Professor James F. Tracy on KPFA

KPFA

"Sandy Hook: Unanswered Questions" with Professor James F. Tracy. Discrepancies in media coverage; coroner's press conference; political fallout.

Guns and Butter - January 9, 2013 at 1:00pm

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9/11 Truth Film Festival 2012 – An Exploration of Deep Events

From the Trenches

• WHAT:  9/11 Truth Film Festival
• WHERE:  Grand Lake Theater, Oakland, CA
• WHEN:  September 11, 2012, 2:00 p.m. till 11:00 p.m.

The eighth annual 9/11 Truth Film Festival will explore eventsrelated to 9/11, what featured speaker, professor, author, former  diplomat, Peter Dale Scott has termed “deep events” — those that are systematically ignored or falsified in the mainstream media and public consciousness.

The Film Festival, will be held again at the historic Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Ave, Oakland, on Tuesday, September 11, 2012 from 2 pm to 11 pm, and is a benefit for the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance.  Tickets are $10- $7 at the door.

9/11 bears the fingerprints of an audacious false flag operation, but it also fits into a long historical pattern of events designed to provoke and alter public sentiment and behavior.

A range of films and film excerpts, along with speakers, will analyze multiple events, including the Oakland bombing of activist Judi Bari, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 7/7 London bombings.

Speakers will include Chris Emery film producer of A Noble Lie – Oklahoma City 1995; Professor Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff of Project Censored; Mark Gaffney, author of Black 9/11 Money, Motive, and Technology and The 9/11 Mystery Plane And the Vanishing of America.

In addition to the films specifically about 9/11, including The Toronto Hearings on 9/11 Uncovering Ten Years of Deception, the new one hour television version of 9/11: Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out, will be screened, and the film Fishead will premiere and cast light on psychopaths, empathy, authority and the power of moral courage.

Bonnie Faulkner, producer of the popular KPFA radio program Guns and Butter, will serve again as mistress of ceremonies.  More details are posted at http://www.SF911Truth.org.

Contact – Ken Jenkins 510-530-0484

AMERICA: Desperate Times Demand Revolutionary Measures

Global Research
Prof. Peter Phillips

Towards Sociopolitical-environmental Collapse

“Don't waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate-—just enough to register your obstruction and defiance—and then get back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being decided.” Chris Hedges, May 2012

Runway capitalism is moving unrelentingly towards sociopolitical-environmental collapse—cheered on by a two-headed single party machine known as US Congress. Activists, who see the coming disasters as catastrophic, are seeking revolutionary change through non-cooperation, and occupy disruptions. Yet, many are the still delusional hopefuls desperately fumbling with traditional responses; including "Kum ba yah" marches, and the futile support for progressive left-leaning candidates seeking positions of influence inside the Washington beltway.

Do we understand that habeas corpus is no longer a legal protection in the US or that the US president can torture and kill American citizens, let along anyone in the world? How can we ignore the inconvenient truths of warrentless wire taps and electronic monitoring for everyone? Why do we tolerate that US-NATO forces killing people in over one hundred countries in the world using special service operatives, private assassins and drones—a million civilians deaths in Iraq alone? How can we be so blind as not to see our corporate media is a propaganda fog machine for the one percent?  These questions, reflecting the reality of America today, are so far from the values of our traditions that accepting any aspect of authority from Washington DC is a sacrilege to our honor. We are in desperate times.

In Congress, wealth begets membership, and wealth is the reward for correct action. The members in the House and Senate have a collective net worth of $2.04 billion, up from $1.65 billion, in 2008.  While at the same time, Americans' household net worth has continued to declined and the number of people living in poverty has risen for the fifth year in a row.

The American Congress is in reality an artificial organization serving as cheerleader to the transnational corporate class of the world. Congress offers its members little more than a transitional path into the good life of corporate affluence as long as the members remain loyal to party discipline. Our legitimate electoral process has been completely usurped by the Supreme Court ruling that a corporation’s free speech rights allow unlimited campaign spending, and congressional lobbying knows no bounds. Any candidate willing to serve in the Democrat or Republican parties in the US congress today, even as a gadfly of resistance, is stepping beyond the pale of constitutional government.

Even if a Progressive Democrat of America—Moves On into the congressional circle, the magnitude of compromise demanded makes effective action impossible other than occasional symbolic votes of resistance. Those stepping out of party lines will invariably result in orchestrated opposition during the next selection cycle—Just ask Cynthia McKinney.

Reform is not an option. The only action possible is a complete and total return to the social justice values of our US Constitution and the Bill of rights. We cannot allow extrajudicial killings, privacy invasions into our homes, and police state interceptions in the commons. We cannot allow global capitalism to continue to kill and impoverish billions of people and destroy the planet

Protecting and even rewriting our Constitution and our Bill of Rights will require revolutionary acts. We must retool our elections and eliminate/ignore the dark clouds of corporate media. A mass movement at this level requires grass roots action by a core of at least ten percent of our population. Getting one out of ten people actively involved is not at all impossible; this is where our traditional values meet human rights. We are a people of hope that only need to overcome our fears and find the voice of our values by using radical democracy for human betterment for all.

The right to vote is a long held value. We am often asked, “Why waste your vote on an independent third party candidate, they will never has a chance to win.” Can voting for a candidate who reflects your own political values and beliefs be a wasted vote? It seems that voting for your true beliefs is a self-actualizing act, and compromising one’s values to pick the lesser of two evils is self-alienating. Therefore, we urge all to continue to vote, but find candidates outside of the two party oligopoly. Maybe someday, self-actualized voting will be fashionable.  

Peter Phillips is a professor of political sociology and social movements at Sonoma State University. He is the president of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored, and co-host with Mickey Huff of the weekly Project Censored Show on KPFA. 

There is an Alternative to Neoliberal Monetary Austerity

Global Research
Michael Hudson

Eurozone

I have just returned from Rimini, Italy, where I experienced one of the most amazing spectacles of my academic life. Four of us associated with the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) were invited to lecture for three days on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and explain why Europe is in such monetary trouble today – and to show that there is an alternative, that the enforced austerity for the 99% and vast wealth grab by the 1% is not a force of nature.

Stephanie Kelton (incoming UMKC Economics Dept. chair and editor of its economic blog, New Economic Perspectives), criminologist and law professor Bill Black, investment banker Marshall Auerback and me (along with a French economist, Alain Parguez) stepped into the basketball auditorium on Friday night. We walked down, and down, and further down the central aisle, past a packed audience reported at over 2,100. It was like entering the Oscars as People called out our first names. Some told us they had read all of our economics blogs. Stephanie joked that now she understood how the Beatles felt. There was prolonged applause – all for an intellectual rather than a physical sporting event.

With one difference, of course: Our adversaries were not there. There was much press, but the prevailing Euro-technocrats (the bank lobbyists who determine European economic policy) hoped that the less discussion of possible alternatives to austerity, the easier it would be to force their brutal financial grab through.

All the audience members had contributed to raise the funds to fly us over from the United States (and from France for Professor Alain Parguez), and treat us to Federico Fellini’s Grand Hotel on the Rimini beach. The conference was organized by reporter Paolo Barnard, who had studied MMT with Randall Wray and realized that there was plenty of demand in Italian mass culture for a discussion of what actually was determining the living conditions of Europe. His aim was to show that the emerging financial elite hopes to use this crisis as their opportunity to carve out personal fiefdoms by privatizing the public domain of the governments they have seduced, bribed or coerced into unnecessary debt. Instead of using a central bank to finance their deficits, governments are told to dump these assets under distress conditions at fire sale prices. So governments end up beholden to bondholders and Eurocrats drawn from neoliberal ranks.

Paolo and his enormous support staff of translators and interns provided us an opportunity to give an approach to monetary and tax theory and policy that until recently was almost unheard of in the United States. Just one week earlier the Washington Post published a review of MMT (followed by a long discussion in the Financial Times . But the theory remains grounded primarily at the UMKC’s economics department and the Levy Institute at Bard College, with which most of us are associated.

The basic thrust of our argument is that just as commercial banks now create credit electronically on their computer keyboards (creating a bank account credit for borrowers in exchange for their signing an IOU at interest), so governments can create their own money. They can reclaim this proper function without incurring needless interest-bearing debt to private bondholders or from banks that create credit by electronic fiat. Government computer keyboards can provide nearly free credit creation to finance spending.

Once the money is created by government, the crucial difference is that governments spend it (at least in principle) to promote long-term growth and employment, invest in public infrastructure, research and development, provide health care and other basic economic functions. Banks have a more short-term time frame and narrowly self-interested motivation. Some 80% of their loans are mortgages against real estate. Banks lend against collateral in place, and the economy’s largest assets are land and buildings. Although banks loans also are used to finance leveraged buyouts and corporate takeovers, most new fixed capital investment by corporations is financed out of retained earnings, not bank credit.

And contrary to popular belief, the stock market has ceased to be a source of such financing. Textbook diagrams still depict it as raising money for new capital investment. Unfortunately, it has been turned into a vehicle to buy out companies on credit (e.g., with high interest junk bonds), replacing equity with debt (“taking a company private” from its stockholders). Inasmuch as interest payments are tax-deductible – on the pretense that they are a necessary cost of doing business – corporate income-tax payments are lowered. And what the tax collector relinquishes is available to be paid out to the bankers and bondholders who get rich by loading the economy down with debt.

The upshot is that the flow of corporate earnings is not used for productive investment, but is diverted to the financial sector – not only to pay interest and penalties to banks, but for stock buybacks intended to support stock prices and hence the value of stock options that managers of today’s financialized companies give themselves.

Welcome to the post-industrial economy, financial style. Industrial capitalism has passed through a series of stages of finance capitalism, from Pension-Fund capitalism via Globalized Dollarization and the Bubble Economy to the Negative Equity stage, foreclosure time, debt deflation, and austerity – and now what looks like debt peonage in Europe, above all for the PIIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. (The Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have been plunged so deeply into debt that their populations are emigrating to find work and flee debt-burdened real estate. The same has plagued Iceland since its bank rip-offs collapsed in 2008.)