It Was Never About Oil

Even when gathered with tens of thousands of folks in Los Angeles, along with Slash, Jackson Browne, and Martin Sheen, chanting “No Blood For Oil! Not In Our Name!” there was something unnerving about that assumption. And in the ten years since that time, I have chipped away at the veil of misinformation that has proven oil may or may not be of limited supply, but what is definitely known: the energy alternatives are prevalent, in-use, expandable, and profitable, but the information is unavailable to common people–largely due to mass distraction.

“Electric carriages” or “horseless carriages” were the predecessors to gasoline monsters. Nicolai Tesla was the mortal enemy of Thomas Edison, where as Edison (General Electric) was the mortal enemy of William Durant (General Motors), a self-made tycoon that had jumped on to the gasoline band wagon and demolished electric train systems nationwide, literally burning them to the ground. I would have preferred a Tesla future with free energy for all, but the powers that be failed to apprehend the importance of energy independence even from a successful capitalist: Thomas Edison.[1]

What has followed in the last eighty years has been an ugly world-political battle over oil fields, the rise to wealth by careless industrialists, producing a culture of greed and confusion, in denial of basic facts about climate change.

These observations were compelling enough to the Iraq Anti-War Movement of 2003 to assume and assert that the Bush family and their close associates manufactured the “weapons of mass destruction” story, only to get that oil. But look how that situation has played out: China is the leading importer of oil from Iraq.[2]

When I learned that, it really indicated that middle eastern oil is just half the picture. At the time, I was reading Digital Disconnect, which illuminates the dark side of information and begins to show the other half of that oily picture, largely by tracing the sixteen-year history of the world-wide-web.

When I learned China was dominating the Iraqi oil, I felt gross, like, after protesting against the war for oil and losing that battle, I feel like at least we should have that oil! Could it really have been about creating free markets and democracy? That’s what’s at play here: American oil companies don’t want to play ball. Free markets and democracy were the public justification for doing it after finding no weapons, but it also officially broke the “isolationist” era forever because Americans always expected an attack before a war. The America of old, raising war bonds to invest in weapons, to keep our political influence as private as possible, that era is absolutely in the can.

So perhaps it was the short-term that mattered to the Bush scene. After all, it was Cheney’s Halliburton that did tremendous contract work, cleaning up after the falsely framed war.[3] But my gut tells me those contracts merely financed a bigger project. A side note, it was recently discovered that Halliburton’s faulty slipshod construction of the well in the Gulf Coast caused the BP spill.[3a] They destroyed evidence to protect themselves. That’s Information Control 101. But what about a more proactive approach? If the Bush NSA, FBI, and CIA are all willing to go along with the WMD story, falsely interpreting data to legitimize the military interests, could that be just the most flagrant in history but not the first? I could probably look as far back as the Romans but let’s stick close to home and history, something we can really trace.

World War II ended with two predominant winners: Russia and the United States. This led to a stand off cold war that never actually ended—cold war simply became part of life in America only now the enemy is Terrorism. But my memories of childhood include the fall of the Berlin wall. The only comparable thing today would be the fall of the North Korean border. It was a bright spot of progress that influenced my worldview at a tender age. And the following Clinton years really lifted that sense of a Cold War. Only to be brought back again in the Bush epoch.

But it is important to consider what intelligence was gained from the Nazi regime. The most glaring is missile technology. Some speculate that Germany was already working on space technology and that we apprehended it along with the Russians, leading to a rapid technological change from 1945 to 1965, marked by tremendous advances in communication technology and of course, landing on the moon in 1969. That was the last heroic thing this country did in the name of peace.

Space technology is not merely for astronauts. Few realize this, because a smart missile, a long range system is actually a space-faring vehicle that pierces the stratosphere to make it’s target. Proving that you can land on the moon proves you can launch a missile across the globe and deliver it to any target in a stealth way. And now, America makes the same promise as Domino’s did in the eighties.[4]

The stack is beginning to fall.

But the form of intelligence that is less recognized and certainly not disclosed by any government–though may be even more important—is the methodology of communication technology and the use of information to influence world-politics. It was tremendous for the Nazi regime. They started the perpetual build up trend; now the United States is the hands-down leader of that madness.

America changed dramatically after World War II. We changed who we are. Isolationism[5] was replaced with a militant charge against the world, pushing those around that might resemble Hitler in any aspect. Vietnam as the first cause of that sort of grounds, asserting ourselves as the greatest nation and that we are right in waging war for democracy and capitalism—not so dissimilar to the Nazi justification for killing in the name of itself.

To see such an evil regime that wants nothing more than to enslave people for the purpose of military build-up and eventual world-domination, and to defeat them means taking on their secrets to learn how they did it and to eventually become them. Initially, it would look like a quest to protect the world from any regime like that again, but eventually one is compelled to follow it all the way down the rabbit hole.

“Power corrupts, or your money back.” – Steven Schneider

Due to the implementation of communication technology and space exploration, neither America nor any nation can honestly maintain Isolationism; it was a thing of a previous era. And when Russia launched Sputnik, the Modern era[6] came to a close and I believe a long, long Dark Age started to crumble.

You can’t hear the noise because it is all around you.

During the Civil War, a fundamental assumption was being challenged: that Negroes were sub-human and deserved servitude. Lincoln changed American politics with a sneaky but effective means-to-end approach that justified numerous barely-legal methods. But his target was clear and altruistic: end slavery forever. Obama swore on the Lincoln bible upon his second inauguration. He has proven to be sneakier, and can’t seem to successfully secure an oath to serve the constitution–both years he messed up the lines. And he has no clear altruistic target. If he wants to leave a legacy like Lincoln, he will actually have to risk his life for something. But sometimes I believe his true intentions and influence will shine in his post-Presidency years. Like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, he will launch initiatives for change. And as the first Generation X president, he has many good years ahead of him, unlike Romney, who needed the Presidency to mark his legacy now, sort of as a retirement project.

But the cause worth risking one’s life for today is the real end to slavery and the thing that economically-philosophically separates us from Islamic nations: the bondage of debt by interest. But Obama has no interest in this, he is a capitalist lawyer, folks. It is curious though, because he seems like a good man, and everyone says he’s a muslim. But I digress.

The thing that I find most remarkable about the Thirteenth Amendment is the provision to enslave prisoners.[7] And specifically how the number of slaves never truly reduced—some say it increased.[8] Especially if you count the balance of low-wage workers in places like Foxxcon and garment factories that burn down in places like Bangladesh[9], there is no evidence that we, as a people, not as a nation, actually ended slavery in the truest sense. Just because all of these laborers are being paid in a free market manner, it’s pennies on the dollar, and the wages never allow these folks to push themselves up to another class. They live and die for their work. Similarly, we spend all of our good years working the majority of our waking hours away, bound to credit payments to protect our families. It is bondage by interest that has enslaved the poor citizens and eroded the middle class.

For fifty years following the death of Lincoln, legislators in Congress, both State and Federal, enacted numerous slave-grabbing laws.[10] And corporations began a rise to power that included forming a central bank, enacting a policy of corporations as people.[11]

Consider that all forms of Democracy, spanning thousands of years, always involved slavery and a non-voting second-class residents. Starting with the brilliant Ancient Greeks, the powerful Romans, and the Founding Fathers, second-class citizenry continued until just fifty years ago, when not everyone had proper voting rights. Less than one hundred years ago, women could not vote. So when you think about it, it was always that top 1% in control of things. Always.

The single crowning eyeball of the pyramid on a dollar bill watches over the immovable huddled masses.

No wonder conservatives always use the slippery slope argument when it comes to enacting liberal social or economic policy in this country. Because they saw it happen and fought it hard! First slavery was abolished, then women could vote, then former slaves could own property, etc. But now conservatives use that slippery slope to argue gay marriage, assuming the slippery slope means, in the long run, enacting laws to protect the peoples right to marry and have sex with animals.[12]

That fear of giving one right leads to myriad more is certainly what led to the rise of the corporation after Lincoln, to consolidate resources, because rich men can be taken down, but rich men incorporated with other rich men: that’s a power-house. And after decades of consolidating power to deal with the freed slaves, and two world-wars won by negro soldiers, everything was going along so cool in the post-war era with everyone in their proper place, until those same negroes started wanting to integrate and even vote.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there has been a tremendous rise in class division, traceable to Federal economic policy, as if to maintain that last grain of slavery in this country. Consolidation of financial resources marks a fifty-year span after the death of John F. Kennedy.[13]

Upon reflection, these fifty years are the first fifty years of really existing democracy. If all “great” democracies had a non-voting class, then this democracy was merely a farce and continues to be, because these years following the death of Hitler and social integration has also involved the widespread implementation of communication technology to influence the thoughts, minds, and values of Americans, to control those votes and economic patterns.

Because the ruling class was actually threatened by the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Voting Rights Act of 1965, they have done everything in their power to control resources. Once the resources were under control, there came a new advent that threatened everything: the World Wide Web.

The Telecommunication Act of 1996 [14] was a bipartisan success in deregulating telecommunication business and ushered a new wave of innovation and start-ups that excited the world with a conviction that the free flow of information and media would be the true democratizing factor we’ve been waiting for and could possibly usher a new era of world peace during the economically roaring nineties. Some felt that way. It was true. But those folks were not aware of the powers that be, dormant, waiting to strike a whole new set of policies to protect the ruling class from such abundance of wealth and information.

In a way, it was too successful. The World Wide Web was too free. Companies would not be able to maintain the existing power dynamics if anybody could communicate anything in a free, encrypted way that supported the same protection to privacy that our Forefathers provided (for their white male voting class) but they had no idea that something like the internet would ever exist under a truly equal class system.

Something had to be done and it all started with Y2K.[15] This event scared the world, leading many to believe computers had the power to disrupt everything in our lives and were beyond our control. This fear has powerful implications upon our consciousness. One year later, the scariest thing ever happened: 9/11. And this thing has not let us go, now twelve years later, we still live with that as the basis of our national security policies, especially as it relates to information.

What this event led to was the PATRIOT Act.[16] Within five years of opening the world up to free-flowing information, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 managed to convince that world that information must be under the watchful eye of a benevolent government. Just as the cause to defeat the Nazis and Japanese led Americans in to believing that a government should take out enemies of democracy, so it is being done with capitalism as the cause. Remember that Bush said, in essence, “Shop. Or the terrorists win.” It wasn’t about freedom and democracy, it was about economics.

By the way, there is no better way to conceal documents and sweep away data than a total demolition. I use the term “terrorist attacks of 9/11” just as the mainstream media does, because it does not denote who did it, just that it was terrorism. Indeed it was.

The “perpetrators” (accused) are still sitting at Guantanamo Bay, hungry.[17] Isn’t it interesting that we have a list of guilty parties, yet no court has tried them? I really do not make any claims about who was behind it, but I can say this with confidence: it was the same powers that have been controlling the so-called free markets for the last one hundred and fifty years. And no doubt, there is collusion with Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden. But to call it a day with the official story without trying and convicting the accused: that’s a conspiracy theory, not a fact.

It’s a preposterous notion, in fact. There is a mountain of evidence against the official report[18] yet Obama has gone on the record to say in essence not to look beyond it for the facts of 9/11. [19] I would say also to Obama, that there are facts as determined by more than 1600 engineers that are also to be dealt with.[19b] 

The Reichstag Fire[20] is speculated—if not proven—to be the event that started the march toward a military state in Germany. Hitler’s scene manufactured information to limit civil liberties in defense of terrorism at home. Many people believe American knowledge of this vicious political tactic has been employed numerous times by the USA, especially in the case of Pearl Harbor[21] . The term used for this sort of manipulation is False Flag. Some are saying even the Newtown shooting was a False Flag, with conspiracy theorists citing conspicuous video interviews and even bizarro correlations to the Dark Knight Aurora, Colorado massacre.[22]

“You can’t handle the truth!” – A Few Good Men

What is appropriate about that quote and that scene altogether, and why it is used over and over, is that it communicated what had become standard military policy and standard ethics in political persuasion. Lincoln sacrificed the lives of Americans because it justified the absolute freedom of all men after it as well as preserving the unity of our country. Once that blood is on your hands as a nation, you can justify other killing in the name of saving lives. Perhaps even the sacrifice of men at Pearl Harbor meant saving many more lives from the clutches of Hitler. That is the contemporary moral–it was also the Roman moral.

Why did Jeb and George Bush Sr. visit Obama behind closed doors, unannounced immediately after his second inauguration, to report merely that they had a friendly chat? And why has his momentum on so many important things that he fought for as a Senator and with in the first term been dashed in the second?[23]

Frankly, I think of Barack Obama as a Walter White character. He starts with good intentions but once he learns how the business runs, his instincts for survival kick in and he suddenly breaks bad with that information, the power of it. And he is so smart that he is perfectly following the logic of the situation he is in, rather than the ethical. But I digress.

Obama is now leading the front on using war powers like Lincoln to get away with certain political agendas. And his Administration has enjoyed the Patriot Act to install permanent data collection systems to spy on the entire world: PRISM.[24]

Oil was never the reason for 9/11, Iraq, or Afghanistan. It was information. Because information is what Tesla had about the capacity for electricity to free us from energy dependence on oil or coal–or peat as it was in the middle ages. And without the Internet or a universally literate society, it was easy to stifle that data and ruin Tesla’s career, to sabotage his experiments and let him burn out. Indeed, even Edison faced threats just for developing batteries for home-energy systems—many of which were modeled for use with gasoline generators. Edison and his buddy Henry Ford were ruthless capitalists, but if we were living in their future today, there would be more equity and most likely your home would be off the grid and driving electric cars. Because we forget so easily when the information is not in our face that our great grandparents were riding in electric taxis in Manhattan and riding electric trollies in Los Angeles.

The political situation is such today that when a nation like Syria has a civil war going, the United States is expected to intervene–even when it doesn’t support either side. Same with Egypt. It’s always helping Israel, which helps secure American interests. And what about Africa and other nations of civil war and genocide? That’s why isolationism needs a revival, a revamping, a 2.0 model. It’s a situation like that which make Obama frustrated, because sometimes I think his primary objective is like Lincoln, to end civil war, to end wars in the middle east, and to leave his administration in peace time. And that is admirable.

If the powers that be however continue to influence politics and politics walks hand in hand with capitalism, protecting it with force, and the PRISM system perpetuates a climate of paranoia, then of course they would be happy to let us believe that oil is the game and not Big Data. Allow the rampant use of misinformation within the dissenting parties and let them distract the people they claim to be enlightening from the real game: Data. Because even though greed for oil makes the powers look bad, at least it’s not the truth.

And the economic depression we are currently in is entirely about consolidating the financial systems until the point that Internet and media systems are truly under control. This way capital-democracy can manage the markets with the Data. This could only go down if the lines between capitalism and government are totally blurred. Mitt Romney would be the perfect president to fully blur that line. At least Obama can be convinced by the people to remember who he is–if we can remember who we are. But his recent speeches have been him telling us who we are. 

Imagine a society where lawyers are not needed because the powers of Google are used to help you find applicable laws and protections that previously only a lawyer with that magnificent bookshelf could find.

Imagine a society where journalists are independent investigators and have the same distribution potential that live TV news has.

Our classist economic system depends upon the ethic of profit over people; profiting on the base standards of existence: food, energy, shelter. It seems like folks can justify almost anything, if the pay is right.

Imagine a world where “scarcity” doesn’t exist, because information has been freed, the people have been empowered to grow their own food, generate their own energy, and build efficient, long-lasting homes. It’s bizarre that with so many unemployed people, we aren’t doing that kind of stuff. But so long as the powers keep us “logging in” almost exclusively to Facebook, despite the enormity of the World Wide Web, I am afraid we will continue under this, and so long as we champion guys like Mark Zuckerberg, we believe that we can achieve by hustling others.

But I do know in my heart, gut, and mind, that the Dark Age is precisely marked by three thousand years of misinformation since the fall of the early egalitarian civilizations. I am sure I could write pages on that, but you know it. One word: Galileo. The Internet marks the end of that era of misinformation, the rise of science, and the dispelling of superstition. But the powers scramble and fight until the last gasp. Look around you: it’s falling apart. Nobody is satisfied with Obama, and even fewer like the GOP. The parties are fractious and the extremists on both sides are finding common ground with civil liberties, which is not a good sign. We’re learning that we can do better. But we the people don’t, because we’re not hungry enough. Not yet anyway.[25]