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"Our enemies... never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
--President GW Bush, speaking before military brass at the White House, in mid-August 2004, to sign a new $417 billion defence appropriation bill

 

I was provided with additional input that  was radically different from
 the truth. I assisted in furthering that  version."
--Colonel Oliver North, from his Iran-Contra  testimony.

The US Government only ships back it's dead from the Iraq war under the cover of night.


 All of the rightwing redneck parrots (whom I have personally encountered) that criticise Moore, have not even seen his productions. Jingoistic catch phrases like his work being very biased spread like a virus through the mass media and have actually obscured the work from being observed, let alone understood. What a memetic† coup for neo-cons and other hawks. Irrespective of the result of the US election, many of the things that Moore said are still valid and need official inquiry.

†Scientist Richard Dawkins' notion of memes: thoughts which, like genes, propagate and compete in the competitive environment of culture.
 

Click pic for a few of the zillion anti Bush websites out there... click here for more 

 
 
 
 
 

The Human Rights movement
has lost one of it's shining stars.
 

Tributes to 
Edward Said.

 
 

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." 

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
 
 



 

Open letter to Australia's John Howard


 

a few more anti-war pics here and here

 
NO WAR

February Global War Protests attract millions around the world...

news items, pictures and Brereton's speech to Aust. Parliament Feb 04

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. " ---Professor Noam Chomsky, MIT
 
 

Joke...

A squad of American soldiers were patrolling the Iraqi border, when they came across a badly mangled dead body.  As they got closer, they found it was an Iraqi soldier. A short distance up the road, they found a badly mangled American soldier in a ditch on the other side of the road, struggling to breathe. They ran to him, cradled his bruised head and asked him what had happened. "Well," he whispered, "I was walking down this road, armed to the teeth when I came across this heavily armed Iraqi border guard.
I looked him right in the eye and shouted, 'Saddam Hussein is a moronic, deceitful, lying piece of trash!'" "He looked me right in the eye and shouted back, 'George W. Bush is a moronic, deceitful, lying piece of trash too!'" "We were standing there shaking hands when the truck hit us."
see jokes section for more...

 

Conspiracies, Plots and 
Other Anti-Democratic Notions
by Peter Phillips 

Paul Wellstone's plane crash wasn't an accident. The CIA bought stock options on United Airlines before 9-11 making millions in profits. The military sprays low-level bio-weapons on the public through airtanker contrails. The tobacco industry plotted to deceive the public on the negative health effects of smoking. Lee Harvey Oswald alone didn't assassinate John Kennedy. The FBI deliberately caused the fire in the Branch Davidian compound. Planted bombs from within the structure destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City. AIDS was created in a government research lab. Mass inoculations are designed for citizen mind control. General Motors and Firestone conspired to destroy public transit in the U.S. The Bush White House interfered with FBI investigations into the bin Laden family before 9-11.

Conspiracy theories abound in America and are directly related to the lack of investigative reporting by the mainstream corporate media. The public knows more about Winona Ryder's shop lifting trial then about the weather conditions and circumstances of Paul Wellstone's air crash. The Los Angeles Times printed 83 column feet on OJ Simpson during his trial, but has ignored for decades the deliberate and successful plot before World War II to dismantle LA's public transit system by General Motors and Firestone. Oliver Stone's interpretation of the Kennedy assassination has been mostly dismissed as "conspiracy theory" by corporate media. Questions regarding the veracity or falseness of seemingly important conspiracies and plots often go unreported by mainstream media. The ten big corporations that now dominate media in America are principally in the entertainment business. While the corporate media is narrowing its content, with news reports often looking very much the same, the public's access to the vastland of the internet is amplifying, and informational snippets and unanswered questions leading to conspiracy beliefs are increasingly available on-line. 

The First Amendment provides for freedom of the press and was established to protect our democratic process by guaranteeing an informed electorate. Yet we just completed a national election with an all time low voter turn out. Millions of voters refused to participate in the electoral process. We denigrated and blamed non-voters for being uncaring citizens, yet the corporate media has failed to address core issues affecting most people in this country. Voter participation levels are directly related to issues that the citizenry feels are important. Many people no longer trust the corporate media to provide the full truth. This opens people's susceptibilities to believing in conspiracies and plots to explain unanswered questions. Cynicism has deterred voting for many. 

How can we free ourselves from this dilemma? First off, We can think of conspiracies as actions by small groups of individuals instead of massive collective plots by governments and corporations. Small groups can be dangerous, especially when the individuals have significant power in huge public and private bureaucracies, but they can not possibly be interlinked in a macro way bridging the gaps between thousand of corporations and government bureaucracies. Micro-plots may well be the answer to some of the conspiracies floating in our circles of cynicism. However, without accurate through investigations we only stew in our distrust and experience widening alienation from our democratic process. 

Additionally, we can advocate strongly for mainstream media to invest in democracy by supporting investigative reporting on key issues. The Director of the Chicago Office of the FBI, Tom Kneir, admitted on August 17 at the American Sociological meetings that the FBI conducted an investigation into the pre-9-11 stock options, but he refused to disclose who bought the stock. Mainstream media needs to pursue this issue using our freedom of information laws to put the conspiracy questions to rest. Finally, we can advocate for full and clear reporting on the policies and plans emerging from the public and private policy circles of the American corporate and governmental elites. Full analysis and disclosure of the published plans of the Trilateral Commission, The Council on Foreign Relations, The Hoover Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, The World Bank, and the Project for the New American Century, would go a long way in showing the roadmaps that the policy elites are building for the world. We don't need macro-conspiracy theories to understand that powerful people sit in rooms and plan for global change with private advantage in mind. If open debate on socio-political policies were offered nationwide it would certainly draw widespread citizen voter participation. Imagine a computer programmer thinking about social policies that would prevent outsourcing of his job to foreign firms. Imagine his enthusiasm voting for representatives that would work to protect his livelihood. Imagine millions of reawakened citizens informed and active in a real democratic process. 

Published on Saturday, November 9, 2002 by CommonDreams.org
Peter Phillips is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. 

 
SBS Australia recently (9-Mar-2004) screened a forum/debate on terrorism. find the SBS Insight site at this link. The post-screening web forum had lots of interesting points from both the Israeli and Palestinean points of view. (The discussion is displayed backwards in time).

This section pertains to international relations in its myriad forms.

Please note that information/essays regarding international relations have been removed from the main site. The information was quickly becoming too voluminous for me to handle, and the links listed below do a much better job than I ever could, in supporting the array of opinions that are held. This is one subject that could easily absorb all of one's time and mine is better spent elsewhere; this is a hard decision to make but one that must be done for the sake of the other sections of the site. goto old mirror files.

Please let me know if any links are not working.

Arundhati Roy was awarded the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize: here is her speech.

It's easy to believe that the world is being caught up in an escalating spiral of terrorism and war. That's what allows the American President to say "You're either with us or with the terrorists." But we know that that's a spurious choice. We know that terrorism is only the privatization of war. That terrorists are the free marketers of war. They believe that the legitimate use of violence is not the sole prerogative of the State. It is mendacious to make moral distinction between the unspeakable brutality of terrorism and the indiscriminate carnage of war and occupation. Both kinds of violence are unacceptable.

Also see Paul Street's Terror Attacks are a Price of Empire that Bush and Blair are Willing for Us to Pay


"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair." - H.L. Mencken

International Politics /
International  Relations Links

Caveat; Consumercide.com does not necessarily agree with all of the content of the sites listed below, but respects that as alternative news media they serve an essential role in the information distribution process. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance", and these sites contribute to that, irrespective of ideological foundations upon which they might initially build. You may notice that the sites cover a very wide range of the political spectrum, and that it would indeed be impossible to endorse all of the perspectives given in these links. Consumercide.com will not be held responsible for anything that appears on external sites.

Consumercide also in no way whatsoever codones racism and vilification of specific groups, and some of these sites or their links may tend towards such depths of human immorality. It is obviously up to the mature reader to discriminate "the wheat from the chaff" in this regard.

Having said that, many of these sites come from a less dogmatically confined position (not to mention positions not as protective of economic and/or power interests) than the highly ownership-centralised and vested-interest laden mass media outlets. Thus they may deserve your consideration...


If you haven't yet seen
"Bowling for Columbine"
then do it! It's a superb 
treatise on America's 
culture of violence and
its' gun problems.


  • A nice piece on Fahrenheit 911 by The Guardian's Berger
     
  • indymedia.org
    independent media centre; "Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. A democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth."

     
  • American Civil Liberties Union
    http://www.aclu.org/
    A strongly dissident voice against the ever-increasing tide of destruction of civil rights... "THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION is the nation’s premier guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the laws of the United States."
     
  • foreignpolicy-infocus.org

    •  
  • Globalissues.org

    • A vast collection of highly relevant materials
     
  • s11-An Australian centre of dissent to the New World Order, TNC governance, the WTO, etc...
  • Green Left Weekly
  • New Left Review
  • The Ecologist

    • "The dangers of globalisation, the real reasons behind climate change, the threat of corporate power, the risks of GM food, the truth about global cancer - just some of the issues we regularly cover."
     
  • Focus on the Global South
  • Democracy Now!
  • Working for Change
  • Power Politics in the WTO By Aileen Kwa

    • (A 59 page 583 kb .pdf book.)

    From the Conclusion of the above work;
    "The WTO continues to steam ahead in the name of progress, without democratic procedures of decision-making, and with the habit of back-room arm-twisting. Guidelines and procedures to establish accountability, and to introduce checks and balances into the system must be developed. Currently, power in the WTO depends on economic might. But at stake are the legitimate and varied development policy objectives of 144, which are steamrollered whenever they get in the way of the rich and powerful. The arrogant abuse of power documented in this paper violates any notion of democracy and justice. It must not be allowed to continue."
     

  • commondreams.org
  • Opensecrets.org

    • Tracks money movements relevant to US politicians.
    About time a site like this was set up for Australia?
     
  • Crisispapers.org, section on dissent here
  • www.outlookindia.com
  • Interhemispheric Resource Center www.irc-online.org
  • Vision strategy-How To Stop America :George Monbiot
  • Raisethefist.com

    • This unfortunate website owner recently became a victim of the US thought police for a link on his website! Read more about his situation and help with the cause...
     
  • Nadir.org / agp.org Globalisation & War Texts

    • A rather massive archive of essays on the subjects...
     
  • International Forum on Globalisation

    • "Representing over 60 organizations in 25 countries, the International Forum on Globalization associates come together out of a shared concern that the world's corporate and political leadership is undertaking a restructuring of global politics and economics that may prove as historically significant as any event since the Industrial Revolution. This restructuring is happening at tremendous speed, with little public disclosure of the profound consequences affecting democracy, human welfare, local economies, and the natural world."
     
  • Brian Martin on 

http://www.outfoxed.org/

Some Conventional International Relations Sites

foreignaffairs.org

www.csmonitor.com

Foreign & Commonwealth Office, United Kingdom

State Department, United States

WWW Virtual Library International Affairs Resources

Harpers magazine

Atlantic Monthly magazine

The American Prospect

 


More Alternative Media


other interesting links

Privacy & Surveillance


 

 

  • The Beast
    This site would be a "real hoot" if the world wasn't really such a crap place...Check out their loathsome 50 list for some nice deconstructions!
Other WWW Alternative News Services
  • world news links
    This is not specifically alternative, but does have a huge linking of news material available on the web.
  • fusionAnomaly
    'Cause all the best people make it to the no fly list...

To survive in the world we have transformed, we must learn to think in a new way. As never before, the future of each depends on the good of all.

--Statement by 100 Nobel laureates


 
 
 

Neo: I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

from The Matrix

 
 

"We don't need macro-conspiracy theories to understand that powerful people sit in rooms and plan for global change with private advantage in mind."

(See Peter Phillips essay opposite)
 

Ken Wilber on the War in Iraq: situating the mess in terms of consciousness analysis (.pdf) (Some surprising conciliatory things said about Tony Blair! )

 
 
 
 

Gandhi's Law...
We must either let the Law of Love rule us through and through or not at all. Love among ourselves based on hatred of others breaks down under the slightest pressure. The fact is such love is never real love. It is an armed peace. And so it will be in this great movement in the West against war. War will only be stopped when the conscience of mankind has become sufficiently elevated to recognize the undisputed supremacy of the Law of Love in all the walks of life. Some say this will never come to pass. I shall retain the faith till the end of my earthly existence that this shall come to pass  . . . 

. . . Non-violence is a weapon of the strong. With the weak, it might easily be hypocrisy. Fear and love are contradictory terms. Love is reckless in giving away, oblivious as to what it gets in return. Love wrestles with the world as with itself and ultimately gains a mastery over all other feelings. My daily experience, as of those who are working with me, is that every problem would lend itself to solution if we are determined to make the law of truth and non-violence the law of life. For truth and non-violence are, to me, faces of the same coin. 

Whether mankind will consciously follow the law of love I do not know. But that need not perturb us. The law will work, just as the law of gravitation will work whether we accept it or not. And just as a scientist will work wonders out of various applications of the laws of nature, even so a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work greater wonders. For the force of non-violence is infinitely more wonderful and subtle than the force of nature, like for instance electricity. 

The person who discovered for us the law of love was a far greater scientist than any of our modern scientists. Only our explorations have not gone far enough and so it is not possible for everyone to see all its workings. Such, at any rate, is the hallucination, if it is one, under which I am laboring. The more I work at this law, the more I feel the delight in life, the delight in the scheme of this universe. It gives me a peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe. 

  --Mahatma Gandhi-- 

From: The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi edited by Raghavan Iyer, 1996, 
published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 242-243.
 

Pentagon bans casket photos

The Bush administration's decision to enforce the ban on media photographs of flag-draped caskets returning from Iraq was widely reported last year -- but even mothers of dead soldiers are being shut out by Pentagon. When Karen Meredith lost her son to a sniper in Iraq, she wanted a photo of his casket at Dover Air Force Base for personal use, but was not permitted to take one, reported Cox News Service.

"It's bad enough that they won't let the country see the pictures of the caskets, but a grieving mother?" asked Meredith. "It's unforgivable after what I lost."

Ironically, the Defense Department introduced the policy (back in 1991, when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense), in the name of protecting the privacy of families who don't want their loved ones' caskets photographed by the press. But Meredith said she wasn't buying it: "They say it's for privacy, but it's really because they don't want the country to see how many people are coming back in caskets."

That may also explain why the Pentagon has them all coming back only under cover of darkness.
nightcaskets.html

-- Julia Scott

source: salon.com


 


 
 

"When the government fears the people, you have liberty.
When the people fear the government, you have tyranny."
- Thomas Jefferson





 
 
"World Ego"
Please read this excerpt From Dr. Wayne Dyer's "Your Sacred Self" - final pages.


 
 

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