William Norman Grigg

Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.

~ Federalist Paper No. 8, in which Alexander Hamilton displayed an atypical ardor to defend liberty against state power.

“We no longer have a civilian-led government.”

This ominous conclusion comes to us from Thomas A. Schweich, who held the title of deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement affairs in the Bush Regime, by way of a December 21 Washington Post op-ed column. Lamenting “the silent military coup d’etat that has been steadily gaining ground below the radar screen of most Americans and the media,” Schweich describes the infusion of the military “into a striking number of aspects of civilian government” as “the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration.”

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The propagandists are working overtime to fear the public into submitting to their global warming threats.

noonehastodietomorrow.com | Oct 13, 2008

By Amy de Miceli

The main stream media is reporting on what the world will be like in 22 years based on a fictitious account, made up by a non-governmental organization know as, Forum For the Future. A self proclaimed, “charity committed to sustainable development” working on behalf of big business. The 76 page report titled Climate Futures A Response To Climate Change in 2030, was created in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Labs.

They outline five possible scenarios of what type of brave new world hell we could be living in by the year 2030; efficiency first, service transformation, redefining progress, environmental war economy and protectionist world. Each one has its own timeline, a make believe “history” with wide array of things that may occur between 2009 and 2030 if we don’t start making globalwarmingour number one priority, they include:

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Bob Bauman - October 01, 2008

The name of the so-called “U.S. Department of Homeland Security” has always disturbed and rankled me.

Created in the frenzied political aftermath of the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks, it sounds like something Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels would have dreamed up to impress the gullible masses. Indeed, the attitude too often displayed at airports by the over paid DHS’s minions of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is akin to that of storm troopers.

Two years ago I and others called attention to a dangerous provision slipped into an omnibus appropriation bill that gave the President of the United States the unprecedented power to deploy the U.S. military for domestic duty within the United States as he sees fit.

President Bush (or someone who had his ear) came up with the disturbing idea that the U.S. military should be put in charge of domestic police matters when a “major catastrophe” occurs within America.

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Anne Elizabeth Moore - October 1, 2008

ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA — Since 11 am on Tuesday, September 2, the first (albeit rejiggered) full day of the Republican National Convention (RNC), masses of cops indistinguishable from one another had suited up in riot gear pulled from the backs of open Ford Expeditions. Now, they were forming a thick perimeter around the St. Paul Capitol grounds, where happy young people had gathered to listen to bands, flirt, and trade colorful flyers advertising varieties of social justice. These men were dressing for a specific kind of evening on the town, and by 8:30, they were hot and bothered. Had they gotten all dressed up with no place to go?

They’d seen action the night before, of course, with 284 arrests, and in raids for several days beforehand. Millions of bucks in federal funds had been shelled out for their new gear, along with a massive insurance policy to cover lawsuits in the event of misuse. But having trailed a march for several hours to a downtown location in front of Mickey’s Dining Car, the officers were ready for more.

That’s when the rumbling began. Not low stomach rumbling, a literary device conveying impending danger. This was the sound of motors rumbling. From snowplows, dump trucks, massive city vehicles. The trucks were establishing a blockade on the dark summer streets of my hometown, forming the outer barricade in a series of three impasses — the two others created by rows of riot cops — penning in politically engaged Americans.

Confused, hungry, and with a sudden awareness that conspiracy to document a riot might be considered a felony under Minnesota’s USA PATRIOT Act, I headed in the opposite direction for dinner, hoping to meet along the way with an exhausted videographer whose two camera people were still in jail. A young girl walking nearby turned to me. “I’m not a protester,” she explained. She was heading to the capitol to sit on the grass to rest.

Clearly, she’s from here, I thought: that’s exactly the kind of boring night I used to have in this town when I was her age.

I turned off toward the restaurant and gasped. Around the corner, a constantly replenishing row of fresh riot cops was marching — goose-stepping, even — up the center of Robert Avenue, in perfect formation. Perhaps 200 went by as I stood, open-mouthed gaping. It dawned on me that I had grown up in what is now a police state. And that that poor girl was not going to enjoy another boring night in St. Paul.

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William N. Grigg - September 29, 2008

We are entering the age of “persistent conflict,” advises the Army’s 90-page official report on modernization and strategy. Dr. Tom Clonan, the international security analyst for the Irish Times, usefully peels away the thin veneer of euphemism applied to that phrase, rendering it “perpetual warfare.”

The Army document is an admission that our rulers intend to divest us of what few tangible liberties we still enjoy. James Madison’s warning resonates again: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

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Antifascist - September 20, 2008

On Wednesday, Antifascist Calling reported on moves by the Department of Justice to seek blanket immunity for AT&T under provisions of the disgraceful FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

If approved by Judge Vaughn Walker, the presiding magistrate hearing the landmark Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit in federal district court in San Francisco, the giant telecommunications corporation and Bush crime family partner would walk away scott free.

The suit, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers caught up in the state’s illegal internet and telephone driftnet surveillance, is challenging unconstitutional spying on U.S. citizens and legal residents.

The shocking extent of the “public-private partnership” in political repression was first revealed in depth when former AT&T technician Mark Klein filed an affidavit in support of EFF’s contention that AT&T had systematically violated their customers’ right to privacy.

As Antifascist Calling has previously reported on many occasions, the telecommunications giant had constructed a secret room (SG3 Secure Room, room number 641A) for the exclusive use of the National Security Agency’s spying operations at AT&T’s Folsom St. office.

On Saturday, EFF reported that the government “started the formal process for retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies sued by EFF and others for their involvement in the warrantless surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans.” That hearing is set for December 2, 2008 in San Francisco.

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William N. Grigg - September 15, 2008

Hail comrades well met: In this famous 1911 editorial cartoon, Karl Marx is rapturously greeted on Wall Street and taken to the bosom of Carnegie and Rockefeller. This tidily sums up the relationship between Wall Street corporate socialists and the non-housebroken Marxist revolutionaries who are their distant kin.

Denouement (n) — The unraveling of a plot; a catastrophe….

From Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

There is something supernally appropriate to the fact that, in order to find the most suitable definition for just right word to describe the ongoing crisis of the financial system, we have to refer to a dictionary published in 1913.

We are now into the second year of the unraveling of the world financial system. It could be described as the Great Denouement (or final act) of a plot that began in 1913, when Congress created the Federal Reserve System, aka the Focus of Evil in the Modern World. So far the effects of the unraveling have had minimal impact on the larger economy.

This is about to change.

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by William Norman Grigg

The recently concluded Republican National Convention in St. Paul served as the grand coming-out party for the Homeland Security State.

Its enforcers, fully panoplied in the military regalia that is rapidly becoming standard police attire, could be seen either strutting through the streets hungry to conduct a beat-down or marching to military cadences. Armored vehicles prowled the streets, while military helicopters rattled overhead. Several journalists, including Amy Goodman and two associates from the independent Democracy Now! media enterprise, were arrested and assaulted by police while covering protest marches.

Large sections of Minneapolis/St. Paul, a placid Midwestern American community, were made to resemble Baghdad under military occupation. As in Baghdad, homes in the Twin Cities were subjected to “pre-emptive” military raids on the eve of the Republican Convention. Beginning the night of Friday, August 29, multi-jurisdictional paramilitary police units armed with automatic weapons stormed residences where left-wing activists were billeted in anticipation of protest demonstrations.

More than one hundred people were handcuffed and questioned during those raids, many of them forced to lie face-down on the ground while officers searched for evidence of various purported plots to disrupt and “terrorize” the convention. According to Glenn Greenwald, a civil libertarian commentator who was on-site immediately after the raids, at least some of the police who conducted the raids couldn’t resist tormenting helpless detainees with jocular talk about summary executions.

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Michael S. Rozeff - September 5, 2008

Protests challenge the power of the authorities. Having to defend their every move shows how weak they really are. They respond the only way they know how, which is with a greater police presence. The police counter-attack with methods that infringe rights and threaten the liberties of all. Reminiscent of police operations in pre-Revolutionary Russia, the New York Police Department “infiltrated and spied on protest groups across the country” prior to the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). Agents provocateurs were also reported.

Peter Dale Scott, Global Research, September 4, 2008

Though few Americans realize it, Cheney and Rumsfeld worked through the 1980s and 1990s on emergency nuclear-response plans which allegedly suspended the American constitution and also Congress.[1] (Through these decades Rumsfeld was CEO of a major pharmaceutical firm, and in the later 1990s Cheney was CEO of Halliburton; but their private status did not deter them from continuing to exercise a supra-constitutional planning power conferred on them by Ronald Reagan.)

Even fewer Americans know that these rules, originally dealing with a nuclear attack on America, were extended by Reagan Executive Order 12656 to cover “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.”[2] And few Americans realize that at least some of these rules, known technically as Continuity of Government or COG rules, were invoked before 10:00 AM on September 11, 2001.[3]

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By MARJORIE COHN - September 2, 2008

In the months leading up to the Republican National Convention, the FBI-led Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force actively recruited people to infiltrate vegan groups and other leftist organizations and report back about their activities. On May 21, the Minneapolis City Pages ran a recruiting story called “Moles Wanted.” Law enforcement sought to preempt lawful protest against the policies of the Bush administration during the convention.

Since Friday, local police and sheriffs, working with the FBI, conducted preemptive searches, seizures and arrests. Glenn Greenwald described the targeting of protestors by “teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets.” Journalists were detained at gunpoint and lawyers representing detainees were handcuffed at the scene.

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