Texts for this class
1. E. F. Schumacher, "Buddhist Economics"
2. Permaculture Documentary: "In Danger of Falling Food"
1. E. F. Schumacher, "Buddhist Economics"
2. Permaculture Documentary: "In Danger of Falling Food"
Friday, March 29, 2019
Notes on the Ethics of Climate Change
§1. Climate change is a scientific, political, social issue. In what sense is it a moral question?
§2. Headings towards 2 degrees above Pre-industrial baseline
Before the 18th century, when humans in the industrial west began to burn coal, oil and gas, our atmosphere typically contained about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We’re now well over 400 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. Warming of more than two or three degrees will badly impoverish nature. Many ecosystems will be damaged. About 20 to 30 percent of living species will be put at risk, and many more than that if temperatures rise as far as four degrees. Corals, which protect many coastlines, will be damaged by the warming and acidification of the oceans. Levels of atmospheric CO2 determine “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” or “climate sensitivity”, defined as the number of degrees by which the atmosphere would eventually warm if the concentration of carbon dioxide were to double from its pre-industrial level and stay at that doubled level forever.
§3. “The world is probably at the start of a runaway Greenhouse Event which will end most human life on Earth before 2040. This will occur because of a massive and rapid increase in the carbon dioxide concentration in the air which has just accelerated significantly. The increasing Greenhouse Gas concentration, the gases which cause Global Warming, will very soon cause a rapid warming of the global climate and a chaotic climate.” (Arctic News, Sept. 2013)
§4. 2018 IPCC Report: Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, according to the latest report from the world's leading body of climate change experts.
§5. Cost-benefit analyses of clean energy systems are engineering and economics problems but also moral problems insofar as they involve the balancing of different values and the interests of different beings.
§6. Public Vs Private Morality Questions: What should governments do to reduce carbon emissions by supporting clean energy systems and reducing carbon emissions?
Private morality: What are my own personal duties to respond to climate change?
Duties of Justice - To not harm others
Duties of Goodness - To improve the world
§7. Are CO2 emissions an injustice?
Causing floods, droughts, fires, forced immigration, famine
§8. Who suffers? Many currently living people, many people in poor countries who did not contribute to the problem, countless future peoples.
§9. How much should we sacrifice the resources (less travel, amenties, meat, etc). of those currently living for the sake of future peoples? What are our duties to the future? Depends on the “Discount Rate” Discount rate measures how fast the value of goods diminishes with time.
If the future generation is going to be richer than us, then the discount rate will be less. The Stern Report uses a discount rate of 1.4 %. A $trillion worth of goods received in 100 years is valued at $247 billion today. The world should invest 1% of total output (approx. $500 billion today) to reduce emissions.
William Nordhaus uses 6% discount rate. A $trillion received in 100 years is equal to $2.5 billion today, a very slight sacrifice.
§10. Duties of Governments
The atmosphere as a limited resource, concerns distributive justice. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) treaty was adopted in 1992, and has been ratified by almost every nation on Earth. It aims to bring emissions under control through international agreement.
§11. COs emissions as an externality, left out of the cost of producing power, and so represent a market inefficiency, to be corrected by including the price of carbon in the cost of producing power, the ‘social cost of carbon’
§12. Two ways to do this: (a) a carbon tax (e.g. $0 to $200/ton of carbon emitted).
(b) Cap-and-Trade system (adopted by Kyoto Protocol 1997) - Each countries emissions capped, then carbon credits distributed - permits to emit which are then traded. Over time, the cap is
lowered. But what is the social cost of carbon?
§13. Personal Duties
Our personal carbon emissions cause harm to others. From a justice standpoint, we have a duty to pay restitution or to reduce harm by reducing emissions. Emissions will wipe out more than six months of healthy human life. Each year, your annual emissions destroy a few days of healthy life in total.On these figures, the monetary value of the harm you do over a lifetime ranges between $19,000 and $65,000, or between 65 cents and over $2 per day for every day you are alive. (half a billionth of a degree)
Two ways we can meet our moral duty:
Reduce personal emissions: Do not live wastefully. Be frugal with energy in particular. Switch off lights. Do not waste water. Eat less meat. Eat local food. And so on. Many of these are steps you can take at little or no cost to yourself, and you should certainly take those ones.
Offset the emissions: Plenty of commercial organizations offer to do this for you as an individual. You pay them a fee per tonne of offsetting you ask them to do. They use your money to finance projects that diminish emissions somewhere in the world. Most projects are located in developing countries. Most of them create sources of renewable energy. Suppose an average American causes 30 tonnes a year to be emitted. Her annual emission could be offset for a mere $300.
§14. Does it matter? If we have indeed passed it, your own emissions make no difference in the long run. There will be catastrophe whether you make them or not. But this should not make you think they are harmless. If we are on track to disaster, your emissions accelerate us along the way. They bring the disaster nearer, and that is harmful. If there is to be a catastrophe, the later the better. So even fatalism does not give you a good reason to doubt that your emissions are harmful.
§15. If we were certain that extinction was inevitable, how does this change our ethical obligations to each other? How should we live our lives?
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
3/28 Ethics of Climate Change
Texts for this class
1. John Broome, "The Ethics of Climate Change"
Recommended
Peter Singer, "Ethics and Climate Change"
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Notes on the Deep State, the CIA and Political Assassinations
A. Ponerology
a. Psychopathology - 1% of Americans who feel no empathy.
b. Etheric Energy-Vampires, “demons”
c. Concentration of Power - Dopamine feedback-loop based on fear/control
B. President Eisenhauer’s farewell warning about the “military-industrial complex”
§1. “We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
C. The Deep State
§2. “…another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”
A loose (non-monolithic) network of financial(banking) organizations, intelligence agencies, powerful law firms, military leaders and political power-brokers who come together from time to time when their interests coalesce: the “military-intelligence-banking-energy complex” [my definition]
D. The CIA as a case study in the Evils of Centralized Power
§3. Creation of the CIA - President Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. The CIA is accountable to the president through the NSC — there is no democratic or congressional oversight. Its charter allows the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties… as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." This loophole opens the door to covert action and dirty tricks; §4. 1948 expansion of the mission to ‘covert actions’ - The CIA recreates a covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy Coordination, led by Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities include "propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
E. CIA overthrowing governments since 1953
§5. The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."
§6. 1953 Iran – CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo.
§7. 1954 Guatemala — CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup. Arbenz has threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years.
§8. 1961 Congo (Zaire) — The CIA assassinates the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba. However, public support for Lumumba’s politics runs so high that the CIA cannot clearly install his opponents in power. Four years of political turmoil follow.
§9. 1973 Chile — The CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist leader. The problems begin when Allende nationalizes American-owned firms in Chile. ITT offers the CIA $1 million for a coup (reportedly refused). The CIA replaces Allende with General Augusto Pinochet, who will torture and murder thousands of his own countrymen in a crackdown on labor leaders and the political left.
§10. 2019 Venezuela - The plot to overthrow Nicolás Maduro is being publicly promoted as an opportunity to steal Venezuelan oil for the benefit of U.S. corporations. They’re not even pretending.
F. Was the assassination of JFK a Deep State Coup organized by the CIA?
§11. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th POTUS, assassinated on Nov. 22nd, 1963 in Dallas Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested 70 minutes after the event. At 11:21 a.m. November 24, 1963, as live television cameras were covering his transfer from the city jail to the county jail, Oswald was fatally shot in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters by Dallas nightclub operator by Jack Ruby, a known police informant. After a ten-month investigation, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, that Oswald had acted entirely alone, and that Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald. A later investigation, the US House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed with the Warren Commission that the injuries that Kennedy and Connally sustained were caused by Oswald's three rifle shots, but they also concluded that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.
§12. Evidence of CIA involvement with the assassination
“We (CIA) need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know anything about it.”
a. Psychopathology - 1% of Americans who feel no empathy.
b. Etheric Energy-Vampires, “demons”
c. Concentration of Power - Dopamine feedback-loop based on fear/control
B. President Eisenhauer’s farewell warning about the “military-industrial complex”
§1. “We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
C. The Deep State
§2. “…another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”
A loose (non-monolithic) network of financial(banking) organizations, intelligence agencies, powerful law firms, military leaders and political power-brokers who come together from time to time when their interests coalesce: the “military-intelligence-banking-energy complex” [my definition]
D. The CIA as a case study in the Evils of Centralized Power
§3. Creation of the CIA - President Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. The CIA is accountable to the president through the NSC — there is no democratic or congressional oversight. Its charter allows the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties… as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." This loophole opens the door to covert action and dirty tricks; §4. 1948 expansion of the mission to ‘covert actions’ - The CIA recreates a covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy Coordination, led by Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities include "propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
E. CIA overthrowing governments since 1953
§5. The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."
§6. 1953 Iran – CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo.
§7. 1954 Guatemala — CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup. Arbenz has threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years.
§8. 1961 Congo (Zaire) — The CIA assassinates the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba. However, public support for Lumumba’s politics runs so high that the CIA cannot clearly install his opponents in power. Four years of political turmoil follow.
§9. 1973 Chile — The CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist leader. The problems begin when Allende nationalizes American-owned firms in Chile. ITT offers the CIA $1 million for a coup (reportedly refused). The CIA replaces Allende with General Augusto Pinochet, who will torture and murder thousands of his own countrymen in a crackdown on labor leaders and the political left.
§10. 2019 Venezuela - The plot to overthrow Nicolás Maduro is being publicly promoted as an opportunity to steal Venezuelan oil for the benefit of U.S. corporations. They’re not even pretending.
F. Was the assassination of JFK a Deep State Coup organized by the CIA?
§11. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th POTUS, assassinated on Nov. 22nd, 1963 in Dallas Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested 70 minutes after the event. At 11:21 a.m. November 24, 1963, as live television cameras were covering his transfer from the city jail to the county jail, Oswald was fatally shot in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters by Dallas nightclub operator by Jack Ruby, a known police informant. After a ten-month investigation, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, that Oswald had acted entirely alone, and that Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald. A later investigation, the US House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed with the Warren Commission that the injuries that Kennedy and Connally sustained were caused by Oswald's three rifle shots, but they also concluded that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.
§12. Evidence of CIA involvement with the assassination
CIA hatred of JFK connected to Bay of Pigs (1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962); Military Leadership hatred of JFK connected to Vietnam and Cuba policy of reconciliation; Lee Oswald’s suppressed background in US intelligence agencies; cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of US government: autopsy tampering, the “Magic Bullet Theory,” ignoring of key witnesses, mysterious deaths of many key witnesses, over 100); Jim Garrison’s lawsuit against the CIA, successful lawsuit against E. Howard Hunt (legendary CIA assassin) plus death bed confession remarks.
G. A false flag is a covert operation designed to deceive; the deception creates the appearance of a particular party, group, or nation being responsible for some activity, disguising the actual source of responsibility. Other likely false flag operations: MLK assassination (April 1968), RFK assassination (June 1968), Malcolm X assassination (Feb 1965); Gulf of Tonkin Incident (Aug 1964); 9/11 Attacks (2001).
§13. Operation Northwoods (proposed 1962). The operation proposed creating public support for a war against Cuba by blaming it for terrorist acts that would actually be perpetrated by the U.S. Government. To this end, Operation Northwoods proposals recommended hijackings and bombings followed by the introduction of phony evidence that would implicate the Cuban government.
H. 9/11 Grand Jury in the works
In spring 2018, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry — together with more than a dozen 9/11 family members and with help from AE911Truth — filed a petition with the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan demanding that he present evidence of unprosecuted federal crimes at the World Trade Center to a special grand jury. Then, in November, came the big news: the US attorney responded in writing that he would comply with the provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 3332 requiring him to relay their report to a special grand jury.
I. Truth and Reconciliation Committee calling for new investigation of 1960s political assassinations
Sixty prominent citizens are marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day by calling for new investigations into the assassinations of 4 men -- assassinations that changed the world: Malcolm X, JFK, RFK and MLK. The group -- The Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) -- believes all 4 assassinations were the result of conspiracies that were covered up by the government. Members of TRC include Oliver Stone, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, David Crosby, Mort Sahl, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and MLK's nephew Isaac Newton Farris Jr.
Notorious CIA programs
Operation PAPERCLIP – While other American agencies are hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the U.S. intelligence community is smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The most important of these is Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union.
Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA’s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.
Operation MK-ULTRA — Inspired by North Korea’s brainwashing program, the CIA begins experiments on mind control. The most notorious part of this project involves giving LSD and other drugs to American subjects without their knowledge or against their will, causing several to commit suicide. However, the operation involves far more than this. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, research includes propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion.
Operation PHEONIX — The CIA helps South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in South Vietnamese villages. According to a 1971 congressional report, this operation killed about 20,000 "Viet Cong.”
Operation PAPERCLIP – While other American agencies are hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the U.S. intelligence community is smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The most important of these is Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union.
Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA’s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.
Operation MK-ULTRA — Inspired by North Korea’s brainwashing program, the CIA begins experiments on mind control. The most notorious part of this project involves giving LSD and other drugs to American subjects without their knowledge or against their will, causing several to commit suicide. However, the operation involves far more than this. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, research includes propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion.
Operation PHEONIX — The CIA helps South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in South Vietnamese villages. According to a 1971 congressional report, this operation killed about 20,000 "Viet Cong.”
Operation CHAOS — The CIA has been illegally spying on American citizens since 1959, but with Operation CHAOS, President Johnson dramatically boosts the effort. CIA agents go undercover as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam War. They are searching for Russian instigators, which they never find. CHAOS will eventually spy on 7,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations.
The CIA and Drugs - Nicaragua and Afghanistan
“The CIA has a long history of being involved in global drug trade in all parts of the world under the control of the US or where it has considerable influence. While a few cases have been investigated and exposed by journalists, the issue continues to remain in the shadows… The CIA’s history began in the 1980s. Drugs were seen as the quickest and easiest way to earn money to fund CIA proxies and paramilitary forces that served them, in different countries. Gary Webb, the brave journalist who exposed the Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking scandal and was eventually driven to suicide by an extensive smear campaign by the mainstream media, described the process like this:
G. A false flag is a covert operation designed to deceive; the deception creates the appearance of a particular party, group, or nation being responsible for some activity, disguising the actual source of responsibility. Other likely false flag operations: MLK assassination (April 1968), RFK assassination (June 1968), Malcolm X assassination (Feb 1965); Gulf of Tonkin Incident (Aug 1964); 9/11 Attacks (2001).
§13. Operation Northwoods (proposed 1962). The operation proposed creating public support for a war against Cuba by blaming it for terrorist acts that would actually be perpetrated by the U.S. Government. To this end, Operation Northwoods proposals recommended hijackings and bombings followed by the introduction of phony evidence that would implicate the Cuban government.
H. 9/11 Grand Jury in the works
In spring 2018, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry — together with more than a dozen 9/11 family members and with help from AE911Truth — filed a petition with the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan demanding that he present evidence of unprosecuted federal crimes at the World Trade Center to a special grand jury. Then, in November, came the big news: the US attorney responded in writing that he would comply with the provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 3332 requiring him to relay their report to a special grand jury.
I. Truth and Reconciliation Committee calling for new investigation of 1960s political assassinations
Sixty prominent citizens are marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day by calling for new investigations into the assassinations of 4 men -- assassinations that changed the world: Malcolm X, JFK, RFK and MLK. The group -- The Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) -- believes all 4 assassinations were the result of conspiracies that were covered up by the government. Members of TRC include Oliver Stone, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, David Crosby, Mort Sahl, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and MLK's nephew Isaac Newton Farris Jr.
Notorious CIA programs
Operation PAPERCLIP – While other American agencies are hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the U.S. intelligence community is smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The most important of these is Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union.
Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA’s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.
Operation MK-ULTRA — Inspired by North Korea’s brainwashing program, the CIA begins experiments on mind control. The most notorious part of this project involves giving LSD and other drugs to American subjects without their knowledge or against their will, causing several to commit suicide. However, the operation involves far more than this. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, research includes propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion.
Operation PHEONIX — The CIA helps South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in South Vietnamese villages. According to a 1971 congressional report, this operation killed about 20,000 "Viet Cong.”
Operation PAPERCLIP – While other American agencies are hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the U.S. intelligence community is smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The most important of these is Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union.
Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA’s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.
Operation MK-ULTRA — Inspired by North Korea’s brainwashing program, the CIA begins experiments on mind control. The most notorious part of this project involves giving LSD and other drugs to American subjects without their knowledge or against their will, causing several to commit suicide. However, the operation involves far more than this. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, research includes propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion.
Operation PHEONIX — The CIA helps South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in South Vietnamese villages. According to a 1971 congressional report, this operation killed about 20,000 "Viet Cong.”
Operation CHAOS — The CIA has been illegally spying on American citizens since 1959, but with Operation CHAOS, President Johnson dramatically boosts the effort. CIA agents go undercover as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam War. They are searching for Russian instigators, which they never find. CHAOS will eventually spy on 7,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations.
The CIA and Drugs - Nicaragua and Afghanistan
“The CIA has a long history of being involved in global drug trade in all parts of the world under the control of the US or where it has considerable influence. While a few cases have been investigated and exposed by journalists, the issue continues to remain in the shadows… The CIA’s history began in the 1980s. Drugs were seen as the quickest and easiest way to earn money to fund CIA proxies and paramilitary forces that served them, in different countries. Gary Webb, the brave journalist who exposed the Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking scandal and was eventually driven to suicide by an extensive smear campaign by the mainstream media, described the process like this:
“We (CIA) need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know anything about it.”
Sunday, March 24, 2019
3/26 Introduction to Political Ponerology: The CIA, the Deep State & Political Assassinations
Texts for this class
1. Steve Kangas, "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities"
2. Nicholas Davies, "America's Coup Machine: Destroying Democracy Since 1953"
3. Interview with David Talbot discussing his book The Devil's Chessboard: Allan Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government.
Other recommended materials
4. Steve Kangas, "Origins of the Overclass"
5. Veterans Today: "The CIA continues trafficking drugs from Afganistan"
6. "Secret World of US Election": John Pilger Interview with Julian Assange
7. Corbett Report: "How the CIA Plants News Stories in the Media"
8. Famed JFK researcher Mark Lane discussing his book"Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK"
9. Edward Curtin, "The Government that Honors Dr. MLK with a National Holiday Killed Jim.
Evil as the Concentration of Power
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men.”
- 19th century British politician Lord Acton
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!
- Langston Hughes
“The United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Deep State
…another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.
A loose (non-monolithic) network of financial(banking) organizations, intelligence agencies, powerful law firms, military leaders and political powerbrokers who come together from time to time when their interests coalesce.
[my definition]
The CIA as a case study in the Evils of Centralized Power
Part I: The CIA Anti-democratic Playbook: How to murder a democracy
“CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow. This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious "School of the Americas." (It opened in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.) Critics have nicknamed it the "School of the Dictators" and "School of the Assassins." Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, including the use of interrogation, torture and murder.” [from http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html ]
Several infamous examples of CIA-orchestrated coups against democratically-elected governments.
(1953) Iran – CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo.
(1954) Guatemala — CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup. Arbenz has threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years.
(1961) Congo (Zaire) — The CIA assassinates the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba. However, public support for Lumumba’s politics runs so high that the CIA cannot clearly install his opponents in power. Four years of political turmoil follow.
(1973) Chile — The CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist leader. The problems begin when Allende nationalizes American-owned firms in Chile. ITT offers the CIA $1 million for a coup (reportedly refused). The CIA replaces Allende with General Augusto Pinochet, who will torture and murder thousands of his own countrymen in a crackdown on labor leaders and the political left.
Part II: Some notorious and well-documented CIA programs
Operation PAPERCLIP – While other American agencies are hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the U.S. intelligence community is smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The most important of these is Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union.
Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA’s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.
Operation MK-ULTRA — Inspired by North Korea’s brainwashing program, the CIA begins experiments on mind control. The most notorious part of this project involves giving LSD and other drugs to American subjects without their knowledge or against their will, causing several to commit suicide. However, the operation involves far more than this. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, research includes propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion.
Operation PHEONIX — The CIA helps South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in South Vietnamese villages. According to a 1971 congressional report, this operation killed about 20,000 "Viet Cong.”
Operation CHAOS — The CIA has been illegally spying on American citizens since 1959, but with Operation CHAOS, President Johnson dramatically boosts the effort. CIA agents go undercover as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam War. They are searching for Russian instigators, which they never find. CHAOS will eventually spy on 7,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations.
Part IV: The CIA and Drugs - Nicaragua and Afghanistan
[From http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/06/04/the-cia-continues-trafficking-drugs-from-afghanistan/ ]
“The CIA has a long history of being involved in global drug trade in all parts of the world under the control of the US or where it has considerable influence. While a few cases have been investigated and exposed by journalists, the issue continues to remain in the shadows.
The CIA’s history began in the 1980s. Drugs were seen as the quickest and easiest way to earn money to fund CIA proxies and paramilitary forces that served them, in different countries. Gary Webb, the brave journalist who exposed the Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking scandal and was eventually driven to suicide by an extensive smear campaign by the mainstream media, described the process like this:
“We (CIA) need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know anything about it.”
Read the original articles by Gary Webb HERE
[https://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/drugs/start.htm ] or watch the film Kill the Messenger
This tactic worked very successfully in Afghanistan during the Cold War when the Mujahideen forces serving the US were funded through drugs. Before the US invasion in 2001, the poppy fields were eradicated by the Taliban. Right after the US invasion, drug production began increasing drastically, and today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s opium, and on the verge of becoming a narco-state.
More on how the CIA smuggles drugs
The CIA and Political Assassinations JFK and MLK
"Someone would have talked," goes the old refrain. In the case of some CIA officers and others associated with the Agency, they did talk. But who's listening?
In 2007, legendary Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt died, leaving behind a taped "confession" in which he claimed knowledge of the plot to kill Kennedy but not active participation, describing himself as a "benchwarmer." Hunt named names - including Lyndon Johnson, Tracy Barnes, William Harvey, Frank Sturgis, and others - but provided no substantiating details. For many observers, the hard-to-credit confession was a "last laugh" and a parting gift to his ne-er-do-well son, who has attempted to capitalize on it.
Other confessions have carried a bit more weight. David Morales, Chief of Operations at the JMWAVE station in Florida where he trained Bay of Pigs participants and by some accounts was involved in assassination operations, was getting drunk one night with childhood friend Ruben Carbajal and a business associate named Bob Walton. Both men said that Morales went on a tirade about Kennedy and particularly his failure to support the men of the Bay of Pigs. Morales finished this conversation by saying "Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?”
Friday, March 15, 2019
Second Paper Topics for PH1104
Due: Thursday, March 28th
Length: 5 pages
Format: Argumentative, posing a thesis or question and offering sustained argument.
References: Use at least two sources from class and two outside sources.
Submit: Via email to justin@oursanctuary.org
1. Should the US Federal Reserve Bank be nationalized? If so, why? If not, why not? Make use of Stephen Zarlenga’s Monetary Reform Manual in your response (https://monetary.org/pdfs/home/32-page-Monetary-Reform-Manual.pdf)
2. What is usury, is it morally-wrong and why? If not, why not?
3. Is it possible to redesign money and monetary systems so that they serve the restoration of the environment and human society? A response to this should include discussion of efforts to reform and/or innovate alternatives to debt-based bank created money, starting with this interview with former central banker and monetary reformist Bernard Lietaer (https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/money-print-your-own/beyond-greed-and-scarcity).
4. In his notes to HR2990, Stephen Zarlenga asserts “How a society defines money determines who controls it. Define money as wealth, and the wealthy will control it. Define it as credit/debt, as is done today, and the banker will be in control. Define it as Aristotle did - an abstract legal power - and government can control it to promote the general welfare.” What are the consequences of these different ways of understanding money, which understanding makes the most sense, and why?
5. While the libertarian anarchist philosopher Robert Nozick argues that “Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor,” philosopher of the Commons Peter Barnes argues that private wealth extracted from the Commons ought to underwrite a social dividend payment to all of the living beings who collectively own The Commons. What are the key differences between these contrasting views of distributive justice, and which vision makes more sense of our current situation with regard to wealth distribution>
6. In his recent article “America’s Next Civil War” (https://thewalrus.ca/americas-next-civil-war/) Canadian journalist Stephen Marche argues that America’s national identity remains fractured along racial lines. Can a civic and inclusive conception of nationalism spoken of by Fredrick Douglas resolve this conflict or is the US tied to an ethnic nationalism forever divided by its roots in slavery?
7. When is the assertion of national self-determination (in terms of a common origin and ethnicity) a valid moral call for solidarity with oppressed groups, and when is it an immoral call for the repression of ethnic minorities?
8. In his reinterpretation of the social contract tradition, Charles Mills argues that ““Instead of pretending that the social contract outlines the ideal that people tried to live up to but which they occasionally failed (as with all ideals) fell short of, we should say frankly that for whites the Racial Contract represented the ideal, and what is involved is not deviation rom the (fictive) norm but adherence to the actual norm.” (The Racial Contract, p. 57) What does Charles Mill’s hypothesis of a racial contract attempt to reveal about America’s social contract and its connection to racism?
9. Charles Mills claims that the Racial Contract not only justifies racial exploitation, but that it ‘constructs’ race. (The Racial Contract, p.63) In what sense - based on what evidence - is it true that racial identity in the US was created by a contractual agreement or series of agreements?
10. After President Obama’s historic terms in office, some cultural commentators have asserted that the US has now entered a post-racial moment, freed from the structural racism of its past. Is this true? If so, in what sense. If not, what evidence suggests the enduring presence of structural racism?
11. How can U.S. culture and society be altered when the roots of white supremacy are foundational as a matter of history and law? How can a group of people invented in part through the assertion that they are more deserving of rights and privileges than others be transformed? Is it possible to take something conceived out of superiority and deployed as a wedge between American laborers, and make it humane and fair?
12. Are prisons obsolete (socially, economically, morally) or are they a necessary tool for maintaining civil peace that merely need to be reformed?
13. The small ‘a’ anarchist David Graeber asks “Perhaps instead of asking what the best political system is that our current social order could support, we should be asking, What social arrangements would be necessary for us to have a genuinely, participatory, democratic system that could dedicate itself to solving collective problems?” What would it take to allow our political and economic systems to become a mode of collective problem solving rather than a mode of collective war?
14. Make up your own question but be sure to check it with me first.
Notes on Reparations
§1. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt… An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future… Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”
§2. If God wills that it [slavery] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn - with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address
§3. The existence of past injustice (previous violations of the first two principles of justice in holdings) raises the third major topic under justice in holdings: the rectification of injustice in holdings. If past injustice has shaped present holdings in various ways, some identifiable and some not, what now, if anything, ought to be done to rectify these injustices? What obligations do the performers of injustice have toward those whose position is worse than it would have been had the injustice not been done? Or, than it would have been had compensation been paid promptly? How, if at all, do things change if the beneficiaries and those made worse off are not the direct parties in the act of injustice, but, for example, their descendants? Is an injustice done to someone whose holding was itself based upon an unrectified injustice? How far back must one go in wiping clean the historical slate of injustices? What may victims of injustice permissibly do in order to rectify the injustices being done to them, including the many injustices done by persons acting through their government? Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, Utopia
A. Jim Crow Kleptocracy • Legal and Extra-legal theft of Non-white Property
§4. Two racially-different ‘class ladders’ from peonage to full citizenship - whites generally bring generational wealth, blacks generational debt: rooted in the legacy of Jim Crow kleptocracy (rule by thieves); Theft of black property during Jim Crow era: the story of Clyde Ross, a tale of unequal protection under the law, deprived of property by racist courts and extra-judicial lynchings. (a 2001 AP Report documents some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars.) Share-cropping: a neo-feudal form of worker exploitation wedded to Jim Crow racism reinforced with violence; “Contract buying” in the North - all the liabilities of home ownership with all the disadvantages of renting; swindles poor blacks out of home ownership. “From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.” (Coates) “Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.” African Americans left out of the New Deal, The G. I. Bill and Levitttowns, the first suburban housing complexes. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible; No changes since 1970 in the income gap: “As a rule, poor blacks people do not work their way out of the ghetto - and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.”
§5. “According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.”
B. Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history
§6. The Federal Housing Commission’s “red-lining:” The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house; Black neighborhoods (no matter how few blacks or their income) were given “D” rating, ineligible for FHA backing. a racist practice which spread to the whole mortgage industry cutting non-whites out from being able to get loans for purchasing homes. ““A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.” Cut out from legitimate sources of funding, non-whites are easy prey for predatory lending. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
§7. The Contract Buyers League suit against city of Chicago. In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a “fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial, according to the jury foreman hopefully ending ““the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.”
C. Precedents for Reparations
§8. Belinda Royall an example of successful reparations at the beginning of the US republic in 1783 Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings by the state of Massachusetts to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations; In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’ ”
§9. French Spoliation Claims During “a seven-year period from 1793 to 1800…France attacked American ships in retaliation for the United States’s neutral stance in the war between France and Britain,” Craemer writes. Though France refused to pay for the damage they caused to people’s property during the war, hundreds of Americans sued their own federal government anyway, arguing that the hostilities, and damages, were ultimately the responsibility of the United States. They claimed that France was retaliating for the United States’s failure to pay back the European country for the support it gave to the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. By 1910, after decades of debate, the United States eventually agreed to pay back $1 million in claims ($38 million in today’s dollars) to hundreds of its own citizens.
§10. West German Reparations to Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. Starting next year, eligibility will extend to anyone who can prove that they hid from the Nazis for at least six months. $89 Billion has been paid out since 1952.
D. Estimates for Slavery Reparations
§11. Gen. William T. Sherman's Special Field Order 15 (Jan. 16, 1865): “Forty acres and a mule” for each formerly enslaved family, setting aside 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land for freed slaves; after Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson reversed Sherman's order, giving the land back to its former Confederate owners.
§12. $193 Billion (Boris Bittker The Case for Black Reparations), determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two.
§13. $200 Billion (Charles J. Ogletree Jr.), multiplying the # of African Americans in the US by the difference in white and black per capita income:
§14. $5.9 trillion and $14.2 trillion (Thomas Craemer of UCONN); tabulating how many hours all slaves—men, women and children—worked in the United States from when the country was officially established in 1776 until 1865, when slavery was officially abolished; multiplying the amount of time they worked by average wage prices at the time, and then a compounding interest rate of 3 percent per year (more than making up for inflation).
§15. H.R. 40 Reparations Study Bill To address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.
§16. Native American rejection of reparations for land theft “Reparations are ill-suited to address the harm and damage experienced by people who understand themselves, in a very practical and moral sense, as members of communities that include nonhuman life. For many Native Americans, our land (including the air, water, and biological life on which we depend) is a natural relative, not a natural resource. And our justice traditions require the restoration of our land relationship, not monetary reparations… The tribes of the Great Sioux Nation have steadfastly refused a money settlement for the illegal taking of the Black Hills, which they consider the sacred center place of their creation. - Daniel R. Wildcat, a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation
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10/16 Philosophy of Money and Banking
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