earnings) as possible. In general we would not provide large-scale bilateral assistance in the more developed LDCs, such as Brazil or Mexico. Although these countries are in the top priority list our approach must take account of the fact that their problems relate often to government policies and decisions and not to larger scale need for concessional assistance.

Within the overall array of U.S. foreign assistance programs, preferential treatment in allocation of funds and manpower should be given to cost-effective programs to reduce population growth; including both family planning activities and supportive activities in other sectors.

While some have argued for use of explicit “leverage” to “force” better population programs on LDC governments, there are several practical constraints on our efforts to achieve program improvements. Attempts to use “leverage” for far less sensitive issues have generally caused political frictions and often backfired. Successful family planning requires strong local dedication and commitment that cannot over the long run be enforced from the outside. There is also the danger that some LDC leaders will see developed country pressures for family planning as a form of economic or racial imperialism; this could well create a serious backlash.

Short of “leverage”, there are many opportunities, bilaterally and multilaterally, for U.S. representations to discuss and urge the need for stronger family planning programs. There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relationships, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the thirteen countries targeted in the report aren’t as white as the US or Australia’s majorities. But I doubt it. (Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria; India, Pakistan, Bangladesh; ndonesia, Thailand, the Philippines; Turkey; Mexico, Brazil and Colombia).

So lets jump ahead a bit. Consider this report from the Globe and Mail:

A few weeks after giving birth to a baby boy by Caesarian section, Hilma Nendongo went back to hospital to have the stitches removed. A nurse glanced at her medical record and casually asked her a horrifying question.

“Oh,” the nurse said, “did they tell you that you had been sterilized.

Ms. Nendongo, a 30-year-old villager from northern Namibia who barely spoke English, tore through her personal health card, looking for a clue to what had been done to her in the state hospital.

She couldn’t read any of the doctor’s scrawled handwriting, except for the word “stop” and the word “closed.” She later discovered the sickening truth: this was a common code for a tubal ligation, the most frequent form of sterilization in Namibia.

She suddenly remembered that the hospital staff had told her to sign some papers as she entered the operating room for her C-section. Nobody had explained the papers.

Oh, did they tell you that they sterilized you? We are such heroes to ourselves, aren’t we? We go help the half-humans so it is only right that we determine their fertility without bothering to even inform them, let alone ask.

[Note to the the outraged, ignorant: the above reference to “half-humans” was sarcasm. That is how we are treating them when we do this.]

By the way, what happens when the UN and other “multilaterals” promote “voluntary” birth control in countries without Western-style freedoms? Nothing good:

“The police said to my husband ‘if she doesn’t get sterilised, the police will arrest you right now and you will be sterilised instead… they threw me on the trolley and tied me up” Rudesinda Quillawamang.

When Fujimori launched a massive family planning campaign in the mid-nineties it was widely hailed and supported by the United Nations and international aid agencies alike. His aim, he said, was to liberate men and women from the burden of poverty and large families. Now, he’s facing genocide charges. During the Fujimori regime, the current government says, over 300,000 men and women were sterilised against their will.

Insight News Television investigates forced sterilisations in Peru. We talk to victims, health workers and others involved, and uncover a dark military plan of social engineering called ‘Plan Verde.’

In the Andes we meet Rudesinda, a young Quetchua Indian woman. She says she was dragged to the operating theatre and forcibly sterilised. And it wasn’t just the countryside where poor people were targeted.

Mary Elena says she was 17 when she went into a Lima hospital for a caesarean. After the birth of her son she found out that doctors had sterilised her. When her husband discovered that she was now infertile, he left her. ‘In this hospital they ruined my life, she says. ‘I think the government wanted to get rid of poor people like me.’

We obtain a full, unpublished, government report about the scandal. The report exposes a sinister military plan, called Plan Verde, to exterminate entire social groups such as the poor and criminals. The military and intelligence sources in the report are all anonymous, but we track down one source. This former military officer details how the military was indeed deployed to sterilise people.

Finally, we question one of the doctors responsible for the sterilisations. Dr Washington is now running for mayor in Anta. Despite the evidence against him, he’s in comfortable denial. ‘Many women are very happy for what was done to them. They have less children, definitely, but they are happy.“

Yes, if they aren’t threatening us with their breeding then they must be happy. We were being totally altruistic by sterilizing them against their will. Here is another article on the same subject.

Supposedly, in any internet debate, the first person to to call the other a Nazi is a loser. But I’ve just sampled a few things out of many. We live in a Nazi world, in denial for the moment.

Of course, unlike the crude racism of the Nazis, I think the class warfare of US eugenics is not so blunt. I’m sure there is a top one percent of almost every population that might be found worthy of US intellectuals. Maybe more. But it is still anti-human, anti-Christian, and a “hidden” evil that is all too obvious.

For further reading.

Writes, Greg Palast:

Each nation’s economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.

Step One is Privatization – which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called, ‘Briberization.’ Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders – using the World Bank’s demands to silence local critics – happily flogged their electricity and water companies. “You could see their eyes widen” at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.”

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest ‘briberization’ of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. “The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don’t care if it’s a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin” via kick-backs for his campaign.

Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet as Chairman of the President’s council of economic advisors.

Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia’s industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.

After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is ‘Capital Market Liberalization.’ In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the “Hot Money” cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation’s reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation’s own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.

“The result was predictable,” said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.

At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, “The IMF riot.”

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, “down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up,” as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples – the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You’d almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings, “confidential,” “restricted,” “not to be disclosed.” Let’s get back to one: the “Interim Country Assistance Strategy” for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states – with cold accuracy – that they expected their plans to spark, “social unrest,” to use their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.

That’s not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador’s currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line. The World Bank “Assistance” plan simply calls for facing down civil strife and suffering with, “political resolve” – and still higher prices.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it’s bright side – for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.

Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia ‘subsidizing’ food purchases, “when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the market) is welcome.” The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to save Indonesia’s financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks from which they had borrowed.

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia’s new president in the nation’s first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at 12% to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to the US Treasury’s vault in Washington.

Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their “poverty reduction strategy”: Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. “That too was about opening markets,” he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa, while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade just as effective – and sometimes just as deadly.

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO’s intellectual property rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has “condemned people to death” by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. “They don’t care,” said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, “if people live or die.”

Read the whole piece: The Globalizer who came out of the cold.