by Brennan Browne, ActivistPost

Do we REALLY have millions of terrorists on American soil plotting our demise? According to the ACLU, Uncle Sam’s list of those it considers terrorists is growing by leaps and bounds — some 20,000 individuals are added each month. In its March 2008 online newsletter, the ACLU surmised that at the rate names were being compiled, the terrorist “watchlist” would surpass one million…that was nearly 4 years ago.

One has to ask why our government has strayed so far from the core, defining, aspects of TRUE terrorism to one which seemingly includes nearly everyone. Most of us can remember the following events where the term “terrorist” did indeed correctly apply to the individuals involved, even if their underlying cause may have held legitimacy:

The 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich West Germany — members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and killed by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. The terrorists were demanding the release and safe passage to Egypt of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs jailed in Israel. 11 Israeli athletes, 1 West German police officer and 5 terrorists died.

Oct. 7th, 1985 — The Achille Lauro — four heavily armed Palestine Liberation Front gunmen hijacked the cruise ship off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, threatening to blow it up and kill the 11 Americans on board if 50 Palestinian militants imprisoned in Israel were not released. When their demands weren’t met they shot and killed disabled 69-year-old Jewish-American, Leon Klinghoffer, then pushed him overboard in his wheelchair.

There are exhaustive examples of bonafide acts of terrorism, genuinely deserving of that classification. However, what the public is being force fed today has little to do with real terrorism and is nothing short of a full-fledged propaganda campaign. A deliberate, controlled, mass indoctrination — not unlike Bush’s prelude to the Iraq invasion — of lies, fear and hysteria utilizing the “terrorist” label to scapegoat innocent citizens in a bid to quash multiple dissent across the board.

Setting fire to a Hummer to draw attention to society’s gluttonous, over-consumption of fossil fuels is arson — not terrorism — no matter how disingenuously our government uses the term to intensify public prejudice and paranoia. Hoisting one’s self into a tree to prevent clear-cutting an old growth forest is a defiant, non-violent act of protest against corporate greed and environmentally destructive practices; it is by no stretch of a sane person’s logic — terrorism. Freeing non-human animals subjected to neglect, abuse, torture and murder may be relabeled “terrorism” by powerful corporate interests controlling Congress, in order to expeditiously imprison and dispose of those who stand in the way of their rapacious business practices and profits, but that doesn’t make those individuals terrorists. Such acts can never be compared — with any moral or ethical honesty — to the violent acts of kidnapping, torture and murder of human beings undertaken by real terrorists. No. The “terrorist” paradigm is being rabidly exploited by the corporate state to silence any and all opposition to its imperialistic agendas.

Redefining the ‘terrorist’ label to include non-violent acts of civil disobedience has become a convenient strategy to demonize, criminalize and incarcerate those who publicly denounce the growing multifaceted, unconstitutional, jackbooted behavior of a government gone mad. Entrapping peaceful groups by infiltrating them and using coercive, bullying tactics by government snitches and provocateurs, to railroad law-abiding citizens into committing crimes they never would have undertaken in the first place, seems solely “American” in nature. For all of the historic red-baiting hysteria about Russia and China’s brutal crackdowns, it’s doubtful that these countries actually INVENT crimes to imprison people. How do I know this? Because they don’t need to. They don’t hide behind a hypocritical facade of democracy. If an individual is problematic to the government they are simply arrested — no need to play mind games for the benefit of an uninformed public to cover their tracks. Their citizens are well aware of the extent of their government’s criminality.

The “terrorist” moniker, now tossed about with as much caution as a knife-wielding psychotic, has little to do with reality and everything to do with the number one threat to an open society — not terrorism — GREED. As long as the U.S. government can continue expanding the myth of terrorists hiding behind every rock, the military, prison and surveillance state will balloon undeterred. In the end, the “War on Terror” has morphed into a form of psychopathic capitalism run amok.

Consider Uncle Sam’s two-fold strategy. The first generates vast wealth into what can be described as a “subterranean economy.” This economy does nothing to support or rectify the current depression the rest of us are ensconced in. Instead, it funnels billions in tax money away from infrastructure and social programs, toward those who directly profit from expanding the “War on Terror” as a capitalist enterprise.

Multibillion dollar government contracts engorge the cherry-picked private sector — those which have direct, influential ties to individuals holding the purse strings in Congress — and are all too willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder to provide technology/services which are destroying any vestige of freedom left to Americans.

An outstanding example of the way this self-serving system operates is Michael Chertoff. Former Homeland Security secretary, founder of the Chertoff Group and [ex] mouthpiece for Rapiscan full body scanners. Before body scanning technology was recklessly foisted on the flying public, providing a perfect Orwellian excuse for state-mandated perversion, Chertoff used his influence to publicly pitch the necessity of installing the scanners from coast to coast. This cozy set-up provided free national advertising for Rapiscan under the guise of an urgently needed upgrade to airport security, which, according to Chertoff, if not undertaken immediately, could result in endless 9/11 type scenarios. A deal that if Congress agreed to — which they did — would potentially make Chertoff very rich. Chertoff conveniently omitted disclosing his security consulting firm’s Rapiscan connection to the public.

Putting blatant conflicts of interest aside, he was given virtual carte blanche to preach his biased solicitations of untested equipment [for health effects on humans] unencumbered by facts, statistics, logic or opposing points of view. Erstwhile, Israeli security has refuted body scanning technology as being worthless in detecting potential terrorists, and points to their perfect record of safety utilizing a system which employs the common sense approach of verbally screening passengers to assess their threat levels.

Chertoff continues to exploit his past government position in order to push agendas which benefit his bank account, amplify ‘terrorist’ phobias and further erode the now weakened thread by which most of our basic freedoms hang.

His is only one example of an endless stream of opportunists, selling democracy down the river while using taxpayer funds and/or former government positions to enrich themselves and intensify a totalitarian state through the ‘terrorist’ paradigm. He is in the “business” of national security…and business is booming. He endorses the virtues of biometric identification systems and a plethora of other invasive technologies which he doesn’t consider unconstitutional or an infringement on personal privacy; anymore than he did by subjecting innocent citizens to legitimized sexual assault when hawking body scanners. He has profited handsomely by denying others’ rights and as long as the “War on Terror” can be continuously rammed down the throats of the citizenry, his golden goose will never die. There are thousands out there just like him, cashing in on the fear and ignorance of a gullible populace.

The need for continuously upgraded spy technology and weaponry systems feeds the secretive network of those employed in the further development and servicing of a ravenous, fascist behemoth.

This brings us to the second of the government’s objectives which I referred to earlier: expanding the label of ‘terrorist’ to one which is all inclusive. This facilitates rapidly removing individuals from society who are a threat to corporatism by their social activism, whistle-blowing, political beliefs, religious affiliations and/or ethnicity, and can now be deemed enemy combatants. The growing reality is that any U.S. citizen may potentially find themselves in the shoes of Jose Padilla or Bradley Manning with seemingly little effort.

More than 2.3 million inmates are incarcerated in the U.S. prison system, outnumbering all other countries combined. This metastatic growth is overwhelming the government’s ability to cope, yet hasn’t deterred the courts from further burdening the system with a majority of offenders accused of non-violent crimes. Uncle Sam’s “War on Drugs” is a significant contributing factor with unreasonably long, punitive, sentences for non-violent offenders. The “War on Terrorism” accounts for nearly one million people, many undocumented, imprisoned due mainly to their Middle Eastern roots. This is forcing the government to utilize for-profit prisons as options. These corporations [heavily subsidized by taxpayers] lobby Congress to the tune of millions for the souls needed to fill their beds. At the same time, their profit incentive drives cost-cutting measures which foster inhumane conditions for inmates, while generating billions of dollars for privately-run prisons.

Ominously, imprisoning people has taken on an economic silver lining for corporations looking to avail themselves of slave labor. This, coupled with Uncle Sam’s growing aversion to anything which might lend undue social and/or financial support to his citizens, has led the corporatized government into unholy alliances where inmates are the fodder.

Judges are also guilty of feeding this corrupt leviathan, by giving first offenders harsh, lengthy sentences unbefitting their crimes, in return for lucrative kickbacks to fill for-profit prison beds.

Uncle Sam has entered the slave labor business by providing companies driving the ‘War on Terror,’ with inmates earning 23 cents an hour. Prisoners are building high-tech electronic components for Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missiles, launchers for TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles, and other guided missile systems. As well as night-vision goggles, body armor, camouflage uniforms, radio and communication devices, lighting systems and components for 30-mm to 300-mm battleship anti-aircraft guns, along with land mine sweepers and electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems Bradley Fighting Vehicles’ laser rangefinder. They also recycle toxic electronic equipment and overhaul military vehicles.

What conclusions can we draw from what has now become Uncle Sam Incorporated? — a corporate enterprise which is intensely pursuing the deaths of its own people through an onslaught of sociopathic legislation which destroys the old, the young, the helpless, the homeless, the hungry, the wildlife, and which has squandered and polluted every last bit of land, water and air so the godless CEO’s at the top can profit from it all? What can we deduce from witnessing the shameless annihilation of our individual freedoms and the contemptuously dismissive imprisonment, abuse and exploitation of our population by legions of greed-driven collaborators willing to lie, steal, cheat, entrap and murder, while perpetuating a global fantasy about who the U.S. government is and what it stands for?

Can we all be ‘homegrown terrorists’ because we haven’t sold our souls to the Devil for profits and power? Or because we hold genuine patriotism in infinitely higher esteem than tacking some cheap U.S. flag pin to our chests?

I do not trust my government. That does not make me a terrorist. It makes me an individual who possesses the ability to tell truth from lies, right from wrong and sanity from insanity, even when the powers that be are claiming otherwise.

I do not trust my government anymore than I would trust an abusive mate who is robbing me blind, locking me away and torturing me senseless at every opportunity. Uncle Sam has proven money and power trump ethics, morality and lives. He will remove, by whatever means necessary, all those who stand in his way.

Perhaps each of us should reevaluate our attitudes toward conspiracy theories. Tales of razor-wired FEMA camps dotting the landscape from sea to shining sea waiting to be filled with clueless American citizens, now doesn’t sound so far-fetched. I’m sure there are more than a few Japanese Americans out there that would readily agree.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheMilitantLibertarian/~3/lYlOulge5I8/

by Jesse Mathewson, ZeroGov

It is well known that commonly accepted history is not always what is right, but what has been propagated the most. There is, however, a level of comfort afforded those who may be mistaken regarding our past. After all, what is repeated most often becomes reality. The Wild West gained its colorful reputation through the propagation of dime store novels and poor Hollywood representations. The formation of the legendary Wild West show in 1883 by Buffalo Bill Hickok and others, helped to spread the myths long before television. These shows, books, and movies demonized the injuns’ and glorified the rough and tumble of the outlaw’s lifestyle. Instead of showing millions of people the truth, which would have never sold a book or a ticket, they showed the highlights. What was glorified and eventually memorialized via film by stalwarts like Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, were the negatives. The Wild West became a place where every day at noon there was a shootout, facing your opponent and gunning him down was accepted as long as you had a badge. The Earps were happening and the Indians were crazy savages that always lost to the cowboys.

I grew up believing this. I lived and breathed the cowboy versus Indian meme. I built six-guns and lever action repeaters from old pieces of two by four. My brothers and I shot and killed each other more times than I care to count, and finally we found daisy bb guns and our fathers welding goggles. Now death had pain involved. The agony of bb’s at 300 fps and the welts raised generated little question that we were men at a young age, and men didn’t complain about war wounds. I was 13 when I found my first previous encampment from a U.S. Calvary bivouac. I remember seeing a piece of leather and metal sticking out of the ground and so I returned with a shovel. After three weeks of digging, I had everything from old copper spoons to buttons with US Calvary on them and laudanum bottles. After dusting it off and polishing the metal pieces, I placed it all in a horizontal box and entered them into the local fair. One first place ribbon later, and several moves left me with nothing of that collection but memories.

What was the Wild West outside of the tourist traps we see now and the stupid reenactments by second rate actors? Was it actually endless gunfights and hangings, or was it more than this? The truth is often over shadowed by that which allows us the most flexibility in discussions and interpretation.

In their ground breaking book, The Not so Wild, Wild West: Property Rights in the Frontier, authors Terry Lee Anderson and Peter Jensen Hill go back through their grandfathers experiences in the Wild West from Montana to Wyoming. They negate the common myth of the daily gunfight and the outlaws ruling everyone. They define a story of hard work, hard choices, and the resulting success of two immigrant businessmen, one who did not even speak English, making their fortunes during the roughest, toughest era of American history.

This was the real Wild West, a land of hard work, hard choices, and true liberty. A country where you worked closely with your neighbors to survive the winters, and took personal responsibility for your decisions. Statistically, the gentle East was more crime ridden following the War of Northern Aggression than the Wild West ever was. In the entire history of the Wild West there was only one confrontation on main-street ever recorded, and that was the shootout between the organized crime leaders the Earps and the vaunted cowboys. Contrary to the myth propagated by Hollywood and modern Tombstone residents, the Earps were not reasonable guys. They were well armed, badged killers who knew that they needed to control the way others in Tombstone spent their money because they would never be caught working a mine or any legitimate enterprise.

The largest amount of deaths that occurred in the Wild West was accidental and work related. Doctors and timely medical care was hard to come by in the East and impossible in the Wild West. Falling from your horse and getting hurt may represent an agonizing death, especially if you were taking care of your farm or ranch by yourself. With days of travel by foot or horseback separating people’s houses and towns, there was a hard land. However, it was by default a land of liberty, for you were in charge of your own destiny. It was by your hands and choices that you became wealthy or survived or sometimes died. What law existed was virtually ignored as being the pathetic meanderings of lazy politicians and carpet bagging gold diggers from the East coast. For close to a hundred years moving west was synonymous with liberty, and was the real American dream for millions.

Since the advent of movies and other genres of entertainment, there have been a focused desire to entertain versus educate. Since the last individual state government was incorporated into the empire we know as the United States, the true nature of the Wild West has been forgotten except by those sons and daughters and grandchildren of the men and women who desired liberty more than the temporary protection offered by the state. Watching a western does not count as history, regardless of how many times the credits say, “based on a true story.”

So when someone asks regarding whether anarchy has ever existed, point them to the Wild West. It was a land of opportunity, liberty and no central government for close to a hundred years. From Kentucky to California, anarchy was in existence and worked well. People prospered and people died, but more than anything people were truly free to live as they wanted and do what worked best for them. A quick look at the state controlled sections of the world throughout history and today and you will see that people die, and people rarely prosper, but most of all people are neither free nor do they know liberty. So what would you prefer, liberty and the ability to thrive based on your own free uncontrolled labor or what you have now?

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by Prof John McMurtry, GR.ca

The following essay by Professor John McMurtry is Part I of an eight part series, which will be published on Global Research in the course of the next month.

The core problem of rights in general is that we have no life-value criterion whereby to tell whether a right is good or bad for society. Rights in private property are accepted from the English, American and French revolutions on, and disbelievers have been generally vilified as subversive and against freedom. Yet any criterion to determine when private property’s right to exclude others enables and disables people’ lives is not conceived by philosophers, and economists assume private property as an absolute presupposition of market exchange. Since John Locke and the private-property revolutions he provides the canonical justifications for in England and America, any idea of basing property and exchange in life needs is effectively  taboo in the mass media, public political discourse and economic theory alike.

Locke specified three provisos of an individual property right claim in his historic Second Treatise of Government which was published within a year of the English revolution against James II in 1688. His conditions for the legitimacy of private property were life-grounded, but for the last time in the received literatures since. Locke’s memorable conditions of just private-property right were sound: (1) “mixing one’s labour with” the property to entitle it; (2) “always good enough left over for others”; and (3) “no waste or spoilage” of it. Yet while Locke’s rhetoric of freedom and democratic accountability was recited almost word for word in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, his life-grounding conditions of exclusionary property were ignored from then on including by Locke himself. Having made the case at length for private property as a “natural right” by these three justifications, Locke erased all of them with “the introduction of money” in a stroke of the pen, and the erasure was never acknowledged. [1] A subordinate clause within a 10-line sentence was enough, and Locke’s money shell-game has stood since – a synecdoche of the capitalist epoch.  His life-grounded provisos have disappeared without a trace, with fateful implications. In this study, I explain the life-value test by which we tell whether any claimed right, however powerful it is in the world, is sound or not, and to what  extent. Property right itself – from personal fixed possessions to corporate kingdoms – is neither holus-bolus justified or rejected, but grounded in and tested by its life value.

The general theory behind my analysis is life-value onto-axiology, what I have spelled out in depth for UNESCO.[2]  Simply speaking, the onto of the concept refers to ontology, literally “the philosophy of being”; and the axiology refers to theories of what is of value, truth being a primary value. Multiplied disciplinary divisions into fields and areas of specialty have, however, among other centrifugal forces of the contemporary mind, excluded any unifying principle of value at all, and that has been a major incapacity of thought behind life and life-support system collapse across the world with no unified causal explanation or resolution in principle.

Right to Life: From Right-Wing Slogan to Life-Grounded Comprehension

One particular block against understanding life value has been the slogan ‘right-to-life’ attached to the U.S. right-wing’s most popular issue of contention – a woman’s relatively recent legal right to end her pregnancy. When I first introduced life-value theory in generic form to the Canadian Philosophical Association’s Annual Meeting in 1998, a well-known feminist philosopher, Alison Jaggar, stormily dismissed the idea as more ‘right-to-life’ advocacy. I report this position to illustrate the metaphysical stupefaction that has come with the internalization of this slogan in even a distinguished feminist philosopher’s mind – so that the very concept of life itself is erasively reduced to an embryo in a woman’s body with rights to continue growing. This fallacy fits a much wider syntax of thought that is by its nature life-blind – the greatest problem of our age to which explanation returns ahead. At this stage, the point is to observe that the ‘right-to-life’ concept to denote what excludes virtually all of lifediscloses in its acceptance a mind-block which, at the most general level, is a structural disconnect of this era’s consciousness from the very ground of our lives. If one tracks its pattern, one sees that a decoupling from life requirements at all levels has occurred. Since the abortion issue has astonishingly managed to appropriate the meaning of ‘right to life’, with even philosophers internalising rather than challenging the conception, while simultaneously avoiding  deeper-structural issues of life rights in discussing justice itself, we need clearly to re-ground. Analysis here thus introduces the method and logos of life-value understanding through this issue. 

As it stands, the abortion issue poses “woman’s right to choose” as in ultimate conflict with “the right to life of the unborn human being”. Legions of people adopt one side or the other in sustained elaboration of the one or the other position, ignoring the common life-ground that life-value understanding begins with – that is, that life is good, and is better the more coherently inclusive its life-fields and ranges in thought, felt being and action. This forms the primary axiom of life value.[3] In contrast, the opposing sides of this issue (and countless others) privilege a standpoint of exclusive right in either-or disjunction.

Here as elsewhere, life-value understanding goes underneath one-sided structuring to the deeper ground of life value itself, and applies a life-value test to both sides. Thus the normalized circle of sterile conflict found in rights conflicts in general – in  which each side obscures the underlying principle of life value in attachment to an aspect which excludes the other – is re-set to comprehend the wider common ground of life value itself to resolve dispute in terms of this more ultimate and unifying meaning.

Life-value analysis therefore always goes to what is at stake in life capacity gain or loss – a life re-grounding which is utterly foreign to the corporate-right reign now destroying world life and life support systems. Life-value method identifies the extent to which any side stands – and does not stand – for life value, and exposes false pretences masking the underlying life-value issues. Here as elsewhere, there is one ultimate criterion of life-value/disvalue across domains, the formal axiom of life value and its converse. As testing will show, it applies across value conflicts.

With respect to the woman’s “right to choose” whether to continue bearing an embryo or fetus, it follows, life-value analysis recognises that the principal life-value bearing here lies with the person who organically bears the life. Gain or loss of life-value and decision on how to go living better or worse is hers by the organic coordinates of life itself. For she alone in the world is the direct experiencer and carrier of it. This is not an argument for private property, to which the woman’s right has been often reduced. It is a life-value diagnosis which explains her rights and its limits at the same time. All concept and image thought is borne by her. The felt side of being within is carried by her. She not anyone else lives the action of the one organism. All of these facts are undeniable – that is, they cannot be life-coherently denied – and all are basic to the ‘right to life’ of the pregnant woman herself and the fields of life she organically bears.

While the embryo bears little or none of these life claims to right at the outset, it qualifies for them as it grows towards these very capacities of higher life and its self-governing direction and enjoyment as human life. In the ontogeny of embryonic existence growing to fetal differentiation to eventually the stage when an organic human being has developed, the concept of a human baby becomes life coherent rather than a patriarchal projection of power to dictate to the woman life-bearer. At this stage, the fetus is truly no longer merely “part of the woman’s body”. It has become a self-organising unity capable of independent fields of life learning, sentience, affect and body action, however infantile. At this moving line of life development the still in-utero fetus ascends to right to life since it could be delivered from the life bearer as a child with all these human ranges of an advanced self-organising life form. It is during this stage, conversely, that the woman’s right to terminate ends insofar as there is truly a being with the distinguishing characteristics of human life.

 Intrinsic Life Worth and Humanity’s Universal Being

It might be reasoned from this line of argument that other forms of life too have a right to life insofar as they too are just as “capable of independent fields of life learning, sentience, affect and body action”. This inference follows, but is a frozen one. Unlike the human infant which is not yet delivered, they are not capable of continuously higher life in development of human language, concept and image thought, feeling identity limitlessly beyond its own body, and rule-governed activities forming all of what we call the sciences, the arts, and games. Humanity in the full sense consists of these ever developing and uniquely human characteristics. It is this out-of-uterus potential of the gestating infant that anti-abortion positions conflate with what is without any of its features – a confusion of projection which is dominant in this lobby.

In accordance life-value measure, the embryo/fetus within the woman’s organism is only of intrinsic worth insofar as it realises and bears life fields of thought, felt being and action – beginning with intra-uterine movement, proprioceptive feeling and perhaps image thought.

Thus the embryo or fetus is correspondingly lower in life value in proportion to thenon-existence of these fields of life value. It is, as Aldous Huxley clinically observes in Point Counter Point, “a potential fish”. But it is also a human potential. Observe that life-value analysis does not import the future imagined of a human person into present value any more than it does the image of a full-grown fish. Yet it still recognises the life value of the projective imagination and feeling-with by life-value measure. It may be a projection, but the act of imagination and fellow-life feeling themselves are of life value as such. They become disvalue in life terms, nonetheless, insofar as they attack or repress the ultimate choice and self-direction of the fully human life of the fetus-bearing woman on the basis of this projection.

Projecting Personhood onto the Non-Human to Deprive the Human

Life-value analysis brings us back to the life-ground. It affirms the right of both bearing mother and embryo/fetus as life value within themselves to the extent of the fields of life-value borne – not by projection of doctrine claiming absolute value where little life-value in fact exists.

In accordance with the same life-value measure, the woman and the fetus are of the greatest value together before artificial separation by this projection. This is why life-value onto-axiology rejects projection of human status onto the non-human when it licenses repression and attack of what is truly human in fact – the impregnated woman. Denial and punishment of her deciding against allowing an almost invisible zygote cell grow rapidly inside her body over almost a year against her will is tyrannical. This form of oppression on the strength of a figurative fallacy is, however, not alone in the contemporary world. It is magnified many times over when the rights of super persons are legally conferred on lifeless corporate stocks which have the rights to rule over living persons in every way that lawyers can construct. These fictive corporate “persons” bearing unlimited growing rights have become the dictator of the age.

The rights of corporate “persons” wholly invented by law are far beyond the patriarchal fiction of an heir inside a mother at impregnation. They can deprive people of their livelihoods and vocations in the thousands without cause, loot and destroy environments around the world in every form of pollution and degradation, sue governments for hundreds of millions for democratic legislation that diminishes their profits, and finance governments in and out of office with no effective rights of living human beings to stop them.

Do we see here a connected  derangement of society’s ruling syntax of value and meaning?Fictional human beings are constructed to rule real human beings. Living persons are thus demoted to things or obedient cogs; while non-human entities are promoted to living persons ruling over them. Has this dehumanization of the human and humanization of the non-human inverted our very structure of thinking in terms of rights. Recall how Locke annulled in the blink of an eye all rights to property by labour, non-scarcity and non-waste by the rights of money to override all of them – the shell-game switch now over three centuries old.

Non-persons inverted into persons and the rights of the non-human over the human are metaphysical absurdities which oppress the world at many levels. The passionate certitude with they are prosecuted is familiar in fanatic cults, but now has countless legs to overrun real human lives in the name of invented “persons” – the most recent of which has been the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision to abolish spending limits on media-flood electioneering called the “free political speech of corporate persons”. Under the court name of “United Citizens”, a turnaround of the long constitutional phrase of “citizens united”, the corporate lobby won the “first amendment right of free speech” for big oil/banks/military/pharmaceutical corporations to, in fact, drown out the voices of all living citizens and persons. An ultimate onto-axiological reversal of human life itself has thus ccurred as court command. Dehumanization of the human and humanization of the inhuman is the inner logic of the corporate rights system.

Deprivation of living people’s rights under cover of “freedom of trade” has long preceded the court’s decision – in fact, only the unilateral rights of transnational corporations. Its deeper decoded meaning is their freedom to displace all life and life-value by private commodities and profit – that is, to substitute the rights of the non-living over the living at every turn for corporate money gain.  Locke’s money substitution for living labor, non-waste and enough left over for others – the canonical justification of the 1688 bourgeois Revolution – rationalized the master cheat of the ruling money party since.

No sacrificial regime to tribal god has so long bedevilled humanity. Its system lock-step over the last 30 years to global disaster is laid bare by this investigation.

The Life-Value Onto-Ethic in Contrast

At the most general level, in contrast, the life-value onto-ethic chooses and stands for what coherently enables life at all levels (the life coherence principle) and upholds it to the most inclusive level possible without life-value loss (the life compossibility principle).

We see this meaning in motion throughout this analysis. But it is buried from view in the most apparently plausible ways. Always there is involved in the discourses of the corporate-rights system the necessity of “trade-offs” that are in fact life-sacrificial- the very nature of the global corporate system which has been internalized by moral theory itself. Yet life-sacrificial tradeoffs  are nowhere truly necessary if they are thought through in the light of the  life compossibility and coherence principles. The clearcuts of forests for “development” of all kinds, for example, are in fact much more developed  in outcome without the clearcuts by selective harvesting and soil stewardship to maximize life function for all. One would hardly know this in the endless positing in our culture of “no choice” and the “necessity” of pesticides, prisons, lay-offs, environmental destruction, foreign wars, and so on. But the rule-governed human being can always change the rules as human – although one can hardly understand this once the ultimate dehumanization of society is assumed as bound by the ‘iron laws’ of a pervasively enforced system.

Behind these disorders of human life sacrifice and system dehumanization – evils which it is civilisation’s vocation to grow beyond – lies the monstrous construction itself. Its ruling value is invariant – to turn life and life conditions into more money for the corporate rich as the final end of society. The rules and rights by which we live are a-priori ungrounded in life and life value, and the slow-motion collapse underneath of world life and life support systems signals this in every domain.

John McMurtry is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada. Most recently, he has focused his research on the value structure of economic theory and its consequences for global civil and environmental life. McMurtry’s principal research project in Philosophy spanning over seven years has followed from the invitation by the Secretariat of UNESCO/EOLSS (Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, Paris-Oxford) to construct, author and edit Philosophy and World Problems as a multi-volume study of world philosophy.

Three sub-volumes entitled Western Philosophy and the Life-Ground, Modes of Reason, and Philosophy, Human Nature and Society have been written with internationally distinguished philosophers contributing to five topic areas in each of these general fields. The central title study by McMurtry, entitled, “What is Good, What is Bad? The Value of All Values Across Time, Place and Theories”, is an encompassing in-depth critical study of known world philosophies and fields to explain the inner logic of each canon and school in relationship to world problems across languages and eras including the method of life value onto-axiology which is deployed to excavate, explain and resolve life-blind presuppositions of the world’s major thought-systems from the ancients East and West to modern and contemporary philosophy. McMurtry was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) in June 2001 for his outstanding contributions to the study of humanities.

The references  as well as endnotes apply to the entire eight part series of Professor McMurtry’s essay.

References

Bernays, Edward W. (1933), Propaganda, New York: Liverright.

Chossudovsky, Michel (2003), The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Picourt, PQ: Global research

Cohen, G.A. (2008), Rescuing Justice and Equality, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.

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Notes 

2   What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All Values Across Time, Place and Theories, Oxford: Eolss Publishers under the auspices of Unesco, 2010.

3  The formal axiom of life value is: x is of value if and only if, and to the extent that, it constitutes or enables a more coherently inclusive range of life than without it: within the fields of life of thought (conceptual and image), felt side of being (sentience, emotion, mood), and/or action (animate movement through space-time).  Conversely, x is of disvalue if and only if, and to the extent that, it disables life so defined.

4   The literature here has become huge, but Amartya Sen (1992) Inequality ReExamined Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press is a good place to start, and discussion around the capabilities touchstone of equality is found in Martha Nussbaum and Sen Nussbaum, M. and Sen, eds. (1993) The Quality of Life.  Clarendon: Oxford University Press, along with relevant work by G.A. Cohen, Onera O’Oneill, Hilary Putnam, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer. Nussbaum (2000), Women and Human Development. The Capabilities Approach New York: Cambridge Univeraity Press provides her most in-depth account.

5  Philip Mirowski’s Machine Dreams (2000) is a very informed study tracking the machine model in contemporary market economic theory into the “automaton theater” of economic, military and decision-theory research today – extending the magic thinking of the invisible hand’s necessitation of the best of possible worlds into the mechanism of life-blind system automatism..

6 Mathematical Psychics (1881[1932], London: London School of Economics). Bernard Hodgson spells out the implications in his Economics as Moral Science ( 2001), Heidelberg: Springer Press..

7 Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud , explains how in his Propaganda (1933) New York: Liverright. As the primary pioneer of modern mass-market conditioning, he identifies the key of the process is to appeal to and control unconscious desires to sell commodities and engineer social consent. My essay entry, “The Ruling Group-Mind” (in the Encyclopedia of Case-Study Research (2008), Toronto: Sage) spells out the unexamined premises and systematically life-destructive consequences of the group-mind phenomenon.

8  Amartya Sen’s Nobel Speech on “Social Choice” preconsciously reveals the problem. In his immense bibliography, there is no concept of social choice he reports that does not assume it as an aggregate of individual agents choosing in market, electoral or other such atomic grid of choice space.

9  Pareto, Vilfredo, (1971 [1906]), Manual of Political Economy, New York: A.M. Kelley. Few realise that Pareto’s classic is based on dyadic asset exchange with no relation to life needs, given distribution, work hours, ecological support systems, or economic performance.

10 This argument is made in “The Case for Children’s Liberation”, Interchange (1979-80) 10:3, with Critical Response and Reply.

11 Adam Smith (1776/1966), An Inquiry into Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: A.M. Kelley, p.85 (Book I, Chapter III, “Wages of Labour”).

12 In a paradigm- setting state Supreme Court decision (Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204  Michigan 459 (1919), for example, the Court held in a precedent ruling that has not since been overturned that it is a violation of “the lawful power of  a corporation” to decide anything not “organized for the profit of the stockholders”. In this case, even Henry Ford’s own plan to “employ more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial  system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and homes” was ruled illegal. It transgressed the rights of corporate stockholders to maximum profits revenues to themselves. In short, the corporate person could not plan for the life benefits of anyone, even “the greatest possible number” of real persons, without violating its legal purpose of private money sequencing to maximally more for money-stock investors.  The corporate person remains programmed by law to this one overriding goal in exclusion of providing more life means for more people by still-profitable business.

13  McMurtry (1999/2002), The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (London and Tokyo: Pluto and Springer Press) explains this anomaly and the underlying money-sequence source and cause of cumulative world system collapse.

14  Little known even today is that the Ford, General Motors, IBM and Dupont corporations produced for the Nazi war machine in these functions even after the U.S. was at war with it (Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949. New York, Dell Publishing Co., 1983). Moreover these corporations received government compensation for their bombed factories and losses in Germany after the war was ended, an indication of the supreme and borderless power wielded upon which the ‘New World Order’, a Nazi concept, was instituted by national and international mechanisms of  law identified in this paper.

15 I have tracked these strategic patterns in depth  in prior work such as Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System (1998) Toronto: Garamond/University of Toronto Press.  

16  The underlying fascist logic is explained in my Fascism and Neo-Conservatism: Is There a Difference?(1984), “Praxis International 4 (1), 86-102.

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Christopher Bollyn speaks at Constitution Celebration in Salt Lake City, Utah. Sponsored by the Constitution Coalition of Utah. Christopher Bollyn talks about 9/11 – September 11th and research done by Steven Jones. Christopher Bollyn telling about the voting process in France that he witnessed, where they count ballots at the precinct level, where anyone and all who wish can be witness to this counting, rather than haul all of the ballots off to a central place to be counted by a few “trusted” officials. Christopher Bollyn, former investigative reporter for American Free Press.

by JD Heyes, NaturalNews

These days, police don’t seem to need a warrant to enter your home without your permission when you’re not there. Well, at least not in Westerly, R.I.

According to a local report,crews from the local utility company, accompanied by cops, were going door-to-door to close off the gas meters of about 1,600 homes, under the guise of trying to fix a “distribution problem.”

If no one is at the home, cops and locksmiths are going into the homes in order to shut off the gas valve. The utility, National Grid, said its crews would be returning to the homes to turn gas meters back on once the problem is identified.

Taking into account the bad things that are associated with a “distribution problem” (i.e. gas leak), there doesn’t seem to be a provision in the Constitution that gives authorities the right to enter a home without probable cause, permission or a warrant. Also, can’t gas lines be accessed fromoutsidea customer’s home?

But then, what are Americans to expect these days,when courts have said you don’t even have a right to resist anillegalentryby a police officer?

In May an Indianapolis Supreme Court, on a 3-2 vote, overturned a common law that dated back to the English Magna Carta of 1215 when it ruled that even when police are entering illegally, Indiana residents had no right to resist them. So much for the old axiom, “Your home is your castle.”

“We believe a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” Justice Steven David wrote for the court. He is saying essentially that cops in the state could enter anyone’s home for improper reasons – or no reason at all. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”

So in other words, resisting this illegal entry could be hazardous toyourhealth. Public safety is a legitimate concern, but so, too, is the expectation of a little privacy in your own home.

Sources:

http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/local_…

http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/…

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/034524_police_breaking_and_entering_private_homes.html#ixzz1iDMQBWWP

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