Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth.
In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low. This can apply to a multitude of government systems, as the key elements of plutocracy transcend and often occur concurrently with the features of those systems.
The word plutocracy (Modern Greek: πλουτοκρατία - ploutokratia) is derived from the ancient Greek root ploutos, meaning wealth and kratein, meaning to rule or to govern.
The term plutocracy is generally used to describe two distinct concepts: one of a historical nature and one of a modern political nature. The former indicates the political control of the state by an oligarchy of the wealthy. Examples of such plutocracies include some city-states in Ancient Greece, the civilization of Carthage, the Italian merchant republics of Venice and Florence, and Genoa.
Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to U.S. President Richard Nixon, argues that the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."
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Plutocracy
Project For a New American Century (PNAC)
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was an American neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. that lasted from early 1997 to 2006. It was co-founded as a non-profit educational organization by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership." Fundamental to the PNAC were the view that "American leadership is both good for America and good for the world" and support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity." Critics claimed that it exerted strong influence on high-level U.S. government officials in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush and strongly affected the George Bush administration's development of military and foreign policies, especially involving national security and the Iraq War.
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9/11/01 as a Pretext for U.S. Imperialism
The 9/11/01 attack served as a general-purpose pretext for imperialist ventures that were planned years in advance of the attack. Deployments for the attack on Afghanistan began within days of the attack. When the attack failed to produce the capture of the alleged perpetrator of the 9/11/01 attack, Osama bin Laden, the administration shifted blame for the attack to Iraqi President Saddam Husein, and commenced its invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The Project for a New American Century, a think-tank including some of the core policy advisors for the Bush Administration, articulated the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" in the policy paper Rebuilding America's Defenses just one year before 9/11/01. The paper also forshadowed the use of Saddam Hussein as a pretext for invasions of Central Asia.:Excerpt: title: Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century
authors: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dov Zakheim, William Kristol, et.al."Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolunionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.""While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein"
site: http://www.newamericancentury.org/ page: www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
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Posse Comitatus Act
The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385) passed on June 16, 1878 after the end of Reconstruction, with the intention (in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807) of substantially limiting the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement. The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services (today the Army, Air Force, and State National Guard forces when such are called into federal service) from exercising nominally state law enforcement, police, or peace officer powers that maintain "law and order" on non-federal property (states and their counties and municipal divisions) within the United States.
The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Act.
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Problem Reaction Solution
Although he never used the terms himself, the triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis is often used to describe the thought of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
The triad is usually described in the following way:
- The thesis is an intellectual proposition.
- The antithesis is simply the negation of the thesis, a reaction to the proposition.
- The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths, and forming a new proposition.
Although the triad is often thought to form part of an analysis of historical and philosophical progress called the Hegelian dialectic, the assumption is erroneous. Hegel used this classification only once, and he attributed the terminology to Immanuel Kant. The terminology was largely developed earlier by the neo-Kantian Johann Gottlieb Fichte, also an advocate of the philosophy identified as German idealism.
The triad is often said to have been extended and adopted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; however Marx referred to them in The Poverty of Philosophy as speaking Greek and "Wooden trichotomies".
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Propaganda
Propaganda is the dissemination of information aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviors of large numbers of people. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda.Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.
—Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion
Propaganda is generally an appeal to emotion, contrasted to an appeal to intellect. It shares techniques with advertising and public relations. Advertising and public relations can be thought of as propaganda that promotes a commercial product or shapes the perception of an organization, person or brand, though in post-World War II usage the word "propaganda" more typically refers to political or nationalist uses of these techniques or to the promotion of a set of ideas, since the term had gained a pejorative meaning, which commercial and government entities couldn’t accept. The refusal phenomenon was eventually to be seen in politics itself by the substitution of ‘political marketing’ and other designations for ‘political propaganda’.
Poster of the 19th century Scandinavist movementPropaganda was often used to influence opinions and beliefs on religious issues, particularly during the split between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches. Propaganda has become more common in political contexts, in particular to refer to certain efforts sponsored by governments, political groups, but also often covert interests. In the early 20th century, propaganda was exemplified in the form of party slogans. Also in the early 20th century the term propaganda was also used by the founders of the nascent public relations industry to describe their activities. This usage died out around the time of World War II, as the industry started to avoid the word, given the pejorative connotation it had acquired.
The execution of British nurse Edith Cavell by the German Army in 1915 was a major theme of World War I anti-German propagandaLiterally translated from the Latin gerundive as "things which must be disseminated", in some cultures the term is neutral or even positive, while in others the term has acquired a strong negative connotation. The connotations of the term "propaganda" can also vary over time. For example, in Portuguese and some Spanish language speaking countries, particularly in the Southern Cone, the word "propaganda" usually refers to the most common manipulative media — "advertising".
In English, "propaganda" was originally a neutral term used to describe the dissemination of information in favor of any given cause. During the 20th century, however, the term acquired a thoroughly negative meaning in western countries, representing the intentional dissemination of often false, but certainly "compelling" claims to support or justify political actions or ideologies. This redefinition arose because both the Soviet Union and Germany's government under Hitler admitted explicitly to using propaganda favoring, respectively, communism and Nazism, in all forms of public expression. As these ideologies were antipathetic to liberal western societies, the negative feelings toward them came to be projected into the word "propaganda" itself.
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Provocateur
Traditionally, an agent provocateur (plural: agents provocateurs, French for "inciting agent") is a person employed by the police or other entity to act undercover to entice or provoke another person to commit an illegal act. More generally, the term may refer to a person or group that seeks to discredit or harm another by provoking them to commit a wrong or rash action.
An agent provocateur may be a police officer or a secret agent of police who encourages suspects to carry out a crime under conditions where evidence can be obtained; or who suggests the commission of a crime to another, in hopes they will go along with the suggestion and be convicted of the crime.
A political organization or government may use agents provocateurs against political opponents. The provocateurs try to incite the opponent to counter-productive or ineffective acts to foster public disdain—or provide a pretext for aggression against the opponent (see Red-baiting).
Historically, labor spies, hired to infiltrate, monitor, disrupt, or subvert union activities, have used agent provocateur tactics.
Agent provocateur activities raise ethical and legal issues. In common law jurisdictions, the legal concept of entrapment may apply if the main impetus for the crime was the provocateur.
In the United States, the COINTELPRO program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had FBI agents pose as political radicals in order to disrupt the activities of radical political groups in the U.S., such as the Black Panthers, Ku Klux Klan, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
New York City Police officers were accused of acting as agents provocateurs during protests against the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City.
Denver Police officers were also found to have used undercover detectives to instigate violence against police during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, in a botched attempt to be extracted. This ultimately resulted in the accidental use of chemical agents against their own men.
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Psychological Operations (PSYOP)
Within the U.S. Psychological Operations community, the correct acronym is PSYOP without the "s" at the end, as noted in FM 33-1-1. NATO references will alternately list the capability as PSYOP or PSYOPS, depending on the source's country of origin, with European countries frequently using PSYOPS as compared to the US PSYOP.
Psychological Operations (PSYOP, PSYOPS) are techniques used by military and police forces to influence a target audience's value systems, belief systems, emotions, motives, reasoning, and behavior. Target audiences can be governments, organizations, groups, and individuals, and are used in order to induce confessions, or reinforce attitudes and behaviors favorable to the originator's objectives. These are sometimes combined with black operations or false flag tactics.
This concept has been used by military institutions throughout history, but it is only since the twentieth century that it has been accorded the organizational and professional status it enjoys now.
The word is commonly used by governments, such as the government of the United States, who do not wish to use the term propaganda or brainwashing to refer to their own work. The word propaganda has very negative connotations, and by calling it psychological operations instead, more sophisticated methods of psychological manipulation are accurately incorporated by the terminology. This euphemism for mind control is ironically an example of psychological operations -- i.e. using psychological techniques to persuade [manipulate] a large number of people to support something that they wouldn't normally support.
The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce attitudes and behaviors favorable to US objectives. The Special Activities Division (SAD) is a division of the Central Intelligence Agency's National Clandestine Service, responsible for Covert Action and "Special Activities". These special activities include covert political influence (which includes psychological operations) and paramilitary operations. SAD's political influence group is the only US unit allowed to conduct these operations covertly and is considered the primary unit in this area.
Dedicated psychological operations units exist in the United States Army. The United States Navy also plans and executes limited PSYOP missions. United States PSYOP units and soldiers of all branches of the military are prohibited by law from conducting PSYOP missions in the US.(Executive Order S-1233, DOD Directive S-3321.1, and National Security Decision Directive 130.) While United States Army PSYOP units may offer non-PSYOP support to domestic military missions, they can only target foreign audiences. However, domestic Federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI are exempt from the above-mentioned law.
During the Waco Siege, the FBI and BATF conducted psychological operations on the men, women and children inside the Mount Camel complex. This included using loudspeakers to play sounds of animals being slaughtered, drilling noises and clips from talk shows about how much their leader David Koresh was hated. In addition, very bright, flashing lights were used at night.
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RAND
The RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development) is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations. It is known for rigorous and often quantitative analysis and policy recommendations.[not in citation given]
RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and five principal locations: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Washington, D.C. (currently located in Arlington, Virginia); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (adjacent to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh); Cambridge, United Kingdom and Brussels, Belgium (RAND Europe).
There are also several smaller offices of RAND in the United States, including the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute in Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2003, it opened the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute in Doha.
RAND is also the home to the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, one of the original graduate programs in public policy and the first to offer a Ph.D. The program is unique in that students work alongside RAND analysts on real-world problems. The campus is at RAND's Santa Monica research facility. The Pardee RAND School is the world's largest Ph.D.-granting program in policy analysis.
RAND publishes The RAND Journal of Economics, a scholarly peer-reviewed journal of economics.
The RAND Corporation has been criticized as militarist. Due to the nature of its work, the RAND corporation also frequently plays a role in conspiracy theories.
In 1958, Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the US had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to US interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.
In April 1970, a Newhouse News Service story reported that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election. This was denied by RAND, which subsequently undertook a review of its recent work to see if there was anything that could have been misunderstood to spark the rumor. They didn't identify any actions as such, and so it is their claim that the review was fruitless.
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Stockholm Syndrome
In psychology, Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, essentially mistaking a lack of abuse from their captors as an act of kindness. The FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 27% of victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome. The syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28, 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, and even defended them after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. The term "Stockholm Syndrome" was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery, and referred to the syndrome in a news broadcast. It was originally defined by psychiatrist Frank Ochberg to aid the management of hostage situations.
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Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones is a secret society based at, but not formally affiliated with, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The society's alumni organization, which owns the society's real property and oversees the organization's activity, is the Russell Trust Association, and is named after General William Huntington Russell, founding member of the Bones' organization along with fellow classmate Alphonso Taft. In conversation, the group is known as "Bones", and members have been known as "Bonesmen".
Even after Yale became coeducational in 1969, Skull & Bones remained all-male until the Class of 1991, when that year's class "tapped" seven female members in the Class of 1992. The decision was controversial among alumni members, some of whom obtained a temporary restraining order and changed locks, before yielding to a close majority vote of the membership.
Many Skull & Bones alumni have gone on to positions of great power, including both the Democratic and Republican nominees in the 2004 Presidential election.
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Straw Man
A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.
It should be noted that presenting and refuting a weakened form of an opponent's argument can be a part of a valid argument. For example, one can argue that the opposing position implies that at least one of two other statements - both being presumably easier to refute than the original position - must be true. If one refutes both of these weaker propositions, the refutation is valid and does not fit the above definition of a "straw man" argument.
Strictly speaking, there are three ways to deal with a straw man setup. 1. Using the terms of the straw man and refuting the theory itself: Beach debate: "There is no threat to morality with "free" sex. Sex for purposes other than procreation is something that shouldn't be tied to morality, shame, or guilt". Note: A weakness of this retort is that agreeing to use the terminology of the opponent may deflect the debate to a secondary one about the opponent's assumptions). 2. Clarifying the original theory: "I said evolution should be taught, not that I believe in the big bang". This may involve explicitly pointing out the straw man. 3. Questioning the disputation ("Why could it not have been made in six 24-hour days?"). See also Debate
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The Art of War (Sun Tzu)
The Art of War (Chinese: 孫子兵法; pinyin: Sūn Zǐ Bīng Fǎ) is a Chinese military treatise that was written during the 6th century BC by Sun Tzu. Composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare, it has long been praised as the definitive work on military strategies and tactics of its time.
The Art of War is one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy in the world. It has had a huge influence on Eastern military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu recognized the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment. He taught that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through a to-do list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a competitive environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.
The book was first translated into the French language in 1782 by French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, and into English by Sinologist Lionel Giles in 1910. It very likely influenced Napoleon, and the planning of Operation Desert Storm. Leaders as diverse as Mao Zedong, General Vo Nguyen Giap, Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini, and General Douglas MacArthur have claimed to have drawn inspiration from the work.
The Art of War has also been applied to business and managerial strategies.
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Tyranny
tyr·an·ny [ tírrənee ] (plural tyr·an·nies)
noun
Definition:
1. cruel use of power: cruelty and injustice in the exercise of power or authority over others
2. oppressive government: oppressive government by one or more people who exercise absolute power cruelly and unjustly
3. state ruled by tyrant: a country or state under the power of an oppressive ruler
4. cruel act: a cruel or oppressive act, especially one committed by a person wielding great power
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Trilateral Commission
The Trilateral Commission is a private organization, established to foster closer cooperation between United States, Europe and Japan. It was founded in July 1973, at the initiative of David Rockefeller; who was Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations at that time. The Trilateral Commission is widely seen as a counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Speaking at the Chase Manhattan International Financial Forums in London, Brussels, Montreal, and Paris, Rockefeller proposed the creation of an International Commission of Peace and Prosperity in early 1972 (which would later become the Trilateral Commission). At the 1972 Bilderberg meeting, the idea was widely accepted, but elsewhere, it got a cool reception. According to Rockefeller, the organization could "be of help to government by providing measured judgment."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a professor at Columbia University and a Rockefeller advisor who was a specialist on international affairs, left his post to organize the group along with:
- Henry D. Owen (a Foreign Policy Studies Director with the Brookings Institution)
- George S. Franklin
- Robert R. Bowie (of the Foreign Policy Association and Director of the Harvard Center for International Affairs)
- Gerard C. Smith (Salt I negotiator, Rockefeller in-law, and its first North American Chairman)
- Marshall Hornblower
- William Scranton (former Governor of Pennsylvania)
- Edwin Reischauer (a professor at Harvard)
- Max Kohnstamm (European Policy Centre)
Other founding members included Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, both eventually heads of the Federal Reserve system.
Funding for the group came from David Rockefeller, the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.
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World Government
World government is the concept of a political body that would make, interpret and enforce international law. Inherent to the concept of a world government is the idea that nations would be required to pool or surrender (depending on point of view) sovereignty over some areas. In effect, a world government would add another level of administration above the existing national governments or provide coordination over areas national governments are not capable of adequately addressing as independent polities. The authority granted this level and how it relates to national governments and/or citizens is debated by both proponents and opponents of world government.
Some people see international institutions (such as the International Criminal Court, United Nations and International Monetary Fund) and various supranational and continental unions (such as Organization of American States, European Union, African Union, Union of South American Nations and Association of Southeast Asian Nations) as the beginning elements of a world government system. An organization comprising legislators from various nations known as Parliamentarians for Global Action have promoted ideas of democratic global governance, though such promotion has varied in its scope and intensity during the organization's history.
Depending on one's point of view, a world government would erase traditional notions of sovereignty, a construct that is presently under intense debate. Many critics contend that the establishment of a world government would be essentially meaningless without an event or conflict that poses a serious threat to the planet or individual member states. The argument that intergovernmental organisations such as the United Nations could be a basis for world government is often criticised by realists who contend that such organisations have little or no real ability to affect global events and constitute only a de jure world government and not the de facto institutions needed. This is based on nationalist ideals or the experience of world-governmental candidates such as the European Union (EU) or the United Nations in addressing situations like the crisis in Darfur or other such conflicts.
Furthermore, conflicts such as the Second World War involving a number of the planet's major powers led to the breakup of near global entities such as the British Empire and others; this suggests to critics that such extended organisations and regimes are not immune from global catastrophes. As another example, critics point to the the League of Nations, established to prevent a re-occurrence of the First World War and the closest express of global government then to date, which nonetheless could not in fact prevent the Second World War as intended.
Another common criticism is how a world government might reflect the worse aspects of nationalism, such as imperialism, in its imposition of cultural values. The concern is that a dictatorship would be formed to enforce a world government, whether beneficial (see H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come) or detrimental. These concerns arises from the contrary view of nationalism as consistent with the compulsion for self-determination. Proponents of world government, however, counter that a federated approach to world government would instead respect the member cultures and encourage greater recognition of multiculturalism than individual nation-states.
A perceived disappearance of individual or national autonomy is perhaps the most widely cited reason for the current disdain for the idea of world government. Euroscepticism is popular in the United Kingdom for example, where parties like UK Independence Party oppose the European Union because of the emerging possibility of it becoming a superstate rather than a free trade organisation as the original European Economic Community was established. Such Euroskeptics also see the European Union as being run by its more dominant members and not as a true democratic union. Similar notions are shared elsewhere in the world, based on the expectation that supranational government would necessarily entail populations of other countries controlling one's own government. The more extreme critics of world government suggest the formation of similar institutions as the global level, if indeed undemocratic, would provide dissidents "nowhere to run."
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