Jade Helm, Walmart and Martial Law — Dust off Your Tin Foil Hat

What better way to spice up a cool, cloudy Monday than with the hottest conspiracy theory circulating on the Internet? This summer, between July 15 and September 15, elite service members from all four branches of the military will be conducting exercises throughout the Southwest, including Southern California, in an operation called Jade Helm 15.

The U.S. Army Special Operations Command said the exercise is designed to train special units to “successfully conduct worldwide operations in support of our nation’s interests.” This is the kind of vague gobbledygook that you might expect from the military, but it should be noted that these types of operations have been conducted before in various areas of the U.S., although this one is the largest to date.

Since the first mentions of Jade Helm, conspiracy theorists across the Internet have been telling anyone who will listen that this is the prelude to martial law in America. This seems a severe stretch of the imagination to me. Obama? Martial law? I don’t think so. However, there is a tantalizing sidebar to all of this that will only add fuel to the conspiracy fire.

Last week Walmart closed five stores on the same day, two in Texas, one in California, one in Oklahoma and one in Florida. The official excuse for shutting down the stores (and putting nearly 2000 people on unemployment) was plumbing problems. This response was met with skepticism, which was heightened when reporters found that none of the affected stores had applied for any plumbing permits from their respective municipalities.

Fast forward to today. A woman with a video camera went to the Pico Rivera, California store to check things out. That store has kept its pharmacy open to allow people with prescriptions there to continue getting their meds. The first thing she noted was that there were police cruisers parked at every entrance and exit to the Walmart. She then went into the section of the store that was open. There she found that shelving had been erected around the pharmacy that blocked any view of the rest of the store. She was eventually kicked out because she wasn’t filling a prescription.

There you go. There will be a huge military exercise in the Southwest this summer where four Walmarts closed unexpectedly and are under police guard. I seriously doubt that plumbing repairs would require that level of security. What’s really going on? I have no idea, but stay tuned.

The last thing America’s elites want to do is wake the sleeping giant

One of the longest running and most oft repeated conspiracy theories is that the American government is actively preparing to institute martial law or impose a national clamp down on dissent and arrest critics of the government, throwing them into FEMA-built concentration camps. This is the historical foundation of the survivalist movement and a tenet of a variety of other ultra conservative/Christian groups in this country. Conviction in this theory has grown markedly since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

To most people, the idea just seems plain nutty. Few can conceive of the American government attacking its own citizens in such a manner. I’m not one of those people. From the McCarthy era of the 1950s to the present day, our government has worked day and night to silence critics, whistleblowers and anyone who would seriously challenge the American hegemony. The Bush and Obama administrations have consistently punished or tired to punish the whistleblowers, not those involved in illegal activities. “National security” has become a catchall excuse for numerous undemocratic activities by the surveillance state.

However, do I believe the government will send troops into the streets of America’s cities and round up and jail dissidents en masse? I don’t think so, not out of any love for, or adherence to, democratic principals, but rather because America’s elites won’t allow it.

If you think about it, this country’s wealthy and powerful .01 percent have never had it better. They are making money hand over fist due to an economy rigged in their favor. They enjoy numerous tax loopholes that allow them to pay little or no taxes. Thanks to the Supreme Court, they can essentially buy their political candidates a seat in Congress. And the companies they run have the luxury of going anywhere in the world to exploit cheap labor. They know that the slumbering masses are far more concerned with which couple gets kicked off of Dancing With the Stars than who represents them in Congress, and I think they would like to keep it that way.

The last thing America’s privileged minority wants is to wake the sleeping giant of people currently placated by the entertainment industry and illusions of control.

Our government lies constantly, but that’s no reason to believe in conspiracy theories

There are some very contradictory and confused arguments in an article in today’s Salon, “America’s Conspiracy Mania: Why Ebola and 9/11 truthers reflect a tortured history.” The strange angle the author takes is that if the government would just stop lying to Americans so much, we might not have so many crazy conspiracy theories. Okay… Good luck with that.

On the one hand, the author details a number of times the government has lied and misled the American people, on the other, he flippantly dismisses the possibility that the government has lied about other issues, such as 9/11.

There is a long history of real U.S. government conspiracies, from the CIA’s Tuskegee syphilis experiments to dosing unsuspecting citizens with LSD to the fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident to illegal mass surveillance by the NSA. But according to the author, there’s no reason to suspect any current conspiracy theories are legitimate.

As an example of our gullibility, the author points out that one-third of Americans polled in 2006 believed that the Bush Administration had either planned the 9/11 attacks or new about them beforehand and did nothing to stop. Perhaps, just perhaps, so many people believe this crazy conspiracy theory because there is a mountain of evidence indicating it is true.

Stigma of “conspiracy theorist” label shouldn’t stop people from questioning authority

Not long after the 1964 release of the Warren Commission Report, the official version of events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, questions started to be raised about the Report’s conclusions. As dissenting voices grew louder, the CIA coined the term “conspiracy theorists” and had its contacts in the media begin using the phrase to disparage doubters as nut jobs whose wacky theories were way out of the mainstream. It has proven to be one of the most successful propaganda operations in American history.

However, recent research is telling us a different story. Various studies are showing that there are many more people who accept so-called conspiracy theories than we are led to believe, and one 2013 research project at the University of Kent in the UK found that of the 2174 comments they collected, those who questioned the official accounts of events like the JFK assassination and 9/11 outnumbered the unquestioning group by more than two-to-one. Other studies have shown that those who accept the official versions of events tend to be more hostile and more dogmatic in their beliefs.

Victims of the CIA anti-conspiracy theory campaign can be found on the left as well as the right. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t understand how people like Rachel Maddow, who have made careers out of questioning politicians’ motives and government policies, can ridicule those who don’t accept the 9/11 Commissions findings.

There are, of course, conspiracy theorists who actually do belong in the wacko nut job column, people like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, who see complex, sinister government plots behind every event that makes news headlines. Debunkers love to point these guys as typical conspiracy theorists when they are in fact, simply loony tunes with a megaphone who appeal to a very, very thin slice of the population.

Not every conspiracy theory proves to be real, and many are patently ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean we should be cowed by demeaning names into never questioning authority. I’d rather be called a conspiracy theorist than a blindly obedient tool of the government.

We can’t trust government to police itself

One important thing the ongoing Snowden NSA revelations should make clear is that large-scale conspiracies do exist. There may have been bits and pieces leaking out and some intelligent guesses about the surveillance of Americans prior to Snowden, but without his courageous actions, we would still be largely in the dark about the illegal, unconstitutional and outrageous actions of our spy agencies.

It bothers me when people blithely lump all “conspiracy nuts” together. It has been an effective tactic, and one that government officials and the mainstream media love to use, but we the people should be smarter and more discerning than to be taken in by that. We used to depend on the news media to be the government watchdog (Edward Murrow, Jack Andersen, Woodward and Bernstein), but that is no longer the case for a lot of reasons, so it falls on the shoulders of individual citizens to risk their careers and their lives to uncover these government misdeeds.

Whether it’s 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination or any government related claim, conspiracy debunkers always ask how could all of the people involved in the conspiracy keep quiet for decades? Well, the NSA revelations demonstrate that illegal government activity involving certainly hundreds, maybe thousands of people worldwide, could be kept under wraps for nearly 10 years. If Snowden hadn’t come along, it may have gone on in secret for another 10 years.

Not all conspiracy theories are true or even believable, but we do have to acknowledge that sometimes they are very real and, if no one has the guts to poke around in the hole with a stick, they will never be revealed. Leaving the government to act without any checks and balances, as we are seeing, is an invitation to disaster.

We are living in Gordon Gekko’s America

It’s a quiet Sunday morning. A good time to reflect on things, especially after spending an hour or so immersed in the latest news the Internet has to offer. Although the sun is out in Minnesota, the climate of this country, and the rest of the world, is very dark and gloomy.

I have an interest in conspiracy theories, but that doesn’t mean I subscribe to all of them. One theory that has been growing in popularity, especially since the Da Vinci Code captured the world’s attention, is that there is a cabal of ultra wealthy individuals, some call them the Illuminati, that pull the economic strings of the international financial systems for their own benefit. This is one theory that I think overcomplicates and over romanticizes a far simpler explanation.

What I believe has happened in America to bring us to our current situation is the growth of unfettered, unrestrained, unregulated capitalism. Since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, we’ve had three Republican administrations and two pro-business Democratic presidents. During those 34 years, these corporate-friendly administrations, with the help of congress, have succumbed to the desires of the military/corporate/media complex and weakened, watered-down and done away with the regulations that were created to keep capitalism in check. As a result, Wall Street and the big banks nearly brought the world to a financial Armageddon in 2008, and there is nothing to say that won’t happen again.

At the same time this massive deregulation was taking place, campaign finance laws were also under attack, culminating in the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allowed companies to pour almost unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns. The result is a congress filled with pro-business puppets who obediently do the bidding of their deep-pocketed masters. How bad is it? House Republicans have just nominated a climate change denier to head the Science Committee’s environmental subcommittee.

None of this needed the invisible hand of a secret group of monocled European aristocrats to happen. It just needed a large enough group of wealthy, greedy, near-sighted capitalists willing to spread around greenbacks to get what they wanted. And they have. Perhaps the most prophetic catchphrase to ever come from a movie was Gordon Gekko’s pronouncement in Wall Street that, “Greed is good.” Way too many corporate leaders and spineless politicians took those words to heart, and we’ve ended up with a situation where Scrooge McDuck and a few of his friends now sit on their mountains of money while the rest of us are happy to be able to pay our monthly bills.

I don’t see a conspiracy here. It’s not nearly as romantic as the Illuminati, but I think stone cold greed has brought us to where we are today.

The government lies about everything...except 9/11

There’s an article in today’s Huffington Post that features a video of a lecture given by the legendary linguist Noam Chomsky. For some reason, during the question & answer period, someone asked him about 9/11. He then went on a tear denigrating 9/11 truthers and stating that there is absolutely no evidence the Bush administration was involved. The money quote from the article was, "There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics," he added, "but it doesn't work like that ... There's a reason there are graduate schools in these departments."

Funny thing is, Chomsky isn’t a physicist either. He doesn’t know anymore about the science or physics of what happened on 9/11 than I do. He is merely picking one group of physicists and engineers to believe over another. I wrote this in the comments section of the article. What was disturbing to me was the level of anger and vehemence you find from so many who believe 9/11 happened just the way the commission said it did. There was name calling and ad homonym attacks and ridicule. And I also find it interesting that so many lefties, people who distrust the government on so many levels, want to believe that everything happened just as the government said it did.

The corporate media has done a very good job of demonizing and marginalizing those who oppose the government’s 9/11 position.

The deep state and the death of democracy

Most progressive emags, blogs and news sources shy away from conspiracy theories such as 9/11, the JFK assassination and the like, and from their perspective, it makes sense. They’re already marginalized, and their credibility is important to their very survival, so delving into highly speculative and controversial “theories” could easily backfire and do more harm to their reputation than good.

There is one area that some might consider a conspiracy theory, however, that the progressive media has investigated and written about extensively, and that is the deep state (great in-depth article here). The deep state or shadow government consists of people we as citizens know very little about, yet who are the ones whose hands are actually on the controls of the surveillance state. This is a relatively small group of civilians and military personnel who work at the highest levels of the NSA, CIA, Department of Defense and other far less visible government organizations. They are the keepers of the secrets.

Sir Francis Bacon is attributed with coining the phase, “Knowledge is power.” This aphorism has never been so true as it is today. A small cabal of officials in Washington has the power to find out virtually anything about anyone, and that includes you, Mr. President, and you, Dianne Feinstein, and you, potential whistleblower. The deep state has the access to, and the control over, information that can ruin political careers, embarrass allies into cooperation and even bring down governments. Bearing all of this in mind, it should come as no surprise that those who could theoretically reign in the spymasters, like the president and congress, haven’t done so, and will not do so in the future.

The idea of the deep state might sound like tin foil hat stuff to some, but it really makes a lot of sense when you consider how little control we the people have over anything done in Washington these days, no matter who we elect to office. Some call it a silent coup, and that seems pretty accurate to me.

To question, or not to question, that is the question

There’s a lengthy and interesting comment thread related to “conspiracy theories” and those who believe them under a Reddit article today. Some of the comments revolve around the question of where to draw the line between what could be characterized as legitimate concerns about something and the undeniably wacky beliefs of some theorists.

I’m not sure where that line should be. There are people who believe that the Bush family and other elites are actually shape-shifting Reptilians from another planet. Crazy, right? Yet how many people in 1964 questioned the government’s story about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, the incident (that never happened) used to justify a dramatic build up of American forces in Vietnam? There may have been some, but they were probably not taken seriously and marginalized. Same thing for the rush to war in Iraq. In the 1950s, if you claimed that the CIA was conducting experiments on unsuspecting American citizens testing mind-altering drugs and bacteria strains, do you think you would have been taken seriously?

Just go back a few years. Would you have believed your neighbor if he said that the government was listening in on everyone’s phone calls and reading everyone’s emails? My point is that there are conspiracies in the real world. People who were considered nuts or anti-American for claiming that the CIA was assassinating people and overthrowing governments around the world during the 1950s were right. We can’t legitimately lump all conspiracy theorists or theories together, yet that happens all the time.

The mainstream news media is particularly guilty of ridiculing or marginalizing those who question the status quo. Subjects such as UFOs, 9/11, the Kennedy assassination and others are either ignored or laughed off as absurd. When it comes to government conspiracies, it is in Washington’s best interest to characterize questioners as being kooks who are out of touch with reality, and they get plenty of support from the press.

Conspiracy theories are just that, theories. Some theories have more evidence to support them than others. The theory of evolution has mountains of research and data behind it. The theory of alien bases on the moon does not. Yet, I think it is lazy, and sometimes dangerous, to live an unquestioning life, and I sometimes wonder who is more out of touch with reality, the people who question the official story or the people who accept as true everything they are told?

We wear our tinfoil hats proudly today

Conspiracy theorists of the world arise. Come up from your parent’s basements. Step away from the computer and your latest letter to the editor. Take a break from stalking your congressman.

Now bask in the warm glow of this victorious moment (although put on some sun screen if you burn easily).

You were right!!!

The government IS spying on you. And that’s not all. A new documentary has been released that confirms what you believed all along: The crash of TWA flight 800 was no accident. And officials may be on the verge of finding Jimmy Hoffa’s body. (UPDATE: No body was found. Of course, they could be lying about that.)

These are glorious days for us indeed. Now you can hold your head up high at this summer’s family picnic and tell Uncle (you-can’t-really-believe-that) Al to go eat a pickle. This Christmas you won’t have to sit in a corner drinking in anger at your family’s collective ignorance of the nefarious goals of the Trilateral Commission.

You were right.

Breath in the sweet aroma of vindication.

But don’t become complacent. We still have work to do. The reptilian Bush clan is still active and may try and put another member in the White House.

Stay vigilant, my friends. Stay vigilant. 

The Martial Law theory

During the past seven years, there have been any number of conspiracy theories surrounding the actions of the Bush Administration, from being involved in 9/11 to deliberately lying us into war to rigging elections. Some theories have actually proven to be true (there’s no question Bush was wearing an electronic device during his debates with Kerry), some have extremely strong circumstantial evidence (spinning pre-war intel, election tampering) and some that are supported by very weak or questionable evidence.

One conspiracy theory that refuses to die is that BuschCo is planning to use some devastating tragedy in the United States to declare martial law before the 2008 elections. Over the years, bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence have been uncovered to suggest that this may in fact be a plan, but not nearly enough sway large numbers of people or the media. Progressive BlogGod Kos has dismissed the idea as nonsense.

My opinion on the martial law theory has always been, “hard to imagine, but I wouldn’t put anything past them.” The depths of deception to which people like Cheney, Rove and Bush will plunge knows no bottom. These have proven to be dangerous people in very influential positions.

An article in the latest issue of The Progressive raises the specter of the martial law theory once again. In “Exclusive! The FBI Deputizes Business” written by Matthew Rothschild, the author delves into a little-known partnership between private industry and the F.B.I and the Department of Homeland Security. The partnership is known as Infraguard, and its purpose is to keep essential private enterprises running during a terrorist attack or national crises…including martial law.

So the heads of companies critical to keeping the country’s infrastructure operating during a crises (transportation, agriculture, telecommunications, public health, etc.) receive early warning updates from the F.B.I on potential threats prior to the general public. At the same time, these companies are asked to report to the F.B.I any suspicious activity they might encounter.

It’s a fascinating and frightening article that everyone should read, but what it has to say about the martial law theory is extremely important. Here is a key passage:

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.
But that’s not all.

“Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.

The author has confirmed from others that this was in fact what was talked about at the meeting. More circumstantial evidence, I know, but when it comes to the Bush Administration, we cant’ put anything past them.