Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
with Abby Martin
Empire Files on Jun 20, 2021
Abby Martin introduces the first installment of a new Empire Files series about the CIA explaining why the agency was created, and how it became the most nefarious criminal organization in the world, with CIA expert Douglas Valentine.
Keep Empire Files independent and ad-free: https://www.patreon.com/empirefiles
From the archives:
Abby Martin: The Woke CIA PsyOp
Chris Hedges: America’s Secret Government
Chris Hedges and Stephen Kinzer: The CIA’s Quest For Mind Control
Abolish Terrorist Agencies by David Swanson
CIA: World’s Biggest Terrorist Organization, featuring William Blum
Dandelion Salad 
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Three cheers for Abby.
Long may she (and her team) thrive.
Yes. Cheers to Abby and Mike.
Abby Martin is one of the world’s best independent journalists.
I wish she would also look at the question of how we do this thing called money, because the CIA and other agencies would not have nearly the power they have if The People stopped thinking that the way we do money is legitimate. https://mrcenter.info/Doc/ConferencePapers/2015/MRC_2015_Gauvin_Meira_Final_Release_Amendement_for_Publication.pdf and http://bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/180-bank-of-england-economists-evidence-absurdity-of-modern-money-contracts and https://mrcenter.info/Doc/ConferencePapers/2020/MRC%202020%20A%20systems%20approach%20to%20money_4122020%20rev2_17.01.2021.pdf and http://bibocurrency.com/index.php/asta3-requirements-2
When the power structure in the imperialist world resides first in how money itself comes into existence – by declaration of the imperialist – then it makes damned little sense to talk about how that stuff is spent instead of money systems and the very definition of money and the structure of how it is implemented.
The tax structures in imperialist societies have always been such that the lower classes are taxed in the form of the imposed monetary unit that the imperialist creates ahead of and apart from the activity of the populace. This mandate that the taxes must be in the form of the imposed monetary unit that only the imperial overlord can create, as opposed to ‘in kind’ contributions of people to the social good, means that the labor and resources are at the whim of the overlord to control and direct.
But it is important to know the order of things. It is the illiterate and illegitimate claim over money creation itself that pays the soldiers before ANY tax is collected!
The self declared imperialist ‘sovereign authority’ to spend and then tax is a trap by which The People are ensnared into militarism they do not want. An ancient strategy called out by David Graeber in his book “Debt: The First 5000 Years.” Simple plan really – government declares its supreme authority to issue currency and first spends it into existence on the military. Then the self proclaimed authoritarian government (same self declared nonsense as the Divine Right Of Kings but disguised under the façade of ‘free and fair elections’) declares that The People must pay a tax with the ‘coin of the realm’ that the government first spent into existence with the military. (Yes, that very military industrial complex – the MIC – Eisenhower warned against.) And, wham, The People must do business with the MIC. The military needs to be fed, clothed, housed, outfitted, etc.
The soldiers are the ones at the head of the pay line of the asinine imperialist power structure. Without the soldiers the imperialist has no one to kick ass for them. From there it becomes an easy control mechanism to get the populace to support the military even if they do not want war. The feudal lord simply paid the soldiers and military folk in the coin of the realm, and the populace would then have to ‘do business’ with the ‘military complex’ (or get their asses kicked by them) in order to obtain the necessary coinage to pay taxes. There is nothing substantially different in our present system.
It is precisely the framework of the operating system of authoritarian control over the creation of the economic unit that precludes democracy and peace.
That then compels us all to look at the history of the asinine notion that some ‘authority’ exists that must create the acCounting unit ahead of and apart from the genuine economic activity that these units will be used to represent. It is acceptance by the populace of the assertion of that kind of authoritarian control over the very creation of the unit of acCount (a long history presented by Graeber and others) that leaves the populace helplessly and hopelessly at war. If we are going to stop the war mongering then We The People must stop whining about the misuse of this illiterate power to create the acCounting unit by the imperialist and define the thing called money in a logical manner according to its acCounting/annotation/record keeping function. We are at a place where we must acquire monetary literacy and establish a rational system as opposed to attempting some kind of behavior modification within a system that is completely irrational and illiterate! The symbols we use to represent the units of value embodied in genuine things of value cannot also BE the value itself! The populace is still not differentiating between abstract representation and the real stuff that is represented in the abstract units! https://www.moneytransparency.com/msta-resolutions
Buckminster Fuller has already told us about this:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Thanks for commenting, francisomy.
It would be one thing if they were JUST a fact gathering institution, but they are not, and never have been.
Exactly.