Requiem for the Underground Media

The alternative media is officially dead. Although hundreds of independent newspapers flourished in the late 1960s, most did not survive the 1970’s and those that did were absorbed into the corporate media system, becoming editorially hollow advertising cash cows while they lasted. The whole point of creating your own newspaper in the 1960s was because all the media were spewing status-quo propaganda. Even now, with the internet dismantling print media and offering unlimited options for serving content, the so-called “alternative” news sites never question the pathetic official 9/11 story or suggest a CIA/Mafia/Pentagon/Texas Oil Cartel conspiracy murdered JFK.
The op to disarm and dismantle the counterculture media was prolonged and the battle took place on many fronts. I started my own newspaper in 1968 in Urbana, Illinois, and was swiftly targeted by a State Narcotics Task Force, who set me up on bogus charges, while rousting me out of high school in handcuffs and shaming my parents at the local country club. That was one of the fronts: round up and imprison the alpha male founders of the alternative media.

I’d hung an Eldridge Cleaver for President poster in my second floor bedroom window and then went downstairs to see how it looked from the street. I’ll never forget my dad’s reaction to seeing that poster while he was hitting his practice golf ball in the side yard. Man, he took off full speed and ripped that poster out of the window and told me never to do that again. He said it sent the wrong message to our neighbors and we’d just recently moved into the neighborhood.

Funny how back in the day many of the brightest journalists wanted to get into investigative reporting. The Washington Post, a propaganda tool of the CIA decided to capture the center of energy on investigative journalism so they served up Nixon, maybe because he gave some of the stolen gold the Japanese had hidden in the Philippines back to China to buy his detente move. For whatever reason, Yale graduate Bob Woodward, a spook and secret bisexual, was transformed into a Knight in Shining Armor to lead the charge of investigators everywhere…..that’s a second front. Use your inside position to manufacture fake whistle blowers who initially release real solid info to establish credentials, but quickly switch to some absurd rabbit hole, like we never landed on the moon, lizard shape-shifting aliens rule the world, chemtrails, Elvis is alive, or Sandy Hook never happened.

I get the feeling the current generation of journalists cringe at the mere mention of 9/11. Although they realize the system is rigged by corrupt politics hidden from view, they also realize showing interest in that corruption is a sure way to end a promising journalism career. Since a handful of companies own the entire system, if you want a job (and jobs are really hard to find), better not be rocking the boat.

Of course, back in the late 1960s, you could rent a 4-bedroom house in Urbana for $150 a month, and work a minimum wage job and survive. But during the last fifty years, the system has evolved to extract increasing amounts of profit from every aspect of our lives. Womb to tomb, we are mined for profit, and most people work themselves silly just keeping their heads above water at this point, and after 30 years don’t possess a secure retirement, since all it takes is a medical problem, divorce, firing, or lawsuit to wipe you out.

Unfortunately, at this stage of the game, it’s virtually impossible for any truly honest underground media to emerge, because even if it did, it would be quickly penetrated and subverted, which is probably what happens to any big internet companies. In one form or another, The Octopus comes a knocking at your door, offers a deal you can’t refuse: play ball and become rich beyond your wildest dreams, or go rouge and and run the risk of getting whacked or busted down to nothing. The CIA and Sicilian Men of Honor are just two tentacles connected to this gigantic beast run by old money. For this class of people, war is a game rigged for milking profits and best played when both sides are funded by the same banks.

I’m currently available for hire to any media company interested in my brand of journalism as I recently got divorced from High Times. I specialize in conspiracy research and counterculture history. Marijuana, in case you didn’t know it, is a conspiracy story, because why else would the world’s most beneficial plant be outlawed everywhere, except through a massive conspiracy?

Sandy Hook Rabbit Hole to Avoid

sandyhookactorsphelpsfromflordiaEvery time a school shooting happens these days, there’s a blatant effort to create a cloud of confusion around the event. Either this is the work of the intel disinfo machine or the pill companies are manufacturing this crap to cover the tracks that lead to their culpability. When I took a preemptive approach to the latest school shooting, just to tell my readers to be on the lookout for the barrage of disinfo, I was immediately attacked by an anonymous troll calling himself Willie.

Let us examine Willie’s op in detail. I told him Sandy Hook really happened and among the possible real Manchurian Candidates are Oswald and Sirhan, so of course Willie attacked everything I said.

Willie claims the grieving parents presented on the news that day were actors playing a role. This is the story that was initially posted by Alex Jones and David Icke, the two most well-known disinfo artists. You’ll also find this bogus story on Veterans Today, which is why I don’t trust that site. Fake conspiracy stories are a big part of the problem because they lead people away from investigating important conspiracies like JFK and 9/11, while sheep-dipping all researchers as crazy kooks.

But since I know people who live in Newtown and since I have been there myself, I know better than to fall into this rabbit hole. I also find it incredibly insulting to the survivors and their families to keep spreading lies about how they never lost their relatives.

Consider this: all the Newtown hoax sites, and there are many, use faked documentation derived from the first few hours of the event, when confusion reigned, as it always does in times of great crisis when rumors spread and facts are hard to pin down. The disinfo machine milks these initial inconsistencies. But you’ll notice none of these sites have done any gumshoe reporting on the facts past those initial inconsistencies in the news. If all these people were actors, and no kids were killed, then the cover-up would create a trail impossible to conceal. This sort of trail is easy to follow in JFK and 9/11, but does not exist with Sandy Hook.

Willie: Take another hit off your bong! Because the bong is improving your IQ. Bonus points: the pot-advocacy (with a side-order of comic book metaphysics) definitely adds to your credibility, too! “ Me: As for the evidence Oswald was hypnotized, he was in the Civil Air Patrol with David Ferrie. Ferrie hypnotized all his cadets.” Uh huh. That’s really great “evidence”, Steve. You’ve still got those grainy photos of Ferrie wearing a turban, right?

Notice trolls attack the person before the argument. I’m a public person and have been an activist for cannabis legalization for over 30 years, so that means I have zero credibility? In fact, the opposite is true, Willie. Pot is about to become legal due to the efforts of people like me, despite 80 years of reefer madness lies and billions in propaganda from people like you. So who’s winning, eh? Stupid stoners? Or disinfo trolls? And as for David Ferrie being a hypnotist (who used hypnotism to seduce teenage boys among other things), many eyewitnesses and former cadets testified to Ferrie’s use of hypnotism, among them Perry Russo, who was interviewed by Jim Garrison and others. Here’s a partial transcript, although I doubt you are interested in any real facts:

Q: You mentioned that there was something involving hypnotism with Ferrie, that he had practiced it? A: Well, Ferrie had shown me that he had received, I think, a doctorate of psychology, he had received a medical degree that he could practice, and three other degrees, which I don’t recall at this moment, and in his house, his first house that I met him in, which was out near the Kenner area or the Metairie area, he had surgery equipment which was kept very clean and things like that, and I had occasion— that he gave us a demonstration in hypnotism at that time. Now, later on in talking to Al, Al Landry, Al told me that Ferrie had used hypnotism on the members of the Civil Air Patrol when he was making aggressions — sexual aggressions on them.

Next, Willie also tried to debunk evidence Sirhan was hypnotized. Me: “As for Sirhan, the evidence he was hypnotized is out on the web for anyone who cares to look.” Well there you have it! That’s a slam-dunk in *every* court of law, Steve. “It’s out on the Internet, your Honor! The prosecution rests!” Apparently Willie can’t do a google search, because if he had, he would have discovered Sirhan’s second lawyer presented this evidence in court and included the notebook in which “RFK must die” was written over and over. That sort of automatic writing is a technique used by programmers and real assassins do not create a trail of evidence against themselves like that. The fact Sirhan has zero memory of the assassination and cannot recall a single detail from the event is evidence he was placed in a trance.

Now, as to how many of you are actually being cut checks from Sunstein.Org I have no way of telling… but you certainly aren’t doing much to dispel any suspicions, are you?

Well, of course, accusing me of being a paid disinformation agent is always the last resort of a troll, isn’t it? I never heard of Sunstein.org until this, but I can see Willie obviously has some knowledge about deep politics. Yet, I am a public person with a 40-year history of activism and Willie is an anonymous troll who is spending hours trying to ridicule me on my own blog? Who do you think is more believable in this situation?

If you agree with Willie and believe Sandy Hook never happened, please go to Newtown and interview some people involved. Get their reaction to claims they are really paid actors and no kids actually died that day. See what sort of reaction you get. Personally, I’m sickened by this sort of disinfo and it’s sad to see how easily some people are led into it.

As for the photo above, what happened was that someone trolled the internet for pictures of people that looked like Nick and Laura Phelps of Newtown and then used those pictures to claim Nick and Laura are actors. Now how hard would it be to expose something like that if it was true? Why not track down Nick and Laura and confront them, Willie? Get out your camcorder and start harassing them with stories about how their kid didn’t die and they are paid actors playing a role. See where that gets you. And until you do produce some actual real evidence to support this insane story you pedal, please stop spreading bogus lies. And if you can’t do that,  just stop posting on my humble blog while announcing “I have won this argument!!” That is really the silliest statement yet because you are such an obvious shill for disinfo and have won zero arguments except in your own mind.

 

Karl Pierson Found His Fame

Get ready for a blizzard of disinfo on Karl Pierson, our latest instant media celebrity, who just attempted to murder his high school debate coach for the crime of kicking him off the debate team, and then shot himself in his high school, and thereby terrorized us all with his voyage to the depths of the dark side. People like David Icke and Alex Jones will immediately try to connect him to some mind control project, but that will likely be a rabbit hole diversion to nowhere because I’ve never found any evidence of CIA or FBI involvement in any school shootings, although tracks of those agencies are all over the JFK assassination, 9/11, and the Boston Bombings.

Which is not to say mind control isn’t involved, but the real op has been the rising level of graphic gore and violence worship inflicted on our youth. And because the school shootings are covered in such graphic detail, the media coverage is now a big part of the problem since it inflicts post traumatic stress on just about everyone who watches the news, but especially on kids now in school. It takes a lot to heal yourself from exposure to those vibrations, and cannabis is the best medicine for reducing psychic stress.

But the real gorilla in this picture is the mass drugging of echo boomers with synthetics like Ritalin and Prozac. You can trace the rise of psychosis as it follows the rise in prescriptions. Of course, the drug companies will fight to keep Karl’s medications secret, like they always do, because their drugs have been a factor in every school shooting.

I’m weary of this battering and encourage everyone to avoid the news for a while. We need to put pressure on the media to stop over-exposing these tragedies and if they can’t find a more responsible and much lower key path, then we should consider a class action suit because they are traumatizing people.

Ask yourself why are echo boomers so drugged, so drenched in violence and so heavily saturated with psychic stress?
I just hope a new movement can soon emerge, one that rejects violence and synthetic drugs.

Who Really Runs the Federal Reserve?

Federal Reserve
Maybe you think banks own themselves, but, in fact, our biggest banks are owned by a small group of investment companies, a concentration of power likely beyond your imagination. Sadly almost nothing is known about the people who own and run these corporations or who they might be answering to (although I can assure you the banking world is peppered with spooks of all stripes). While headlines may talk about people like Donald Trump or the Koch Brothers, they never seem to peer very deeply into our banking system do they? But you can figure out some of this on your own because the data is available to anyone with access to the web. Just type in the name of any bank or Fortune 500 company, and the bigger they are, the more likely they’ll be owned by a combination of the companies below. Lots of people talk about the power of Goldman Sachs, but that company, for example, is owned by Capital Group, Vanguard and State Street.
Vanguard is the biggest mutual fund company in America and their president doesn’t even have a wikipedia page. This is the case with many CEO’s of our most powerful financial firms. What does that tell you about the Brahmins who run the system? They don’t like publicity. In fact, avoiding wikipedia and the media is likely considered a badge of honor in this culture. Frederick William McNabb III makes Philadelphia his home and his connections into the top tiers of the economy are too vast to list. Vanguard is the second biggest stockholder in Bank of America, JP Morgan and Citigroup. How’s that for covering the bases?
Fidelity CEO Edward Johnson III and his daughter Abigail own 49% of the stock of this privately-held corporation. They both went to Harvard and live in Milton, Massachusetts. Fidelity is the third biggest shareholder of Bank of America.
State Street: You won’t find CEO Joseph L. Hooley on wikipedia and he possesses but a lowly BS degree from Boston College, yet his company is the number one shareholder in Bank of America, JP Morgan and Citigroup, as well as the third largest shareholder in Wells Fargo. Check out any major blue chip stock and they are likely big investors. It’s a Boston-based company so you know some old Brahmins are probably associated somewhere along the line.
BlackRock: This is the largest investment management corporation in the world with a name certainly worthy of a proper Illuminati cut-out. Naturally, CEO Laurence Fink doesn’t even have a wikipedia page. Initially, this company was part of the Blackstone Group, but spun off in 1988 by specializing in mortgage-based securities. Then, after the 2008 meltdown, they were given a strategic position in “fixing” the problem they created. They are well-vested in all the biggest banks, being the third largest shareholder in Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citigroup, while coming in fourth biggest in Wells Fargo.
Bank of NY Mellon: This is the oldest investment bank on Wall Street and got an enormous bail-out after the 2008 meltdown. Gerald L. Hassell is a Duke graduate who came up through the ranks to run the firm. I would imagine the New York Tories had a hand in this one although Alexander Hamilton initially founded the bank through his Dutch connections.
Capital Group: David I. Fisher runs this powerful investment company, which formed in 1933 as a renegade to Wall Street. Fisher attended college at Berkeley and, like most of these CEO’s, has no wikipedia page.
Massachusetts Financial Services (MFS): Although started with funds from the Boston Brahmins, this company is now owned by a Canadian Company called Sun Life Financial, which is mostly owned by American Funds. And herein lies the problem of this shell game. You see, there’s obviously an intense concentration of power and wealth that has been accumulated by these dominating investment firms and since they all have invested into each other, while buying up control of most of the blue chip corporations, the real ownerships are nested inside an endless series of boxes. These CEO’s are truly Masters of the Worlds they inhabit and all of them measure their annual compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars.
Many fake conspiracy sites will try to hoodwink you into believing all these banks are secretly owned by the Rothschilds and to prove this point, they’ll point to an executive officer (not even a CEO) in each corporation that has past experience working for a Rothschild company? I find that logic pretty absurd. Executives of large banks move around and prior employment is no proof of anything. You’d have to look at the actual stock held by relatives of that family. And while I’m sure their holdings are vast, like other banking dynasties, I don’t believe it eclipses the combined wealth of all the other dynastic families of North America and England. Plus the fact that known disinfo groups like the John Birch Society keep pushing the Rothschild meme makes it all the more suspicious. The puppet masters need a managed dialectic to advance their economic agendas, so keeping Bluebloods and dynastic Jewish families at seeming odds is a big part of the op, and those divisions can be played against each other when circumstances warrant. Meanwhile, instead of investigating this nexus of extreme power, our media carefully avoids talking about the owning families or even the chosen CEO’s who run their companies. It’s a shadow world of secret societies and private clubs that you’ll never be allowed into.

Toxic Hot Seat: Your Couch is a Chemical Bomb

I was getting so disappointed with HBO I was actually thinking about cancelling. Boardwalk Empire started out okay, only I can’t imagine why they didn’t tell the real story of Nucky Johnson’s war with William Randolph Hearst. Now that show has jumped the shark so many times I’ve lost interest. But yesterday I was surfing the documentaries and came across the newly released Toxic Hot Seat.
This is truly an eye-opening revelation. Did you know most house fires are started by cigarettes? The cigarette companies actually had to put chemicals in their products to keep them burning constantly like that. I guess that was to make more money because cigarettes smoke themselves. Notice that spliffs go out right away and don’t burn down any houses, but if you fall asleep with a cigarette in your fingers, you might not wake up. The fire doesn’t kill you because toxic fumes usually get you first.
Back in the early 1970s, the cigarette companies knew they had a serious problem with house fires, so they went after the furniture makers. Instead of making cigarettes safer by eliminating some of the chemical additives, the cigarette companies decided furniture must be made safe from cigarettes. Pretty soon all the foam used in furniture was laced with tons of deadly chemicals, all to make us safer? This was certainly a win-win for the DuPont company. The entire concept was absurd, but we are still paying the price. And it’s a lot higher than you might think.
Yes, much of our furniture is toxic and emits clouds of fumes every time you sit down on your couch, although you can solve this problem by getting a couch made before around 1972. Hard to imagine today, but there was a time when foam had zero chemical additives. If you’re wondering why autism and other mental disorders are epidemic, consider the role of chemical pollution. Some of the worst pollution comes right into our homes disguised as furniture. What makes this situation even more ridiculous is that this toxic furniture turns incredibly more deadly once it catches fire. Yes, the retardant slows down the ability of the foam to flame up….for a few minutes….but once the foam does catch fire, and it will, then those chemicals vaporize and can enter your system easily. Talk to some firefighters about the epidemic of cancer in their profession and they’ll tell you it’s from the vapors created by toxic furniture.
Maybe this documentary can change the situation. There’s no justification for continuing to dump all these toxic chemicals into our homes. We really need a furniture company to come along and stand up against this nonsense. One of the primary chemicals we are talking about is BVO, brominated vegetable oil. And you know something really bizarre? The soft drink manufacturers put BVO into many of the citrus-flavored soft drinks. BVO use in food is banned in most civilized parts of the world, but here in the United States, we let our kiddies lap it up in sugar-laced drinks? And we wonder why some of our kids are having mental problems?
What this country needs is an all-out assault on the chemical industry that keeps making up new toxic molecules every year and dumping them into our homes. There’s been little effort so far to slow down this poisoning. I sure hope this eye-opening documentary starts a groundswell of protest against BVO. And stay away from Mountain Dew, Fanta Orange and Gatorade drinks with citrus. Always check the ingredients because soft drinks containing BVO will list it on all their bottles and cans.

In Praise of Flick Ford

After the Soho Weekly News folded, I went looking for a new place to publish my landmark 1980s uptown-downtown journalism. Ah, yes, the tawdry East Village in the 1980s, a time and place that someday may be as widely celebrated as the Summer of Love in San Francisco, because it was equally revolutionary and exciting.
My first book, Hip Hop, had disappointed me as it looked rushed out and I guess it was. For my next book, I wanted to work more closely with the designer. I noticed the East Village Eye on a newsstand and that caught my eye because I loved the new wave art direction. Soon, I met the publisher Leonard Abrams, and the art director David Allen, who had two other art directors he loved working with, Flick Ford and Brian Spaeth. The illo (above) was drawn by Flick, a portrait of the two of us, based on a photo from the East Village Eye.

I was living on the Upper West Side, where I still reside, a former reporter for the New York Daily News, hanging out mostly with friends from Illinois who had all penetrated the upper ranks of the corporate media world. But suddenly I shifted gears and started hanging out in the East Village almost nonstop for ten years.

I’m shy, so I like extrovert buddies who can start a conversation. Larry Green was my sidekick in high school and he always reminded me of a young Fred Astaire. Very suave and he loved to dance. I remember thinking: odd, a dude in the dance club, but then Larry told me it was the easiest way to meet hot girls.

Well, Flick reminded me of a young James Cagney and he could entertain and sweet talk the opposite sex better than anyone I knew, excepting Chef Ra, and Flick became my sidekick for the next decade. He certainly had a style all his own and I radically adjusted my look just from hanging around with him.

Flick, Brian and I would go on to form the Soul Assassins, a legendary band from the period. We all worked at High Times at one point, and now we’ve gone in different directions, although I think all three of us are doing our best work right now. I’m tremendously impressed with Flick’s latest book, Wild, 75 Freshwater Tropical Fish of the World.

I didn’t catch on to Flick’s obsession with fish until one day when out of the blue he got a small tank for his apartment. I returned a few weeks later and his apartment was filled with huge tanks, fresh and salt water. It’s safe to say the fish were talking to Flick. And what do you think they were saying? Save me?

Of course, that was 30 years ago. Today, Flick is widely recognized as one of the world’s greatest fish painters. He travels the globe catching fish so he can watercolor them straight from the water and then he mostly returns them to their habitat. Wild is an attempt to document the earth’s freshwater phenotypes. I guess you know life began in water so these fish are some of our oldest ancestors. And many are disappearing and have been replaced in captivity by flashy hybrids, which is cool, except what happens when all the original phenotypes are gone? In case of emergency, it’s up to the conservationist to capture, protect and preserve these phenotypes and that’s really what Wild is all about: inspiring a new generation to respect the natural order by honoring the ancestors of the earth. This is not just a book of paintings, however, but an encyclopedic compendium of vital information and includes maps of origin and instructions on captivity.

Here’s Flick’s Rainbow Trout from the Upper Missouri. You can’t really do these images justice with web shots, however. The fish literally jump off the pages and many are so colorful you wonder why anyone felt they needed to be enhanced through breeding. Even more astonishing are the prints and original watercolors Flick carries when he’s on tour. I thought I’d give you a heads up on a rare opportunity to meet a colossal talent in person.

And check out Flick’s website here: http://www.flickford.com/