the Ames prophecy

China: the standard bearer for our future open society

2009-06-27T02:31:00.005+03:00

The Saudi government, I hear, will draft UN technical standards for "defining methods to uphold women's dignity":

U.N. Agency Eyes Web Anonymity Controls - CBS News: "A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the 'IP Traceback' drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public."

I think the word for the shit that is going down around the world, with the full complicity of the private sector is "Orwellian".

But, hey, I love, Big Brother. Or the Chinese government. Whichever applies best.

Anti-fascist=Terrorist (UK police)

2009-04-01T02:38:00.002+03:00

TERROR PROBE AFTER ANTI-FASCIST GRAFFITI
I'm keeping the capitalisation this is not the title of an Onion article, this is a real new item from the UK.

POLICE say they have seized a deactivated Kalashnikov rifle, imitation handguns, knives and a number of devices "made from fireworks" as part of a terrorism investigation.

Two men aged 25 and 19, a 16-year-old schoolboy and a 20-year-old woman were this morning still being held at Launceston police station under the Terrorism Act. Another woman, also aged 20, was released from police custody late last night following a court hearing. All five appeared at Plymouth Magistrates Court yesterday afternoon after police applied for warrants of further detention. The hearing was presided over by a London judge who specialises in terrorist matters.

The investigation came about after a sharp-eyed police officer stopped a 25-year-old man – believed to be Andrew Sprague – on Friday night daubing anti-fascist graffiti along the North Street subway under Exeter Street, just a couple of hundred yards from Charles Cross police station.

It is understood the man had sprayed the word "Antifa" – a militant anti-fascist organisation with international links. Their website claims their primary "enemy" is the British National Party, who they say have in recent years "done their utmost to hide their fascist politics beneath a thin veneer of respectability".

Mind-boggling: 1984 through a Monty-Pythin sketch.

Ames on the Alabama shootings

2009-03-12T02:43:00.001+02:00

"Reliable is following a classic Reaganomics corporate policy of treating workers like disposable assets rather than as human beings. After all, if you fire employees en masse, and squeeze the terrified remaining workers into overtime work, the result is that it saves rich shareholders and executives a few extra bucks. And that’s a good thing because the rich need to be taken care of first and foremost, or so we’ve been told for the past 30 years by all the vile little Ayn Rand kommisars who somehow worked their way into power in this country. We’ve been conditioned for 30 straight years to accept the insane idea that companies only exist to serve shareholder/executive interests, and that workers are there by the grace of the plutocrats, and if they don’t like it, well, they’re free to quit and find another job. Which is to say, anyone who’s not an executive can fuck off."

Mark Ames has written one hell of a book about such events, I should note...

You want anger, do you?

2009-03-05T15:22:00.009+02:00

Getting angry at work may not be a bad thing, and may in fact help you move up the career ladder, researchers believe.

The Harvard Medical School study found those who repressed frustration were three times more likely to say they had reached a glass ceiling.

Thankfully it is noted that "Outright fury was destructive". One can thus assume that the rather intense outbursts of ~~slave~~ worker outrage, all around the world are not helping the upward mobility of those involved...

Also note the conflicting advice laid-off workers are presented with:

Experts warn against real displays of [email] anger [at being fired] over concerns that it could hurt a future job search. Many caution against even a hint negativity.

"Don't show any bitterness. Don't complain. Just be positive," says Donna Flagg, a workplace expert and the President of The Krysalis Group, a business and management consulting firm in New York.

... or prehaps venting your anger is ok only when employed. When you're fired it's a liability one should watch out for.

2009-02-25T01:58:00.001+02:00

EU Comission: Lithuanians must keep on rioting

Lithuania, whose attempts to shore up public finances by cutting salaries and raising taxes have triggered riots, must further limit wages to help the economy recover from a “severe contraction,” the European Commission said in a draft report to be published tomorrow

2006-12-07T12:04:00.000+02:00

Hot or Not

The United States has used computers to secretly generate terror risk rankings for all American and foreign travelers who have crossed US borders for the past four years. The Associated Press reports that these ratings are supposed to help tell the government if a traveler is a potential terrorist or criminal. The government intends to keep the ratings on file for 40 years, and travelers are not allowed to see or challenge whatever rating they have been given.

2006-12-06T13:59:00.000+02:00

Reviving...

1,2... it's alive again!

2004-08-31T21:18:00.000+03:00

Am I allowed to utter your hallowed name?

You shall not profane our sacred site with your sacrilegious and blasphemous links; thus "for your protection and ours we have established a procedure for parties wishing to introduce a link to the ATHENS 2004 website on their site. By introducing a link to the ATHENS 2004 official Website on your site you are agreeing to comply with the ATHENS 2004 Website General Terms and Conditions."

2004-07-20T03:44:00.000+03:00

Second attempt

"Bush acknowledged that acting CIA Director John McLaughlin had said there was no direct connection between Iran and Sept. 11. But the president said he has long expressed his concerns about ~~Iraq~~ Iran."

2004-06-01T20:42:00.000+03:00

The merry march of progress

Russia's poorest face huge cuts in benefits:
System supporting veterans, disabled people and pensioners to be swept away as Moscow reforms aim to cap compensation...

2004-05-26T04:25:00.000+03:00

The Abu Ghraib recruiting report. Prospects

"Eleven teenagers have gone on trial in the German town of Hildesheim, accused of abusing and humiliating a classmate and filming his ordeal. "

2004-05-04T19:48:00.000+03:00

I was a teenage criminal

"In the government's efforts to protect children from abuse, however, the law also forbids under-16s from engaging in any sexual activity - ranging from 'touching' to full intercourse."

... but they claim they won't actually enforce the law, in such cases. But let's criminalize everything just in case...

2004-04-30T17:05:00.000+03:00

Winning hearts and minds

"...The graphic images include one of a hooded and naked prisoner standing on a box with wires attached to his genitals. CBS said the prisoner was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted.
Another shows naked prisoners being forced to simulate sex acts. In another, a female soldier, with a cigarette in her mouth, simulates holding a gun and pointing at a naked Iraqi's genitals..."

2004-04-27T18:51:00.000+03:00

Christian Mullah Indoctrination Kit

This is not a spoof site. Really!
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant study predicts 50%-60% reduction in teen sexual activity with Choosing the Best...

2004-04-06T00:54:00.000+03:00

If she plays with herself, is it child abuse?

"State police have charged a 15-year-old Latrobe girl with child pornography for taking photos of herself and posting them on the Internet.
Police said the girl, whose identity they withheld, photographed herself in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts. She then sent the photos to people she met in chat rooms.
A police report did not say how police learned about the girl. They found dozens of pictures of her on her computer.
She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography."

2004-04-04T13:52:00.000+03:00

Mengele capitalism

"Orphans and babies as young as three months old have been used as guinea pigs in potentially dangerous medical experiments sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, an Observer investigation has revealed.
British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is embroiled in the scandal. The firm sponsored experiments on the children from Incarnation Children's Centre, a New York care home that specialises in treating HIV sufferers and is run by Catholic charities. "

2004-04-03T04:27:00.000+03:00

Cry Baby Jesus

"US troops are to be armed with a stun gun that uses a baby's high-pitched scream to bring the enemy to its knees.
The gun, which will be issued to marines in Iraq this month, fires 'sonic bullets' that can be targeted like a torch beam.
Anyone hit with a full blast would suffer excruciating pain, permanent deafness and some form of cellular damage. A prolonged blast could kill. "

2004-03-22T13:30:00.000+02:00

Food and Lodging

The UK is fastly turning into a Kafkaesque authoritarian jail:
"WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?
An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons."

2004-03-19T18:52:00.000+02:00

Storming Denmark's free zones

"Some 200 officers took part in this week's operation, and were greeted by barricades and booing residents.
Their 10-hour-long incursion into Christiania resulted in 48 arrests - almost all for the possession or sale of cannabis, a drug banned in Denmark.
Mr Vittrup says the suspects will face trial and possible prison sentences of up to six years...

After decades of defiance, it seems Christiania is finally being brought to heel."

2004-02-24T02:15:00.000+02:00

UK: Liberty Removal

"The news that M15 is to increase its numbers by a thousand is merely the latest instance of David Blunkett's rampant authoritarianism. The secret state's claim that it is losing the never-ending, unprovable war against terror will play its part in the government winning a far greater prize. Across the range of his responsibilities - immigration, policing, the criminal justice system and prisons - Blunkett has either proposed or actually introduced measures whose repressive nature should shock us. That, by now, we may have become inured to them, does not take away from the fact that New Labour is trying to radically change the constitutional environment in which we live. "

2004-02-10T03:52:00.000+02:00

A state of siege

"The threat from suicide bombers was now so great the burden of proof in British courts may have to be lowered in terrorism cases so extremists can be tried before they succeed in mounting an attack, he said.
Mr Blunkett said proposals allowing British terrorism suspects to be tried at least partly in secret by a security-vetted judge will be put forward in a discussion paper soon."

More:The UK will take my baby away

"Tony Blair hinted the standard of proof in organised crime cases may need to be lowered so that it is easier for police to secure convictions."

Ingsoc lite: the Blair project.

2004-02-09T12:40:00.000+02:00

Joe McCarthy is still alive

"In what may be the first subpoena of its kind in decades, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists...
...In addition to records about who attended the forum, the subpoena orders the university to divulge all records relating to the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a New York-based legal activist organization that sponsored the forum. The group, once targeted for alleged ties to communism in the 1950s, announced Friday it will ask a federal court to quash the subpoena on Monday."
More from the Des Moines Register: (1, 2).
The National Lawyers' Guild responds.

2004-01-29T19:56:00.000+02:00

deseretnews.com | Dossier program alarms Utahns

"It sounds like a sci-fi thriller: a super computer program that gathers dossiers on every single man, woman and child — everything from birth and marriage and divorce history to hunting licenses and car license plates. Even every address you have lived at down to the color of your hair.
It sounds surreal, but former Gov. Mike Leavitt signed Utah's 2.4 million residents up for a pilot program — ironically called MATRIX — that does just that. And he never bothered to reveal details of the program to Utah citizens or to state lawmakers who, upon learning of the program on Capitol Hill this week, are now worried the state could be involved in a program that jeopardizes basic civil liberties."

2004-01-29T14:07:00.000+02:00

The Register

"Once you buy your RFID-tagged jeans at The Gap with RFID-tagged money, walk out of the store wearing RFID-tagged shoes, and get into your car with its RFID-tagged tires, you could be tracked anywhere you travel. Bar codes are usually scanned at the store, but not after purchase. But RFID transponders are, in many cases, forever part of the product, and designed to respond when they receive a signal. Imagine everything you own is 'numbered, identified, catalogued, and tracked.' Anonymity and privacy? Gone in a hailstorm of invisible communication, betrayed by your very property. "

2004-01-19T16:38:00.000+02:00

Workers Assail Night Lock-Ins by Wal-Mart

"The reason for Mr. Rodriguez's delayed trip to the hospital was a little-known Wal-Mart policy: the lock-in. For more than 15 years, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has locked in overnight employees at some of its Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores. It is a policy that many employees say has created disconcerting situations, such as when a worker in Indiana suffered a heart attack, when hurricanes hit in Florida and when workers' wives have gone into labor."

2003-10-09T18:25:00.000+03:00

Keep 'em working and miserable

Sad workers may make better workers says study:
Psychologist Dr. Robert Sinclair and his former PhD student Carrie Lavis recently conducted a series of four studies addressing the effects of experimentally induced happiness versus sadness on work productivity by asking the participants to build circuit boards. In the first study, sad people committed significantly fewer errors than did happy people (approximately half the number of errors) but there was no difference in the number of boards completed. Thus, sad people were more productive.
Experimentally induced happiness/sadness is beyond my grasp anyway.

2003-10-09T17:13:00.000+03:00

Let us recount the names of the dead

Diary of a Texas death cult.

2003-09-25T15:29:00.000+03:00

Corporate Gestapo

"NEVER in my career have I allowed a team which worked for me to think they had a 40 hour job. I have allowed YOU to create a culture which is permitting this. NO LONGER."
It's nice to know that these sort of maniacs were running the global economy.

2003-09-25T15:25:00.000+03:00

Our future lies with eugenics

"Eugenics, as advocated by kindly figures such as its pioneer, Sir Francis Galton, or its most eloquent exponent, Dean Inge, was simply the notion that the useful and intelligent classes should be allowed, indeed encouraged, to breed, and the murderous morons, who are never going to contribute anything except misery to themselves and others should be discouraged. No one need be killed."
This was published in the bleeding Telegraph mind you. But the author is a kind nazi and doesn't think anyone need be killed, unless of course it's absolutely necessary.

2003-09-25T15:21:00.000+03:00

How low can Dow go?

"In a stunning example of corporate insensibility, Dow Chemical, the world's largest chemical company, and new owner of Union Carbide, is to sue survivors of the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. While the site of the disaster lies covered in toxic waste and survivors struggle with continuing ill health and deadly pollution from the site, Dow has decided to add to their woes with an Indian lawsuit."
Soundtrack: Dead Kennedys "Kill the Poor"

2003-09-25T15:17:00.000+03:00

Crime Pays!

"In this special report, American RadioWorks correspondent John Biewen explores how some groups with vested interests work to influence public policy - helping to keep more people locked up longer."
At last, slave labour one can afford.

2003-09-25T15:13:00.000+03:00

Bosses warn against rights for temps

"Business leaders have warned that a leaked European Commission draft proposal to extend temporary workers' rights could be very damaging 'to all concerned'. "

2003-09-19T12:50:00.000+03:00

Human Rights Violations in The United States - Red Onion State Prison

"The day I arrived I was...told that I was at Red Onion now and if I act up they would kill me and there was nothing anyone could or would do about it."
Midnight express... american style.

2003-09-16T02:17:00.000+03:00

New terror laws used vs. common criminals

"A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months."

2003-07-11T01:27:00.000+03:00

test

The Original Ames Prophecy

2001-06-06T02:35:00.000+03:00

Due to the unavailability of the original in the exile archive, I republish below the original essay, taken from archive.org. If by any minuscule chance Ames himself stumbles upon this and doesn't want it posted, he shouldn't have posted it on the web in the first place. But anyway I'll take it down

Nouveau Reich - Year 2000 In Review
Issue #25/106, Dec 21, 2000 The eXile - Moscow's Only Alternative!

The Third Reich died a hard and premature death - exactly 988 years prematurely - but its spirit lives on as we enter the new Millennium. MARK AMES looks back at the year that the Reich returned, quietly consolidated its power and took control of planet earth so completely that Hitler would be left scratching his charred, bullet-punctured, museum-displayed skull at the sheer wonder of it all.

Welcome to the NOUVEAU REICH. It's the best description we could think of to describe the fake democracy and fake individualism sweeping the globe, its crass elitism, vulgar hypocrisy and Death Star efficiency. The Nouveau Reich is so vast and powerful that its minions control everything from the clothes you don't wear to the views you don't view and the meaningless votes never counted. It's a flip-side-of-the-coin Reich whose very power lies in the fact that it corrected Nazi Germany's biggest mistake of all: drawing too much attention to itself. In the Nouveau Reich, everything bad is labeled good, everything white labeled black. Just look at Colin Powell and Condi Rice...
When most of us think of the Third Reich, the first thought that comes to mind is, "Cool uniforms." Uniforms were Numero Eino on the Fascist's To Do List. The Nouveau Reich is no exception, having ushered in a revolutionary uniform all of its own. It's called BUSINESS CASUAL and you wear it whether you like it or not. As online fashion Askmen.com recently noted, "To say that business wear has changed in the past couple of years is an understatement. And it's not just the dot-com-mers that have changed the way they come to work; even consulting and law firms have altered their dress codes in order to promote comfort. In turn, productivity increases and companies maintain their competitive edges by keeping the best new twenty-somethings in their firm."
This harsh uniform-switch has not come without its millions of victims. The October 30th issue of Businessweek writes: "It's the ultimate sartorial irony: Less restrictive dress codes were supposed to make life more comfortable for everyone. Instead, with the old rules gone, many people are in a state of dressdown confusion.
"Companies have also learned that if they don't lay down specific policies, the words `dress casual' can be subject to wide interpretation. `There was a general assumption that employees would share the same definition of what "business casual" meant,' says Robert DeRocker, executive vice-president of Development Counselors International, a New York marketing and communications firm specializing in tourism and economic development. `We were wrong.'"
Welp, whattaya expect, giving the Volk all that freedom of choice! As we learn from Businessweek, our efficient Reich eliminated the problem by eliminating the choice. Firms hired consultants to issue guidelines as to what could and could not be worn in "busi-ness casual", with some companies holding fashion shows to teach their worker-slaves what is and isn't acceptable: "Some companies with written guidelines also make their point with fashion shows. Often featuring employees as models, they present a series of appropriate outfits. At one two-hour event held in early October at Saks Fifth Avenue's flagship store in New York, some eight employees from J.P. Morgan and Salomon Smith Barney modeled the clothes. Sometimes, the shows go a step further, highlighting dress-down don'ts as well. Last March, Powell Goldstein Fraser & Murphy, a law firm with offices in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., held a presentation at each office, with several partners demonstrating such business-fashion faux pas as shorts and sandals."
The problem of course is that casual wear in theory expects the worker to express his or her individuality, an alleged liberation from the uniformity of suit-and-tie wear. So here's the great dilemma that all the people of the Nouveau Reich face: how to pretend that you're an individual without actually being an individual and getting in trouble with the Reichsfuhrer.
AskMen.com tells you how: "If you're not sure about what your company means by `business casual,' just ask your superior to clarify what is and isn't permitted. You can also observe what others are wearing. Asking a superior is always a good idea, since others may not necessarily know what business casual is and may still be wearing suits everyday."
In South Padre Island, Texas, a proclamation by Mayor Edmund Cyganiewicz requires the resort town's chief of police to cut ties off of delinquent dressers. Sieg Hiy'all!
In the Third Reich, Work equaled Freedom and architecture was consciously designed to impose State power and fear, and make the individual feel small and meaningless. In the Nouveau Reich, the widely popular OPEN OFFICE PLAN attempts the same, while pretending to promote the opposite. Open Office Plan takes away the five-foot high cubicle partitions - mankind's last fleeting vestiges of privacy - and replaces them with noth-ing - just one giant partitionless room where everyone is observable and observing one another morning till night. This way, slackers can't hide their slacking, and individuals understand that they are merely a mass of humanity.
Even for seasoned office serfs, this was hard to swallow at first. Cubicle mascot Dilbert, in one cartoon, quipped, "I cried because I did not have an office with a door until I met a man who had no cubicle."
The theory of open office plan was recently elucidated by Dr. Jay L. Brand, Ph.D., who calls himself an expert on Officing Research/Ideation:
"To experience the maximum potential benefits of moving to open office plans, a broad organizational focus is essential. If the advantages of an open office are forced on managers while executives remain in much larger, private office areas, this duplicity will probably not go unnoticed. Ideally, every level of the organization should be convinced of the demonstrated advantages of an open office plan:
1. A shared organizational learning environment
2. Social facilitation of performance
3. Enhanced acquisition of the corporate culture
4. An increased opportunity for social interaction
5. Ease of supervision and monitoring.
"In addition to these documented advantages of open office plans, an holistic, organizational approach to transition that integrates incentive systems and other aspects of work life normally controlled by separate departments can help to ensure successful change for the long term. Such linkages also ensure that workers receive valued rewards, thus increasing their sense of personal control and autonomy."
And you know what? This insane plan works. One e-site dedicated to the debate between cubicles versus open space (the vote was nearly even) led off with this posting: "Having recently left an open plan environment for a high- walled cubicle office, I can't tell you how much I miss the `old' order. In part, the open office was productive because we were a good team who enjoyed working together and fed off of each other's creativity. We actually had more privacy, in part because we were in a large space and could hold telephone and personal conversations at normal tones without imposing on our neighbors, and in part because we respected each others privacy. On the other hand, my current cubicle nightmare has me surrounded by secretaries - as opposed to knowledge workers - and their chatter is not only loud and incessant but completely meaningless to my work. Jennifer jenrittner@yahoo.com"
Masochism and submission aren't just a way of work - in the Nouveau Reich, they're a way of life. Scores of books extolling SUBMISSION AND MASOCHISM lead amazon.com's sales, and judging by reader reviews, they can't get enough. Consider Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission, about which an amazon Top 100 Reviewer, "fermed" from San Diego, writes, "It is understandably difficult, of course, to maintain a light touch while trying to explain how being urinated upon can be a joyful and erotic event. And yet this is an important book." Another hit seller, A Hand in the Bush : The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting, elicited this review from CandyGrrrl: "I loved what it did for my sex life, not only do I know how to fist myself properly, but now I know how to fist others properly. [...] We all fist at one point in our lives." Indeed. So as not to be left out, dykes have The Bottoming Book : How to Get Terrible Things Done to You by Wonderful People, about which Eva Lynne from California wrote: "I find its true value as a tool of empowerment."
While the Third Reich's B&D culture was consciously dark and scary, the Nouveau Reich's is masked in consensual, sensitive doublespeak, to the point where someone who's been tied up, whipped, fisted and pissed on actually feels "empowered." Hell, if you can convince the Nouveau Volk of that, you can convince them of anything!
On the other hand, a NOUVEAU MASTER RACE emerged as chronicled in the book Bobos In Paradise. A "Bobo" - the marriage of "bohemian" with "bour-geois" - is defined as an upper-class East Coast elite which dabbles in such bohemian pastimes as art and wine collecting and mutual praise. Just this month, "Bobos In Paradise" surpassed Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas to become amazon.com's all-time best-selling pop culture book.
Getting back to the Volk, we now know that the Reichsworker wears business casual, works in an open plan office, gets fisted and urinated on... and buys furniture from IKEA, which offers classic Nouveau Reich homogeneous individuality, harmless exterior with an evil core. IKEA's founder and chairman, Ingvar Kamprad, admits that he was an active member of the fascist Sveriges Nationella Forbund from the early 1940s (when he founded IKEA) until well into the late 1950s and beyond. He also admits to having been close to Per Engdahl, the Benito Mussolini of Sweden, who died eight years ago. You wouldn't know this from IKEA's stated philosophy: "From the beginning, IKEA has taken a different path. We have decided to side with the many. Home furnishings that combine good design, good function and good quality with prices so low that as many people as possible can afford them." Of course, those low prices and good quality are thanks to untermenschen laborers. IKEA has been busted on numerous occasions for employing child labor in the Philippines and Indonesia, and more recently for using union-cleansed sweatshops in Romania and Poland, where employees were paid roughly twenty-five cents an hour. Le Monde also reported last year that IKEA circulated a memo in France not to employ black delivery people because customers would be less willing to open their doors to them. "[F]or this kind of work do not recruit black people," the memo told its managers.
Here in Russia, we all remember how IKEA bought off the local press in order to support their drive to remove a famous Moscow memorial to the defense of the capital against the 1941 Nazi invasion - right around the time Kamprad joined the Swedish fascist party and founded IKEA - and replace it with a freeway on-ramp to IKEA's superstore parking lot. Nearly all of the press took the bait, as this is standard policy in the NV.
So here you have it, everyday life in the Nouveau Reich's euphemistic "New Economy". Wait, what the hell is a NEW ECONOMY anyway? For a few clever schiesters, it meant a fast easy buck; for most, it means answering phones and packing crates 80 hours a week at near-minimum wages WITHOUT UNION REPRESENTATION. Way back when, Nazis didn't like unions too much. In fact, they killed the unions. But in the New Economy, unions are a priori banned.
Amazon.com's Jeff Bozos, named Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1999, has so far successfully argued that unions make no sense at his company, since each worker theoretically owns a few worthless shares in his sinking ship. If you think that sounds oddly similar to the Nazi argument that unions were no longer necessary, and even destructive in a corporate state, you're right. While Bezos fought against unionizing, a ruthless internal campaign to squash unionizing was documented by The New York Times: "Over two weeks, managers held a half- dozen `all hands' meetings for customer service workers in Seattle, where managers argued how unionizing would be bad for Amazon." Some of the arguments: Unions are greedy and for-profit, the dues are expensive, and they can't guarantee results. The anti-union propaganda was relentlessly posted on internal amazon web sites and eventually leaked to the press.
Was it effective? Put it this way: even Generation-Y hero Pud, whose fuckedcompany.com site became famous for humorously chronicling the collapse of the dot.com bubble (it's now one of America's Top Ten web sites), sent out a special posting this month attacking the idea of amazon workers unionizing in his trademark Generation-NV ungrammatical style:
"I've been avoiding this subject, but here are my toughts. [sic] In case you haven't heard, there's a big-ass Amazon fufillment [sic] warehouse in Delaware. 35% of the company employees work there. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers has been eyeing the Internet for a long time. They're staging a walkout of the entire workforce at the Delaware center. They have the support and promise of over 600 workers to do so - thereby shutting down fufillment [sic] during the holiday season. You know I speak for operations people - being a programmer myself, I know what it's like to be taken advantage of. But the fucking unions don't have a clue what's going on with the state of Internet companies - they think all dot-com'ers are making millions. They should be taken to court for blackmail and strongarming."
Amazingly enough, most of the e-savvy Reichsworkers who responded to Pud's posting on his topic messageboard supported his attack on unions, calling union supporters "communists" who should "go to North Korea". This site, it should be remembered, does not cater to illiterate KKK fanatics; rather, this is the voice of the twentysomething generation. The wife of one amazon.com warehouse worker who posted a message noting her husband's 8-dollar-per-hour wage was flamed by other message board posters who said he should "find another job or start his own company." In the Nazi times, hundreds of thousands of agitators had to be shot before workers were tamed into talking this way; in the Nouveau Reich, they do it all on their very own. Incidentally, "amazon" is a wonderful NR EUPHEMISM to mask as environmentally-conscious a company which sells deforestation (mass books mailed in envelopes packed with styrofoam).
But that's what NV doublespeak, and doubledo, is all about: the first-ever AFRICAN-AMERICAN Secretary of State and NSA head would make you think that America and the Republican Party are making racial progress - until you realize that they work for George Bush Jr. - whose father appointed "Uncle" Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and whom blacks rejected by an unprecedented 9-1 margin - and Dick Cheney, who as a Congressman in 1986 refused to sign a non- binding resolution calling for the release of Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela from prison. Jesse Jackson plans to lead a civil march on Bush's inauguration to protest what blacks believe was election theft, citing, among other things, police checkpoints in predominantly black Florida neighborhoods on election day, harassment, and thousands of falsely accused black felons who were struck off the Florida voter rolls. As for Powell and Rice - Rice was described by Stanford colleagues as being a "tyrant", while Powell has been linked to the cover up of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
There have been minor rumblings among workers. While most Nouveau Reich employees have remained pliant, eTown's are rebelling, with 50 percent of customer service employees having signed a ground-breaking union representation petition to be voted on in January. Etown COO Lew Brown claimed that this was "for employees to decide"; however, according to salon.com, "two employees who staged a sick-out to talk amongst themselves about pay issues were sacked the next day." Why would eTown's employees rebel? They earn between $11 to $13 an hour in San Francisco, which practically makes them street people. In fact, according to the same article, 34% of Silicon Valley's homeless have full-time jobs. Not that it matters anymore - eTown has recently announced mass layoffs, and its business is in danger of folding.
While unions have been successfully sidelined in America's New Economy, in Russia, workers are about to get fully reamed in a NEW LABOR LAW that many think was designed specifically to appease McDonald's, which has had problems with pesky Russians who fought successfully for the right to unionize. Russia's union code will allow for 56 hour work weeks, unions will have to give managers information about their membership, employers can pay wages in barter rather than in cash (as when workers at the Akhtuba factory in Volgograd were paid in vibrators and dildos two years ago), and unions' right to sue employers in the courts on issues like unpaid wages will be severely weakened. The reasoning? As Labor Minister Alexander Pochinok said last week, "Go and see how they [McDonald's] are oppressing the working class. For all of its existence, there hasn't been one delay in wages at that workplace. ... They have a splendid program of benefits. ... The working conditions are in line with all norms for lighting, safety, etc. ..." The Moscow Times countered, "The union at the McComplex plant says the company harasses its members and that conditions are not quite as ideal as Pochinok says." Indeed, when Clinton declared earlier this year that former KGB functionary Vladimir Putin was "a man we can do business with", he wasn't initiating a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of convenience rather, he was sealing a Ribbentrop-Ribbentrop Pact of like-minded Oberfuhrers. Sure, last year Clinton and Tony Blair declared that they would never allow human rights violations of the scale seen in the Former Yugoslavia to occur again, only to turn around and promote Putin's rise to power as he slaughtered thousands of Chechens and Russians. But in NR terms, there was nothing hypocritical about it at all: we Americans been EXTERMINATING TOWELHEADS in Iraq for a decade now, while funding and arming the Israeli slaughter in the occupied territories - so why can't the Russians have a little fun too? There has been some dissent within the Nouveau Reich sphere of influence about our policy in Iraq, but meanwhile, hardly a day goes by without American or British planes vaporizing an Iraqi hut, or when a couple hundred Iraqi children don't die from our sanctions - some 500,000 Iraqi children have made an unannounced visit to Allah over the past decade according to UNICEF. To this, Madeleine Albright was quoted by the BBC as replying, "It's a price worth paying." Now that the United Nations - pushed jointly by America and Russia - has voted to severely tighten sanctions against Afghanistan, we can expect Allah to play host to hundreds of thousands of more children in the near future. This is what Clinton meant by doing business together.
In fact, the U.S. and Russia have a lot in common in the Nouveau Reich, more than just the world's Number One and Two prison populations, nuclear arsenals and serial murderers. While Putin has successfully "consolidat-ed" his power by dissolving the upper house of parliament, taming the lower house and exploring amending the Constitution to extend his term to seven years, Clinton, in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, said that he believed the U.S. Constitution should be changed to allow presidents to run for more than two terms "due to increased life expectancies." Asked if he believed he would win a third round if nominated, he answered, "Yes, I do." His successor, George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote but will be taking office anyway, was quoted on Monday as saying, "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dic- tator." Well Bubba, your dreams may just come true.
While the Western press shook its fist over Moscow's Operation Whirlwind, in which dark-skinned people from the Caucasus were harassed and rounded up as potential suspects following the apartment bombings, reports quietly leaked out of New Jersey and other areas of America about RACIAL PROFILING, in which dark-skinned Americans are routinely stopped and searched as likely crime suspects. Numerous stories and editorials attacking Russia's Internet-sniffing intrusion by the FSB, dubbed SORM-2, were unmatched by outcries against America's far more efficient CARNIVORE program or Britain's RIP, both of which promote highly sophisticated Internet sniffing programs intended for use by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Like SORM-2, CARNIVORE will be physically installed by the FBI at Internet providers across America, where it will be able to filter key words from every email and e-transaction conducted over the Internet. It was such an obvious violation of the U.S. Constitution that even right-wing Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey demanded an inquiry. The Justice Department appointed an "indepen-dent commission" to investigate the matter. The investigation found that CARNIVORE was an effective law enforcement tool: "Carnivore does not violate privacy or civil liberties," it said, and concluded: ``It provides investigators with no more information than is permitted by a given court order." Welp, guess what? Turns out that most of the commission team had a slight bias on the matter: one member worked for both the FBI and the Department of Defense, one for the NSA, and two others for the IRS, which caused even the hawkish Armey to complain: "This Department of Justice proposal has confirmed my fears. This important issue deserves a truly independent review, not a whitewash."
Britain's RIP bill (Regulation of Investigatory Powers) goes even further, giving the government the right to demand any-one's encryption key and to jail those who fail to comply. RIP passed. A newer and more far-reaching bill before the Home Office, according to a recent article in The Guardian, will give security agencies "the right to access records of every phone call, email, and inter-net connection made in Britain," and looks set to pass as well. Perhaps if they'd renamed Carnivore and RIP something like "Vegan" and "Hospice", the minor hullabaloo over these moves would never have happened. But even the Nouveau Reich makes a few boo- boos.
One would expect that these developments would cause an outcry in a functioning democracy, except that in the Nouveau Reich, there isn't a functioning democracy. Just the veneer. Nowadays, ELECTIONS ARE SIMPLY STOLEN.
The Moscow Times detailed how massive fraud allowed Putin to steal the Russian presidential election in the first round this year, an election which was WHITE-WASHED by the OSCE as a "step forward" for Russia's nascent democracy. This was the same OSCE which, in November, partially annulled and fixed some of the results from the Bosnian election which it oversaw after hardline nationalists did better than the OSCE wanted. Some candidates and whole chunks of votes were simply canceled as punishments for expressing wrong views. The OSCE also whitewashed the recent elections in Albania, which were rife with massive fraud and intimidation. The OSCE's top Tirana-based director had to flee the country last month after a death threat from the aggrieved Albanian losers, proving that sometimes divine JUSTICE does rear its ugly head.
Another kind of JUSTICE - the corrupt kind - reared its ugly head in the recent American elections, much to the rest of the corrupt world's schadenfreude glee. Even though Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 300,000 votes, a group of 271 electors installed Bush as president of the Free World. The election theft was upheld by a court so hugely biased that even the American Volk, according to recent polls, are questioning for the first time the Judicial branch's legitimacy.
How biased was the court? Justice Anthony Scalia's son Eugene is a Washington law partner of Theodore B. Olson, the attorney who twice argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Another son, John Scalia, is an attorney in the Miami firm that has represented Bush in Florida. Justice Clarence Thomas' wife, Virginia, has been helping the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, collect applications from people seeking employment in a possible Bush administration. And Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was reported in this week's issue of Newsweek as having exclaimed, "This is terrible!" upon hearing first TV projections on election night that Gore had won Florida. The reason? "[H]er husband, John, explained to friends and acquaintances that she was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona and a Gore presidency meant they would have to wait another four years because she did not want a Democrat to name her successor." (Reuters) All three justices voted to overturn Florida's Democratic-appointed Supreme Court majority ruling which called for a recount, a move which many believe would have led to a Gore presidency. Somewhere in all of that there was supposed to be a president elected by the American voters. Instead, a president was appointed by his own people.
This is part of a growing trend of the debasement of an independent judiciary in America, a positive development from the point of view of the Nouveau Reich. In many states, where justices are voted in, trial lawyers and unions have long been major contributors to their election campaigns. But increasingly, corporations have heavily contributed as well. Some incumbent judges were noted recently for having racked up campaign treasures 70 times their opponents'. Here is one example, cited in Mother Jones: "This January in Texas, Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht accepted a $10,000 check from law firm Hughes & Luce just weeks before it presented oral arguments in a case before him. Another law firm arguing the same side of the case, Vinson & Elkins, gave a total of $13,000 in contributions to Hecht three days before filing its brief, according to Texans for Public Justice. Hecht's dissenting opinion in that case `was exactly what (the firms) wanted,' said Cristen Feldman, a lawyer at TPJ."
In the Nouveau Reich, this is where the real inter-party battles will be fought, and where real opposition is thoroughly crushed. Western media and business derides Russia's court system as being corrupt and bought, but that's probably because Westerners haven't figured out how to buy Russian judges the way they can their own. Consider the case of Agrobusiness giant MONSANTO, a company which helped to destroy the career of a Florida investigative TV journalist who was bankrupted while trying to do an expose on Genetically Modified milk. Turns out Monsanto has a Gestapo- like department which, to use the phrase, "has ways of making farmers talk." According to a recent Mother Jones article, the company uses private investigators (it calls them "auditors") to dig up evidence on growers it suspects of foul play, including trespassing onto private property to gather samples. It has broadcast the names of violators in radio ads and even ran a toll-free telephone line where growers were encouraged to call in and snitch on neighbors.
Monsanto representatives have acknowledged that they have launched somewhere between 100 and 525 technology infringement cases against farmers in the United States and Canada - which means the number is probably several times higher. All but one case have been settled out of court, and we'd bet our bottom reichsmark that Farmer Joe didn't exactly come out on top in those settlements.
Interestingly, Monsanto recently boasted that by the end of this year, all soya products grown in the United States come from its genetically- modified seeds. Good news for them, bad news for the Volk. Last year, European scientists conducted a study showing that health complaints due to soya allergies increased 50% in 1999 alone! Coming on the heels of the recent Starlink scandal, in which Aventis Corporation's genetically engineered Starlink corn (approved only for animal feed) made its way into food products because of cross-pollination, this might be seen as bad news for the Volk. After all, those Taco Bell taco shells are causing snack-pounding couch potatoes to break out in hives from coast to coast, leading to a massive recall and federal investigation. The Nouveau Reich doesn't like having to investigate its big-time contributors, but healthy workers are also important for a strong corporate state.
Such debasement of democracy might be expected to inspire some opposition. Therefore, OPPOSITION MUST BE CRUSHED. In the Russian sector of the Nouveau Reich, we have watched as opposition has been successfully almost completely liquidated, while in the American heart of the Reich, the same is happening on a slightly more subtle scale. Well, not that subtle.
Protests this year at the IMF/World Bank gathering in Washington were marred by police brutality, illegal arrests and massively biased media coverage. Similar protests in Philadelphia at the Republican Convention were crushed even more ruthlessly, as the protest leader, John Sellers, was jailed on misdemeanor charges, including holding a cellular phone that was "an instrument of crime", and held on $1 million in bail. He was eventually cleared. Scores of others were held for between $10,000 and $100,000 bail, all on misdemeanor crimes, and charges of police brutality were widespread.
But while the Philly cops mostly hid their beatings, the LAPD, known as the blueshirts of the Nouveau Reich, didn't even bother pretending. LA police charged a crowd of thousands that had already agreed to peacefully disperse, firing rubber-jacketed bullets, "bean bag" guns and peppers spray, wounding protesters in the back, and targeting, according to an ACLU suit, media and legal observers. They also shut down the Independent Media Center's (IMC) satellite cast just as it was about to broadcast a live feed from the convention under the guise that there was a bomb threat. When bomb experts arrived, they refused to even inspect the satellite van citing "insuffi-cient evidence" (Village Voice, 8/15); LA police only allowed the satellite to transmit again 10 minutes after the satellite broadcast window for the show closed.
The LAPD has come under a lot of fire lately. Multi-million dollar Lawsuits are piling up and hundreds of convictions are being overturned in Los Angeles due to police corruption and evidence- planting. Interestingly, hundreds of convictions came from defendants who pleaded guilty even though they were innocent, because they knew that they would lose anyway. The recent police killing of a black actor at a Beverly Hills party was first explained as a result of him pulling out a toy pistol and aiming it at the police; subsequent ballistics proved that he had been shot repeatedly in the back. In Texas, The Dallas Morning Star detailed how court- appointed lawyers for poor death row inmates often fell asleep on the job and a shockingly high percentage had been severely reprimanded or disbarred. This past year, Texas tried to implement rules in which warders could decide which journalists were "serious" and therefore worthy of interviewing death row inmates, and which were "independent" or "biased" in their coverage, while the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which is poised to carry out its first federal execution since the Kennedy administration, established new media rules that journalism organizations fear effectively bar face-to-face interviews with the condemned. Earlier, the Bureau implemented guidelines forcing journalists to submit any proposed article with first-in-line death row inmate David Paul Hammer to the Terre Haute Penitentiary Warden Harley Lappin for approval before publishing, although this demand was later withdrawn.
A key to a successfully-functioning Nouveau Reich is a PLIANT PRESS. While the ACLU called the LA events a "police riot" characterized by "extreme use of force and undifferentiated attacks on a crowd of peo-ple", The Washington Post wrote, "demonstrators tried to provoke officers... into showing less restraint" while The New York Times dismissed the activists as "excitable rock fans" who make trouble because they "want to be entertained," and called police attempts to handle the situation "ingenious."
In fact, as it turns out, the media is one of the biggest promoters of repression and brutality. ABC News' top Middle East analyst, Anthony Cordesman, published a report last month advocating the use of "excessive force" against Palestinian civilians. The report, already condemned by Amnesty International, was released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential Washington think tank where Cordesman holds a chair in international security and whose board members include Joseph Lieberman and John McCain. "There will be no future peace or stable peace process," he wrote, "if the Palestinian security forces do not act ruthlessly and effectively."
Specifically, he noted that "effective counter- terrorism relies on interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture, arrests and detentions that are `arbitrary' by the standards of civil law, break-ins and intelligence operations that violate the normal rights of privacy, levels of violence in making arrests that are unacceptable in civil cases, and measures that involve the innocent (or at least not provably directly guilty) in arrests and penalties."
As a model for the Palestinian Authority, Cordesman held up the British forces in Northern Ireland, who often "used excessive force, abused human rights, and used extreme interrogation methods and torture" but who nevertheless "did an excellent job of balancing the conflicting problems of effective security and a concern for human rights."
Sieg Hiy'all!
One pesky dissenter, presidential candidate Ralph Nader, was BURIED by the Nouveau Reich the presidential debate commission ruled that he didn't qualify to appear on nationally-televised debates. The commission was made up of Republicans, Democrats, and the heads of major U.S. news organizations. And who heads the U.S. television news companies? General Electric (NBC), Disney (ABC), AOL-Time Warner (CNN) and Viacom (CBS). Oddly enough, General Electric contributed some $900,000 to the two major parties; Disney contributed $1.15 million; AOL contributed $1.43 million; Time Warner contributed $1.54 million; and Viacom contributed $533,000 dollars. Doesn't give them a huge incentive to allow a non-donated-to candidate to appear in their show, does it? GE, Disney and representatives of the two parties agreed to exclude any candidate who polled less than 15% from the debates, knowing that the only candidate who could poll that high without coverage on their networks would have to be a Democrat, Republican, or a billionaire - in other words, one of their own. They even went so far as to physically exclude Nader (who campaigned against corporate funding of political candidates) from the debates even though he had a ticket, and successfully smeared him as a mere Gore spoiler rather than as someone who took very strong and controversial stands.
In order for the Nouveau Reich to function efficiently, dissent must be eliminated - yet no one can suspect it. Hence in America, a two-party system which advocates an almost singular political platform and whose major contributors are nearly identical (Disney's contributions were split 51% to the Democrats, 49% Republicans, while GE's were 45-54, Time Warner's 70-30 and partner AOL's 44-56). This is much like the way in which allegedly rival city newspapers share advertising staff and operations in order to cut costs and boost rev-enues - a trend which has led to increasing mergers and single-major- newspaper markets in many American cities - the two American political parties split revenues and share the backscratching burdens, thereby keeping out any competition.
In Russia, new legislation backed by the two main parties, Unity and the Communists, will wipe out over 90 percent of Russia's political parties, thereby creating an American-style duopoly. That is the stated goal. After all, it "consolidates power," and, well, that's just the way things are done in the Nouveau Reich.
Indeed, CONSOLIDATION is the name of the game as even PBS, the last closest thing to televised opposition in America, has moved towards merging with mainstream media's most odious mouthpieces. Frontline recently announced that it is now joining forces with ABC News' Nightline program, while MacNeil-Lehrer will merge with The New York Times. That's right, the very New York Times which called for an increase in bombing during NATO's air war against Yugoslavia, and which praised Putin's KGB past earlier this year by noting that in the 1970s, the KGB was a place for "young, upwardly-mobile Russians" who wanted to get out and see the world. Even more sinister is the Voter News Service (VNS), formed by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and the Associated Press in 1990 in an effort to save millions of dollars in exit polling costs. They have a monopoly on election-day exit polls, and are responsible for calling Gore the initial winner of Florida. Reuters has just hired its first non-journalist to head the company. Tom Glocer, who worked as an M&A lawyer for the American law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell will take over as chief executive in July. In an age when lawyers increasingly vet the news for actionable content, it's no wonder that a lawyer will be taking over the world's largest news information provider.
Sieg Khuiyel!
Bringing the media into line is a Reichswide policy. Recently, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma was nailed on taped conversations ordering the murder and subsequent cover-up of investigative journalist Grigory Gongadze, whose headless corpse was recently discovered in a ditch near the Dniepr. In a sign that the Reich is not happy with Kuchma's bungling of the murder, he may soon be out of a job. Meanwhile, across Central Asia, opposition media has been completely squelched. "The media have been emasculated completely most places," Jerzy Wieclaw, head of the Kyrgyzstan office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was quoted as saying. Stuart Auerbach, director of development for the Media Development Loan Fund, an American foundation assisting independent news organizations, described the situation as horrible. "There is no real independent media in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, once the bright spots, and it's worse in the other countries." In Russia, we all know what's happening. Meanwhile, in Kosovo, KLA thugs have killed several journalists this year and at one point exiled Veton Surroi, the publisher of the largest Albanian-language newspaper, Koha Ditore, after he called for an end to attacks on the Serb minority. The Albanian attacks not only continue, but have increased, spilling into Serbia proper under NATO's watchful eye. Oddly enough, the only country in the world where democracy and freedom of speech are on the rise is Serbia - and this is in large part due to the fact that we bombed the country into poverty and submission. Give the IMF and World Bank a few years, however, and we can expect the Nouveau Reichspolitik to rule there too.
Moving on, what would a rundown of the Reich's achievements be without going into the MILITARY BUILDUP.
One of the Bush-Cheney team's main election platforms was a rearming of America, whose military, they alleged, had been strangled during the Clinton years. "The US military is worse off today than it was eight years ago. A high priority will be to rebuild the US military, to give them the resources they need to do the job we ask them to do for us and to give them good leadership," Cheney said during the Oct 5 Vice Presidential debates. How far behind are we? America's military budget is roughly $300 billion per year. Our biggest rival, Russia, has recently increased its 2001 budget to a total of... $7 billion. That's right: America's military budget is merely 45 times larger than Russia's. China, the other potential rival, has an annual military budget of $37 billion, or about 1/9th of America's, and you can bet that with the world's largest army to house and feed, not a lot of that $37 billion goes towards a fleet of $2 billion stealth bombers.
Gore-Lieberman's response? They argued that they planned on rearming America even MORE than Bush-Cheney, while pointing to their many military successes. And what a military romp they had! Invasions of Haiti and Yugoslavia, the latter being the first offensive action by the "defense pact" NATO ever; the occupation of Kosovo and Bosnia; the relentless bombing of Iraq; and now, PLAN COLOMBIA, a $1.3 billion war plan hatched by suspected war criminal Barry McCaffrey which massively boosts aid and weapons to Colombia's army (accused ofnumerous human rights violations) in their war against leftist rebels, now labeled "narco-terrorists". American advisors are expected to become heavily involved in both the training and execution of the war, a war which was given initial impetus by Gore-funder Occidental Petroleum. The war, as expected, is already spilling across the border into Ecuador, where rebels are stepping up attacks and taking refuge. But no worry. This year, both Ecuador and, more recently, El Salvador, ADOPTED THE U.S. DOLLAR (or "Nouvelle Reichsmark") as their official currency, to the praise of the IMF, joining such economic powerhouses as Argentina and Panama.
Moreover, under Clinton, the United States' share of the world arms market grew from under 25% to over 60%, sometimes arming both sides of the conflict. Between 1993 and 1997, America sold $190 billion in weapons. At the same time, America was one of only two countries not to ratify a treaty outlawing land mines and the only country not to ratify another treaty outlawing nuclear testing.
The American media has been CHEERING it the whole way.
Last weekend, Fox TV broadcast its NFL pre-game aboard the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman, which calls itself "the world's most modern naval vessel." On November 30th, Defense Secretary William Cohen threw a $295,000 black-tie party in Beverly Hills for the Hollywood elite with the aim of influencing the media's portrayal of the military. "Blockbuster films like `Top Gun' and `An Officer and A Gentleman' are just as important to the military [as advertising] the spokesman stressed," reported Reuters. He also called Motion Picture Association head Jack Valenti a "citizen patriot". Or was it Putin who called him that?
In the news area, CNN claimed this year that it was duped into allowing military propaganda specialists from an Army Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) unit to work in the news division of its Atlanta headquarters, while NPR also had PSYOPS units working in its news gathering department during the war against Yugoslavia. McCaffrey, meanwhile, was busted paying U.S. World & News Report, Seventeen, ESPN and Beverly Hills 90210, among others, to insert anti-drug messages into their scripts.
Given this map of multi-front warfare and global rearming, it's hard to understand what Cheney was talking about. But it seems we'll soon find out.
Overall, we can look back at the first year of this, the Nouveau Thousand Year Reich, and say proudly, "It was a very, very Reich-y year!"
But don't listen to us. Here's what popular human rights site About.com wrote about the year 2000 on its lookin' back page:
"Like 1999, the death penalty, women's rights, children's rights and use of torture continue to be popular on About.com's human rights site. New popular topics for 2000 include modern day slavery and sweatshops. Here is a list of the top 10 most popular pages for this site
Death Penalty
Modern Slavery
Serious Errors in Death Penalty
Women's Rights
Torture
Slavery Today
Death Penalty News
Sweatshops
Children
Killing Women in Pakistan."
Have a happy Neue Year. Und 999 more!