Corruption, criminality and the privatised state: The implications for accounting

Corruption, criminality and the privatised state: The implications for accounting
Glen Lehman ∗ , Kym Thorne
University of South Australia, School of Commerce, Adelaide, 5001, SA, Australia
a r t i c l e
Available online xxx
Keywords: Corruption - State crimes - Accountability - theatre - Levinas - Roberts
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.accfor.2015.10.002


∗ Corresponding author at: University of South Australia, School of Commerce, Adelaide 5001, SA, Australia.
E-mail addresses: Glen.Lehman@unisa.edu.au (G. Lehman), kym.thorne@unisa.edu.au (K. Thorne).

a b s t r a c t

This article introduces concepts of corruption and how they translate into state crimes against democracy and economic state crimes against democracy. This article argues for an approach to corruption that goes beyond individual psychology to consider the systemic purposeful actions of dominant elites to protect and advance their interests. This article also contends that contemporary accounting is enveloped within a corroding political, economic and financial system that advances the interests of neoliberal elites.

[All rights reversed]

1. Introduction

Corruption can be defined as the misuse or abuse of power for private gain. This present paper uses Roberts (2015) and Sikka (2014) to argue that ‘corruption typically involves something like a whole theatre of appearances; public smiles and private threats’ (Roberts, 2015, p.87). This article uses Roberts (2015) approach to examine how the privatised state has become embroiled in what can be referred to as state crimes against democracy (SCADS) and economic crimes against democracy (e-SCADS).
Corruption often seems to involve a benign image of power—here the work of Roberts (2015) is helpful in exposing how corruption is a deeply uncomfortable phenomenon. He emphasises Levinas’ assignation of responsibility to vulnerable neighbours to create ethical relations. Roberts (2015) argument is used to deepen Sikka’s (2014) investigation into the causal factors behind the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) suggesting the existence of a corrosive systemic corruption between politicians, economists, regulators, bankers, ratings agencies and accountants and auditors that favours the interests of dominant elites. All too often the most distinctive goal of corporations, governments and the state is simply to maximise financial gain for dominant elites. deHaven-Smith (2006, p. 333) defines SCADS involving the connections between ‘corruption’ and ‘state crimes’ as:

actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and popular sovereignty.’
They differ from graft, bid-rigging, voting fraud, and other, more mundane, forms of political criminality in their potential to subvert political institutions and entire governments or branches of government. They are practices that attack core principles of democracy itself (deHaven-Smith, 2006, p. 333).

deHaven-Smith (2006) makes the argument that these ‘state crimes’ can take a variety of forms and can occur at any level of government. However, deHaven-Smith’s (2006) analysis of SCADS focused almost entirely on state crimes in the United States (Kouzmin, Johnston, & Thorne, 2011). These SCADS have at times involved conspiracies among top officials to subvert democratic processes for political advantage or to further ideological agendas (Kouzmin et al., 2011). Kouzmin et al. (2011) identify examples such as Watergate, Iran–Contra, and Plame-gate. Weiner (2008) documents the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) anti-democratic, nominally illegal obsession with national and international covert action and regime change. Later, Weiner (2012) also documents the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) anti-democratic and nominally illegal obsession with national and international intelligence activities. The Wikileaks exposures and the ‘whistleblowing’ actions of Assange, Manning and Snowden have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the seemingly questionable, if not illegal, actions of some United States government agencies, nationally and internationally, singularly or in concert with other governments or private interests that impinge on the rights of its own citizens and citizens of other nations and reduce the possibility of democratic praxis.

deHaven-Smith’s (2006) approach to SCADS may be too restrictive. According to Kouzmin et al. (2011), there is a direct connection between Representative Government and New Public Management’s quest for efficient operational and managements frameworks that if unregulated, provides opportunities for the state to favour elites and other interests to act against its citizens. Examples of such developments include increasing processes of deregulation and the growing use of outsourcing, privatisation, no-bid contracts, and public-private partnerships (PPPs) (Kouzmin et al., 2011). Addressing the economic sphere (Kouzmin et al., 2011) in association with the social/psychological sphere (Roberts, 2015) it is evident that a much more expansive and higher-level series of ‘state crimes’ may be possible. Evidence for this proposal may be found in those policy contexts where the provision of public goods have been contracted to the private sector leaving a largely unregulated and hollowed-out state open to elite manipulation (Kouzmin et al., 2011).

In contrast to deHaven-Smith (2006) and Roberts (2015) this article conceptualises and studies ‘corruption’ and ‘state crimes’ by focusing on the social forces involved in the accumulation of capital that are responsible for unrestrained economic growth and financial gain—which has the potential to give rise to economic ‘state crimes’ (e-SCADS). According to Kouzmin et al. (2011) e-SCADS can be explained as:

[conjoined actions] among political insiders to manipulate bid processes, overcharge or overpay for public goods, weaken or evade contractual obligations, or in other ways [bypass] democratically accountable agencies. They differ from ordinary graft, embezzlement, and cronyism in several important respects. ‘State crimes’ involve collusion among public officials and outsiders rather than one or two individuals operating in isolation; they are organised and carried out under the code of laws; and they have the potential to grow in scale and complexity over time. In some cases, ‘state crimes’ are the government side of what Black (2005) refers to as control frauds; that is, financial frauds such as the pillaging of the United States savings and loan industry in the 1980s, the 2001 Enron fraud, the 2002 Tyco and World Com frauds, and the 2008/2009 global financial crisis carried out by corporate CEOs and investment/banking executives enabled by changes in regulatory policies and enforcement (Calavita, Pontell, & Tillman, 1999; , p. 222).

Arguments similar to these have been evident in the work of Chwastiak (2013, 2015) who delineates how the United States neoliberal agenda is responsible for the development of an illegal environment in Iraq where private contractors profit from what normally should have been considered corruption if not malfeasance. Chwastiak (2015, p. 2) uses an example of subcontractors that were hired by the CIA after 9/11 to transport supposed al Qaeda operatives to countries where ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ are sanctioned. Not only did these firms aid and abet state crime, but they also profited from it. Furthermore, when two of these subcontractors went to court over a contract dispute, their court documents escaped the attention of the Federal Government entirely. Chwastiak (2015, p.1) argues that state crimes are transformed into commodities by accounting, thereby rendering ‘profit, performance, minutia and normal business routines as important and kidnapping and torture as irrelevant’.

The present article is structured in two sections. The first section following this Introduction examines the relationships between corruption, subjection and state crimes. The second section explores how the state is immersed in corrupt practices leaving itself open to elite manipulation. The third section focuses on state economic crimes and the privatised state. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of reforms concerning corruption, SCADS and e-SCADS prevention and detection specifically related to accounting.

2. Corruption, subjection and ‘state crimes’

The idea that corruption poses is that ‘corruption is the norm and effective subjection, the exception’ (Roberts, 2015). If we can face up to corruption, then we can be freed from the assumption that authorities are good and will protect us. He suggests that the dominant discourse operates with an idealised conception of corruption. Following Roberts (2015) we argue that dialectic emerges which suggests that corruption is the inevitable companion of all attempts to abolish it.

Corruption, according to Roberts (2015), involves facing the other which involves how power itself is involved in this process. Taking a lead from Roberts (2015) examination of Neu, Everett, and Rahaman (2015)Neu et al.’s (2015) discussion of the remedies of corruption in disciplinary processes of subjection it is possible to develop the outlines of an analysis of the subjectivity of corruption. Neu et al. (2015) base their paper on how to prevent corruption in Government procurement processes—the supply side phenomenon. This is not because of the potential for well-designed forms to produce a disciplined and ethical subjectivity, but because ‘corruption itself has much deeper origins and might still be possible within such processes’ (Roberts, 2015, p. 87). The hope of the corrupt, of course, is that their conduct will remain invisible behind the appearances of due process and inspection; that it will be impossible to disentangle their deceit from their legitimate exercise of authority. Roberts continues:

The discipline of due process that is fully inscribed on well-designed forms, and the traces this creates for subsequent audit, at least leaves the outcome uncertain, and thereby forces a certain caution and discretion on the corrupt. Subjection and corruption, however, are clearly not opposites or mutually exclusive. Rather corruption is better viewed as a sort of mirror image of subjection—a contemptuous parody perhaps. The two images are almost identical; both involve the exercise of power, both have the power to normalise and individualise, and yet corruption, unlike subjection, is emptied of the substance of ethics; the will of the Other no longer has internal force. Instead the corrupt have, in effect, slipped back into the illusions of a ruthless autonomy (Roberts, 2015, p. 87).

Roberts argues that the corrupt are spoilt and act much like a child who is yet to attain maturity. He argues that the unfortunate issue is that the corrupt impact on others and have the potential to utilise organisational resources to further their own ends. These ideas are traced back to processes of subjectivity through a Lacanian analysis where the spoilt child reflects ‘their own need for subjection’, this seems to be the cure for their desire (Roberts, 2015, p. 87).

Importantly, the reality of the formally and informally powerful in society is often similarly characterised by an intense dependence on others to realise the objectives against which they themselves are judged. As noted by Roberts ‘[i]n mature institutions, organisations and individuals, such dependence and its associated anxieties can perhaps be consciously recognised and openly acknowledged’ (Roberts, 2015, p. 87). Neu et al. (2015) explores the possibility of form based subjection and, at the same time, points to how such processes are so easily subverted. Neu et al. (2015) has served to reinforce the need to go beyond the prevalent view that corruption is best understood in relation to the psychological make-up of individuals. As Lukes (2005, p.86) in his seminal study of power suggests, understanding corruption requires searching ‘behind appearances for the hidden, least visible forms of power . . . the power of the powerful is to be viewed as ranging across issues and contexts, as extending to some unintended consequences and as capable of being effective even without active intervention’.

3. State vulnerabilities to SCADS and e-SCADS

Roberts (2015) and Sikka (2014) consider some of the broader factors which give rise to corruption. This section focuses on how the state itself has the potential to perpetuate corrupt practices. It should be obvious that corruption and crimes of the state often have major economic dimensions but this present article aims to explain how corruption also envelops democracy and democratic institutions. This observation gives rise to the primary difference between SCADS and e-SCADS revolving around the motivations of those who are involved in the process. For those who are not motivated for financial or pecuniary gains the process of corruption becomes one associated with the manipulation of democratic accountability and democratic governing institutions Lehman (2011) and Thorne (2010).

deHaven-Smith (2006) and Kouzmin et al. (2011) identifies that the increasing frequency and sophistication of SCADS and the propensity of towards e-SCADS within the American context since the middle of the Twentieth-Century has occurred due to:

America’s growing reliance on covert paramilitary operations in domestic (Weiner, 2012) and international affairs (Weiner, 2008). Witt and Kouzmin (2010) demonstrate that the United States government has organised coups and regime change across the globe (see also Blum, 2004; Chossudovsky, 2003; Juhasz, 2006).

Skills developed in the intelligence community for manipulating the politics of other nations have migrated to United States domestic politics (Weiner, 2008, 2012).

Tactics which have been developed in one country or setting and have been copied by political elites elsewhere, known as oligarchic isomorphism’ (Kouzmin et al., 2011, p. 223).

The increase of centralisation and interdependence of organisations in industrial societies (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2012).

This places dominant elites in a position ‘to both initiate and manipulate crises and to exploit the opportunities created by the social disorder and destruction they bring’ (Kouzmin et al., 2011, p. 223).

Following Roberts (2015, p.87) ‘the infantile phantasies of omnipotence/dominance which are the genesis of corruption are properly seen as nothing more than a defence against an unbearable anxiety associated with the reality of a child’s vulnerability and complete dependence’. However, crisis as a political and economic opportunity is apparent in many cases of SCADS and e-SCADS and normalises corruption as part of the visible and invisible actions of dominant elites. Our recommendation to address not only the psychological but the macro social and economic forces involved in corruption, SCADs and E-SCADS is to reinvigorate norms of professionalism and ethical behaviour within routine processes of public administration, notwithstanding the heavy cloak of anonymity imposed upon public officials in many governance systems.

4. State crimes and the privatised state

This article questions the too prevalent notion of corruption as a consequence of a flawed individual psychology that is too often portrayed as being without any systemic dimension. This article does not consider power to be benign but concurs with Lukes (2005) view that power is all pervasive and visible and invisible corruption is part of the ‘normalised’ apparatus by which elites seek to advance their interests and ‘secure the compliance (unwilling or willing) of those they dominate’.

This domination stretches into economics and accounting. Graham and Neu (2003) suggest that the internationalisation of accounting movements often start from the presumption of market efficiency that, in turn, encourages certain accounting solutions. They ask:

What is the dynamic among the ways in which accounting technologies make visible certain problems, suggest certain solutions, operationalise these solutions, and encourage certain consequences? (Graham & Neu, 2003).

An obvious adverse outcome is that these solutions favour the interests of dominant elites and fail to adequately interpret, or explore the impacts of accounting on different communities. In addition, these solutions also fail to allow other voices to be given an explicit means to articulate their needs and values that shape their lives. Implicit within this line of argument is a questioning of whether neoliberal globalisation processes including accounting processes perpetuate a means-end culture of control. For example, outsourcing and PPP’s and other such arrangements needs to be construed as asset-stripping, a form of fiscal corruption in the hands of oligarchs within the private sector who remain prime beneficiaries of such arrangements.

As Klein (2007, p. 12) documents, dominant political and economic elites used the ideas developed by Friedman and the Chicago school of economics to methodically exploit moments of shock and contrived crises in other countries for three decades—starting with Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile. Friedman’s free-market assumptions became a rationale for drastic tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, gutting of social services, and privatisation of formally civic functions and duties. More recently this ‘crisis’ driven approach has migrated from austerity economics to ‘advanced’ Western economic multinational agreements such as the European Union. It was no accident that the ongoing Greek financial crisis had the falsification of financial documents used to join the European Union in its genesis, nor was it an accident that the privations diminished public goods and disproportionally impacted on the most vulnerable.

Traditional accounting, as a subset of economics, has been premised on the assumption that economic growth promises a better world and that this world would be characterised by greater material prosperity and equality within and between nations. Even more recently, economic growth, especially through free-market liberalisation, has been advocated as a path to solving environmental problems as well. As this dream is unlikely to be realised within the current system it is therefore important that we begin to re-consider the role of accounting in creating practices which perpetuate corruption and are captured by the interests of dominant elites. Indeed, this need is now more important than ever before given the ideological hegemony of global capital and the increasing disharmony between nation-states. For example, a need exists to consider the impact on local communities associated with initiatives such as multi-lateral trade agreements, free-market liberalisation and processes of harmonisation. These trends have created a climate whereby our lives are governed by these trends rather than the other way around Graham & Neu, 2003; Lehman (2009, 2010, 2011a, 2011b)).

5. Conclusion

What is required is an environment where government based economic actions or outsourcing or PPP’s could be used without jeopardizing the public interest. This article calls for an end to neoliberal capitalism’s penchant for disaster capitalism (Klein, 2007), the purposeful inducement of crises and the ‘crucifixion economics’ (Saul, 2005) that actively weaken government and forces deregulation. Roberts and Scapens (1995) emphasise that ‘transparency’ is too often treated as a neutral component of accountability and as the natural corrective for ‘corruption’ and any other form of criminality. Roberts (2009) points out that making something visible changes what is rendered transparent, shapes organisational reality and individual and group identities and may lead to purposely misrepresenting accountability structures without addressing underlying corruption or criminality.

This involves preventing dominant elites from combining the best and the worst aspects of both the public and private spheres and moving between them in a self-interested manner. The aim of accounting research might be to prevent elites from disguising their interests and mystifying the political dimensions of societal/organisational life while camouflaging corruption and criminality. Corruption must not continue to be conceptualised as isolated, unconnected incidences of individual psychology or organisational ineptitude or some manifestation of organisational ‘evil’ (Adams, 2011) but as an arena for dominant elites. This is a challenging task. As Johnson (2011) conveys in his review of Acemoglu and Robinson’s (2012) book, ‘the relationship between power, prosperity and poverty and the relative success or failure of nations the United States [and elsewhere] is now ‘in the grip of an oligarchy that is determined to protect its position at the expense of spending for the public good . . . Nations frequently fall when powerful interest blocks change . . . [this] situation is more serious than any ratings company’s view on the debt level’.

What should be of central concern to accounting research and to accounting practice is creating concepts and techniques that allow us to establish whether the interaction between the public and private spheres are symbiotic, parasitical, destructive or criminogenic in relation to citizenship and democracy. Combatting SCADS and e-SCADS will require a forensic accounting approach attuned to the purposive misuse of governments, markets and our social/intellectual commons by hegemonic interests fluxing visible and invisible power whilst decrying ‘corruption’ by individuals and demanding ‘transparency’.

The challenge will be to recover the arena of norms/values from the deadening embrace of dominant elites, technocratic neoliberals, ‘free-marketers’, technology pundits and the conservative dogma of religious and other fundamentalists resistant to conflict and democratic participation.


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Frederickson, H. George. (2007). Filling up the Hollow State: The ‘state of agents’ project. PA Times, December, 11.

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excellence—Privatization and out-sourcing as oligarchic corruption. Admin. Theory Prax., 20(4), 491–507.

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& M. Witt (Eds.), State crimes against democracy: Political forensics in public affairs (pp. 79–106). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Korten, David C. (1995). When corporations rule the world. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press.

Kouzmin, Alexander, & Dixon, John. (2006). Neo-liberal economics, public do-mains and organizations: Is there any organizational design after privatization?
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Understanding False Flag Operations In Our Time

Understanding False Flag Operations In Our Time

By Bonnie Faulkner

Global Research, February 06, 2016

Guns and Butter 20 January 2016

Region: USA

Theme: Intelligence

http://www.globalresearch.ca/understanding-false-flag-operations-in-our-time

Richard Dolan covers false flag operations analyzed as a distinctively modern phenomena, post WWI; the planet being stolen by a transnational corporate financial class; ideological false flags including religions and nationalism; the propaganda spectrum including cultural values, educational system and news media; a war of corporate cultural control and imposition of a global police state; US Psychological Operations Manual; white, grey and black PSYOPs; regime change and color revolutions; NGOs; characteristics of a false flag.
False flag operations analyzed as a distinctively modern phenomena, post WWI; the planet being stolen by a transnational corporate financial class; ideological false flags including religions and nationalism; the propaganda spectrum including cultural values, educational system and news media; a war of corporate cultural control and imposition of a global police state; US Psychological Operations Manual; white, grey and black PSYOPs; regime change and color revolutions; NGOs; characteristics of a false flag.

This is Guns and Butter.

We have 9/11 in which the hammer comes down and beats you over the head for the rest of your life with a big national security stick so that people learn to duck their head and not speak up, because … bad idea now. You know, we now have, I think 20% of the American population is 15 or younger. I think that’s the number. These are people who grew up – they don’t know anything other than post-9/11 America. And actually, let’s say that anyone who’s under 25 doesn’t, really. They were kids. That’s probably, what, a third or more of the population. It’s all going away. The whole past of the United States, the whole idea of rule by the people, of privacy. We have an entire new generation who are growing up without any of that. It’s all gone.
I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Richard Dolan. Today’s show: Understanding False Flag Operations in Our Time. Richard Dolan is an author and historian. He is nearing completion of a groundbreaking book, A History of False Flag Operations, which will explain one of the most pernicious developments of our time: how clandestine agencies secretly engage in violence and destruction in order to promote their agendas. He has published four books and numerous articles on anomalous phenomena, suppressed science, secret space programs, breakaway civilizations, the intelligence community and similar subjects. He is best known as the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and The National Security State. He studied US Cold War strategy, Soviet history and international diplomacy. Today’s presentation, Understanding False Flag Operations In Our Time, is from the Architects of the New Paradigm Conference in San Rafael, California, January 16th, 2016. Richard Dolan.
* * * * *
In addition to writing books I’ve spent many, many years doing private consulting work. Basically I’m an independent writer and I would meet with individuals one on one, thousands and thousands of them. It was a great experience with me just to sit down and talk with someone about their life, about their career, about their anxieties and everything else.
What I’ve always noticed is that when you start scratching the surface of someone’s worldview you find very quickly that they, just as you, have an understanding that there’s something not right with the world around us. Not everyone has the motivation or the education or the background to kind of dive into this like a madman obsessed with getting to the truth, but they know. They feel it in their bones. There’s something wrong, desperately wrong, with the state of the world, and it involves a feeling that they’re not in control anymore.
In particular I think we can see this in the last 20 years in the United States where we’ve had severe economic dislocation. I live in the northeastern part of the United States and I’ve gotten to see really the obliteration of a company that informed the town that I live in. That’s Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, and I just watched Kodak go poof over the past decade and a half. But I think you can see this story everywhere, in many places of the US.
It accompanies a kind of loss of hope, a loss of confidence, a feeling like is the future really going to be worth something? In addition to that, those people who try to learn about their world by turning on the television and watching CNN, inevitably what they find is that they’re totally confused about what is happening. It just seems like one damn thing after another, one terrorist thing doing this and one national security thing doing that and these crazy people, why do they hate us… and there’s really no sense of understanding when you plug into the establishment news media. There doesn’t seem to be like how do we solve any of this, how do we fix this, how do we really get to a better world, why can’t these people just like freedom and democracy like we do? This is the kind of nonsense that … There doesn’t seem to be a way out of it.
I would say that all of that confusion, all of that hopelessness is by design. I believe this now. I don’t believe, as I might have years past, that the people on top, they’re trying to do their best but it’s a tough world out there. No. No. No. They want you to feel helpless. They want you to be confused. Let’s talk about why.
One reason why is that the whole planet is being stolen. You’ve got this many people who want to own every single thing that’s worth owning in this planet – all the water, all the genetically modified foods they want to shove down your throat, all the minerals in the ground. They want every single thing. And they’re getting it. They’ve got it, actually, and they just want more. That’s the way it’s happening.
It’s a transnational corporate financial theft of everything. It’s a war. When there’s a war, the people who are running that war really don’t want you to be able to react to it. They don’t want you to be cognizant of what is happening. And they want you to be quiet about it. They want you to obey and be compliant.
Therefore, they must rule by means of deception. Because if they were to out and out say to you, “Yeah, we’re going to steal all your stuff,” you might have a thing or two to say about it. So what must happen is a kind of ideological false flag or an ideological psych on you and me. This is exactly, I think, what we are seeing in the world.
Now, it’s certainly not true to say that this is a new development in a larger sense. Human history has always been informed by intense hierarchy. In that sense you could say mind control has always existed in the sense that elites have typically kind of created worldviews by which the great masses of humanity would look to the authority for guidance and for salvation. I think the obvious example of this we could see is various religions of the world but I would also include things like nationalism and other kinds of ideologies that let us say encourage and enforce compliance among the population.
I think we can agree that false problems have, since forever, since throughout human history, been kind of created in order to accommodate a pre-arranged solution to that problem, things that I would call an ideological false flag. What I mean by that is not an instance where a government or an intelligence agency in ancient times would kill people and blame it on another party and scare the heck out of people and enforce their rule. No, but by creating a mindset.
Think of something like the Inquisition. That’s a perfect example of an ideological false flag where back in, I think it was, 1487, a book called Malleus Maleficarum was published. This was a guidebook, really, on how to identify, prosecute and kill witches. That’s what that book really was. As a result of that, over the next century or so about 1 million European women were executed for witchcraft, about then. It did several things. One is it created a lot of fear among the population. “Oh, my God, witches. Get rid of those people!” It enforced the authority of the ecclesiastical Church at the time, at least for a certain while until there was a reaction against it. And it also got a lot of power and money for the Church. Families of witches would actually pay through indulgences to minimize the amount of time in Purgatory or get them out of Hell. This actually really happened. It also allowed for land grabs by the Church of the families of the witches, very much like the US government does today with people suspected – this is really the truth – of various crimes. They take your property. This is what the Church did. So that I call a false flag. The War on Terror is an ideological false flag.
That’s an old, old part of human history. I would say in our world today there is a manner in which they’re trying to get inside your head, and I call it a propaganda spectrum. There are all kind of forms of control but they get progressively more pernicious as you go down the list.
The most fundamental method by which society, that you are expected to conform to society, would be what we might call cultural values. That’s when you go to school and you learn to pledge allegiance with your hand over your heart and you go through the educational system. Even 100 years ago Bertrand Russell was talking about as a method of conformity. More recently we have really great visionaries like John Taylor Gatto who has talked very much along the same lines, of the educational system as a system of control over your head. Get inside your head and make you obey, make you an obedient worker.
So that’s the cultural values. Not all of it is necessarily evil. We can all recognize that a functioning society would require a kind of cultural consensus, but you can still see how the implementation of certain cultural values could at least provide a foundation of obedience.
Beyond that, though, I think what is a little bit more pernicious is what we might call cultural distractions. This is the phenomenon of the Kardashians and things like Dancing With The whatever they’ve got on this week or Monday Night Football, or all the stupid, meaningless stuff that is poured into everyone’s head every single day – truly, literally meaningless information that just goes right in. And we all like entertainment. I’m watching back episodes of “The Sopranos” so I’m just as guilty as anyone else. Those are my people. I’m from the Northeast. “You know what I’m talking about? Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.”
But I think when you get into a level of distraction that is so mindless as what we obviously see around us, this is a signal. It’s a signal for you to look over here, don’t look over there. There’s something important going on over here so look at this shiny little trinket. It goes on and on and on and on and it never stops, and it never will stop as long as this system is in place as it is.
Beyond that, though, there’s still always people even in what we would call the ordinary, out-there society, all the other people in this country, who still want to feel like they’re being informed, and that’s when they turn on the TV and they watch CNN or Fox or NPR. Hey, why not? Because look, NPR was run for years and years by a man who was running CIA propaganda, and that’s a fact, so NPR’s really no different. Yeah. It’s really true. People think, “Oh, I’m so educated. Fox sucks. I’m going to listen to NPR because they’re intelligent.
Well, you know, here’s the thing about that, I’ll just say as an aside. Our whole cultural narrative these days, our whole cultural discourse in politics seems to me to be on nothing more than cultural issues. Not that they don’t matter, but it’s like if you’re a liberal that means “I support transgender rights.” If you’re a conservative, “I don’t support transgender rights.” “I do support Black Lives Matter.” “I don’t support Black Lives Matter.” “I do support smoking weed in Colorado.” “I don’t support smoking” … If this is what we’ve come down to in our politics, we’re done. It’s over – over, over. Stick a fork in us, it’s done because, as I say, there’s a serious war happening. It is a war of corporate cultural control and imposition of a global police state over you and over your children, over your grandchildren, for all of time. That’s the war. If we’re not talking about that, then we’re just wasting our time. That’s my view.
Anyway, for that third level of control and spin there’s the news media, people who want to be informed, so they’ll turn on CNN and become confused forever, because really, that’s a system that is all about censorship, spin, propaganda, control. CNN … Why is it that CNN is on at every single gate at every single airport in the United States? Why? Is it like every airport manager in the country is like, “Oh, wow. I totally love CNN. I want to inform…” I don’t think so. They’re a private company owned by Time Warner – clearly there’s a nice sweetheart deal – and because they are the propaganda voice of the US State Department and CIA. That’s the only reason they’re on. That’s the only reason you see them at every gate. So that’s the third level. I would say those first three levels of propaganda account for probably 95% of the control mechanisms in place to keep you in your place. Most probably.
But then, every now and then you need a little bit more something, and that’s when we’re talking about psy-ops, psychological operations, covert ops, color revolutions, regime change down to the “Shock Doctrine” type of events, if anyone’s read Naomi Klein. I’m a big fan of that book. And then down to false flags, which I think is the most pernicious of those. I’ll talk a little bit about these in a little more detail.
With psy-ops, psychological operations, US military, this is in their playbook. This is an official thing that our military does, and other militaries do it, too. It’s not just us. It’s interesting that the Defense Department will have in this psychological operations manual three different types of ops. They call them white, grey and black psy-ops.
White psy-ops is pretty straightforward. It’s not really even a psych job on the world. It’s basically an official or a virtually official statement of the United States government just getting their message out to the world. And you know it’s from the US government and it’s relatively straightforward, even if you don’t agree with it.
Grey psy-ops is a little more interesting and very pervasive in our world today, as it’s always been. If you’re familiar with something like Operation Mockingbird, that would be a grey psy-op. That would be something like using journalists or using other voices that are not officially part of the US government but basically having them give the US government perspective, pretending it’s coming from some other voice. That’s a grey psy-op, and that’s a very, very widespread phenomenon.
The Pentagon, for example, which spends billions of dollars every single year managing their social image – they do – that includes things like not simply having close relationships with professional journalists who spin the news in their favor, but it also includes paid trolls, which I call sock puppets. This is true. Let’s say you read news articles and you look at all the comments below and you see these real whackjobs out there. Some of them really literally are sock puppets. That means you’d be a Pentagon employee and you’d be in charge of X number of profiles on the social media and on the message boards. That’s what you would do. You would disrupt, you would persuade, you would cajole, but in fact, you’re a paid employee. That would be a grey psy-op, as well.
Then there’s black psy-ops, and this is where we’re really getting into some serious stuff. This is according to the US Psychological Operations Manual: A black psy-op is something that comes from a US government source but “appears to emanate from a source hostile in nature. US government would deny responsibility.” That’s a false flag. I don’t know how else you can describe it. Something that the US government does but seems to come from one of the “bad guys.”
One of the things about black psy-ops in the manual is that – at least they state – this is not actually a function of the United States military but actually that black psy-ops are a function of the US intelligence community, and that kind of makes sense. I guess the point is that false flag black psy-ops are in the playbook of the United States. It’s just worth keeping in mind.
Something like regime change or the so-called color revolutions, these can include false flags, which I’m going to get into a false flag in just a moment in case you’re still wondering, “What the heck is a false flag?” Regime change is something that the United States has truly perfected to the extent possible over many decades. They did it back in 1953 in Iran. Essentially what that was was a CIA operation to overthrow an elected government that had the temerity to nationalize its oil, and you can’t do that, so the CIA, Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of T.R., ran an operation for the CIA to pay off people to pretend they were communists, to do horrible things to discredit that group, and to organize crowds that pushed for regime change. And it was quite successful. This was a model that has been followed ever since.
Primarily now what you find is the US does this through NGOs, non-governmental organizations, and this has been a very, very major topic of study. So again, it’s all ruled by indirection. There’s one group known as Avaaz – it’s called The Voice in many languages – and many others as well, but this one has been heavily involved in supporting efforts to destabilize and topple the governments of Libya. They were really gleeful about that one and calling for NATO intervention, which ended up essentially destroying that nation, which it is to this day, and they’re trying to do the same in Syria today.
So in other words, the US works through these and many other NGOs to push for regime change where ordinary citizens, people around the world that don’t know any better think, “Oh, well they’re a non-governmental organization. They’re obviously detached, objective, etc.” No. They’re not. They’re working for the United States government and intelligence community. And this is very, very common. That’s an image of the color revolution in Ukraine back in ’04 and it’s just a model that’s been done tried and true many times now.
Another aspect of the covert ops, getting toward false flag in cases we might call provocations, and this has happened everywhere, we’re talking about agents provocateur. We probably are all familiar with the old COINTELPRO operation from the FBI from the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s in which the FBI would infiltrate organizations that were pushing for positive social change, I would say – Students for Democratic Society, the Black Panthers. What they would do then is have their guys inside the organization fomenting violence and doing things to discredit those organizations. That’s provocation.
This is again, a highly effective tool used within the US, used in Canada, used in the UK. It’s used all through Europe. It was used very much in Ukraine in 2014, used in Iraq after the invasion in ’03, through ’04, ’05, ’06. There are a lot of provocations that we know about – I’ll be writing about them in my new book – in Syria, elsewhere. And it happened in the Occupy movement, without a doubt.
So you have covert operatives infiltrating movements for progressive change with a view to discredit it. I suspect most of you may be familiar with this or on board with it, but if you doubt it, this is a great deal of research and really excellent journalism that has gone into this and has, I think proven – not suggested, not hinted, but has proven that provocations are standard operating procedure. Some of these guys just get found out.
Another important means by which I think propaganda is used to dominate your mind and to kind of impose a corporate control kind of global revolution is what we might call the “Shock Doctrine” technique, and this was the contribution of Naomi Klein. Really, what she argues is that neoliberalism, or let’s call it globalism, as a fundamentally anti-human process, her argument is that it can only be imposed via trauma, I guess we could say. She came up with the phrase “shock doctrine” through the US military’s phrase of “shock and awe.” The military goes into a nation, we’re going to “shock and awe” them. Think about, oh, wow… what a thing to say about another group of people. You pound them into submission and traumatize them, and that’s precisely US military doctrine.
What occurred to her was that this is actually how they rule, not just abroad but they rule at home through shock. She was thinking of Katrina, she was thinking of 9/11. When some horrible, terrible thing happens in which people are just bereft and no one’s thinking clearly… Often after these horrific things happen, and that is exactly when, she says, contingency plans which had been in place since forever are rolled out and people just accept it because they’re looking for help – corporate control over New Orleans after Katrina or the whole national security apparatus rolled in after 9/11 and so on and so on.
What she suggests is that these catastrophes and the anxiety that comes about as a result of it that is played up by authorities results in what she calls learned helplessness. We’ve done science studies of rats and you create so much anxiety and loss of control, they learn helplessness, and it’s the same with people. And her argument is that this is a key method by which global control is achieved. I would totally agree with that, and I would say, let’s go one step further.
There are instances in which crises aren’t simply happening and then groups opportunistically take advantage of it. I would argue that there are a number of events in our contemporary world in which those catastrophes are intentionally created, and that is what we call a false flag – an instance in which a group, an intelligence agency usually, does something truly horrible – killing people, blowing up buildings, some other kind of horrific act that is then blamed on another party by which to justify things that could never otherwise be justified, whether it’s dastardly pernicious laws of control over a population or wars that could never have otherwise be justified to justify theft of natural resources of other countries and so on. That’s a false flag. There’s a lot of that going on around in the world these days.
I think it’s probably the single most powerful form of propaganda. I can’t think of anything that has more emotional impact than a false flag. And I also think there’s not much more that I can think of that’s more risky or audacious or bold to undertake than a true false flag. It’s not something for everyone. I think it’s something that only a very few organizations truly have the wherewithal and the power to implement. I’ll get into that in a moment.
If you scroll through the Web on the phenomenon of false flags you’ll find a lot of sites that will say that this is an ancient phenomenon going back. Some will site things like Nero burning down Rome and blaming it on the Christians to implement certain things. And when I started researching this about a year ago I was certainly inclined to accept that line of reasoning, but my own research has told me otherwise.
Actually, I would argue that false flags are not an ancient phenomenon. Now, I talked about the ideological false flags, a kind of mind control system in place, like the Inquisition and other things, but that’s different. I mean false flags as a covert op. I don’t think that’s an ancient phenomenon at all. I think it’s a distinctively modern phenomenon and, in fact, I think that’s an important thing to understand about them so that we realize why they are happening today, and I will be talking about that now.
I think to have a false flag what you need, because a false flag is a big psych job on the population, so one thing that is necessary is you have to have a kind of ostensibly – and I say ostensibly – democratic type of system. It doesn’t have to be truly democratic. The United States is not a truly democratic society. In fact, Yale university – I think it was Yale – did a study a couple of years ago that actually quantitatively I would say proved that what we have is an oligarchy. What they did is they looked at public policy and legislation that was implemented and looking at public opinion and the like, and really, I think, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that the wishes of the great masses of the population have zero impact on public policy, and that public policy is, on the contrary, put into place on the wishes of those who have power and money and influence. It’s no surprise. That’s an oligarchy, and that’s what we have.
But we also have an ostensive democratic system where people still believe and we still have the remnants, let’s say, of that kind of rule of the people. It’s not just the United States. It’s in much of the world now. Kim Jong Un of North Korea doesn’t need to do false flags. Really, why? Because he’s got the people terrified. He just controls them through fear – and lies, yes, but a lie is not the same as a false flag. In fact, he can’t really do easily, in my view, a false flag against South Korea, either, because he doesn’t have control over major media globally. That’s the next thing.
For false flag you need an ostensibly democratic system because you have to corral the people into a particular point of view, and then you need control over major media. You have to have the ability to effectively propagandize without competition from other narratives – at least significant competition of that. So you dominate the narrative.
On top of that, you need decent covert op teams, people who know what they’re doing. Again, this is not the type of thing that you would really find in the ancient world. You need a lot of money to do that, and there’s a few nations in the world today who have much more money and means than others to do this. And you need motive and the capability, obviously, for what I would call geopolitical, financial or national political change. There’s got to be groups that are pushing to revolutionize their society in ways that they believe it should be. They realize they can’t do it along legal means and so they use these other means.
The other one thing I would say why false flags are not a truly ancient phenomenon is in the ancient world – and I’m an avid student of ancient history, very much so. What you find in ancient history is lots of bloodshed. I mean massacres and horrific… We think it’s bad today but in the ancient world armies would go in and just completely kill every single inhabitant in a town, my God. So there’s no shortage of bloodshed. There’s no shortage of lies that nations would tell each other, absolutely. But the idea of doing something like a false flag in the ancient world, when you look at most of the cultural values that existed in most of the societies back then, it really would be pernicious to them. As bloody-minded as most of the ancient militaries were, there was a sort of code. Let’s call it a code among thieves or a code of honor, in which the deception really would be considered a pernicious and a horrible thing to do. Also, I think it would be much more difficult to do a true false flag for those reasons and due to the lack of communication, just a harder thing to do. I think a false flag is, again, a distinctively modern phenomenon.
To do a false flag internationally or even domestically and have it fly internationally, you need power in the world today. You’ve got to be able, especially for something international, to dominate global media, at least sufficiently so that you can sort of push aside alternative narratives and explanations. You also have to have the ability to intimidate other nations into silence if you’re going to do this, and there are very few nations that have that ability in the world today.
I’m going to do a little bit and there’s no way that I’m going to be able to go over every single thing that I think has been a false flag in the last 100 years – there’s a lot of things – but I do want to give a sense of how the phenomenon has evolved. False flags have evolved.
My own research at this point is telling me that the true phenomenon really takes off following the First World War. Again, there are isolated events possibly, maybe probably, from prior to World War I but not many. Even talking about the sinking of the Maine, I’ve looked into that and I’m not really sure that I would classify that as a true false flag. It can go either way. But we start seeing them now for sure in the 1930s and, really, the main nations that were doing them, Japan, Germany, Soviet Union. They did some very prominent ones and I think many of us are familiar with some of these.
Everyone’s heard of the Reichstag Fire. The German invasion of Poland is maybe one of the classic international false flags of all time. Essentially, Germans took a bunch of political prisoners who were rotting away in their prison system, dressed them in Polish military uniforms, took over a radio station at the border, shot all of the prisoners, posed one of them at a microphone and then went on the air and pretended that Poland had attacked Germany and was inciting Poles in Germany to resist Hitler. This was an absolute false flag. The German people, as far as we can tell, more or less accepted it. International politicians were not particularly impressed by it, to say the least, but it worked enough for the Germans to justify to themselves that they invaded. False flag. That’s the Reichstag, by the way, burning. That’s their 9/11.
The thing that they all have in common, those false flags of that decade, is that those were nations with state control over the media. That’s a very important thing to keep in mind. And they also had very sophisticated military intelligence groups for their time, without a doubt. So they had the control over the media and they had the teams. They were militarized and this is, I think, why after World War I we start seeing it. World War I militarized all of Europe and the United States, and really transformed those cultures to that extent so that there was a very strong militarization in the aftermath of that, and I think that was part of it.
What you find after the Cold War is that the United States wins the False Flag Olympics hands down, and it’s really been every since. I would say that the US and its vassal states essentially run the false flag universe. It’s basically US, Israel, the UK, I would say are the big three. There are certainly other nations that have been involved in this, without a doubt. Particularly since 9/11 a lot of nations have jumped on board.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a lot of them did it in order to get US terror funding. There was a case I think in ’02 that was found out, this one, the nation of Macedonia – found out that they had murdered seven illegal immigrants from Pakistan and said that these are al Qaeda terrorists. They were not al Qaeda terrorists. They were illegals but they were innocent people. They were killed and Macedonian authorities played it up as al Qaeda specifically in order to get US funding and they aren’t the only example of that type of shenanigans, kind of a piling-on effect after 9/11.
But back to the Cold War, what you see is a transformation of the false flags in the sense that they start becoming domestic. There are still international incidents that are false flags, absolutely. There was one that was found out by the Israelis in 1954 where Mossad was basically finding Egyptian Jews who were going to blow up certain buildings and blame it on the Muslim Brotherhood and it was found out. It was called the Lavon Affair, after the Israeli Defense Minister. The parties involved confessed and all that. That was an international type of false flag. They did that, incidentally, to encourage the British not to leave and abandon the Suez Canal.
But primarily what you see are domestic false flags specifically for political control. COINTELPRO in the US is maybe a classic example of that, the FBI doing what they call black-bag jobs and the like, to dirty tricks, smearing people, doing events and blaming it on other organizations and so on.
In Europe, probably the most pernicious was known as Operation Gladio, which was a NATO/CIA operation. Essentially, when World War II concluded there was the fear among Allied nations that the Russians would roll over Europe, and so there were teams put in place in Europe to act as kind of a resistance if this were to happen. Well, the Russians did not roll over Western Europe and these teams are still sitting there. In Italy, they got the bright idea of killing people and blowing up buildings and train stations and blaming it on the communists, which they did for years – years and years. This has been found out. And in fact, one of the Gladio operatives, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is serving life in prison for his part in Gladio, in an interview was very specific. He said, “The point of what we were doing was to force these people” the Italian people in this case, “to turn to the state and ask for greater security.” They’re very up-front about it. These were NATO operatives, with the knowledge of the higher-up authorities, and they were just doing this and blamed their murders on the Red Brigade and blamed them on other leftwing groups.
There’s a long proven history. This is another list of the ‘60s, and in the ‘70s and ‘80s and I’m not going to go over all of it. It includes the Gulf of Tonkin, it includes some really nasty Mossad operations, some of which looked exactly like Charlie Hebdo, one of which occurred in 1982, a bombing of a Jewish delicatessen in Paris. Sound familiar? But it was in 1982. When French intelligence investigated far enough they kind of ran into a brick wall and everything stopped, and it did get some very good international analysis at the time.
One of the more pernicious ones would be during the ramp-up to the Persian Gulf War. Do you remember this? I bet some of you do. The Incubator Hoax. This woman was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States but she was pretending to be a nurse on TV, and to Congress. What she said was that the Iraqi troops, once they had gone into Kuwait – remember that? – were looting incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital, leaving the premature babies to die on the floor. And it was such a horrific image, this went on all the news. Everyone promoted this from NPR to Fox and everyone in between. It was a total lie and she was a total lie, but this is how it works. In fact, by the ‘80s and ‘90s, the United States military was officially hiring public relations firms in a very effective way. The Persian Gulf War was kind of a watershed in that effort.
Let’s keep going here. Through the ‘90s you’ve got quite a few of these. The Oklahoma City bombing’s probably the most prominent one there. I’ll talk about some of the problems of how to identify these types of false flags when I close.
As we get to the 21st century I think we hit the era of true false flags. I’m not going to go into the specifics; there’s just too much. I want to talk about the geopolitics and help us understand why this is happening. I think one of the key things has to do with globalization. With globalization you get economic disruption and the loss of jobs. This is Seattle 1999. I think Seattle is a great indicator. These are the WTO riots, or protests, November 30th. This went for four days, into early December. This is significant.
Back in 1999 Americans still believed they had rights. I remember those days. The WTO, the World Trade organization, was convening in Seattle at that time, and for several months protestors planned this out, and when that convention happened these protestors, at minimum 40,000, probably much more – shut that city down. They shut it down. They were so effective the delegates were not able to enter the premises for the longest time. Police teargas didn’t work, pepper spray didn’t work. The police were overwhelmed by an incredibly powerful public reaction, and this is what happens when the public feels empowered. The WTO was really initiating some very nasty decisions that, in fact, they ended up doing, that just accelerated the process of the de-industrialization of the United States.
This is when people were saying, “No. Were not going to put up with it.” Of course, 18 months later we have 9/11, in which the hammer comes down and beats you over your head for the rest of your life with a big national security stick, so that people learn to duck their head and not speak up because … bad idea now. You know, we now have, I think, 20% of the American population is 15 or younger. I think that’s the number. These are people who grew up – they don’t know anything other than post-9/11 America. And actually, let’s say that anyone who’s under 25 really doesn’t. They were kids. So that’s, what, a third or more of the population. It’s all going away. The whole past of the United States, the whole idea of rule by the people, of privacy. We have an entire new generation who are growing up without any of that. It’s all gone.
For some of these young people, I hate to say it, but it almost seems meaningless. I have two brilliant young teenagers, 19 and 17, and I know a lot of their friends. They’re a little different; they’re kind of plugged in, but I know about a lot of young people and they just live, post their stuff on Facebook … They don’t care about privacy. They don’t expect it. It’s a different world. I think this type of thing is a threat to the globalist process and is a trigger for false flags.
The other major geopolitical thing behind false flags, I would suggest to you, is the petrodollar system. I can’t go over the whole thing here but essentially, this is the deal worked out between Henry Kissinger and the king of Saudi Arabia in the early-‘70s to keep the dollar in place as the world reserve currency. The dollar had just gone off the gold standard – whole story behind that – and now they wanted to hook the dollar to petroleum. And really, what Kissinger was able to agree was to have all the OPEC nations sell their oil only in dollars, and that’s the foundation of American policy to this day. All of the nations would get their oil pegged in dollars.
It’s great for the US because it allows that there’s a global demand for our currency, which allows for all kinds of things that the US can do printing up trillions of dollars and basically holding the world hostage as a result. No other nation could afford to do what the US is doing, to prosecute all of its wars and the like, because of the petrodollar system. And it is a foundation of America’s empire. It’s really never discussed, never, ever discussed in mainstream media. But the petrodollar system forces, these geopolitics force US neoconservatives – which is simply another world for empire-builder – neoconservative.
Think about that word. Old conservative. What would be an old conservative? Someone who I would think would want to conserve the traditional republican values and institutions of this country. That’s not the worst thing in the world. A neoconservative is the new conservative. They’re preserving not the republic, my friends; they’re conserving the empire. That’s what a neoconservative is. They are building and conserving empire. You can be a Republican like Dick Cheney, and you can be a Democrat like Hillary Clinton, and you can be a neoconservative. They’re twins. They’re brother and sister twins, politically, in my opinion. They both are as equally intent on domination and preservation of the United States empire, and that forces the neocons, the whole petrodollar system, to demonize any of these people who are not on board with that system. This is why Saddam went away, because he started selling his oil in euros in 2000. And Kaddafi, with the gold-based dinar system, he was about to introduce, which was a threat to the dollar. And Putin, of course, who is simply … Well, long story about Vlad. We’ll have to skip that for another time. I’m fascinated by Russian politics, always have been.
It forces the United States to feel the need to physically control the sources of energy that exist, basically the hydrocarbons that go from basically Western Africa across the continent to the Middle East and to western Asia. That’s two-thirds of the world’s oil and natural gas right there, and the US wants it all. They want to control it physically.
These are the geopolitical reasons, I would argue, that are directly behind 9/11. To steal, say, $30 trillion worth of oil under the ground in Iraq, which they did and then sold off to multinationals, and to steal all the nice mineral wealth under the ground in Afghanistan as a nice little bonus. So theft, of course, is always important for this, and then to control the population.
I would suggest, too, that the petrodollar and all of this is all part of a hierarchical-based and scarcity-driven system. That is, energy scarcity – Energy in our world today is based on physical control over a particular commodity, oil and natural gas primarily, and if you control those locations, you control the distribution, you have the power. That’s a strength and a power of the system, but it’s also the weakness of the system, because if we develop an alternative energy paradigm, this is very much in danger. And that’s a good thing. So this whole system is vulnerable to emerging technologies, and that means that the false flag phenomenon itself would be vulnerable to that.
I’m going to give you a quick profile. You know how we talk about racial profiling by the police; let’s talk about false flag profiling. There’s certain things that by themselves or even collectively don’t prove that something is a false flag but they give you an idea that you want to look carefully at it. The only way to prove one thing or another is through good investigative journalism but, nonetheless, let’s just take a quick look at some of these things.
One thing to look for is that it’s a sensational event that gets a lot of major media attention, boom, immediately. That’s pretty obvious. But what you really want to look for are changing narratives. In other words, particularly in the beginning, in the first day or two of an event, you will always find competing narratives of what exactly happened. You really want to look for that because after a few days, that goes away and the major media, particularly, are on board with, boom, this story, and this is the only story.
San Bernardino’s a great case. This happened not long ago and there were several witnesses – several – who said, “I saw three big white guys come in with guns.” Now, I don’t know if that’s the case or not but that’s a fact. These witnesses said this. That’s just one example. With 9/11 there’s all kinds of alternative narratives. You have the case of Rumsfeld talking about the plane that got shot down over Pennsylvania. Woops, maybe I didn’t mean to say that. And on and on and on. There’s all of these competing different statements that get leaked out and then just go away. You want to look for that.
You also want to look for the fact that the case is quickly closed, that a patsy or the “evil-doer” is quickly found and usually is either killed immediately or if he’s not killed, he just disappears and then the trial is always a kangaroo court and you’ll never even hear what’s going on. Boston was a great example of that.
Another thing you want to look for is that these suspects are connected to intelligence groups, whether US or non-US, but frequently US. I would say this. If you are approached by the FBI, ever in your life, and your skin color’s maybe a shade or two darker than mine, you’d better run far and fast. I’m not kidding. Because what they do, the FBI goes after foreign nationals who look foreign – that is, i.e., they’re a little darker – and they love to set these people up. More than have of all the terrorist arrests post-9/11 that have to do with federal terrorism charges, they’re FBI set-up jobs.
So the FBI will approach you, they’ll convince you, “Oh, yeah, the US government, they suck. Let’s go get them.” And in particular, if you’re not that bright, if you’re very easily impressionable … This happened in my town of Rochester just a couple weeks ago. They got another one there. They will bring you to the store to get your terrorist equipment, like a knife or a ski mask – I’m serious – and then they’ll arrest you and you’ll never see daylight ever again. These people on their own would almost never have committed any of these crimes, so this is provocation. This is what our government does to us. So if the FBI comes up to you, no matter what you look like, run. Go away from these people. What you find is that these suspects, there’s often a connection to intelligence organizations.
Typically the suspects that are promoted in the media have some kind of connection, sociologically, demographically, to whatever group is to be demonized. Back in the ‘90s it was typically rightwing militias, gun nuts, that type of thing. Timothy McVeigh comes to mind. In our century it’s more Muslims. They seem to be the group they’re going after, but there’s others. The LAX shooting was a so-called rightwing conspiracy theorist. That’s how he was portrayed in the media. And so on and so on, so look for these.
One thing you really want to look for are unanswered questions, and just problems associated with the official explanation of the event. There’s often gaping holes in these things, that the media – the establishment media, that is – never ask, how did these guys get out of Charlie Hebdo shooting so easily? There’s a car, no one bothered them. How is it they talked about a pristine passport being found after 9/11 and then also after the Paris murders just a few months ago. Really? A pristine passport? In the case of the Paris shooting, this perfect Syrian passport was left behind. What? Really? Then that story kind of went away and is not talked about … changing narratives. These are very suspicious things and whatever the truth is behind these – maybe we’ll never find the truth to some of these incidents because who knows why? But we certainly ought to be asking the questions.
Multiple drills is important. This is a key thing. When the events happen you typically find there are multiple drills happening that portray the exact same thing. With 9/11, there was a drill going on that day to protect America against the attack by terrorists using airplanes to crash into us. I’m not kidding. And there are a number of these multiple drills with the shootings and other things.
Why would that be? Here’s why. In the intelligence community, when you’re planning this thing out, there are always people who are not in with the in crowd. They’re not on board. The idea of the multiple drills is to provide cover, so if someone sees that this is happening the answer is, “Oh, no, no, no, no. We’re doing a drill. We’re doing a drill.” But then it happens. The other thing is that the existence of the drills also provides confusion during the day when the false flag occurs and that is very helpful for the operation.
The other thing you just see is a media narrative that jumps right on top because there’s intimate collaboration. The discussion’s inevitably focus on do we need more police protection, greater police state measures? What about our privacy? Yeah, but we have to have security. That whole discussion just goes on and on and so the public conversation inevitably creeps toward fascism, always does, and war – fascism and war.
Finally, you find the government taking action and doing things, again, that could never be justified, whether it’s invading Iraq or whether it’s rolling out the naked-body scanners owned by Michael Chertoff’s company after the Underwear Bomber – Ooh … Underwear! Bomber! – and sweetheart deals that happened that would never have happened otherwise.
Now, it’s true. Some of these events may not be always false flags. They might be devious, evil opportunism run amok. Would not rule that out, but a lot of these I think are indeed false flags absolutely, and we need to look at it.
Finally, in concluding, I would say that a lot of these false flags are not necessarily going to be military operations, especially moving forward. I think we need to look for corporate and financial false flags. In fact, there have been financial false flags in the past. I’ll write about the 1907 financial crisis that led to the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and I think that we have financial false flags that are going on in our own era. We have corporate false flags, if everyone remembers the Sony North Korea hack – absolute corporate/intel false flag – the flu scares, the pharmaceutical. All of these I think are a big part of our world today. Keep in mind, too, not every false flag – in fact, no false flag, likely, is going to be on the magnitude of something like 9/11. That’s the granddaddy, the big one. Most other false flags will have varying levels of impact on the world. Think of them as different types of different size weapons to target different types of things that they want to get done.
I just want to wrap up. I think there is a way out. What we’re seeing, the false flag phenomenon is important right now because you have groups that are trying right now to establish a global, totalitarian system, and they are trying very, very hard using false flags as a way to psych us out, terrify us, make us feel helpless so that we run to the state for protection. You can see it happening. This is exactly what they’re moving toward, and they’re being very successful at it right now.
In that war, we have to expect all forms of propaganda to be ramped up and to be in place, including the false flag but not exclusively false flags. All the tricks of the trade are coming out.
The way out for us, obviously, educate ourselves. Be unafraid to be an activist. I keep thinking, find out what you’re willing to go to jail for. Think about this. What are the things that you personally are willing, would be willing, to be arrested for? Because we’re getting to that point, what will we support? Organizations like WikiLeaks, which technically do things that are illegal but we need them because we’re not living in a democratic system. We’re living in an authoritarian system masking as a democratic system.
Fascism today is not going to look like Hitler. That was 80 years ago. This isn’t the world of the 1930s. Fascism’s not going to look like Brownshirts raising their right hand. That’s not how it is. Fascism’s going to look a lot sexier. It’ll look like Monday Night Football and it’ll look like Dancing With the Stars and it’ll look like all those nice things that people like to look at, the glitter. And it’ll call itself democracy. But it’s not going to call itself fascism. Of course it won’t. So we have to be aware.
The other thing that researchers should be doing, and they are doing this, we’re seeing this with the Web – is they’re calling out false flag opportunities now when they happen. This was not the case 20 years ago. It’s happening now. When any big event happens you see it. Now, sometimes people just jump on and say “False flag!” and maybe not always with evidence, but researchers are very, very aware now and so it’s becoming a little more difficult.
The main thing I feel we need to do, though, is to break out of this hierarchical control system. I was talking about energy earlier. I think there are ways for us moving forward technologically and in terms of our own thinking, to break ourselves out of this system of energy control. We’re talking about things like energy harvesting devices, free energy and the like. I think this is important.
The other thing, I do write about UFOs and let’s call it the ET phenomenon. I do consider that probably the greatest and most deep, dark secret that we have in our world today. It represents an infrastructure that is so vastly beyond the infrastructure we’re looking at here, and I do think that the opening of that secret as well as other secrets would cause an effect for people to be peering into the structures of power and allow them to take or at least begin the process of taking back the power, taking back our own sovereignty so that we can live actually as we always wanted to – as free, independent citizens of a society that believes in rule by the people.
You’ve been listening to Richard Dolan. Today’s show has been: Understanding False Flag Operations In Our Time.

Richard Dolan is an author and historian. He is nearing completion of a groundbreaking book, A History of False Flag Operations, which will explain one of the most pernicious developments of our time: how clandestine agencies secretly engage in violence and destruction in order to promote their agendas. He is best known as the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and the National Security State. He is widely regarded as a leading researcher and historian on the topic of the UFO cover-up. He studied US Cold War strategy, Soviet history and international diplomacy. Since 2012, he has hosted The Richard Dolan Show, airing on KGRA Radio every Monday evening, from 8-10 pm Eastern. In addition to his research, his company, Richard Dolan Press, actively publishes innovative books by authors from around the world. Visit his website at richarddolanpress.com.

Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. To leave comments or order copies of shows, email us at faulkner@gunsandbutter.org.

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U.S. Blew Up World Trade Center To Create ‘War On Terror’

Saudi Press: U.S. Blew Up World Trade Center To Create ‘War On Terror’

http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2016/05/22/saudi-press-u-s-blew-up-world-trade-center-to-create-war-on-terror/

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TEL AVIV – The Saudi press is still furious over the U.S. Senate’s unanimous vote approving a bill that allows the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. This time, the London-based Al-Hayat daily has claimed that the U.S. planned the attacks on the World Trade Center in order to create a global war on terror. 

The article, written by Saudi legal expert Katib al-Shammari and translated by MEMRI, claims that American threats to expose documents that prove Saudi involvement in the attacks are part of a long-standing U.S. policy that he calls “victory by means of archives.”
Al-Shammari claims that the U.S. chooses to keep some cards close to its chest in order to use them at a later date. One example is choosing not to invade Iraq in the 1990s and keeping its leader, Saddam Hussein, alive to use as “a bargaining chip” against other Gulf States. Only once Shi’ism threatened to sweep the region did America act to get rid of Hussein “since they no longer saw him as an ace up their sleeve.”
He claims that the 9/11 attacks were another such card, enabling the U.S. to blame whoever suited its needs at a particular time; first it blamed Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, then Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and now Saudi Arabia.

September 11 is one of winning cards in the American archives, because all the wise people in the world who are experts on American policy and who analyze the images and the videos [of 9/11] agree unanimously that what happened in the [Twin] Towers was a purely American action, planned and carried out within the U.S. Proof of this is the sequence of continuous explosions that dramatically ripped through both buildings. … Expert structural engineers demolished them with explosives, while the planes crashing [into them] only gave the green light for the detonation – they were not the reason for the collapse. But the U.S. still spreads blame in all directions.

The intention of the attacks, writes al-Shammari in his conspiracy article, was to create “an obscure enemy – terrorism – which became what American presidents blamed for all their mistakes” and that would provide justification for any “dirty operation” in other countries.
The terror label was applied to Muslims even though it was Muslims who helped America defeat the Soviets and bring an end to the Cold War, he writes. The problem, asserts al-Shammari, is that the U.S. must always find a new impetus to have an adversary, for “the nature of the U.S. is that it cannot exist without an enemy.”
Al-Shammari’s article comes amid a torrent of vociferous articles in the Saudi press that range from accusing the U.S. of being “schizophrenic” and in cahoots with Iran to publishing warnings that if passed, the “Satanic” bill would “open the gates of hell.”

FOR ISRAEL

www.barrychamish.com

                                                                                 FOR ISRAEL
                                                                         by Barry Chamish

   I have a horrid ethical conflict. I have an anti-semitic spammer that I mostly succeed in deleting. Today one got through. I will present it highly edited, for in its utter hatred of Jews, the
author has discovered the same facts that I had presented two decades before. AND I've received a LOT more material than this. I have to find some way to demonstrate that I'm FOR Israel...
just not FOR lying. It WILL catch up with us. In my world it already has.
   In the first article, the author makes the classic error; what he calls Zionists are LABOR Zionists. They are opposed by Right Wing and Religious Zionists and by Religious non-Zionists who according
to both British and Ottoman censuses were by far the leading populations of major 19th century cities like Haifa, Tsfat and Jerusalem. Instead, he paints a black and white caricature out of a glossy
and highly detailed color print. As does every Arab writer that I'm aware of..
   As do most Jewish writers about the founding of Israel and the Holocaust.
   It's messy, but it's not like I relate to anyone trying to bring Israel down. Most of us were puppets on a string when got there, and however it happened, we'll fight for our home.
   Before you begin reading the first piece, listen to my history in English:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGo8zwKeTf4
  
    Or Hebrew:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOYpkCP1WNM

    Read Spritzler, then stick around for more after:

John Spritzler
February 6, 2005
Lastly, let us see what the Zionist leadership did to rescue Jews during the actual years of the Holocaust.

On December 11, 1943, the Jewish Forward, largest Yiddish newspaper in the world, criticized the Zionist leaders, writing,

"The Jewish Conference [a Zionist organization] is alive only when there is something in the air which has to do with a Commonwealth in Palestine, and it is asleep when it concerns rescue work for the Jews in the Diaspora." [19]

Baruch Kimmerling, in his review of Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II, writes:

"Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven." [20]

The head of the World Zionist Organization's Zionist Rescue Committee in Budapest during the war, Rudolf Kastner, later a prominent member of Israel's government under Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, collaborated with the Nazis. In the years 1944-45, Kastner was made a V.I.P. by the Nazis and not required to wear a yellow Star of David because, in exchange for being allowed to hand pick 1600 prominent Jews, including his own relatives and friends, to emigrate to Palestine, he helped Adolf Eichmann lure a half million Hungarian and Transylvanian Jews to their death without a fight by arranging for phony postcards "from other Jews" to convince them that the trains to the death camps were merely taking them to be "resettled." The betrayal was especially horrible because Eichmann only had "150 men and only a few thousand Hungarian soldiers at his disposal" and the Jews, had they known the truth, could have easily carried out a mass escape to territory that the Nazis did not occupy. These facts came out in a famous 1954 Israeli libel trial in which Kastner initially thought he could silence his accuser but, as the trial developed and witness after witness came forward to confirm the accusations, he began to shift his defense to the claim that he had only done what all top Zionist leaders of the time advocated. At this point Kastner was "conveniently" assassinated by persons unknown. [21]

Zionist sabotage of rescue efforts was an established policy as early as 1942. In a letter to the Times (of London), June 6, 1961, Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, Chairman of the wartime Rescue Committee established by the Chief Rabbi of Britain, describes how the Zionist leadership in Great Britain opposed efforts to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust. He writes that, contrary to the claims that the British government was "largely indifferent to and unwilling to take action in defense of the European Jews who were being massacred daily by the Nazis in spite of efforts by Zionist leaders to persuade the British Foreign Office to rouse itself into action on behalf of the victims...My experience in 1942-43 was wholly in favour of British readiness to help, openly, constructively and totally, and that this readiness met with opposition from Zionist leaders who insisted on rescue to Palestine as the only acceptable form of help." Rabbi Schonfeld goes on to describe how, in December, 1942, he and others formed a Council for Rescue from the Nazi Terror which initiated a Parliamentary Rescue Committee supported by leading members of both Houses, and how they submitted a motion to Parliament calling for the government "to declare its readiness to find temporary refuge in its own territories or in territories under its control for endangered persons who are able to leave those countries; to appeal to the governments of countries bordering on enemy and enemy-occupied countries to allow temporary asylum and transit facilities for such persons; to offer to those governments, so far as practicable, such help as may be needed to facilitate their cooperation; and to invite the other Allied governments to consider similar action." But this is what happened, according to the rabbi's letter:

"As a result of widespread concern and the persistence of a few, this motion achieved within two weeks a total of 277 Parliamentary signatures of all parties. This purely humanitarian proposal met with sympathy from government circles, and I should add that H.M.Government did, in fact, issue some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits -- indeed, in favour of any threatened Jewish family whom we could name. Already while the Parliamentary motion was gathering momentum, voices of dissent were heard from Zionist quarters: 'Why not Palestine?' The obvious answers that the most urgent concern was humanitarian and not political, that the Mufti-Nazi alliance ruled out Palestine for the immediate saving of lives and that Britain could not then add to her Middle East problems, were of no avail.

"At the Parliamentary meeting held on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being energetically pursued by over 100 M.P.s and Lords, a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine. Some voices were raised in support of the Zionist view, there was considerable debate, and thereafter the motion was dead. Even the promoters exclaimed in desperation: If the Jews cannot agree among themselves, how can we help? It was useless to argue with a then current Zionist argument: 'Every nation has had its dead in the fight for its homeland -- the sufferers under Hitler are our dead in our fight'."

Why did  Zionist leaders sabotage rescue efforts? The answer is spelled out very clearly in a dramatic letter. In the autumn of 1942 Nathan Schwalb (Dror) was representative of the Zionist He-Halutz (The Pioneer) organization in Geneva. At this time a Jewish rescue Working Group in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, was sending desperate appeals to He-Halutz for money to bribe senior Nazi officials to delay or prevent the transport of Czechoslovakian Jewry to Auschwitz and other death camps. Schwalb replied, in his letter to the rescue group, as follows:

"Since we have the opportunity of this courier, we are writing to the group that they must always remember that matter which is the most important, which is the main issue that must always be before our eyes. After all, the allies will be victorious. After the victory, they will once again divide up the world between the nations as they did at the end of first war. Then they opened the way for us for the first step [the British Balfour Declaration of 1917 supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine -- JS] and now, as the war ends, we must do everything so that Eretz Yisroel [the Land of Israel -- JS] should become a Jewish state. Important steps have already been taken in this matter. As to the cry that comes from your country, we must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations and territories after the war? And so it would be foolish and impertinent on our side to ask the nations whose blood is being spilled for permission to send money into the land of their enemies in order to protect our own blood. Because 'rak b'dam tihyu lanu haaretz' ('only through blood will the land be ours'). As to yourselves -- members of the group -- 'atem taylu' ('you will get out'), and for this purpose we are providing you with funds by this courier." [22]

One might dismiss this cruel letter from Nathan Schwalb as an aberration, unrepresentative of the Zionist leadership at higher levels. But it turns out that Schwalb was acting in accordance with the views of his superiors in the Zionist movement. In his book, In Days of Holocaust and Destruction, Yitzchak Greenbaum, Chairman of the (Zionist) Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee in Jerusalem, wrote, "when they asked me, couldn't you give money out of the United Jewish Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, 'NO!' and I say again, 'NO!'...one should resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to secondary importance." In February, 1943, Greenbaum gave a speech in Tel Aviv on the subject, "The Diaspora and the Redemption" in which he said:

"When they come to us with two plans -- the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land [settling Jews in Palestine -- JS] -- I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land...If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Keren Hayesod (United Jewish Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No! and once again No!" [23]

Zionism's hostility to Jews trying to survive anywhere other than Palestine goes back at least to 1938 when, at a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain, David Ben-Gurion, argued: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." [26] These are the words of a fanatic, obsessed with the dream of becoming a ruler of a "state of his own" no matter how many innocent Jewish lives must be sacrificed for that end. One might dismiss Ben-Gurion's words about Jewish children as merely rhetoric unconnected to real-life decisions, but as we have seen, it turns out that Zionist leaders during the Holocaust did indeed act in accordance with Ben-Gurion's insistence that Jewish lives -- hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives -- are less important than achieving a Jewish state.  Zionist leaders sabotaged efforts to rescue Jews in Europe during the Holocaust because they felt that the rescue of Jews threatened their goal of becoming masters of a "state of their own."

Every ethnic/racial group contains individuals who aspire to be part of an elite ruling class, enjoying great privileges and power over "their own people." The Zionist movement enabled people like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meier, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, among others, to rise in the world and become elite rulers of a state which now possesses nuclear weapons and one of the most powerful armies in the world. To achieve this end, Zionist leaders have sacrificed the welfare of ordinary Jews at every opportunity. They point to anti-Semitism (or what they speciously label as anti-Semitism) in order to justify a Zionist project which has nothing to do with helping ordinary Jews achieve a safe and secure and happy life free from real anti-Semitic attacks.

** Before we get back with James Baldwin, get to know what I do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o6xj0PGOhg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDxtcS_6Y8M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRlCBhIl2r0

** A reader and close friend dives deep and sends this along...

James Baldwin makes some points worth considering :

Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises. From the time of the Balfour Declaration (during World War I) Palestine was under five British mandates, and England promised the land back and forth to the Arabs or the Jews, depending on which horse seemed to be in the lead. The Zionists—as distinguished from the people known as Jews—using, as someone put it, the “available political machinery,’’ i.e., colonialism, e.g., the British Empire—promised the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British Empire would be safe forever...But absolutely no one cared about the Jews, and it is worth observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently anti-Semitic...the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.

The villain is Roundtable Group anglophiles who tried to create Israel after WWI and failed. These men weren’t men of faith they were Atheists that not only didn’t believe in god but felt them to be superior to their neighbors. If you feel superior to your neighbor then you don’t have to treat them as you would have them treat you. You can rationalize living by another rule – the ends justify the means.   They masqueraded as the faithful because it helped them fulfill their ends. The Jewish Prophets, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed all preached the golden rule. It is the most elegant moral compass in the universe. It provides a path to peace. The Roundtable Group anglophiles weren’t successful after WWI. But they left a cadre of intelligent agents in Germany who brought Hitler to power and he was successful in establishing Israel. Israel wasn’t a Jewish homeland. It was a means to control middle east oil. Hitler also would help establish the Muslim Brotherhood. They would also be the means to controlling middle east oil.

If you don’t connect the Rhodes-Rothschild Roundtable Group to Zionism and the American Roundtable Group members who surrounded Wilson and wrote his 14 points to the movement you aren’t painting a true picture of who was behind the evil. These are the anti-religious scum who are still running the show. They have morphed into Chatham House and the CFR. You won’t find any members of these organizations moving to Israel to live – including the ones who claim to be Jewish. Interestingly the phony Jews who belong to the CFR are now speaking out against Zionism despite the fact that their fathers, who didn’t move to Israel were ardent Zionists.

**

**I got my books from Israel!! Five cartons of the rare Israel Betrayed,
plus, Save Israel, Shabtai Tzvi, Labor Zionism and The Holocaust, Hatzeelu
Et Yisrael,and  Last Days Of Israel. Thank you Tova and Bob. I now have books
which I'll send to anyone who asks and pays fairly.

write me at:  chamish@netvision.net.il

Essential contributions, if you want me to continue, at Paypal:  chamishba@gmail.com

or by writing:

Barry Chamish

POB 840157

Saint Augustine, FL  32080 

Get my books on lulu.com including Bye Bye Gaza, only $10 to download.black and white: http://www.lulu.com/content/575116

My radio show at:

http://www.libertyarchives.com /