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The intelligence bureaucracy that ate our world – Part 1

by Marvin Ramirez

Marvin J. RamirezMarvin Ramirez

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Many of you, dear readers of El Reportero, might not have any idea of what the government is really doing with all the data accumulated in their databases – our information. How much information it has about all of us and what this means for the preservation of civil liberties in this world of super high technology, where almost everything – from the TV set on which you watch your favorite soap opera to every phone call you make on your cell phone – is being recorded. And our Congress – if we can call it our Congress – is an accomplice on this rape of our liberties. The following article, that was found hidden somewhere in the internet, brings a lot of fine information for you and me to know a little bit more how we are becoming their slaves in a more and more sinister way. Most of us live our lives just coming and going to our jobs or watching our favorite ball games – like zombies, looking dumbly at our iphones, doing nothing about it. Due that this article is too long for our space availability, we have split it into two parts. This is Part One.

by Tom Engelhardt

Data mining you: how the intelligence community is creating a new American world

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism – about you and me, that is – for up to five years. (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.) This, Clapper claimed, “will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s Washington. George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words “practically and effectively,” not to speak of “mission.”

For most Americans, though, it was just life as we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terror1ists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years – or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence think it’s even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part – and it hardly made a ripple.

If Americans were to hoist a flag designed for this moment, it might read “Tread on Me” and use that classic illustration of the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant from Saint-Exupary’s The Little Prince. That, at least, would catch something of the absurdity of what the National Security Complex has decided to swallow of our American world.

Oh, and in those nine days abroad, a new word surfaced on my horizon, one just eerie and ugly enough for our new reality: yottabyte. Thank National Security Agency (NSA) expert James Bamford for that. He wrote a piece for Wired magazine on a super-secret, $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center the NSA is building in Bluffdale, Utah. Focused on data mining and code-breaking and five times the size of the U.S. Capitol, it is expected to house information beyond compare, “including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails – parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”

The NSA, adds Bamford, “has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email relamessages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net.”

Which brings us to yottabyte – which is, Bamford assures us, equivalant to septillion bytes, a number “so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.”

The Utah center will be capable of storing a yottabyte or more of information (on your tax dollar).

Large as it is, that mega-project in Utah is just one of many sprouting like mushrooms in the sunless forest of the U.S. intelligence world. In cost, for example, it barely tops the $1.7 billion headquarters complex in Virginia that the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency, with an estimated annual black budget of at least $5 billion, built for its 16,000 employees. Opened in 2011, it’s the third-largest federal building in the Washington area. (And I’ll bet you didn’t even know that your tax dollars paid for such an agency, no less its gleaming new headquarters.)

Or what about the 33 post-9/11 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work that were under construction or had already been built when Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin wrote their “Top Secret America” series back in 2010?

In these last years, while so many Americans were foreclosed upon or had their homes go “underwater” and the construction industry went to hell, the intelligence housing bubble just continued to grow. And there’s no sign that any of this seems abidingly strange to most Americans. NEXT WEEK , PART TWO: A SYSTEM THAT CREATES ITS OWN REALITY.

Final goal of the surveillance state

by Jon Rappoport

Surveillance is coming at us from all angles. Chips, drones, TSA checkpoints, smart meters, back-doored electronic products, video cameras, spying home appliances; our phone calls and emails and keystrokes and product purchases are recorded.

The government and its allied corporations will know whatever they want to know about us.

What then?

What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?

Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.

Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.

National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.

Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”

As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”

Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”

Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.

This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.

As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.

In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.

We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.

The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.

On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only humane and acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.

Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.

This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.

The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.

Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.

An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.

Surveillance; planning; control.

This is the vision.

It isn’t ours. It never was. But we are not consulted.

Instead we are made witness to watershed events: the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; the 2001 assault on the Trade Center and the Pentagon. These ops paralleled the unleashing of better and more far-ranging methods of surveillance.

We are profiled down to the threads on our clothing and DNA in our cells. But what is our profile of the technocrats and their bosses?

They are divorced from human life. They live in a vacuum. They take pleasure from that vacuum.

In 1982, I interviewed Bill Perry, who had just left his job as PR chief at Lawrence Livermore Labs, where scientists design nuclear weapons. Perry had been given the kind of job PR people long for. But one day, when he passed the desk of a researcher and listened to his plaints about budget limitations, Perry said, “Listen, America already has the means to blow up the whole planet eight times. What more do you need?”

The researcher looked up at him with a genuinely puzzled expression. He said, “You don’t understand, Bill. This is a problem in physics.”

In the same detached sense, the technocrats who want to calculate and direct our future, move by move, minute by minute, see us as components of a complex and very interesting problem.

Yes, they indeed expect to exercise power and control. But they also live in an abstraction. They deal their answers from that realm. They exercise cool passion.

They see, for example, that not every single twitch of thought of every person on earth is yet mapped, so they want to finish constructing the means by which they can chart those “missing elements.” They want to complete the formula.

They view their research as a wholly natural implication of the mathematics they can manipulate. They swim in technology and they want to extend its architecture. To abandon the program would be tantamount to denying their own intelligence. They climb the mountain because it is there.

They do perceive that one factor does not fit their algorithms: the free individual. It’s the wild card. Therefore, they are compelled to analyze freedom and break it down into DNA functions and brain processes. They assume, because they must, that the free individual is an illusory idea that flows from some older configuration of synaptic transmission, at a time in our evolution when we needed it. But now, they suppose, the engineering of human activity and thought has superseded such quaint notions. Now we all can be tracked, traced, and studied on a different and wider scale. Now we can be seen for what we really are: a hive.
Therefore, we must be instructed, within tight limits, about our various functions.

Today’s technocrats flourish with great optimism as they design the future world and its single society. If they run out of pieces of their puzzle to study, they’ll try to track the motion of every atom and electron and quark in the universe. They’ll delight in it.

Knowing all this, we know the terms of the war we are in.

The Central Planners have an equation: “free=uncontrolled =dangerous.”

By the gross terms of that equation, they lump us in with thugs and murderers and terrorists. They even see the normal functioning of the brain as a threat, as an intrinsically defective process, and they have long since decided that organ must be corrected with drugs.

We, on the other hand, must assert, in every way possible, that freedom is real and inviolable, and we must back that up with our actions.

(Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com).

Gloria Trevi biopic to be released in September

by the El Reportero’s news servicies

Gloria TrevisGloria Trevis

A film inspired by the eventful life of singer Gloria Trevi will premiere next Sept. 5 in more than 1,000 movie theaters around Mexico, the producers said.

While Trevi has expressed unhappiness over the “Gloria” project, producer Matthias Ehrenberg told a press conference that the screenplay is based on interviews she gave to journalist and playwright Sabina Berman and seeks above all to pay tribute to the singer.

“It’s an impartial story with no yellow journalism in it. Basically it’s about Gloria the celebrity, her rise to fame, what happened to her, things that go out of control and the consequences,” Ehrenberg said.

Taking the story to the screen are Sofia Espinosa as Trevi and Marco Pérez in the role of her manager Sergio Andrade.

The film includes several of Trevi’s songs because the production company acquired the rights, and will be sung by Espinosa, Ehrenberg said.

“Gloria” will screen in theaters around Mexico starting Sept. 5, Mauricio Duran Ortega, vice president of marketing and distribution at Universal Pictures in Latin America, said.

Gloria Trevi was arrested in Brazil in the year 2000, accused by a Mexican court of the kidnapping, sexual abuse and corruption of minors, together with Andrade and one of her backup singers.

After a long legal battle in Brazil, the singer was extradited to her country in 2002 and pardoned by a Mexican court two years later, after which she returned to show business.

New Robert Rodriguez TV series debuts on El Rey network

Director Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series,” a television adaptation of his popular 1996 film that starred George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino, debuted on his El Rey Network.

The series, the first original content produced for the network, is about two crazy bank-robbing brothers who are on the run after a heist that left several people dead.

The 10 one-hour episodes in the series star D.J. FranciscoCotrona as Seth Gecko, George Clooney’s character in the movie; Zane Holtz as Richie Gecko, who was played by Quentin Tarantino in the feature film; and Jesse Garcia, who plays a Texas ranger.

Don Johnson is Sheriff Earl McGraw, the role played by Michael Parks in the film version.

“From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series” looks at the start of the criminal careers of Seth and Richie, and how the FBI tried to capture them.

The brothers head for Mexico and end up in a strip club that, as in the film, turns out to be a den of vampires.

Colombian actress Celmira Luzardo dies, age 61

Colombian actress Celmira Luzardo, who pursued her career in theater, film and television and may have been best known for her role in the soap opera “Yo soy Betty, la fea,” has died in Bogota, family and friends said Thursday. She was 61.

Luzardo, the youngest of a family of actors, died Wednesday of respiratory problems, friends and relatives said Thursday via the social networks.

Luzardo stood out during the 1980s and ‘90s in several Colombian television productions and is remembered in particular for her role as Catalina Angel, a fashion designer on “Yo soy Betty, la fea.”

She also landed roles in other Colombian soap operas and TV. Luzardo, besides acting, had studied editing and production at the National Film Institute in London and filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di Cimenatografia in Italy.

Several years ago she had moved to the Caribbean island of San Andres and had distanced herself from acting.

Love me Tenderloin: Documentary film premiering at San Francisco Main Library

by the El Reportero’s staff

A scene from the theatrical, plates, with Ricardo Salinas of Culture Clash.A scene from the theatrical, plates, with Ricardo Salinas of Culture Clash.

The eclectic Tenderloin, near neighbor to cultural, civic and government buildings as well as the hotels, shopping and tourism of downtown San Francisco, is the subject of a new documentary film by Henri Quenette, premiering at the San Francisco Main Library on March 25.

Long known as the “heart” of San Francisco, the Tenderloin is a refuge for elderly, disabled and low-income working people striving to stay in the city. This area is perhaps the last frontier in SF’s ever-expanding gentrification trend. It has a high density population and visible issues with drugs.

Henri Quenette’s moving documentary film about San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, Love Me Tenderloin, shows the everyday lives of four inhabitants living in the Tenderloin: Bridchette, Arnold, Woody and Indian Joe. Through these lives, the viewer learns about the many difficulties of living in the Tenderloin.

Almost a quarter of the neighborhood’s residents live below the poverty level. Despite the challenges, the film also offers hope, by highlighting how much love there is among the residents of the neighborhood and the people who work there to improve the life of the Tenderloin residents.

Film premiere: San Francisco Main Library’s Koret Auditorium on March 25 at 5:45 p.m. A reception will follow the screening, sponsored by the French American Cultural Society.

For a preview, see the trailer and other information at: https://www.facebook.com/LoveMeTenderloin or http://vimeo.com/86108597.

PLACAS: The perilous journey of a new play about escaping gang life and a perilous tattoo

San Francisco International Arts Festival (SFIAF), Laney College Theater and Paul S. Flores present the return of playwright Flores’ stage play PLACAS starring Ricardo Salinas of Culture Clash. PLACAS will make its East Bay premiere at Laney College Theater near Lake Merritt in Oakland, March 27-29, 2014.

PLACAS (barrio slang: a code word for graffiti tags, a nickname or body tattoos) is a stage drama about family, transformation and redemption that focuses on a Salvadoran former gang member in the barrio trying to reclaim his family while letting go of his past. Set in today’s San Francisco, it explores the benefits and risks of tattoo removal for gang members thru one man’s determination to reunite his family after surviving civil war in El Salvador, immigration, deportation, prison and street violence.

PLACAS focuses on inter-generational relationships between young men and their fathers and uses the metaphor of tattoo removal as a way of moving forward and as a path to a possible solution.

PLACAS stars Ric Salinas as Salvadoran immigrant Fausto Carbajal, a now middle- aged ex-gang member recently released after nine years in prison. As a requirement of his parole Fausto must remove the tattoos that mark him as a member of his gang. Wearied by what has been a lifetime of violence, he accepts the terms. He is determined to reunite his family, traumatized by three decades of war, forced migrations and street crime. He returns to San Francisco to live with his mother, a war refugee, and hopes to re-unite with his ex-partner, Claudia and their now teenaged son, Edgar. Fausto visits Claudia and Edgar.

But Edgar, who has not seen his father for most of his life, resents Fausto and displays disturbing character traits that remind Fausto of himself in his youth.

It is clear that the reunion will be difficult. Fausto realizes that his son is in danger of being initiated into a rival gang when Edgar is arrested for carrying a gun to school and placed on probationary house arrest. Fausto attempts to persuade Edgar against joining the gang and offers to move the family out of the neighborhood, but Edgar runs away. Fausto must find Edgar before the police do. His process of transformation is both physically and emotionally painful, but can he save himself, and is it enough and in time to save his son?

Ric Salinas (Culture Clash) returns to the stage at Laney College as part of a five-city tour which begins Thurs. March 27 – Sat March 29, at 8 pm. in Oakland.

Tickets: $15 – $40 Reserved Seating Box-Office: http://www.sfiaf.org, 1-800-838-3006.

Group Rates Available: Call 415-399-9554 for info.

Boxing

The Sport of Gentlemen

Boxing” de Molina

Wednesday, March 26 – Tokyo, Japan –

WBA super flyweight title: Denkaosan Kaowichit (62-3-1, 26 KOs) vs. Kohei Kono (29-8, 12 KOs).

Saturday, March 29 – Berlin, Germany –

Cruiserweights: Yoan Pablo Hernandez (28-1, 14 KOs) vs. Pawel Kolodziej (33-0, 18 KOs).

Saturday, March 29 – Newcastle, England –

Bantamweights: Stuart Hall (16-2-1, 7 KOs) vs. Martin Ward (18-2, 4 KOs).

Saturday, March 29 – Atlantic City, New Jersey (HBO) –

Light heavyweights: Sergei Kovalev (23-0-1, 21 KOs) vs. Cedric Agnew (26-0, 13 KOs)

Sunday, April 6 – Tokyo, Japan –

Flyweights: Akira Yaegashi (19-3, 9 KOs) vs. Odilon Zaleta (15-3, 8 KOs);

Junior flyweights: Adrian Hernandez (29-2-1, 18 KOs) vs. Naoya Inoue (5-0, 4 KOs).

Congratulations to Óscar Orellana on his 50th birthday

 

Óscar Orellana with tres friends.Óscar Orellana with tres friends.

Accompanied by three of his many friends, the general manager and former co-owner of the popular nightclub Club Roccapulco, Oscar Orellana, was honored on his 50th birthday with a delicious cake.

The celebration took place at Roccapulco, and was accompanied by the also popular grupo, Julio Bravo and his Orquetra.

His friends (in the picture, whose names were not obtained) who are frequent visitors at the club, offered him the cake.

El Reportero joins with Óscar’s friends to wish him a virtual, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

 

 

Voted the ‘Best Latin Alternative Band,’ Las Cafetera come to the S.F. Bay Area

Compiled by the El Reportero’s staff

Las CafererasLas Cafereras

After a successful 3-month Northwest and Midwest Tour this past fall that had them open for groups like Juanes, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Las Cafeteras hit the road again.

This time, Las Cafeteras are going to different parts of the country and will be engaging communities in the East Coast (Boston, New York, Philadelphia), Texas (Austin), Florida (Miami), and Northern California. Along with their performances, Las Cafeteras will also be having cultural exchanges with universities, museums, and immigrant rights organizations with the purpose of sharing stories from their respective cities.

Las Cafeteras’ musician David Flores says, “we believe that we are all the same because we are all different and we want to use our tour as a platform to inspire people across the country to share their story through poetry, storytelling and art.”

Two presentations at UC Berkeley: on March 13, at Hearst Field Annex, and on March 14 at the Memorial Glade, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California.

Month-long Performing Arts 2014 Festival Returns to SF Public Library

Come sing with the beloved bilingual recording artist, educator and children’s author José-Luis Orozco! Children and families will sing and dance to Jose-Luis’ Spanish and English music rooted in Latin American culture. His music combines rhymes, movements, and rhythm with information, such as the alphabet, vowels, numbers, and colors. These four concerts will be a delight for the entire family.

Acrobatics, juggling, balancing, contortion, and more will be performed by Wayne Huey of Red Panda Acrobats and by the kids and teens of Circus Center’s Youth Circus. The Youth Circus will thrill with aerial acts, clowns, face painting, and a chance to join the circus at the skills workshop following the performance.

And finally, by popular demand, five puppet troupes are returning to SFPL to amuse and amaze. Magical Moonshine Theatre performs traditional Europeanstyle hand-and-rod puppet theatre. Sean’s Shadows creates tales with light and shadow from around the world. The Fratello Marionettes both educate and delight with puppets and puppeteers in full view. Ventriloquist, Tony Borders, brings some crazy critters and a magical picnic with Muppet-style hand puppets.

On March 11, José Luis Orozco in Concert, from 9:30 a.m. – 12 noon at Parque Niños Unidos, on 23rd Street & Treat. On March 12, Cartooning Workshop for Teens with Morgan Taylor, from 4:30 – 6 p.m., at the Main Library, Children’s Creative Center, 2nd floor. For more info call For more information, call 415 557-4277.

Remembering one of the world’s greatest flamenco guitarist: Paco de Lucía

by the El Reportero’s news services

Paco de LucíaPaco de Lucía

The world is mourning the passing, this week, of one of the world’s greatest flamenco guitarist, Paco de Lucía.

De Lucía, 66, died suddenly of a heart attack while vacationing in Mexico with his family. He will be given state honors in his native Algeciras, Spain with a public wake and memorial. His long career started when he was just 11-years-old and took him all over the world including Carnegie Hall. The self-taught musician is credited with revolutionizing flamenco guitar music by infusing different influences, including salsa and bossa nova, into his music and taking it outside of Spain to the rest of the world. His song Between Two Waters (Entre dos Aguas) is one of the most recognized Spanish classical guitar pieces in the world. Others consider Friday Night in San Francisco with John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola his greatest recording.

De Lucía, who was born Francisco Sanchez Gomes, worked with some of the greatest flamenco guitarists including Jose Greco. De Lucía music can be found in the soundtracks of several Spanish movies including ‘Carmen.’ His talents and music served as a great influence on other musicians who remembered him kindly.

“The Maestro King of Gypsy Flamenco Music is in heaven NOW,” tweeted Carlos Santana. Alejandro Sanz noted, “A genius has left us “PacoLives.” Chick Corea praised de Lucía, “inspired me in the construction of my own musical world as much as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.” Julio Iglesias probably said it best, “One of the greatest emblems of Spanish art has left us.”

The Spanish legend was working on his 30th album before he died. That album ‘Canciones Andaluzas’ will be released in April. He received his first Latin Grammy in 2004 and another in 2012 for his En Vivo live recording.

Carlos Santana Shares Cover of New Album “Corazon”

Guitarist Carlos Santana presented the cover of “Corazon,” the first disc he ever recorded with over a dozen Latin artists, and announced that the album will go on sale May 6. Artists like Pitbull, Juanes, Romeo Santos and Gloria Estefan take part in this new collaborative recording, said a communique from the Sony Music label and the artist, who calls the album a return to his Spanish-speaking childhood, having been born in the Mexican town of Autlan de Navarro in Jalisco state.

The colorful cover showing the guitarist’s face with figures that appear to be Indians, was created by Boa Mistura, a Madrid-based artists’ collective that works principally on pieces of public art.

“Corazon,” produced by Lester Mendez, recalls the artist’s Hispanic roots and features the additional participation of the Fabulosos Cadillacs (Argentina), Ziggy Marley (Jamaica), Miguel (Estados Unidos), Niña Pastori (Spain), Samuel Rosa de Skank (Brazil), Chocquibtown (Colombia), Lila Downs (Mexico) and Diego Torres (Argentina), among others.

“All the artists, men and women, who have taken part bring their own light, their talent, their spirit, they want to work with me…I’ve surrounded myself with artists who see the invisible and do the impossible,” Santana told Efe in an interview in late 2013.

The disc includes numbers like “La Flaca” by Jarabe de Palo, sung by Juanes and the first single from the album to go on sale.

Leopoldo López:Venezuela’s dangerous man

by Alvaro Vargas Llosa

After several days in hiding, Leopoldo López, one of the leaders of Venezuela’s resistance movement, turned himself in at a massive protest rally and proclaimed: “If my imprisonment serves to wake up people…it will have been worth it.”

The Chavista dictatorship headed by Nicolás Maduro has charged him with acts of violence related to recent protests. Actually, as multiple testimonies and large amounts of graphic evidence demonstrate, the violence has been perpetrated by the paramilitary groups, known as “colectivos”, that the government has armed and eulogized as protectors of the Bolivarian revolution.

These militias are similar to the ones the Cuban government routinely employs against its critics. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Cuba is closely involved with the Venezuelan regime and has played a key role in the design and operation of the security apparatus. Maduro’s ties to Havana go back to the 1980s, when he was trained at the infamous Escuela Superior del Partido Comunista, also known as “Ñico López.” Defectors from the intelligence services have stated that he has had close connections with Castro’s America Department, charged with spreading the revolution across Latin America.

Why is Leopoldo López so dangerous? For several reasons.

1. He is fearless. The world has recently discovered this, but Venezuelans have known it for quite some time.

2. Although his lineage goes back to Bolivar’s independence struggle, he has no connection to the four decades that anteceded Chavez´s coming to power—known as “puntofijismo” after the Punto Fijo Pact signed in 1958 by the mainstream political parties and associated in the minds of government supporters with corruption and a deep social chasm. The Chavez regime has built its revolutionary legitimacy on the demonization of the democratic period, the “ancient régime” that Venezuela was supposed to leave behind. But López, who is only 42, rose to prominence together with other young leaders, including Henrique Capriles—the man who led the opposition in last year’s rigged elections—as a member of Primer Justicia, a new political organization around the time when the late Chávez rose to power.

3. For several years, López was more popular than Chávez even though he was the mayor of a small Caracas municipality. Fearing him as a potential contender, the government barred him from holding political office. The vaccum in the opposition was eventually filled by Capriles. But López was Capriles before Capriles.

4. López is a survivor, a condition uncommon in a man of his social roots if you see the world through the lens of class warfare. Although the Chavista machinery was able to push the Harvard-trained opponent aside by taking away his rights, to Maduro’s astonishment López is still going, now turned into an icon of the resistance movement from his Ramo Verde military prison.

5. He has shown a sense of the epic, a political quality more usually associated with the left in Latin America. There is no successful resistance movement without an epic narrative. López is writing it.

6. He also has a sense of political aesthetics. Walter Benjamin spoke of the aestheticization of politics in a different context. The sequence that started with the protests of February 14 and ended with the moving images of López turning himself in will be the stuff of legend. Dressed in white, holding a flag and some flowers, the hero, a father of two little children, kissed his wife goodbye amid a sea of supporters and subsequently turned himself in to the National Guard thugs, who brutally shoved him into an armored vehicle.

For Venezuelan freedom lovers, those images will be the equivalent of the day, in 1992, when an unknown lieutenant colonel, Hugo Chávez, appeared on TV following his failed coup attempt against President Carlos Andrés Pérez and announced that his objectives has not been achieved “for the moment.”

7. López has understood that pressure in the streets, peaceful civil resistance, is indispensable in the struggle against tyranny. Which is why, together with Congresswoman María Corina Machado and the mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, he has embarked on what he calls “The Way Out” in order to force a transition to the rule of law. For Maduro and his Cuban backers this is a major problem. It threatens their strategy, designed to perpetuate the regime by taking all hope of change away from the millions of victims after fifteen long years of authoritarian populism. They want Venezuelan critics to become what Cuban dissidents are today—an immensely heroic but politically impotent group of people that the government has no trouble overwhelming when they make too much noise.

Maduro and the Cubans are right: López is a dangerous guy.

[For background on the political unrest in Venezuela, see the author’s award-winning book, Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression.]

What you wanted to know about the New World Order – Part 2 and last

by Marvin Ramirez

Marvin J. RamirezMarvin Ramirez

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Dear readers of El Reportero, I want share with you the following article, published by a website called, Spoon-Fed Truth, which contains just what I was looking for, information that would define in more detail what the meaning of The New World Order was. Many of you have heard it so many times by the Bushes, and even Obama. Well, I hope you will enjoy it and come up with your conclusions. Remember, this type of information – labeled as Conspiracy Theory, is never covered in the mainstream media, as they are believed to serve the agenda of The New World Order. El Reportero is reproducing it as it was written by its original author/s. This is Part 2 and last.

Published by The Spoon-Fed Truth

Those behind the New World Order are a synthesis of the survivors of empires, of super-merchant families, of barbarian kings, of banking families established in the middle-ages, and of the royal families of Europe, among others, which trace back to the old world. The group which orchestrates the entire agenda is often assumed to be the Illuminati, and can serve as a synonym for New World Order and just like the government, it is made up of “branches” which infiltrate and influence world banking, world politics, and religion and spirituality.

Unfortunately, in the United States, the Establishment’s goal of a One World Order is reaching fruition through complacent consent and subversive conquest.

America, a Constitutional Republic, is plunging into the satanical One World Order facilitated by the calculated placement of unscrupulous individuals deeply dedicated to the goals of the secret societies they belong to. America, formerly the home of the brave and the free, is currently the home of the people who merely think they are free. None are more enslaved and manipulated than those who mistakenly society themselves as free, therefore rendering them exceptionally vulnerable.

Consent, using mass population management can be achieved by using elements of Hegelian Dialectics. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the political and social scientist and professor at the University of Berlin from 1817 until his death in 1831, clearly defined his philosophical/political concepts that came to be known as Hegelianism. His ideas are still taught and authors continue to elaborate on his philosophies, though inattentive Americans fail to acknowledge or even distinguish their application in our own society despite the obvious and devastating consequences.

What we think we see is often an illusion intentionally presented, like the view themselves as free, therefore rendering them exceptionally vulnerable.

Consent, using mass population management can be achieved by using elements of Hegelian Dialectics. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the political and social scientist and professor at the University of Berlin from 1817 until his death in 1831, clearly defined his philosophical/political concepts that came to be known as Hegelianism. His ideas are still taught and authors continue to elaborate on his philosophies, though inattentive Americans fail to acknowledge or even distinguish their application in our own society despite the obvious and devastating consequences.

What we think we see is often an illusion intentionally presented, like the 1conjuror who would have you to believe he holds an orange in his right hand, when it is actually in his left hand. Citizens of the world, whether their sympathies are left-wing or right-wing, monarchist or republican, have been used as pawns in their game of Hegelian psychology by the hidden hand that rules. In reality, the orange is in neither left nor right hand. The Hegelian dialectic process is the notion that conflict creates history.

From this axiom it follows that controlled conflict can create a predetermined history. For example when the Trilateral Commission discusses ‘managed conflict’, as it does extensively in its literature, it implies the managed use of conflict for long run predetermined ends – not for the mere random exercise of manipulative control to solve a problem. The dialectic takes this Trilateral ‘managed conflict’ process one step further. In Hegelian terms, an existing force (the thesis) generates a counterforce (the antithesis). Conflict between the two forces results in the forming of a synthesis. Then the process starts all over again: Thesis vs. antithesis results in synthesis.

It’s like two companies with undisclosed common stockholding submitting competitive tenders for a project on a site for which their stockholder has different plans altogether. Whatever the outcome, the stockholder is in beneficial control.

More On Hegelian Dialectics

Unfortunately, despite the government’s responsibility to protect citizen’s rights, it is blatantly obvious that the government is following an alternative, deliberately destructive agenda including: rural cleansing of the resource-producing population, economic destabilization, runaway inflation, unrestrained immigration, illegal surveillance, the NAU, deteriorating infrastructure, ethnic disparity, de-population through war, disease, toxicity, and chemtrails, selective response to “natural” disasters, destruction of the middle class, seizure of private property and obliteration of God-given liberties – all at the hands of an elite ruling class – crony monopoly capitalists and war profiteers, intent on stealing and controlling the earth’s resources, a contrived diminishing food supply and the surviving useless eaters, still obedient and moderately productive.

What happened to that illusive balance of power?

The sheer magnitude of the complex web of deceit surrounding the individuals and interlocking institutions involved in this conspiracy is mind boggling, especially for the average human being who has been indoctrinated to reject the existence of it, often laughing in the face of it. The global agenda is  being orchestrated by these extremely powerful and influential groups, some of which are genetically-related individuals that have carried a bloodline with them through the ages, and it also include many of the world’s wealthiest people, top political leaders, and corporate elite. Using a pyramid hierarchy technique, and creating such an over abundance of organizations, clubs, societies and so-called “ABC groups”, a pyramid hierarchy built within each of them, the elite are able to keep their agenda hidden from the world. This is how they keep their presence and agenda so well hidden? It is all in the compartmentalization of organizations, and the secrecy that is precious to a pyramid structured hierarchy. The thirteen royal bloodlines sit at the top. A quote from author David Icke, who does a wonderful job at explaining the pyramid hierarchy.

“The structure can be symbolized as a web or as a pyramid in which the few at the top dictate to the many at the bottom. The many are kept in ignorance of what is really going on. The pyramid structure of secret societies is mirrored in government, banking, business and every other organization and institution … Only the few at the top of the pyramids know the real agenda and what the organization is trying to achieve. The further you go down the pyramid the more people are working for the organization but the less they know about its real agenda. They are only aware of the individual job they do every day. They don’t know how their contribution (apparently innocent in isolation) connects with those of other employees in other areas of the company government or whatever. They are ‘compartmentalized’ and the only people who know how it all fits together are the very few sitting at the top – the bloodline families and their lackeys. The smaller pyramids, like the local branch of a bank, fit into bigger and bigger pyramids, until eventually you have the pyramid that encompasses all of the banks. It is the same with the transnational corporations, political parties, secret societies, media empires and the military. If you go high enough in this structure all the translational corporations (like the oil cartel), major political parties, secret societies, media empires and the military (via NATO, for instance), are controlled by the same families who sit atop the biggest pyramids. In the end there is a global pyramid that includes all the others … At the capstone of this you will find the most elite of the Illuminati, the ‘purest’ of their bloodlines. In this way, they can coordinate through apparently unconnected, even ‘opposing’ areas of society, the same policies.” All roads lead eventually to them.” -David Icke, Tales from the Time Loop.