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Deal Welcoming US Military into Philippines Slammed as ‘Betrayal’

The U.S. and Philippine governments have agreed on a 10-year pact to open this southeast Asian country to more U.S. troops, warships, and fighter planes, flouting the people’s movements that booted the U.S. military from its permanent Philippine bases over twenty years ago.

“We have lost too much because of the U.S. military presence in our country,” Bernadette Ellorin, Chairperson of BAYAN-USA—an alliance of Filipino organizations in the U.S, toldCommon Dreams. “The Philippines has long history of protests against militarization. The protests now are only going to grow.”

The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement was announced Sunday by the White House and confirmed by two anonymous Philippine officials speaking to the Associated Press.

According to AP, which obtained a Philippine government primer, the accord “would give American forces temporary access to selected military camps and allow them to preposition fighter jets and ships.” The primer did not specify how many U.S. troops will be deployed.

The agreement will be signed on Monday before President Barack Obama arrives on a two-day visit to Manila. The deal comes in the midst of Obama’s tour of the Asia-Pacific region, in what is widely seen as a bid to secure a U.S. military “pivot” to the region and push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a so-called “free trade” deal that has been slammed as “corporate colonialism.”

Critics say the U.S. economic and military agenda in the Asia-Pacific is aimed at securing dominance over the region and hedging against China. “Militarization is always the other side of economic intervention,” said Ellorin.

Throughout the Asia-Pacific, and in cities across the U.S., Obama’s trip has been met with protests. “Even before Obama is planned to arrive, they already started holding protests at the U.S. embassy in Manilla, and they were met with violent reaction from security forces,” said Ellorin.

For over 100 years, social movements in the Philippines have opposed U.S. power over their country, which includes more than five decades of direct colonial rule and the backing of brutal dictator Ferdinand Marcos — who was president from 1965 to 1986 until he was overthrown by a popular movement.

Even after Philippine independence, the U.S. maintained a heavy presence of bases and troops, despite widespread opposition to the environmental and social harm they spread, which includes numerous incidents of sexual assaults and rape perpetrated against civilians.

Social movements forced the Philippine government to shut down the last permanent U.S. bases in the country in 1992. However, the U.S. currently sends 500 troops to the southern Philippines annually for so-called counter-terrorism purposes, while 6,500 come each year for training, according tothe Philippine military.

Obama has aggressively pushed to expand this military presence as part of the U.S. military’s “re-balancing” to the Asia-Pacific. The U.S. and Philippine governments have levied U.S. humanitarian response to Typhoon Haiyan to build support for a buildup.

“This is treachery from the Philippines government and a betrayal of our territorial integrity by taking a subservient role to imperialists,” said Ellorin.

She added, “In 1992, it was the people’s movement that ousted the U.S. from two permanent bases. We did it once we can do it again.”

The Crime of Peaceful Protest

NEW YORK—Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.

The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, “This debate is going to end.” He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

The trial of McMillan, 25, is one of the last criminal cases originating from the Occupy protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, has relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that come with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was not only about battling back against the rise of a corporate oligarchy that has sabotaged our democracy and made war on the poor and the working class. It was also about our right to peaceful protest. The police in cities across the country have been used to short-circuit this right. I watched New York City police during the Occupy protests yank people from sidewalks into the street, where they would be arrested. I saw police routinely shove protesters and beat them with batons. I saw activists slammed against police cars. I saw groups of protesters suddenly herded like sheep to be confined within police barricades. I saw, and was caught up in, mass arrests in which those around me were handcuffed and then thrown violently onto the sidewalk. The police often blasted pepper spray into faces from inches away, temporarily blinding the victims. This violence, carried out against nonviolent protesters, came amid draconian city ordinances that effectively outlawed protest and banned demonstrators from public spaces. It was buttressed by heavy police infiltration and surveillance of the movement. When the press or activists attempted to document the abuse by police they often were assaulted or otherwise blocked from taking photographs or videos. The message the state delivered is clear: Do not dissent. And the McMillan trial is part of the process.

McMillan, who spent part of her childhood living in a trailer park in rural Texas and who now is a graduate student at The New School for Social Research in New York, found herself with several hundred other activists at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan in March 2012 to mark the six-month anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street. The city, fearing the re-establishment of an encampment, deployed large numbers of police officers to clear the park just before midnight of that March 17. The police, heavily shielded, stormed into the gathering in fast-moving lines. Activists were shoved, hit, knocked to the ground. Some ran for safety. More than 100 people were arrested on the anniversary. After the violence, numerous activists would call the police aggression perhaps the worst experienced by the Occupy movement. In the mayhem McMillan—whose bruises were photographed and subsequently were displayed to Amy Goodman on the “Democracy Now!” radio, television and Internet program—was manhandled by a police officer later identified as Grantley Bovell. [Click here to see McMillan interviewed on “Democracy Now!” She appears in the last 10 minutes of the program.]

Bovell, who was in plainclothes and who, according to McMillan, did not identify himself as a policeman, allegedly came up from behind and grabbed McMillan’s breast—a perverse form of assault by New York City police that other female activists, too, suffered during Occupy protests. McMillan’s elbow made contact with his face, just below the eye, in what she says appeared to be a reaction to the grope; she says she has no memory of the incident. By the end of the confrontation she was lying on the ground bruised, beaten and convulsing. She was taken to a hospital emergency room, where police handcuffed her to a bed.

Had McMillan not been an Occupy activist, the trial that came out of this beating would have been about her receiving restitution from New York City for police abuse. Instead, she is charged with felony assault in the second degree and facing up to seven years in prison. She is expected to take the witness stand this week.

McMillan’s journey from a rural Texas backwater to a courtroom in New York is a journey of political awakening. Her parents, divorced when she was small, had little money. At times she lived with her mother, who had jobs at a Dillard’s department store, as an accountant for a pool hall and later, after earning a degree, as a registered nurse doing shifts of 60 to 70 hours in hospitals and nursing homes. There were also painful stretches of unemployment. Her mother, from Mexico, was circumspect about revealing her ethnicity in the deeply white conservative community, one in which blacks and other minorities were not welcome. She never taught her son and daughter Spanish. As a girl McMillan saw her mother struggle with severe depression and, in one terrifying instance, taken to a hospital after she passed out from an overdose of prescription pills. For periods, McMillan, her brother and her mother survived on welfare, and they moved often; she attended 13 schools, including five high schools. Her father worked at a Domino’s Pizza shop, striving in vain to become a manager.

Racism was endemic in the area. There was a sign in the nearby town of Vidor, not far from the Louisiana state line, that read: “If you are dark get out before dark.” It had replaced an earlier sign that said: “Don’t let the sun set on your ass nigger.”

The families around the McMillans struggled with all the problems that come with poverty—alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic and sexual violence and despair. Cecily’s brother is serving a seven-year sentence for drug possession in Texas.

“I grew up around the violence of poverty,” she told me as she lit another cigarette while I interviewed her Thursday night in an apartment in Harlem. She smoked nearly nonstop during our conversation. “It was normative.”

Her parents worked hard to fit into the culture of rural Texas. She said she competed as a child in a beauty pageant called Tiny Miss Valentines of Texas. She was on a cheerleading team. She ran track.

“My parents tried,” McMillan said. “They wanted to give us everything. They wanted us to have a lifestyle we could be proud of. My parents, because we were … at times poor, were ashamed of who we were. I asked my mother to buy Tommy Hilfiger clothes at the Salvation Army and cut off the insignias and sew them onto my old clothes. I was afraid of being made fun of at school. My mother got up at 5 in the morning before work and made us pigs in a blanket, putting the little sausages into croissants. She wanted my brother and myself to be proud of her. She really did a lot with so very little.” 

McMillan spent most of her summers with her paternal grandparents in Atlanta. They opened her to another world. She attended a Spanish-language camp. She went to blues and jazz festivals. She attended a theater summer camp called Seven Stages that focused on cultural and political perspectives. When she was a teenager she wrote collective theater pieces, including one in which she wore the American flag as a burka and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a character dressed as Darth Vader walked onto the stage. “My father was horrified,” she said. “He walked out of the theater.”

As a 13-year-old she was in a play called “I Hate Anne Frank.” “It was about American sensationalism,” she said. “It asked how the entire experience of the Holocaust could be turned for many people into a girl’s positive narrative, a disgusting false optimism. It was not well received.”

Art, and especially theater, awakened her to the realities endured by others, from Muslims in the Middle East to the black underclass in the United States. And, unlike in the Texas towns where she grew up, she made black friends in Atlanta. She began to wonder about the lives of the African-Americans who lived near her in rural Texas. What was it like for them? How did they endure racism? Did black women suffer the way her mother suffered? She began to openly question and challenge the conventions and assumptions of the white community around her. She read extensively, falling in love with the work of Albert Camus.

“I would miss bus stops because I would be reading ‘The Stranger’ or ‘The Plague,’ ” she said. “Existentialism to me was beautiful. It said the world is shit. It said this is the lot humanity is given. But human beings have to try their best. They swim and they swim and they swim against the waves until they can’t swim any longer. You can choose to view these waves as personal attacks against you and give up, or you can swim. And Camus said you should not sell out for a lifeboat. These forces are impersonal. They are structural. I learned from Camus how to live and how to die with dignity.”

She attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., under a scholarship. After graduating, she worked as a student teacher in inner-city schools in Chicago. She joined the Young Democratic Socialists. She enrolled at The New School for Social Research in New York City in the fall of 2011 to write a master’s thesis on Jane Addams, Hull House and the settlement movement. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began in the city six days after she arrived at the school. She said that at first she was disappointed with the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park. She felt it lacked political maturity. She had participated in the political protests in Madison, Wis., in early 2011, and the solidarity of government workers, including police, that she saw there deeply influenced her feelings about activism. She came away strongly committed to nonviolence.

“Police officers sat down to occupy with us,” she said of the protests in Madison. “It was unprecedented. We were with teachers, the fire department, police and students. You walked around saying thank you to the police. You embraced police. [But then] I went to Occupy in New York and saw drum circles and people walking around naked. There was yoga. I thought, what is this? I thought for many protesters this was just some social experiment they would go back to their academic institutions and write about. Where I come from people are hungry. Women are getting raped. Fathers and stepfathers beat the shit out of children. People die. … Some people would rather not live.”

“At first I looked at the occupiers and thought they were so bourgeois,” she went on. “I thought they were trying to dress down their class by wearing all black. I was disgusted. But in the end I was wrong. I wasn’t meeting them where they were. These were kids, some of whom had been to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, [who] were the jewels of their family’s legacy. They were doing something radical. They had never been given the opportunity to have their voices heard, to have their own agency. They weren’t clowns like I first thought. They were really brave. We learned to have conversations. And that was beautiful. And these people are my friends today.”

She joined Occupy Wall Street’s Demands Working Group, which attempted to draw up a list of core demands that the movement could endorse. She continued with her academic work at The New School for Social Research. She worked part time. She was visiting her grandmother, who was terminally ill in Atlanta, in November 2011 when the police cleared out the Zuccotti Park encampment. When she returned to the New School she took part in the occupation of school buildings, but some occupiers trashed the property, leading to a bitter disagreement between her and other activists. Radical elements in the movement who supported the property destruction held a “shadow trial” and condemned her as a “bureaucratic provocateur.”

“I started putting together an Affinity Group after the New School occupation,” she said. “I realized there was a serious problem between anarchists and socialists and democratic socialists. I wanted, like Bayard Rustin, to bring everyone together. I wanted to repair the fractured left. I wanted to build coalitions.”

McMillan knows that the judge in her trial—who in one comment on the lawyers’ judge-rating website The Robing Room is called “a prosecutor with a robe”—has stacked the deck against her.

The British newspaper The Guardian reported that Bovell, the policeman who McMillan says beat her, has been investigated at least twice by the internal affairs department of the New York City Police Department. In one of these cases, Bovell and his partner were sued for allegedly using an unmarked police car to strike a 17-year-old fleeing on a dirt bike. The teenager said his nose was broken, two teeth were knocked out and his forehead was lacerated. The case was settled out of court for a substantial amount of money. The officer was also captured on a video that appeared to show him kicking a suspect on the floor of a Bronx grocery.

In addition, Bovell was involved in a ticket-fixing scandal in his Bronx precinct.

Austin Guest, 33, a graduate of Harvard University who was arrested at Zuccotti Park on the night McMillan was assaulted, is suing Bovell for allegedly intentionally banging his head on the internal stairs of an MTA bus that took him and other activists in for processing.

The judge has ruled that Bovell’s involvement in the cases stemming from the chasing of the youth on the dirt bike and the Guest arrest cannot be presented as evidence in the McMillan case.

The corporate state, which has proved utterly incapable of addressing the grievances and injustices endured by the underclass, is extremely nervous about the mass movements that have swept the country in recent years. And if protests erupt again—as I think they will—the state hopes it will have neutralized much of the potential leadership. Being an activist in peaceful mass protest is the only real “crime” McMillan has committed. 

“Everyone should come and sit through this trial to see the facade that we call democracy,” she said. “The resources one needs to even remotely have a chance in this system are beyond most people. Thank God I went to college and graduate school. Thank God Marty and Rebecca are my lawyers. Thank God I am an organizer and have some agency. I wait in line every day to go to court. I read above my head the words that read something like ‘Justice Is the Foundation of Democracy.’ And I wonder if this is ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ People of color, people who are poor, the people where I come from, do not have a chance for justice. Those people have no choice but to plea out. They can never win in court. I can fight it. This makes me a very privileged person. It is disgusting to think that this is what our democracy has come to. I am heartbreakingly sad for our country.”

Safety Failures Pervasive at Site of Mysterious Nuclear Leak

The airborne radiation leak at a federally-owned New Mexico nuclear waste dump that “was never supposed to leak” was caused by poor management, a dismal safety culture, and structural failures, according to the U.S. government’s own investigation released Thursday.

The 302-page report (pdf) from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Accident Investigation Board finds that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico was plagued by a lack of “rigorous” internal safety measures by Nuclear Waste Partnership, the contractor that operates the facility.

Furthermore, the report charges, the NWP and the Carlsbad Field Office of the Department of Energy “have allowed the safety culture at the WIPP project to deteriorate, and as a result workers “do not feel comfortable” speaking up about and documenting problems and dangers. “Questioning attitudes are not welcomed by management and many issues and hazards do not appear to be readily recognized by site personnel.”

Investigators acknowledge they still do not know the cause of the leak that started February 14th and sent radioactive particles into the air, exposing at least 21 workers to radiation and alarming nearby residents. The release of radiation followed an underground fire on February 5th that forced the evacuation of the facility and sent six workers to the hospital with smoke inhalation-related injuries.

Don Hancock, Director of the Nuclear Waste Program at the Southwest Research and Information Center, told Common Dreams that though the report is damaging for the DOE and others, it fails to satisfactorily answer several key questions.

“They don’t explain, for example, how much the contractor is being paid,” said Hancock. “And they don’t discuss why the contractor was hired if they can’t do the job and why we the tax payers are paying them to do such a poor job.”

In addition, the report indicates that the radioactive leak was short-lived without adequate evidece to back up that claim, charges Hancock.

“Why didn’t they provide more detail about how the 21 workers were contaminated?” he added, referring to charges that workers were sent back to the site with inadequate protections after the leak was known to have occurred. “DOE bureaucrats have stated that workers’ exposure levels were safe, but there are no doctors who specialize in treating people with internal radiation exposure who have spoken publicly on the subject.”

The only deep-earth dump for radioactive waste in the U.S., WIPP remains closed, leaving radioactive waste across the country stranded, including 19 radioactive shipments that are currently being stored above-ground at the waste handling building at the WIPP facility.

“The report is filled with deficiencies,” said Hancock. “And it’s not news that there are major contractor and management problems, oversight problems, and a bad safety culture. People have been saying that for a long time.”

Crisis actors, smoke bombs, fake blood and literal “smoke and mirrors” were all part of what was the false flag terrorist attack called the Boston Marathon Bombing. To anyone who saw the pictures and footage of fake blood, make- up artists and smiling “victims”. It was obvious that something was not right. For those involved in filmmaking and in the know the discrepancies were obvious. We spoke to famous Hollywood filmmaker, producer and director Nathan Folks about why he is certain the Boston Marathon Bombing was a false flag terrorist attack.

Robles: Hello Sir.

Folks: Hi, how are you?

Robles: I’m very well. How are you?

Folks: Very good.

Robles: That’s nice to hear especially after everything you have been through. Now your story is going way-back. It started with the Boston Bombing. If you can tell our listeners a little bit about what you know about that “event” and what has happened to you since.

Folks: Back in 2013 I was watching the events unfold and as a producer, you can pinpoint very specific things that didn’t seem right. And I started to realize that we are watching yet another false flag event unfold. And as I started putting the pieces together I realized that we are up against an environment that is trying to create a fear factor in the media. And the fear factor is to keep us scared and to keep us in fear as long as they can.

And the events that I know to be true, including the “Boston hero” who was a person in my last film, “The prosecution of an American president” and his wife, I started to recognize that this was not an event that was at all 100% true.

Robles: What about this Boston hero? What role did he play?

Folks: He is actually a father that had lost a son in the Iraq War and he was part of our film and a part of the movement, you know, of exposing the truth about Iraq and talking about the things that the Bush Administration did during those years of his administration.

And I was blown away at the fact that he was essentially being used to act in this fake environment, this hyper-reality scene of a terrorism that never happened.

Robles: Now, can you tell us three things here if you could. You used the term “Hyper-Reality” what is that and how is it used? And what is a “Crisis Actor”? Many people may still not know what that is. And if you could, detail for the listeners, some of the things that you saw as far as screens being put up as for the false stages being set up where things were filmed and stuff?

Folks: I will start up by saying that if there was an injury or a death in the event that unfolded my heart goes out to those families. But from the people that I know that were involved, from the people that were in the scenes that we call Hyper-Reality Filmmaking, which is a very common thing you do in the military.

It’s where filmmakers, or people, create a hyper-reality scene so that the military can be well-adjusted to a real scene in Iraq or any other kind of war zone.

This is where these people are actually able to see and feel and help what they think is a real injured person whereas it is really just an amputee that is playing as a crisis actor, and (in this case) a crisis actor being someone that had lost their limbs but a makeup artist has been able to re-enact a bloody scene with “no leg blown off” and this hyper reality scene, so that when we are now on the ground, they actually see and feel like they are in a war zone.

And I’m watching this unfold on the streets of Boston and thinking, one: how were they able to get away with that? And two: watching the edits and the supposedly live television broadcasting we were seeing, it wasn’t “live” at all, it was edited.

Robles: How you know? What did you see? What were the clues you saw?

Folks: Well, there were a lot of things. In live footage you don’t see cuts. You know, cutting from one scene to another and in live footage you don’t have, especially now, this wasn’t in 2013 HD technology, this was in old technology from 2002, because it is grainer and you can’t see the edits as well.

As a filmmaker that what I would do if I was trying to reenact something like that and…

Robles: I’m sorry. Can you be more specific? I didn’t quite follow that. So it was made using old technology?

Folks: It’s using an older technology that is grainer. So you can’t see the very true HD quality and you are watching… If you look back at any old footage from early 2000 or even the 1990s, it is very grainy and when you are watching it on a new technology television with latest plasma and HD and any kind of new technology you can see that it was edited.

Robles: So television stations at that time, they were using modern technology?

Folks: They were definitely using modern technology last year. It’s just when you see pictures from 2013 that were in HD and then you look at clips and cuts of the footage from television, it is very obvious that it was used on purpose.

Robles: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the scenes. I’m sure a lot of people who were interested in what really happened, they saw some of the pictures, for example: the amputee with sticks, apparently sticking out of his legs or something, and blood that looked like paint, I mean, I have seen blood, I worked in a hospital, I know what blood looks like, it’s dark, it’s brownish red and this was this bright red paint. Can you tell us about that?

Folks: I think even more of an obvious situation is that: you get your legs blown off you are not going to be out in front of millions of people celebrating Boston at a hockey game or any type of arena. I think the emotional impact of losing your legs would probably keep you out of the public eye for at least a year. And that was the biggest obvious example to me, but as far as anyone that has been in the paramedics or nursing would know, that if you blow your legs off, you are not supposed to moved.

If someone’s falls here on Wilshire, just falls down, they tell you not to move, they are not supposed to move them. They could have broken a bone or a neck; their spine could be dislocated. You don’t move them and you certainly don’t put them in a wheelchair and run them down the road.

And it is just taking this to a whole different comical level that the fact that they think we all buy this, and that we are all going to sit here and watch it happen over and over again, you know, they have another thing coming. That’s why I joined forces with the Worldwide Wave of Action because you know; the truth has to come out. And people are not going to sit here and watch them make a mockery of ourselves.

Everybody around the world knows Boston Bombing was a joke; everyone in the US has been fed lies and lies after lies and it started in 9-11 and it hasn’t stopped.

Robles: Can you tell us… you sent me some pictures of these screens that you could actually see the road like “moving up”, it was like a mirror or something. Can you tell us about those?

Folks: You mean as far as the 3D… the Green Screen that they used at the Boston Bombing?

Robles: Yeah, can you detail all that?

Folks: From what I understand, they… it looks to me like they used a second street in order to re-enact the scene, over and over, to get it right and by using Green Screen they were able to show the buildings that were actually on Boylston Street and when you use a Green Screen it is a lot like Titanic. In the movie Titanic in 1997 we are watching the film and we are watching this boat sink and we are watching the water fill into the boat and we see people falling off the boat. That is obviously not happening in real life, we are watching it on Green Screen. They are putting a digital layer behind the screen of real action people. And we are watching a boat sink in the background and that is what they did in this example.

They just did it on television. We are watching green screen on television to re-enact a street scene that happened for real, but just a smoke bomb but when they re-enacted the people that were hurt they had to add the blood and the amputees and to put one the makeup.

You can see the person putting makeup on these people the entire scene; I call her “The Woman in Pink”. She has literally got a makeup bag and she is going to each victim, she is not helping them! She is putting make up on them!

So I’m sorry, I’m not fooled and I’m not going to let everyone else be fooled. Someone has to speak out against it. And they can follow me, they can do whatever they want but at the end of the day the truth has to come out some time. They can’t get away with it anymore.

Robles: Now please tell us, you have been persecuted, you have been through hell, I can’t think of any other way to put it. If I can tell our listeners: you contacted me right after it happened and after that a lot of terrible things started happening to you. Can you tell us some of those things?

Folks: Well, obviously, you can’t prove anything because I was very sick. I have never been sick in my life, I have never been in the hospital, but in the days after this event and weeks after this event and me talking about it, I was in the hospital for a total of 22 days over the course of three months.

And they really couldn’t determine what it was and I couldn’t hold water, I couldn’t hold food, it was some type of poison.

I can’t say for sure that I was poisoned by someone but I can say that I had some type of poison that nearly killed me.

And it took me good 3 to 6 months to kind of rehabilitate and get back on my feet and I figured if they are trying to scare me off or they are trying to keep me down from speaking: then it was a good try but it didn’t work.

Robles: Could you tell us what has happened to some other people? There was one guy, he wrote an article, you said, questioning the reality of the Boston Bombing Marathon. And you told me about some other people who had gotten sick as well.

Folks: Yeah, there is a gentlemen that runs a website called “Natural News” and he was coming out with very similar examples that I was during that time. And just now finding out that they wrote an article about how he has gotten sick from the food, he talks about. And they took his article down and re-wrote it in the third person.

And I don’t know if he is even able to speak, but I do know that after finding some of these examples of people that were coming out at same time that I was, that they were sick and poisoned as well, makes me realize that something is going on.

Robles: When you were in the hospital you also told me some other people close to you… (Can you talk about that?) that there were some other people you knew that got sick.

Folks: Yeah, I don’t think I can go into any detail but there were several other people that had gotten sick, and that seems to be part of this coming out. Anyone that has come out about this, got sick or disappeared.

Robles: How many people have disappeared, since then?

Folks: Well, I can say that everybody that reacted to this Boston bombing, the millions and millions of people that came out on the websites, came out about the scene and about the situation, essentially were silenced because there wasn’t a word about it this year. And that just gives me more of a comforting notion that it has been silenced for someone who has gone out and done something to the people that did come out about it…

Robles: You said that Internet before we started, you said that your Internet shut down in the US, it is on lockdown or something…

Folks: I mean strange things like in one day I have a Verizon Wireless Internet and in one day over 200 GB was taken from my service, ran up 35 hundred dollar bill in a 24-hour period. And then when you contact Verizon saying that it is obviously not something that I did, they ignore me and say that I have to pay if I want my service back on. So not many people want to just pay $3,500 for no reason.

Obviously, I never turned my Internet back on. I have been working on different types of Internet on different phones but it was designed to create a situation that I would shutdown. It was a warning probably of some sort. It was so that I would stop speaking about things that I’m knowledgeable about.

Robles: You gave me a good example about Boston False Flag, if someone who did a search on Google. Can you tell us about this false bomb?

Folks: Yeah, it is just that nobody is speaking about the Boston bombing. There is nobody speaking about false flags. And in this country our web searches seem to be completely deleted. You know, during that time I downloaded everything I knew and everything I saw and I have it on hard drive and the fact that all of that is now gone and I have them on hard drive.

Robles: Everything is gone?

Folks: Somebody is trying to take it away, make it disappear. It was very bad; whoever was in charge of the Boston Bombing Campaign did a very lousy job. They need to consult with some real Hollywood producers if they are going to do anything like that again and maybe make sure that they don’t fool the nation in their process because this is absurd.

Robles: They are not very creative in doing the same thing again and again and again.

Folks: They keep getting away with it, they are getting used to be able to get with it and they are getting sloppy and eventually and as this Worldwide Wave of Action is able to expose the truth more and more, I think we are going to stop this evil that is now taking over the US and is trying to keep people in fear and using fear mongering techniques on our media.

CNN and FOX and all these media sources are not telling the truth anymore. They are more interested in talking more about artists like Justin Bieber and Lindsay Lohan going to jail than potential war in Crimea.

I mean, this is, don’t even get me starting on that because I think we all know who is behind the taunting of that situation.

So it is just becoming obvious and even though people are not speaking about it because they are scared off or because they are scared to make a name and come out and talk about it.

This is our time to re-live the 60s, this is my generation’s time to stand up and say “No more!”

And we are not going to sit here and be poisoned and be lied to and listen to this “essentially crap” that they are feeding us in our media, this is not going to happen anymore. We have to stand up and make a change.

This is John Robles, you were listening to an interview with Nathan Folks, he is a well-known US film and TV director and producer. He is also the organizer of the Worldwide Wave of Action. You can find the rest of this interview on our website voiceofrussia.com. Thank you very much for listening!

The giant hole at the heart of our market economies needs to be plugged.

And Business Insider – the world’s most popular financial news blog – is currently running this as its top two front page stories:(Read the Business Insider stories here and here.)If we reclaimed the power to create credit from the too big to fail banks, we would all be much wealthier…

Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado- two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February – have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez’s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado’s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.

These Washington agencies have also filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013 and 2014, including funding for their political campaigns in 2013 and for the current anti-government protests in 2014. This continues the pattern of financing from the US government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars were given to organizations from so-called “civil society” to execute a coup d’etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than $100 million in efforts to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following 8 years.

At the beginning of 2011, after being publically exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the OTI closed its doors inVenezuela and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the US. The flow of money to anti-government groups didn’t stop, despite the enactment by Venezuela’s National Assembly of the Law of Political Sovereignty and NationalSelf-Determinationat the end of 2010, which outright prohibits foreign funding of political groups in the country. US agencies and the Venezuelan groups that receive their money continue to violate the law with impunity. In the Obama Administration’s Foreign Operations Budgets, between $5-6 million have been included to fund opposition groups in Venezuela through USAID since 2012.

The NED, a “foundation” created by Congress in 1983 to essentially do the CIA’s work overtly, has been one of the principal financiers of destabilization in Venezuela throughout the Chavez administration and now against President Maduro. According to NED’s 2013 annual report, the agency channeled more than $2.3 million to Venezuelan opposition groups and projects. Within that figure,  $1,787,300 went directly to anti-government groups within Venezuela, while another$590,000 was distributed to regional organizations that work with and fund the Venezuelan opposition.  More than $300,000 was directed towards efforts to develop a new generation of youth leaders to oppose Maduro’s government politically.

One of the groups funded by NED to specifically work with youth is FORMA (http://www.forma.org.ve), an organization led by Cesar Briceño and tied to Venezuelan banker Oscar Garcia Mendoza. Garcia Mendoza runs the Banco Venezolano de Credito, a Venezuelan bank that has served as the filter for the flow of dollars from NED and USAID to opposition groups in Venezuela, including Sumate, CEDICE, Sin Mordaza, Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones and FORMA, amongst others.

Another significant part of NED funds in Venezuela from 2013-2014 was given to groups and initiatives that work in media and run the campaign to discredit the government of President Maduro. Some of the more active media organizations outwardly opposed to Maduro and receiving NED funds include Espacio Publico, Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), Sin Mordaza and GALI. Throughout the past year, an unprecedented media war has been waged against the Venezuelan government and President Maduro directly, which has intensified during the past few months of protests.

In direct violation of Venezuelan law, NED also funded the opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Table (MUD), via the US International Republican Institute (IRI), with $100,000 to “share lessons learned with [anti-government groups] in Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia…and allow for the adaption of the Venezuelan experience in these countries”.  Regarding this initiative, the NED 2013annual report specifically states its aim: “To develop the ability of political and civil society actors from Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia to work on national, issue-based agendas for their respective countries using lessons learned and best practices from successful Venezuelan counterparts.  The Institute will facilitate an exchange of experiences between the Venezuelan Democratic Unity Roundtable and counterparts in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Argentina. IRI will bring these actors together through a series of tailored activities that will allow for the adaptation of the Venezuelan experience in these countries.”

IRI has helped to build right-wing opposition parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and has worked with the anti-government coaltion in Venezuela since before the 2002 coup d’etat against Chavez. In fact, IRI’s president at that time, George Folsom, outwardly applauded the coup and celebrated IRI’s role in a pressrelease claiming, “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…”

Detailed in a report published by the Spanish institute FRIDE in 2010, international agencies that fund the Venezuelan opposition violate currency control laws in order to get their dollars to the recipients. Also confirmed in the FRIDE report was the fact that the majority of international agencies, with the exception of the European Commission, are bringing in foreign money and changing it on the black market, in clear violation of Venezuelan law. In some cases, as the FRIDE analysis reports, the agencies open bank accounts abroad for the Venezuelan groups or they bring them the money in hard cash. The US Embassy in Caracas could also use the diplomatic pouch to bring large quantities of unaccounted dollars and euros into the country that are later handed over illegally to anti-government groups in Venezuela.

What is clear is that the US government continues to feed efforts to destabilize Venezuela in clear violation of law. Stronger legal measures  and enforcement may be necessary to ensure the sovereignty and defense of Venezuela’s democracy.