Signs of an emerging police state
Oceans in Peril – Pollution Overload
U.S. deaths from Fukushima Japan Reactor Melt-down
FBI agents responsible for terrorist plots
Federal Reserve loaned trillions to major banks
Small network of corporations run the global economy… and more
Show Transcript
Introduction: Top 10 Censored News Stories of 2012
October 18th, 2012. Welcome back to the Decrypted Matrix. I’m Max Maverick here on Revealing Talk Radio. Took a little break yesterday, actually needed the day off. Feels good to be back. Got a strong show tonight with a lot of topics to cover.
Television is so powerful that in 1952, the British government banned showing hypnosis on TV. That ban is still in force today. The question many ask is: how much manipulation is there under the radar with this technology that we use on a daily basis? We know there’s spying, wiretapping going on with the grid. We know that technology is exploited in many ways. There are drones flying around, naked body scanners at the airports coupled with invasive pat-downs. If you refuse the body scanner, it’s a massive invasion of privacy. They’re watching you get used to it. It’s conditioning. It’s not about the act itself, it’s about mass conditioning, getting generations of people used to this kind of treatment so the next generation thinks it’s normal.
Press TV is being taken off the air. Press TV is an Iranian alternative news outlet trying to get the truth out from the perspective of those people. It’s certainly worth hearing and worth understanding.
The LA Times ran a story asking why mainstream media is protecting Mitt Romney. There’s evidence of drug money laundering connections. Not only that, but Obama’s opposition research let Romney slide on his criminal associations. We’ve resurfaced some high-resolution photos of US and Afghan troops patrolling poppy fields from June 2012. It’s absolutely disgusting that the US and its interests are guarding illicit drugs. Ninety percent of the world’s heroin comes out of Afghanistan. It’s a trillion-dollar industry at least. Why wouldn’t the intelligence agencies want to control that? Of course they would. They’ve been corrupt since inception.
CIA Director William Casey once said: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false.” The attempt of the Decrypted Matrix is to archive all of this corruption and show you how it’s all connected, to give someone an explanation for how these things connect at the top.
The Fraud of the Presidential Debates
We talked about the fraud of the Romney-Obama debate. It was pretty hilarious. Juice News Media did a rap news segment, “Romney versus Obama,” raising awareness about what they should actually be debating. Time magazine’s Mark Halperin published the previously unpublished copy of the 21-page Memorandum of Understanding that the Romney and Obama campaigns negotiated with the Commission on Presidential Debates, establishing the rules.
Here are some highlights from that document. The candidates may not ask each other direct questions during any of the four debates. The candidates shall not address each other with proposed pledges. At no time during the October 31st presidential debate shall either candidate move from his designated area behind the respective podium. For the October 16th town hall style debate, the moderator will not ask follow-up questions or comment on either the questions asked by the audience or the answers of the candidates. The audience member shall not ask follow-up questions or otherwise participate in extended discussion, and the audience member’s microphone shall be turned off after he or she completes asking a question.
Appropriate steps shall be taken to ensure that no audience member poses any question or statement different than what was previously submitted to the moderator for review. No candidate may reference or cite any specific individual sitting in the audience at any time during the debate. Each candidate may move about in a pre-designated area as proposed by the Commission and approved by each campaign, and may not leave that area while the debate is underway. The full document is available at the Decrypted Matrix website.
George Carlin on Corporate Ownership
Before we dive into the news, here’s a clip from the late great Mr. George Carlin, who was out there spreading the truth. His whole standup career touched on conspiracy, exposing corruption, media manipulation, and censorship. I can’t recommend George Carlin enough. Joe Rogan as well, who integrates elements of the matrix into his act with jokes about aliens, the workings of humanity, religion, philosophy, space, and the planets.
There are a few entertainers out there who use their platform to raise awareness on important topics. Tonight’s feature is the list of top ten stories underreported by the mainstream media, put together by Project Censored.
Project Censored and Media Consolidation
There are many forms of censorship that are potentially as damaging as overt censorship. Corporations have been engaged in a merging process that is really consolidating sources of information in America. This is why people think it’s a great idea to elect Obama or Romney, as if that would actually have an effect on our lives. It’s this belief that everything that comes through the TV must be the truth.
Here are the largest, most influential media corporations: General Electric Company (NBC), Viacom, Walt Disney Company (ABC), Time Warner (CNN), CBS Corporation (CBS), News Corp (Fox), Gannett Company, Knight Ridder Incorporated, New York Times Corporation, Washington Post Corporation, and Tribune Company. These represent the interests of corporate America. The media we watch sets the parameters of the news and information content. Mainstream media is absolutely manipulating the news that the public is allowed to see.
Project Censored has been documenting inadequate media coverage of crucial stories since it began in 1967 at Sonoma State University. Each year the group considers hundreds of news stories submitted by readers. Students search LexisNexis and other databases to see if the stories were underreported. The stories are fact-checked by professors and experts in relevant fields. Project Censored director Mickey Huff says the idea was to show how underreported stories fit together into an alternative narrative, not to say that one story was more censored than another.
The Top 10 Censored Stories: Numbers 1 through 5
Number 1: The Police State. We cover this on almost every episode. President George Bush was largely criticized for his role in curbing civil liberties in the name of the War on Terror. President Obama signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, including its clauses allowing indefinite detention without trial for terrorism suspects. Obama promised that his administration would interpret them to avoid constitutional conflict. But if and when the next administration chooses to interpret them otherwise, that’s the danger.
Another law of concern is the National Defense Resources Preparedness executive order, signed March 21st, which empowers the President in the event of a threat to the security of the United States to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology for national defense requirements. Journalist Chris Hedges, along with co-plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, challenged the NDAA’s indefinite detention clause. On September 12th, a judge blocked its enforcement, but that ruling was overturned October 3rd.
The signing of the 2012 NDAA allows indefinite detention of those accused of supporting terrorism, including US citizens. Under this system, the government can simply point and label someone a terrorist. It’s accusation before conviction. It’s as if due process doesn’t matter anymore. Anyone who’s accused of terrorism has no voice, just as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have no voice.
As Doug Casey pointed out: there was no single day when Germany actually became a police state. Even after Hitler came to power legally and democratically, it was a gradual process. New laws, new regulations every day. War hysteria worked on the common man. It’s the classic metaphor of a frog put in a pot of water where the temperature is gradually raised until it boils. We can’t put our finger on exactly when we crossed the edge. Doug Casey was asking “Has America become a police state?” back in 2007. This has been on the horizon for five, six, seven years. The police state is creeping in. September 12th could be argued as when it began. We now have radiation devices, they’re monitoring protester activity. Peaceful protesters are a top threat on the FBI’s domestic terrorism watch list, specifically animal activists and animal rights activists. It’s absolutely disgusting.
Number 2: Oceans Are in Peril. Big banks are not the only entities that our country deems “too big to fail.” Our oceans are not getting a bailout though. Mother Jones reporter Julia Whitty’s “The Fate of the Ocean” describes how the destruction of the ocean’s complex ecosystems jeopardizes the entire planet, not just the seventy percent that is water. Ocean acidification caused by global warming mirrors the acidification that was one of the causes of the Great Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago.
On a more hopeful note, forty newly protected marine ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea showed that areas with well-enforced marine reserves had five to ten times larger fish populations than unprotected areas. This encourages the establishment and maintenance of more reserves. There’s also the massive plastics problem. There are some really insightful documentaries about plastics in the oceans, and “Plastic Planet” is one to check out that reminds you how much danger the oceans are in.
Number 3: US Deaths from Fukushima. A plume of toxic fallout floated to the US after Japan’s tragic Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011. The US Environmental Protection Agency found radiation levels in the air, water, and milk that were hundreds of times higher than normal across many states. One month later, the EPA claimed the radiation levels had declined and they would cease testing. But after a Freedom of Information Act request, journalist Lucas Hixson published emails revealing that in April 2011, the task of collecting regular data had been halted.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, which is an industry lobbying group, actually pressured the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Scientists Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman found that in the period following the Fukushima meltdowns, 14,000 more deaths than average were reported in the US, mostly among infants. They later updated that number to 22,000. There may be many more deaths from the Fukushima situation that haven’t been reported.
Number 4: FBI Agents Responsible for Terrorist Plots. If you didn’t know this, you know now. FBI agents go undercover into communities such as mosques, in the guise of building relationships, and quietly gather information about individuals. This is part of an approach to finding what the FBI considers the most likely kind of terrorist: lone wolves. Their strategy is to seek out annoyed, disgruntled individuals who might participate in a plot, then give them the means and the opportunity. In case after case, the government provides the means and the opportunity.
The result: of 508 cases classified as terrorism-related in the US justice system since 2001, 243 involved an FBI informant. In 49 cases, the informant actually participated directly. Nearly all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings, facilitated by the FBI with undercover agents and informants who posed as terrorists, offering fake C-4 explosives, disarmed suicide vests, and rudimentary training. The suspects, often naive individuals, played their parts and were arrested.
This is how they do it. They need to justify the idea of terrorism. They need to show they’re doing their jobs and that the police state actually has a reason behind it. They claim they’re catching terrorists, but they’re actually setting them up, finding disenchanted individuals, often Muslims who are angry at the US because perhaps a drone strike killed their father a few years ago. And we talked about the double-tap strategy these drones are using, where they hit the target, then hit again once rescue workers arrive. Those are war crimes, absolutely.
Number 5: The Federal Reserve Exposed. The Federal Reserve loaned trillions to major banks. For the first time in its history, the Fed was audited this year. The GAO audit report states that from late 2007 through mid-2010, Federal Reserve banks provided more than sixteen trillion dollars in emergency loans to the financial sector to address strains in credit markets and avert failures of individual institutions believed to be a threat to the stability of the financial system. These loans had significantly less interest and fewer conditions than the higher-profile TARP bailout.
The lending was rife with conflicts of interest. For example, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase served on the board of the New York Fed at the same time his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed. William Dudley, the New York Fed President, was granted a conflict-of-interest waiver to keep his investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time those companies were given bailout funds. In response, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, championed by Congressman Ron Paul, passed the House of Representatives. HR 459 was expected to die in the Senate, but the movement behind calls to hold the Fed accountable seems to be growing.
The Top 10 Censored Stories: Numbers 6 through 10
Number 6: A Small Network of Corporations Runs the Global Economy. Mainstream media unfortunately did not report enough on a study by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich. Out of 43,006 transnational companies, only 147 of them control 40 percent of total global wealth. The researchers built a model visually demonstrating how the connections between companies form what they call a “super-entity.” Some have criticized the study, saying that control doesn’t equate to ownership. True, but as we clearly saw in the 2008 financial collapse, corporations are capable of mismanaging assets in their control to the detriment of the actual owners. Largely unregulated super-entities like this are vulnerable to global collapse.
Number 7: The International Year of the Cooperative. The United Nations declared 2012 to be the International Year of the Cooperative, based on the co-op business model’s growing success. One billion people worldwide are co-op member-owners, or roughly one in five adults over age fifteen. The largest is Spain’s Mondragon Corporation, with more than 80,000 member-owners. The UN predicts that by 2025, worker-owned co-ops will be the world’s fastest-growing business model. Worker-owned cooperatives provide equitable distribution of wealth and genuine connection to the workplace. This is most typically seen in the organic farming community. Why are we not hearing about worker-owned co-ops in America?
Number 8: NATO War Crimes in Libya. Massively underreported. The BBC revealed how British special forces agents joined and blended in with rebels in Libya to help topple dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Alternate media sources reported that NATO targeted the water supply system, claiming Gaddafi was storing weapons in the water facility. Writer James F. Tracy makes the point that the correlations between the US and Libya were left out of mainstream news coverage. Background knowledge and historical context confirming Western involvement in the destabilization of Libya are essential for making sense of corporate news narratives depicting what was presented as a popular uprising.
Gaddafi was actually effective in restoring the economy for his people. He brought them up from being among the most impoverished in Africa to a real quality of life. He was working on the Great Man-Made River project, the largest fossilized water reservoir in the world, bringing water to the people of Africa. His revenues went to the people, not to corporations. He was also using a gold dinar as currency, which threatened the Western financial system. There were many reasons Gaddafi was considered a threat.
Number 9: Prison Slavery in the United States. Many corporations proudly proclaim that their products are made in America, and that’s true, but in places where US labor laws don’t apply. Workers are often paid 23 cents an hour and exposed to toxic materials with no legal recourse. These places are US prisons. Slavery conditions in prisons are explicitly written into the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
Prison industries supply products to the War Department. The majority of products manufactured by inmates include complex parts for missile systems, battleship components, jet parts, land mine sweepers, night vision goggles, body armor, and camouflage uniforms. This is happening in the context of record-high imprisonment. The US leads the world, with disproportionate numbers of African Americans and Latinos in prison, stripped of the right to vote even after they’ve served their time. As psychologist Elliot Currie puts it, the system of slavery that exists in this country is also racist. Roughly sixty percent of US prisoners are people of color.
Number 10: HR 347, Criminalizing Protest. This has been called the “anti-Occupy bill.” Concerned citizens and lawyers worry that it could have a disastrous effect on First Amendment rights to protest. Officially called the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, the law makes it a felony to knowingly enter restricted areas or engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct in or near those zones. The Secret Service defines these zones around the White House, national security events, and anything involving the President, the immediate family, or former presidents. These are moving targets. Anywhere they happen to be becomes a restricted zone, effectively eliminating free speech in their vicinity.
Closing Thoughts
So those are the top ten most censored stories heading into 2013, put together by Project Censored. These are the headlines that should have been dominating the mainstream but were largely ignored. From the creeping police state and the destruction of our oceans, to Fukushima fallout deaths, FBI-manufactured terror plots, the Federal Reserve’s secret lending, corporate consolidation of global wealth, the cooperative movement, NATO war crimes in Libya, prison slavery, and the criminalization of protest. This is why independent media and outlets like the Decrypted Matrix exist: to archive this information, connect the dots, and make sure the truth gets out there. Stay vigilant.
