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Friday, January 29, 2010

Northeast 9/11 Truth Conference

Via an e-mail distribution.
Boris Epstein

Northeast 9/11 Truth Conference

January 31, 2010

10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Boston, Massachusetts

Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Avenue, 5th floor

(near corner of Harrison and Beach; 5 minute walk from either the Orange Line Chinatown T stop or the Green Line Boylston T stop)

Registration Donation to Defray Expenses: $10

Call Richard Krushnic (617-276-7839) or Chris Gruener (617-965-6552) to preregister—preregistration appreciated.

Schedule

10:00 – 10:45 Registration, Brunch

10:45 – 11:00 Discussion of revisions to the following suggested agenda.

11:00 – 11:30 Evaluation of the previous day’s New England Regional Antiwar Strategy Conference and the participation of 9/11 Truth advocates in the conference.

11:30 --1:30 Hearing From Each Other: Short presentations of varying lengths, with brief questions and discussion following each presentation.

1:30 – 1:50 Break, Snacks

1:50 – 2:35 General discussion: Where does 9/11 Truth go from here?

2:35 – 3:20 General discussion, kicked off by Lenny Mather of the Greater Boston Alliance for 9/11 Truth and Justice and Bill Woodward of Seacoast 9/11 Truth: Organizing a Northeast 9/11 Truth Network and mutual support organization.

3:20 – 4:00 Open. Use of this time will be decided during the proceedings of the conference.

Presenters in the “Hearing From Each Other” part of the program:

This list of presenters is open to change, and the topics listed below are suggested topics, also open to change. In some cases the presenters have agreed to the topics, in others they may decide to alter their presentation. If you would like to have a topic or a presenter included, that can be proposed at the conference, but it would be appreciated if you would send in your suggestion in advance to rkrushnic@gmail.com.

Paul Zarembka, professor of Political Economy, SUNY Buffalo, ed. The Hidden History of 9/11:

The erroneous presentation of the “Institutional Analysis” debunking of 9/11

Truth as presented by Noam Chomsky and Michael Alpert, and the absurd “guilt by association” debunking of 9/11 Truth by Chip Brulet. Paul will also comment on 9/11 Truth in Buffalo.

Barrie Zwicker, editor of Global Outlook, producer of first documentary questioning the official version of 9/11, aired on Canadian TV. Barrie lives in Toronto.

Overview of 9/11 Truth in Canada. Mass Media and 9/11 Truth in Canada.

Peter Dale Scott, author of The Road to 9/11, and many books on “deep politics”—the covert operations and secret strategies of the ruling corporate and government elite, including the assassination of President Kennedy and other assassinations, and US Government involvement in and regulation of the global illegal narcotics trade.

Vice President Cheney’s role in 9/11. What will the next false flag operations be? Thoughts on where 9/11 Truth should go from here.

Bill Woodward, professor of Psychology at University of New Hampshire, leader of Seacoast 9/11 Truth.

Overview of Seacoast 9/11 Truth. Experience of a public university professor fighting to speak out and keep his job.

Alfonse Olszewski, founder of Veterans for 9/11 Truth. Alfonse lives in St. Louis, MO.

Overview of Veterans for 9/11 Truth.

Conal Foley, member of Smedley Brigade of Vets for Peace, operator of a Winthrop, Mass. Cable TV weekly 9/11 Truth program for four years.

The experience of operating a weekly local 9/11 Truth TV program for four years.

Sander Hicks, Canvassing Director for NYCCAN (New York City Coalition for Accountability Now), author of The Big Wedding: 9/11, the Whistleblowers, and the cover-Up, producer and interviewer for TV program INN World Report (look Sander up on Wikipedia).

Review of NYCCAN’s efforts to get a truly independent New York City investigagion of the events surrounding 9/11, until Sander left NYCCAN in 2009. Where to from here?

Chris Gruener, founder of the Greater Boston Alliance for 9/11 Truth and Justice, psychotherapist.

Overview of Greater Boston 9/11 Truth.

In addition to the above, we hope that we can hear from some or all of the following, who are not yet confirmed for participation:

Wayne Madsen, author of the blog Wayne Madsen Report, and Washington, DC-based free-lance journalist, whose articles have appeared in many key regional newspapers. Former Navy anti-submarine warfare officer. Following his Navy career he worked on National Security Administration contracts for RCA Corp. and the US State Dept., among others (look him up on Wikepedia).

False flag operations, viewed by a former military and intelligence insider.

Barry Kissin, Attorney living in Frederick, Maryland, location of Fort Detrick, US Army Research Labs.

The post-9/11 Anthrax false-flag operation by the Army’s Fort Detrick Labs. What’s it like to publicly debate the District Attorney regarding a front-page news false flag operation?

Gerhard Bedding, from Keen, New Hampshire, leader of Monadnock 9/11 Truth.

Overview of Monadnock 9/11 Truth.

Danny Schechter, author of Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception. "The News Dissector," is an independent filmmaker, writer and activist who specializes in economic and media issues. He is executive editor of MediaChannel.org, the world's largest online media issues online network. Produces the News Dissector Blog. He spent many years in Boston area media at WBCN, WGBH, and WCVB. He worked for CNN and ABC News, has written ll books on social and political issues, and directed 30 documentaries including his latest, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, on the financial crisis as a crime story.

What has this all-around media activist been able to say through the media about 9/11? Can 9/11 Truth break through the not-online mass media wall?

NOTE: This Northeast 9/11 Truth Conference on Sunday at Encuentro 5 in Chinatown follows the New England Regional Antiwar Conference on Saturday at MIT. Some Presenters are presenting in both Conferences.


A Few Bios Follow:

[ C. V. | Events | Politics: Iraq, al-Qaeda, 9/11 | Selected Writings | Complete Bibl ]

(This page, and my Curriculum Vitae, are not copyrighted. They are available for legitimate public use or reproduction, though not for private gain.)

For those primarily interested in my recent political prose, go to My Politics webpage, formerly entitled "Iraq, al-Qaeda, 9/11". For those primarily interested in my poetry, go to My Selected Writings webpage. In fact the two genres inter-relate, as exhibited by both my most important prose book, The Road to 9/11, and my most important book of poetry, Minding the Darkness.

Click here to learn about a symposium, two all-day seminars on my work, and a poetry reading on March 13, 14, 17, and 20, at the Open Center, 22 East 30th Street, New York, Ny 10016.

Biography

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott. He is married to Ronna Kabatznick; and he has three children, Cassie, Mika, and John Scott, by a previous marriage to Maylie Marshall.


His prose books include The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (in collaboration, 1987), Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (1994, 1995, 2006), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008).

His chief poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994), published in Canada as Murmur of the Stars. In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award. A new book of poems, Mosaic Orpheus, will appear in Spring 2009 from McGill-Queen's University Press.

An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, he was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).

His poetry has dealt with both his experience and his research, the latter of which has centered on U.S. covert operations, their impact on democracy at home and abroad, and their relations to the John F. Kennedy assassination and the global drug traffic. The poet-critic Robert Hass has written (Agni, 31/32, p. 335) that "Coming to Jakarta is the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time."

If you have any comments or questions, I would be glad to hear from you at pdscottweb@hotmail.com.

Please click here if you have written to me and failed to receive a reply.

This website is dedicated to helping to promote an informed public opinion that is both local and international. I particularly want to thank those who have sent me supportive or informative emails from 37 countries: Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Turkey, Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, Singapore, China, Japan, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Canada (plus 3 more from visitors in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nepal). Special thanks to the visiting professor in Singapore, who said that he was forwarding this URL to his friends in China. I wish also to thank friends who have forwarded useful material, such as the important Irish Times story on bin Laden, the US, and oil, that first reached me via Indonesia from Qatar.

I do believe that international public opinion, when it becomes powerful enough, will become the most effective restraint to the excesses and follies of particular governments.

Barrie Zwicker

An esteemed Canadian [author, broadcaster, investigative journalist and media critic] since at least 1970, Barrie Zwicker was born in Nova Scotia in 1934, but was raised in rural Manitoba (very near the provincial boundary with Saskatchewan); he began his journalism career working for his local paper from the age of 16, right in the tiny hamlet of Russell, Manitoba.

Thereafter, he studied journalism in college at the University of Michigan (in Ann Arbor), and in 1967 earned a Southam Fellowship, which allowed him to work directly with the great pioneer of media analysis, Marshall McLuhan, renowned author of "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" (in which the phrase was first introduced, "the 'Medium is the Message' "), at St. Michael's College in Toronto.

From St. Michael's College, he went on to a series of staff-writing assignments in both the U.S. and Canada, including The Toronto Globe and Mail; the Toronto Star; the Vancouver Province; the Sudbury Star; the Detroit News and the Lansing State Journal. During his seven years in Toronto with the Globe and Mail, he won numerous awards with the Education Writers' Association of North America.

For seven years, Zwicker taught a course at Ryerson University in Toronto, on "Media and Society."

For the better part of 15 years, that is from the inception of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's "Vision TV" in the fall of 1988, until 2003, Barrie Zwicker was the program's in-house, resident "media critic." In the 2001-2002 TV season, Zwicker hosted VisionTV's "Insight: the 'MediaFile' Edition" (a weekly half-hour commercial-free alternative look at the media), moderated its media panel, and provided commentary for each program. Six of his "MediaFile" commentaries that season -- a series titled "What Really Happened on Sept. 11th?" - made him the very first mainstream television journalist in the world, to go on air and [deeply question] the official story of the events of September 11th. The commentaries elicited the greatest response of any programming in the channel's history, which was literally 99% positive. The series became known as "The Great Deception," and was released on video under that title. The updated version (available on VHS and DVD) contains seven segments.

Understandably, he's drawn widespread comparisons to Michael Moore, having in common their mutual penchant for strongly articulating outspoken viewpoints, and for his similar approach to documentary film-making.

He was the very first journalist from the mainstream press (on either side of the U.S./Canadian border) to have voiced an opinion (during a live broadcast) that, the "Terrorist Attacks of Sept. 11th were indeed (and in fact) an inside job" when, on January 21st, 2002, and on national (Canadian) television, he challenged both the U.S. & Canadian media to inquire, and to focus upon.... the following unasked questions:

* Why didn't the president give any orders for 140 minutes after the first plane had been hijacked?

* Why didn't he make a statement in the first 165 minutes after the first plane had been hijacked?

* Why did not a single American Air Force plane make a single interception during these two hours?

In 2002, Zwicker's first documentary on 9/11 aired on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's "Vision TV." Titled, "The Great Deception," it was the first North American documentary, critical of the mainstream media's "public" discussion about 9/11.

"The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw," is a 70-minute [sequel] to what was his earlier-produced "The Great Deception." This film premiered at the The Citizens' Commission on 9-11.

In this work, Zwicker contends that "fear" was the tool systematically employed, by which the aftermath of the public's reaction to the events of 9/11 was stage-managed, manipulated and controlled, and argues that the "War on Terror" is indeed a "mechanism," or strategic ploy, by recourse to which the actual perpetrators have undertaken a transformation of all the most fundamental, of our socio-economic and political circumstances by which to implement an agenda, to accelerate plans for their own widespread, deep and long-lasting social and political control. He also analyses the military failures and breakdowns on the day of 9/11, and observes how strangely and inappropriately the president and his aides had acted, that entire day. Throughout, mainstream media is held to account for being either compliant with, or complicit in.... systematic, willful and calculated deceit of the general public.

This film was followed by another documentary he made (and which was released in 2004), titled "Deep Complicity: 9/11 and The Media."

His book, "Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11," was published by New Society Publishers in September of 2006.

"Even skeptics like myself will find much in Barrie Zwicker's book to ponder, enjoy and, yes even embrace. Interestingly researched and well written, a valuable aid to correct thinking about conspiracy theory." - Michael Parenti, author of "Culture Struggle and The Assassination of Julius Caesar."

Zwicker was also involved (as the host) in the video documentary called, "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream," first broadcast on VisionTV, and earned a number of awards from local film and video festivals, for his contributions.

* In 1977, Zwicker created a directory of contacts for editors, reporters and researchers, called Sources; and, in 1994, a Canadian government directory called Parliamentary Names & Numbers. He subsequently sold them in 1999.

* In 1996, he founded a media relations newsletter and Web site called HotLink.

* In 1991, he was awarded an honorary membership in the Media Club of Canada.

* Zwicker is also the director of an alternative information web site, 911inquiry.org

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Exactly six months after September 11th, Barrie Zwicker remarked during a live (national) broadcast on VisionTV, i.e., on live national (Canadian) television,

broadcast March 11th, 2002,

and which may be found at:

http://www.visiontv.ca/Programs/Prog_Archives/GreatDeception/ArchiveMarch11.html

All printed transcripts from "The Great Deception: What really happened on Sept. 11, 2001," which aired on CBC's VisionTV program called "Insight Media," and was regularly hosted by Barrie Zwicker, who was their in-house "Media Analyst,"

are available online from the website of VisionTV....

which may be found at:

http://www.visiontv.ca/Programs/prog_archives_greatdeception.html .

Part One from this transcript,

may be found at:

http://www.visiontv.ca/Programs/Prog_Archives/GreatDeception/Archive1.html

Part Two from this transcript,

may be found at:

http://www.visiontv.ca/Programs/Prog_Archives/GreatDeception/Archive2.html

Part Three from this transcript,

may be found at:

http://www.visiontv.ca/Programs/Prog_Archives/GreatDeception/Archive3.html

Part Four from this transcript,

may be found at:

http://www.visiontv.ca/Programs/Prog_Archives/GreatDeception/Archive4.html

Part Five from this transcript,

may be found at:

http://www.visiontv.ca/Programs/Prog_Archives/GreatDeception/Archive5.html

Part Six from this transcript,

may be found at:

http://www.visiontv.ca/Programs/Prog_Archives/GreatDeception/Archive6.html

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An article about Zwicker's program on CBC's VisionTV was published in the Toronto Star, May 11th, 2003,

which then reappeared on the Common Dreams website,

and may be found at:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0511-04.htm

Paul Zarembka

Paul Zarembka is a professor of Economics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Since 1977, he's been the general editor for a series of volumes, called "Research in Political Economy"; he's authored "Toward a Theory of Economic Development"; edited "Frontiers in Econometrics"; and he co-edited a volume titled, "Essays in Modern Capital Theory."

The text is pasted below, which is taken from both the "Abstract" and the "Introduction," appearing on the draft of a paper which is dated this past October 17th (2009), which along with his co-author he recently presented at the annual conference (held in Amherst, Mass. this past Nov. 5th - 8th) which was sponsored by the journal "Rethinking Marxism"; this paper was co-authored by Dr. Zarembka (who's a Political Economist in the Economics Department with "S.U.N.Y." at Buffalo), along with Canadian (fellow Marxist) Sociology Professor, David MacGregor (who's with the University of Western Ontario in London) - the title of their paper is: "Marxism, Conspiracy, and 9/11."

The "Abstract" for the paper ("Marxism, Conspiracy, and 9/11"), follows below:

While left commentators typically agree on the convenience for the U.S. ruling class of the outcomes of 9-11, such as the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the demonization of the wider Muslim world, many are unwilling to question whether the attacks actually conformed to officially validated accounts. After recalling a prescient comment by Adam Smith that capitalist interests habitually engage in secret combinations, this paper discusses Karl Marx's account of the hidden machinations behind the rise of Louis Napoleon, an understanding now widely accepted but not at the time. Three twentieth-century examples of a public/conspiratorial dichotomy of state actions are then surveyed -- the role of British bankers in the rise of Hitler, the failed attempt to overthrow President Roosevelt, and the work of Peter Dale Scott regarding the JFK assassination.

The paper thus becomes prepared to review evidence about 9-11, evidence that has cast significant doubt toward the official version. The authors give particular attention to the collapses of three WTC buildings, the numerous war games that were scheduled for the same day, and the evidence regarding the identities of the alleged hijackers. The authors also note how Marxist theory contends that the state operates in the interest of the dominant economic class, yet fails in containing an articulated conceptual distinction between acts of the state that are public and open to direct investigation, and those that are concealed, secret, and indeed conspiratorial.

A few paragraphs from his "Introduction" are next

(Quoting first, from Adam Smith):

"Back at the time of the initiation of the American Revolution against British colonialism, Adam Smith presciently commented that...."

....The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorities, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen....

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbors and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which nobody ever hears of. Masters too sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretenses are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamor, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands...."

The above citation is sourced at:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN3.html#B.I,

Ch. 8, "Of the Wages of Labour" (paragraphs 11, 12, and 13)

Dr. Zarembka then amplifies below:

What can be noticed in Smith is the observation that owners and workers both combine, but owners do so in secret, while workers do not. Thus, workers are not in fact "conspiring" (acting together in secret), while capitalists do "conspire." If Smith's understanding of the class practices is correct, we can say that general opposition to theories of a conspiracy, without considering the merits of a particular argumentation, is a bourgeois construct. That is, the bourgeoisie recognizes that workers do not conspire (as the word is understood) yet take care to ascribe - to ideologist - the same non-conspiracy to themselves. This ideological works most effectively with those who don't experience working-class life and its direct experience of hostility from the capitalist class, i.e., the petit bourgeoisie (including the academic world).

Like all major terrorist incidents, 9-11 sustained social re-direction by instilling widespread fear in the public and inviting retaliation against an alleged enemy. 225 years after Smith remarked upon secret collusions by capitalists, the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., were presented as motivation for retaliatory military adventures, and an ideological campaign that transformed the social and political landscape. Besides dissolving the anti-globalization movement, so strong after Seattle, these attacks made possible a sequence of events that conformed to prior plans set forward by the Bush II White House and its affiliated right-wing think tanks. The plans included encirclement and isolation of Russia and establishment of an American bulwark in Muslim-dominated areas of the globe, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. The project is an extension of US support for the mujaheddin, which, under President Reagan, helped topple the Soviet Union and, during the Bush I and Clinton Administrations, assisted in dismembering and ultimately destroying Yugoslavia. However, given the unsatisfactory character of the official story, the evidence regarding 9-11 has also sustained the charge that it was a form of state terror, a 'false flag' terrorist event that one of us has elsewhere called Machiavellian state terror (MacGregor 2008).

Distance from the version proselytized by U.S state is not a calling card of many "left" U.S. publications. In a 2006 issue, the otherwise critical journal CounterPunch announced that it would not contemplate carrying articles that deny the official story of 9-11, and labeled those who questioned the official story as "conspiracy nuts." Thus, an important left periodical made belief in Washington's account of the fall of the Twin Towers the gold standard for oppositional thought. Rolling Stone pointed readers to one of its own authors dismissing alternative versions of 9-11 as "clinically insane" (see Taibbi, 2006). "Enough of the 9/11 conspiracy theories, already" admonishes Matthew Rothschild (2006), editor of The Progressive. Terry Allen (2006), for In These Times, makes an astonishing comparison to HIV and AIDS: those "who deny that HIV is responsible for AIDS, for example, have contributed to unnecessary infections and deaths." Responding to such presentations, Barrie Zwicker (2006, pp. 190-224) considers the lamentable record of left icon Noam Chomsky (and his multitudinous followers) who denies any problems with the standard narrative of the events of 9-11. Chomsky's resistance to alternative perspectives on the terror attack on the U.S. recalls his stubborn, decades-long battle against critics of the 1964 Warren Report on the assassination of President Kennedy -- an event many compare in its world-historical significance to the 2001 aerial attack on New York and Washington.

Marxist theory of the state has always understood that the state operates in the interest of the dominant economic class, whether the approach has been an instrumentalist view or a structuralist perspective (the latter originating most clearly from the work of Nicos Poulantzas, 1968 and 1970). However, it has no articulated conceptual distinction between acts of the state that are public and open to direct investigation, and acts of the state that are concealed, secret, and indeed conspiratorial. While Marxist commentators typically agree with the outcomes of 9-11 mentioned above, many are unwilling to grant that 9-11 occurred in a manner not officially validated by US authorities, that is, they dismiss the possibility of a conspiracy by the capitalists and its state. While the terrorism on 9-11 offered a reason for US military-state action, it is not investigated as a product of the state apparatus itself. Yet, if Marxism had already included a conceptual distinction between the public and the conspiratorial, at least study of the two possibilities could have become a mandated research topic, whatever the conclusion reached.

Actually, Marx himself was sensitive to the conspiratorial. The most famous example, which we describe in our first section, is Marx's riveting yet under-appreciated account of the rise to power of Louis Napoleon in which there clearly emerges a profound distinction between the public and the conspiratorial. The second section of this paper mentions three twentieth-century examples of the conspiratorial aspect of state actions, the conspiratorial background to the rise of Hitler, the failed attempt to overthrow President Roosevelt in 1933-34, and Scott's (1993) study of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy introducing his concept of 'deep politics.' Finally, we turn to 9-11 and discuss the some of the overwhelming evidence for state-sponsored terrorism....

1. Marx and Conspiracy

There is hardly space here to provide a fully detailed account of Marx’s recognition of a public/conspiratorial divide, although his work relies partly on a conspiratorial approach to government. Symptomatically, Marx himself warmly embraced one of the most fantastic conspiracy theories of his day, that Lord Palmerston, the charismatic English Foreign Secretary, was a Russian agent who sought to extend Czarist influence during his long term of office. And the fundamental Marxist notion that the capitalist state itself is a masked form of bourgeois rule, a covert meeting of minds among landed property owners, financiers and industrialists to monopolize the means of power, hints rather strongly at conspiracy.

The clearest example of Marx's methodological approach to the public/conspiratorial divide may be his classic, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon." Every page in this account is concerned with covert machinations among various political contenders for power in France but the most prominent motif is the conscious intent of Louis Napoleon and his lumpen-proletarian followers, from the beginning, to bring about, by whatever illegal and covert means, the fall of republican rule in France and its replacement by a dictatorship. Although we now take this conspiracy for granted, given the persuasiveness of Marx's account, it was hardly the conventional view of the period. As Marx points out, one of the most influential voices of the time, the London Economist, portrayed Louis Napoleon as a staunch defender of parliamentary governance who, against his own better judgment, was forced by events beyond his control to seize the helm. While it is true that Marx's chronology of parliamentary seizure relies on a sophisticated and then-unrivaled appreciation of complex social class forces at work in France, especially the cowardice of various factions among the parliamentary bourgeoisie, the dark, conspiratorial figure of Louis Napoleon is an overwhelming presence....

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Buffalo is home to three State University of New York (S.U.N.Y.) institutions. Combined, they account for roughly 40,000 students in the area.

Following are links for two pages from the Wikipedia, that are specific to Paul Zarembka's academic institution, S.U.N.Y. (the State University of New York) at Buffalo,

which may be found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_University_of_New_York

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo,_The_State_University_of_New_York

Next is the official website of S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo,

which may be found at:

http://www.buffalo.edu/

Here's a link for the webpage of the Department of Economics for S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo,

which may be found at:

http://www.economics.buffalo.edu/

Next is a link for a (*.pdf) map of the "North Campus" (location of the Econ. Dept. at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo), separate from both the "South Campus," and the "Downtown Campus,"

which may be found at:

http://www.buffalo.edu/buildings/maps/NorthCampus.pdf

Then we have a link for Paul Zarembka's own "Faculty Profile" page, in the Department of Economics with S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo,

which may be found at:

http://www.economics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/zarembka/

Next are links for Paul Zarembka's own author page on the university's website that's dedicated to the Department of Economics, for S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo,

which may be found at:

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~zarembka/

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~zarembka/7S9-11.htm

Danny Schechter

"the News Dissector," is an independent filmmaker, writer and activist who specializes in economic and media issues. He is executive editor of MediaChannel.org, the world's largest online media issues online network, and recipient of many awards including one for his News Dissector Blog. He spent many years in Boston area media at WBCN, WGBH, and WCVB. He worked for CNN and ABC News, has written ll books on social and political issues, and directed 30 documentaries including his latest, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, on the financial crisis as a crime story.

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