MEDIA ROOTS- As the world of art becomes increasingly homogenized, it is growing harder to come across original art that has societal and political significance. With the exception of Banksy and a few others, rarely do you see a prominent artist putting themselves out there to make a bold statement or provoke controversial thought. Like every other commodity in this corporatist system, popular modern art has become an over-produced, unoriginal, profit driven industry.

In times of perpetual wars and endless threats, dissenting propaganda artists have always been a crucial element of communication, organization and reflection. For our generation- there is Nathan Janes (AKA Red Baron), a propaganda artist and political activist who refuses to sell out to the system.

Janes is the mind behind PUPAGANDA, a pop art website countering the societal saturation of ‘meaningless advertising art’ by providing more inspiring, thought provoking work.  According to Janes, “It’s time people quit living a life of constant entertainment and start engaging in critical thought while questioning the barrage of commercial images and propaganda that they are faced with each day.”

His motivation is to open minds by depicting the machinery the global elite use to advance their own agenda.  And he does it with a man’s best friend – Janes uses the comforting imagery of dogs because they serve as an artistic tool for individuals to explore contentious topics.

Janes’s art has been featured in multiple prominent publications and he has been commissioned to do paintings by celebrities like Caprice Bourret and Pete Wentz of the band Fall Out Boy. Media Roots recently sat down with Nathan Janes for an exclusive interview about his artistic and political endeavors.

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MR: What was your political awakening? Why did you start making political art?

NJ: My political awakening happened about three years ago. My journey began when my musician friend Photon Man gave me a copy of Terrorstorm by Alex Jones. It wasn’t long before I transformed my art from “Pop ARF” to “PUPAGANDA.” My previous “Pop ARF” artwork focused on the heartwarming appeal of dogs; I promoted the message of the prevention of cruelty towards animals but many of my paintings were just aesthetically pleasing without any particular message. While I still have compassion for dogs, my focus today is to awaken the general public to the ways in which we have been trained to follow our masters much like dogs. 

Since I have begun to create more powerful and thought provoking paintings, interest from art publications and other media that once promoted my work has ceased. Today’s artists found in the mainstream media and major galleries, create work lacking careful analysis of society. Artists that make strong statements about the Establishment and the ways in which we are being controlled and managed may never be promoted widely because we are a threat to the status quo.

MR: Why do you paint dogs and how does that fit into the messages you relay?

NJ: Dogs are the perfect subject to communicate my message because people still have empathy and compassion for dogs. We have been exposed to dehumanization through a constant flow of images on television, in movies, and in print depicting so much violence against our own kind that people no longer have compassion for one another. When something tragic happens to another human being, we are unable to react but if a dog is abused in anyway there is a sudden swell of compassion. There are also many parallels between the ways that dogs are trained and how we are conditioned by culture, which make for powerful paintings.

MR: What mediums do you usually work with?

NJ: I work in acrylics and usually paint on stretched canvas.

MR: Did you have any art school training or does painting come naturally for you?

NJ: I am a graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio. My work today is a representation of my hard work and incredibly intensive practice.  I began training to be an artist as a freshman in High School. I am not talented or gifted; I have just applied myself and developed my skills and technique over many years.

MR: You just launched an international campaign that sparked attention worldwide, including a plug from Adbusters. What is Unplug the Signal, and why should people get involved?

NJ: Unplug the Signal is a campaign to turn off televisions.  I designed the campaign to create awareness of the gross manipulation of reality that is broadcast by the six major corporations controlling the content of television. With the average American adult watching more than 4 hours of television each day, the television plays a major role in continually creating the perceived reality in which we live.  The television has been used as a weapon of mass deception for the last half a century; it manages society and culture through such techniques as perception management, behavior placement, predictive programming and crisis creation.

People should get involved with this campaign because the television remains our greatest threat to individual sovereignty and the largest obstacle to becoming a truly informed individual. In order for individuals to see the real locus of control and look beyond such things as the false left/right paradigm, they will first need to be able to get beyond the paradigm conditioned by the television. In order for people to wake up, this information needs to be shared between families, friends, and neighbors. The campaign has just begun and already the message is spreading. I am very happy with the feedback it has been receiving.

MR: What are your three favorite pieces and what do they represent?

NJ: My three favorite pieces would be those that focus on the engineering and control of society through television:

Total Indoctrination, Acrylic on Canvas, 48” x 48”, 2009

This painting represents how totally absorbed someone who regularly watches television can become, where they see everything within their lives relating somehow to television. It depicts a life where anything outside TV is rejected and all thoughts and discussions are just recycled conversations from TV and slogans from those sold to us as authorities and experts.

TV Mind Control, Acrylic on Canvas, 36” x 48”, 2009

This piece depicts the hypnotic affect of television as those who watch become a subject of mind-control. Too often the brain is switched to standby and all information is collected and accepted as truth without any questioning.  When viewing television, we do not consciously rationalize the information resonating within our unconscious depths; the hypnotic affect makes us highly suggestible.

Unplug the Signal, Acrylic and Masonite, 20″ x 16″, 2010

“Unplug the Signal” represents the constant flow of information that is transmitted by the television 24 hours a day. It is this signal which places the viewers all on the same page and makes them highly predictable. Plato’s Cave serves as an allegory for this phenomenon. In Plato’s cave, people view the shadows on the wall and interpret these shadows as reality. When one of them finds a way out of the cave and returns to tell the others what is outside, he and his message are rejected. When individuals are so thoroughly engrossed by the message of television, they will reject any information outside of the paradigm it presents while attacking and ridiculing the messenger.

MR: What is in store for Nathan Janes?

NJ: I am currently working on a painting of the President’s dog. This painting is a critical assessment I created in response to the threats to our liberties as sovereign citizens of this Republic. As for what’s in store, I will be working on a painting on Tiananmen Square, Chemtrails, implantable microchips and other projects that will spread the message of the Unplug the Signal Campaign including poetry, song writing, and the development of an literary allegory.

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Find out more about Nathan “Red Baron” Janes at PUPAGANDA, or follow his work on Facebook and YouTube. Get involved in his Unplug the Signal campaign at UnplugtheSignal.com

Abby

SALON– Earlier this month, The Cato Institute’s Unbound published my essay on America’s Surveillance State, and then invited several commentators to reply and participate in a debate of these issues.  Two of those replies were particularly critical:  this one from John Eastman, former Dean of the Chapman University School of Law (recent home to John Yoo), recently defeated GOP candidate for California Attorney General, and former clerk to right-wing judges Clarence Thomas and Michael Luttig; and this one from Paul Rosenzweig, a Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Homeland Security official in the Bush administration.

My reply to them is now posted.  As I noted, those two responses “perfectly illustrate the continuous stream of manipulative fear-mongering over the last decade which has reduced much of the American citizenry into a meek and submissive faction for whom no asserted government power is too extreme, provided the scary menace of ‘Terrorism’ is uttered to justify it.”  For that reason, I think the discussion is quite instructive.

* * * * *

THE SURVEILLANCE STATE THRIVES ON FEAR

I’m particularly appreciative of the responses to my initial essay by John Eastman and Paul Rosenzweig. Those two replies — especially the former — perfectly illustrate the continuous stream of manipulative fear-mongering over the last decade which has reduced much of the American citizenry into a meek and submissive faction for whom no asserted government power is too extreme, provided the scary menace of “Terrorism” is uttered to justify it.

That more-surveillance-is-always-better mentality is what allows Eastman and Rosenzweig to dismiss concerns over surveillance excesses a mere four weeks after the establishment-supporting Washington Post documented that our Surveillance State is “so large, so unwieldy and so secretive” that not even top intelligence and defense officials know what it does. For those who are so fearful of Terrorism and/or so authoritarian in their desire to exploit and exaggerate that threat for greater government power, not even the construction of a “Top Secret America” — “an alternative geography of the United States” that operates in the dark and with virtually no oversight — is cause for concern.

Eastman’s essay centers around one three-word slogan: We‘re at war! For almost a full decade, this has been the all-justifying cliché for everything the U.S. Government does — from torture, renditions and due-process-free imprisonments to wars of aggression, occupations, assassination programs aimed at U.S. citizens and illegal domestic eavesdropping. Thus does Eastman thunder, with the melodrama and hysteria typical of this scare tactic: “Not once in his article does Greenwald even acknowledge that we are at war with a global enemy bent on destroying us.” A global enemy bent on destroying us! Scary: be very afraid.

By invoking The War Justification for America’s Surveillance State, Eastman wants to trigger images of America’s past glorious wars. He’s not particularly subtle about that, as he begins with a charming story of how his grandfather’s letters were censored during World War I (how censorship of a soldier deployed in a foreign war justifies surveillance of American civilians on U.S. soil is anyone’s guess). But, for several reasons, this war justification is as misleading as it is dangerous:

Continue reading about America’s Surveillance State.

Written by Glenn Greenwald

© SALON, 2010

GUARDIAN– The White House was accused today of spinning a government scientific report into the amount of oil left in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP spill which had officials declaring that the vast majority of the oil had been removed.

As BP workers finished pouring cement into the well as a first step to permanently sealing it today, environmental groups and scientists – including those working with government agencies to calculate the scale and effects of the spill – said White House officials had painted far too optimistic a picture of a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (Noaa) into the fate of the oil.

“Recent reports seem to say that about 75% of the oil is taken care of and that is just not true,” said John Kessler, of Texas A&M University, who led a National Science Foundation on-site study of the spill. “The fact is that 50% to 75% of the material that came out of the well is still in the water. It’s just in a dissolved or dispersed form.”

With work progressing on the final phase of the “static kill” sealing of the well, Thad Allen, the Obama administration’s top official on the spill, told reporters there would be no new oil in the Gulf.

But those assurances failed to satisfy scientists and environmental groups, who disputed the claim by Carol Browner, the White House energy and climate adviser, that “the vast majority of oil is gone”.

In Louisiana, state wildlife officials told CNN that tar balls and patches of oil were still washing up in the marshes and coastal areas of St Bernard, Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes.

Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, said the White House had been too quick to declare the oil was gone. “The blanket statement that the public understood is that most of the oil has disappeared. That is not true. About 50% of it is still in the water,” she said.

Continue reading at GUARDIAN.

© GUARDIAN, 2010

photo by Deepwater Horizon Response/Flickr

August 16,2010

COMMON DREAMS– It’s already history. In mid-August 2010, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan launched a huge media campaign to prevent any substantial withdrawal of military forces the next summer.

The morning after Gen. David Petraeus appeared in a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to promote the war effort, the New York Times front-paged news of its own interview with him — reporting that the general “suggested that he would resist any large-scale or rapid withdrawal of American forces.”

In fact, the general signaled that he might oppose any reduction of U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan a year from now. During the NBC interview, the Times noted, “Petraeus even appeared to leave open the possibility that he would recommend against any withdrawal of American forces next summer.”

On Monday, the Washington Post also published the twisty line of the suddenly interview-hungry Petraeus, reporting that “he remains supportive of President Obama’s decision to begin withdrawing troops next July, but he said it is far too soon to determine the size of the drawdown.” The newspaper observed that “the general’s presence in Kabul, as opposed to the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, could make him a far more forceful voice for attenuating the drawdown if he chooses to make that case.”

“Attenuating the drawdown” means keeping the war machinery at full throttle.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, with the evident approval of the White House, has launched a fierce media blitz to cripple the policy option of any significant military withdrawal a year from now. Riding high in what is supposed to be a civilian-run military, Petraeus is engaging in strategic media operations to manipulate what should be a democratic process on matters of war and peace.

Who bears ultimate responsibility for this manipulative, anti-democratic behavior? The commander in chief.

Ominously, the Petraeus media offensive got underway just days after presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs picked a fight with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — a wing that has been strengthening its opposition to the war in Afghanistan.

More than four decades after President Johnson used the term “nervous Nellies” to disparage the growing number of Democrats who voiced dissent about the war in Vietnam, the Obama White House is now disparaging progressive dissenters with terms like “the professional left.”

Every week, President Obama is sacrificing billions of dollars and uncounted lives in the service of what Martin Luther King Jr. called — at a time of another horrific war effort — “the madness of militarism.” Then, as now, a Democrat in the White House augmented the momentum of the Pentagon’s war train, boosting it with eagerness to appear tough and avoid Republican charges of weakness.

While history is not exactly repeating, it is rhyming. Like a dirge.

Now, as in the era of Dr. King’s final years, war is escalating while the lures of silence or equivocation are widely viewed as prudent. Rationales for muting dissent keep pitching for complicity.

The immediate problem is one of political acquiescence. Right now, it’s time to speak up against the efforts by a top general to stampede this country into more war. No matter who is willing to go along with the madness of militarism, we must not.

MEDIA ROOTS- When was the last time you stopped to think about the one thing you can’t live without? I don’t mean the Internet – I’m talking about water. Without clean drinking water, life could not go on. This is why it’s so important that we know what is in our water. For the past sixty-five years, city governments nationwide have been adding a controversial substance called fluoride to municipal water supplies.

You probably recognize the word fluoride  from the back of your toothpaste tube or from your visits to the dentist. But the fluoride added to our water is not the same as that in our toothpaste. The chemical added to our water is a fluorine compound called hexafluorosilicic acid that is generated as a by-product from the phosphate fertilizer industry. 

Phosphates are minerals that are used to make fertilizer, and phosphate mining industry is a giant moneymaker. Fluoride is created by the production of fertilizer as well as in the manufacturing of steel, aluminum, glass, and cement. Previously, the lack of government regulation allowed gaseous fluoride to move through factory smokestacks and straight into our atmosphere. Now, environmental regulations require giant filtration systems called “scrubbers” atop the stacks to keep these toxic chemicals from escaping into the air. Fluorosilicic acid is then extracted from these scrubbers and condensed to a water-based solution which is packaged unrefined and sold to city governments for the purpose of water fluoridation.

By selling the fluoride byproducts for this purpose, companies avoid  the huge cost of disposing of these chemicals in the environment safely, and according to regulation. Back in the 1930’s, a band of industrial corporations – including Monsanto, U.S. Steel, Union Carbide, and Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA),  the leading producer of aluminum – had been cheaply disposing of their fluoride byproducts into the environment for years. This changed when their toxic waste became the target of negative press in the local news. A 1933 toxicology report by the USDA had warned of fluoride’s toxicity, singling out the aluminum industry as the biggest culprit. 

The new potential of legal liability due to the exposure of workers and communities to industrial fluoride scared these corporations. Knowing that disposing of industrial fluoride waste safely was expensive, ALCOA employed biochemist Gerald Cox in 1936, to argue for fluoride’s dental benefits through experimentation on rats. Cox, neither a doctor nor a dentist, concluded that fluoride strengthened and protected teeth against decay and began to tour the country promoting water fluoridation on behalf of his employers. Interestingly, Cox’s findings ran contrary to the position originally held by the American Dental Association (ADA) on water fluoridation. 

In 1944, the Journal of the American Dental Association published the following statement:

“We do know that the use of drinking water containing as little as 1.2 to 3.0 parts per million of fluoride will cause such developmental disturbances as osteosclerosis, spondylosis, and osteopetrosis, and we cannot afford to run the risk of producing such serious systemic disturbances…” 

In spite of this warning by the ADA, Grand Rapids, Michigan became the first community to fluoridate its drinking water the very next year.

In 1947 Oscar R. Ewing, a paid attorney for ALCOA, was picked to head the Federal Security Agency.  In this position he oversaw the Public Health Service or PHS (which is now the Department of Health and Human Services). This enabled him to change the Code of Federal Regulations, and place all control of drinking water fluoridation in the hands of his own department. Making clear his lingering ties to the aluminum industry and their expensive toxic waste, Ewing made fluoridation promotion one of the first official policies of the PHS. Over the next three years, 87 additional American cities began fluoridating their water.

The study that is often referred to in fluoride’s defense was conducted by the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) of the United States Public Health Service (PHS). It sought to determine whether there was a relationship between fluoridation and tooth decay. Released in 1988, the multi-million dollar nationwide survey examined 39,000 U.S. school children aged 5-17 from 84 different fluoridated and non-fluoridated geographical areas.

Surprisingly, the study uncovered a declining trend in tooth decay rates in both fluoridated and non-fluoridated areas, mostly due to overall better hygiene. The overriding conclusion from the extensive study was that there is no relationship between tooth decay and fluoride ingestion. Despite this consensus, this study is still commonly cited to link lowered decay rates in fluoridated areas. A seldom-reported fact is that the same trend was found in non-fluoridated areas too.

Fluoride overexposure can bring serious health risks. The most common affliction due to overconsumption is called fluorosis, a condition characterized by a discoloration of teeth or changes in bone density. An excess of fluoride eats away at the enamel of your teeth, causing craters and surface discoloration. Dental fluorosis is the first clear and obvious sign that your body is being poisoned by too much fluoride, and cases can range from mild to severe. This occurs because only 50% of all fluoride taken in by the body is excreted. The remaining fluoride is disseminated throughout the body, accumulating in our bones, pineal gland and other tissues. In Karnataka, India, an excess of fluoride has turned the ground water into a slow poison, crippling at least 10,000 people. 

The Director of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Dr D Nagaraj, says that “due to fluoride concentration in water, many people in districts [in Karnataka, India] like Dharwad and Tumkur have spinal cord diseases. These are progressive diseases, after decades of consumption. People are battling with permanent disabilities.”

Alarmingly, a 1991 study by the U.S. Public Health Service found that the rates of osteosarcoma, a deadly type of bone cancer, were significantly higher in fluoridated communities than in non-fluoridated communities. The Harvard School of Dental Medicine found the same link in study done ten years later. Additional studies have associated fluoride ingestion with other serious health problems, including chromosomal damage, morphological changes to their kidneys and brain, hypo activity (or inactivity), damage to the thyroid gland, skeletal fluorosis, osteoporosis, liver cancer, and fertility problems.

The most distressing findings come from 18 human studies done in China, India, Iran and Mexico that show a substantial lowering of IQ in fluoridated areas. The ingestion of fluoride has been shown to increase the gastrointestinal absorption of aluminum by over 600%, and the absorption of heavy metals like aluminum is speculated to have a direct correlation to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological brain disorders. Although a direct correlation between Alzheimer’s disease and fluoride ingestion is inconclusive, it is interesting to note that the rate of Alzheimer’s is twice as high in America than in Europe, where many countries have banned fluoridation.

Many countries around the world are skeptical of the benefits of adding fluoride to drinking water. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan and China have all ruled out water fluoridation as a safe and fair practice.       

If you want to find out whether you’re drinking fluoridated water, the first thing you can do is access your city’s fluoridation status on the Center for Disease Control’s website in its oral health section.    

If your water is fluoridated, it’s not a lost cause.  You can speak out in your community or at city council meetings to let your local representatives know your concerns.  To remove fluoride from your water you have a couple of options. You can equip your home with water filtration systems like those at Equinox or Burkey. Filters like Pur and Brita do not remove fluoride.  If you buy bottled drinking water, reverse osmosis and distillation remove almost all fluoride.    

If your city is planning to fluoridate you can stop it! Activists in Pennsylvania have successfully fought off fluoridation legislation since 1987 and they’re at it again. There is still a chance to put a halt to the fluoridation process in your own city.

Whether or not you support water fluoridation, the real issue here is having a choice. No chemical, no matter what its supposed benefits are, should be forced upon the public without their consent.  Having access to clean water should be a fundamental right for every human being.

“Water is the lifeblood of our bodies, our economy, our nation and our well-being.” -Stephen Johnson     

***NOTE

After numerous attempts to get data from city officials proving the benefits of mass fluoridation, I kept getting referred back to either the respective city’s water website or other government controlled sites. I also attempted to get in contact with Ellie Nadler, the head of San Diego’s Coalition for Fluoridation, but couldn’t find any legitimate website or group presence for that matter. Ellie backed out of any interviews and refused to give a statement.

Written by Abby Martin, Research help by Jeff Wilson

Interview I conducted with David C. Kennedy, DDS, and former head of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology.

Additional Resources–

Tooth Decay Trends in Fluoridated and Non Fluoridated Areas

EPA Union Calls for Moratorium on Fluoridation

600 pros urge Congress to Stop Fluoridation

Scientific Consensus Statement on Environmental Agents Associated with Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Chapter 4.3.2 (pg. 14)

ADA Positions and Statements Interim Guidance on Fluoride Intake for Infants and Young Children

Dr. Kennedy, DDT Speaks out Against Fluoride

Fluoride Information Network

The Fluoride Risk

Citizens Uniting Against Fluoride

Flickr photo by Minimalist Photography