Wall Street now serves, in the words of one former investment executive, as “Lucy to America’s Charlie Brown,” endlessly creating new products to lure the great herd of unwitting investors into whatever tawdry greed-bubble is being spun at the moment: Come kick the football again, only this time we’ll call it the Internet, real estate, oil futures. Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

- Wall Street’s Naked Swindle
by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone
2009-10-14

In the event of pandemic influenza, law enforcement agencies (e.g., State, local, and tribal Police Departments, Sheriff’s Offices, Federal law enforcement officers, special jurisdiction police personnel) will play a critical role in maintaining the rule of law as well as protecting the health and safety of citizens in their respective jurisdictions. Planning for pandemic influenza is critical.

- Law Enforcement Pandemic Influenza Planning Checklist
Department of Health and Human Services

Guillain-Barré syndrome can affect anybody. It can strike at any age and both sexes are equally prone to the disorder. The syndrome is rare, however, afflicting only about one person in 100,000. Usually Guillain-Barré occurs a few days or weeks after the patient has had symptoms of a respiratory or gastrointestinal viral infection. Occasionally surgery or vaccinations will trigger the syndrome.

- Guillain-Barré Syndrome Fact Sheet
National Institute of Neurological Disorders
and Stroke (NINDS)

The letter from the Health Protection Agency, the official body that oversees public health, has been leaked to The Mail on Sunday, leading to demands to know why the information has not been given to the public before the vaccination of millions of people, including children, begins.

The letter, sent to about 600 neurologists on July 29, is the first sign that there is concern at the highest levels that the vaccine itself could cause serious complications.

It refers to the use of a similar swine flu vaccine in the United States in 1976 when:

• More people died from the vaccination than from swine flu.
• 500 cases of GBS were detected.
• The vaccine may have increased the risk of contracting GBS by eight times.
• The vaccine was withdrawn after just ten weeks when the link with GBS became clear.
• The US Government was forced to pay out millions of dollars to those affected.

Concerns have already been raised that the new vaccine has not been sufficiently tested and that the effects, especially on children, are unknown.

- Swine flu jab link to killer nerve disease: Leaked letter reveals concern of neurologists over 25 deaths in America
Daily Mail UK
2009-08-15

That’s odd – the titles of the documents listed at Flu.gov seem to include random capitalization…

• Law EnforcEmEnt PandEmic infLuEnza PLanning chEckList
• CorreCtional FaCilities PandemiC inFluenza Planning CheCklist

Evidence of steganography in government publications?

Where’s my tinfoil hat when I need it…

Germ-spreading schoolchildren are expected to be the focus of a massive U.S. vaccination campaign against the novel H1N1 flu.

- Most parents won’t have kids get H1N1 flu shots, study finds
by Melissa Healy for the LA Times
2009-09-25

“Your kids are gonna die” – sounds like a terrorist’s threat…

Consumers: Be wary of Internet, e-mail, and other ads promoting products that prevent, cure, treat, or diagnose novel H1N1 flu. Some of these ads promote fraudulent flu remedies.

Products that carry these fraudulent claims might be promoted as dietary supplements, drugs, vaccines, or diagnostic tests.

For questions about the flu or approved flu-related products, contact your doctor or pharmacist.

A message from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

- H1N1 Consumer Fraud
US DoHHS PSA
2009-05-12

Beware of snake oil – great advice from a less-than-trustworthy source.

Novartis and Baxter International applied for patents for this vaccine long before the engineered ‘outbreak’ in Mexico in April. Novartis made its provisional patent application in 2005 and it was approved in February this year. Baxter International applied for its patent in August 2008 and it came through in March, just before the virus was released in Mexico to start the whole thing rolling.

The sequence is this: patent the vaccine; release the laboratory-created ‘swine flu’ virus in Mexico; use the controlled and pathetic media to cause panic in the population over ‘deadly’ swine flu; tell the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic and demand vaccination for the entire human race; spread a strengthened virus in the vaccine and through other means to cause terror and hysteria to ensure that people line up for their jab of live virus. Oh yes, and get governments to give you blanket immunity from prosecution for the effects of your vaccine.

- A STRENGTHENED VIRUS AND A POLICE STATE
by David Icke
2009-09-20

If the situation doesn’t feel right, look into it – this conspiracy theory assigns clear means and motives to the supposed conspirators… and there is evidence that the American people are not being told the whole story: not a good sign for those who stand to lose here.

“Do you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, alone, without any aid from a rogue agency of the US government or at least a portion of that agency? I believe you are very naive if you do.”

- Charles Harrelson

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

- The Big Takeover by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone

Hearkening back to On Conspiracies and Theories and The Paranoid Style, there is nothing new or novel about this revelation – a coordinated effort by a few well-connected individuals acting to secure their own interests at the expense of others’ has been the crux of most every conflict throughout history.

Wouldn’t it be novel if we could stop the madness, demand accountability, and inculcate social responsibility into the minds of politicians and citizens alike?

Fat chance…

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.

- The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter
Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.

Just for the record, I do not consider myself to be a last bastion of any particular values or even common sense… Worth noting, however: society has been plagued by the recurring problems of war, corrupt leadership, and inadequate planning for countless generations.

There remains a lesson to be learned here, no?