irony that it is the empire and its files that need to see sunshine and brought to us all to bear witness and move to action
by Paul Haeder / July 20th, 2025
It should be your world instead
Fly your kite
I did it once
Let it be twice
Let it be another tale…It’s your turn, world… say something!
I’m having Abby Martin on my radio show, and I’ll post the story and link here at DV. Her 2019 film seems almost ancient compared to the hell-hole Israeli Jews have unleashed on humanity: SERIOUSLY.
Filmed during the height of the Great March of Return protests, it features exclusive footage of demonstrations where 200 unarmed civilians have been killed by Israeli snipers since March 30, 2018.
But this is the plan:
If this isn’t plain evil, then you are lobotomized for sure: More than 134,000 Palestinians — among them more than 40,500 children — have sustained war‑related injuries, with roughly 10 children per day losing one or both legs, a new report by a UN-led humanitarian coordination body has revealed.
There is no safe space in Gaza. 20 months of intense hostilities have destroyed the protection environment for persons with disabilities and older persons. 134,105 people including over 40,500 children have new war-related injuries. 25 per cent are estimated to have new disabilities requiring acute and ongoing rehabilitation. Over 35,000 people are believed to have significant hearing damage due to explosions. Ten children per day lose one or both of their legs.
Martin’s new project is almost in its final edit, and it’s a film about how the U.S. Military — that vast complex she might not be encompassing in toto (military, education, medical, engineering, science, legal, media, entertainment, PR, chemical, mining, dual and triple use research COMPLEX) is the world’s largest polluter in the greenhouse gas realm, as well as poisons and toxins and destroying water resources and soil.
Here’s an interview she did with Lowkey:
And so we have this as Mint Press’ tagline: “The U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter in the world. There is no corporation or industry that compares to the damage and devastation done by the U.S. war machine,” Abby Martin told Watchdog host Lowkey today. Abby Martin is a California-based artist, journalist and filmmaker who is host of The Empire Files, a series that analyzes the world through the framing of the United States as a global empire. Her upcoming movie, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” exposes how the U.S. military and America’s endless wars are a key driver in catastrophic climate change.
The Empire Files is also getting into this:
The Eyes Left podcast (an Empire Files production) created this factsheet and downloadable two-sided brochure to print and distribute to service members.
Domestically, Trump is illegally using service members against immigrants and legitimate protests against ICE paramilitary raids. This campaign has grown increasingly fascist and modeled after white nationalist fantasy.
Now, go to the CIA-Drenched Wikipedia and see how that neoliberal wack-a-mole shit hole denigrates Abby. If you want. But it’s the same attack dog crap. I’m not sure if she’s been on Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, but I can say that as journalist and educator at the college level, I recently was in Eugene, Oregon, and spoke with a forty-something male reporter for NPA, and then an intern from New York.
Blank faces:
Covert Action Magazine; Project Censored; Consortium News; Break Through News; Mint Press News; Empire Files; Counterpunch; Monthly Review; Black Agenda Report; and of course, I did not get into more radical news sources.
They knew nothing of Street Roots, the Portland-based kick ass street newspaper that kicks high on many stories, not just stories about the houseless: “Newberg community rallies around beloved wine country leader after sudden ICE detention — After the arrest of Moisés Sotelo, ICE accused him of having a DUI conviction, but local prosecutors said there’s no record of any previous charges against him.”
Big story for NPR reporters, but they had blank stares.
So what does this say about media today, and this Zac is in his late forties, and this Safina ( both staffing the KLCC station, an NPR affiliate out of Eugene/Lane Community College) is in her early twenties. Media literacy? The J Schools are part of the problem, and I was in one at the University of Arizona, and I worked for newspapers in Tucson and Arizona, and I eventually taught journalism (Part-time) and worked as a journalist in El Paso.
We are in big trouble. I was in the baby news game in the 1970s starting off, and we did have much leeway at the Arizona Daily Wildcat, but even that conservatism and false balance and gimmicky neutrality and equivocation from the old guard was disgusting because even then we knew the conservative politicians did not consider media fair and balanced, calling it the So Called Liberal Media, yet another myth.
And here we are with every sort of middle of the road and legacy media being not just attacked, but shut down, vis-a-vis lawfare.
Oh, also, since Pedophilia and Human Trafficking and Rape are in the news with Trump and Company, they knew nothing of Nick Bryant’s work. Amazing. They didn’t know what the Gawker was.
Despite a strong desire from the public to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case, which saw the trafficking and sexual exploitation of thousands of young girls, the cabal associated with Epstein continues its conspiracy to suppress the ugly truth of the ruling class.
One of the key witnesses that has made her testimony quite public is Virginia Roberts, or Virginia Guiffre as she now known. She has stated that she was pandered by Jeffrey Epstein to a large number of rich and powerful figures who include senior political figures and a member of the British royal family. She (also) says – and this is yet to be fully established by other witnesses – that Jeffrey Epstein was secretly recording at least some of the sexual contacts she allegedly had with senior figures and that presumably tapes of these contacts exist somewhere. We know that very recently when the Southern District of New York launched an investigation that the first thing they did was to use a crow-bar to break Jeffrey Epstein’s front door to his 7-story mansion and to go then straight to his safe. What do you think is going on?
Nick Bryant: One of the discs was allegedly labelled with the name of a person who is affluent, a powerbroker and then (the name of) a victim. We don’t know the victim and we don’t know the power-broker. But I have known that Jeffrey Epstein has been clandestinely taping people. In 2005, when the Palm Beach Police Depart served a warrant on Jeffrey Epstein’s home, they found two hidden cameras. Hidden cameras have been a part of his reality for quite some time.
What I try to tell people, when they say “Jeffrey Epstein has a person compromised”, (is that) if you are compromising powerful people, people who have access to thugs, murderers, you have to have an organisation behind you that is very powerful. You can’t be just Jeffrey Epstein and whack people. So, these people knew that if they tried to do something to Jeffrey Epstein, something would be visited upon them that is far worse.
So, if you are blackmailing very powerful people – you cannot do that and live, unless you have an organisation behind you. And those people that you are blackmailing have got to be aware of that organisation, or else they will take you out in a heartbeat. Legs broken, arms broken or whatever they do.
Investigative journalist and founder of the Epstein Justice non-profit Nick Bryant is leading a petition urging President Trump to release the Epstein Files. The files are a cache of federal documents detailing the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, the late politically-connected financier behind a massive child trafficking ring. Trump previously promised to release these documents, which some have speculated included a “client list” of possible co-conspirators.
Check out his in-depth article, The Jeffrey Epstein Cover-Up: Pedophilia, Lies, and Ghislaine Maxwell, for a detailed account backed by evidence, including insights from Epstein’s infamous Black Book.
His other book:
No knowledge of Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, Mnar Muhawesh Adley, Rania Khalek
Forget about this pre-Trump Hack Election: LIVE at The People’s Forum: Katie Halper, Rania Khalek, Abby Martin & Claudia De la Cruz
So, I’ll talk about Palestine, about the unending genocide and torture regime of the Jewish State of Murdering, Raping, Starving, Poisoning, Polluting, Occupying, Maiming Palestine.
Her project about US military being the Destroyer of all Destroyers and Pacific People on Planet Earth, pollution or just the tertiary and secondary and direct hell and stunted development of nations that have been put in the US’s crosshairs for not being, well, pro-USA/Capitalism/Empire.
This is why it’s impossible to strip oneself from Israel’s crimes and the crimes of Capitalism:
The F-35 program relies heavily on a vast network of contractors, with Lockheed Martin as the prime contractor. This program involves nearly 1,800 domestic suppliers across 45 states and Puerto Rico. The F-35 program is a major economic driver, contributing approximately $72 billion annually to the U.S. economy and supporting over 275,000 jobs.
Oh, I have seen reports of more than 2,400 “suppliers,” which ARE the tendrils of the Military Offensive Murder Weapons Department.
[The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is the Department of Defense’s most ambitious weapons program and plays a crucial role in DOD’s ability to meet current and future U.S. national security goals. At the same time, the F-35 has been plagued by mounting costs and delays resulting in what some have called a staggering price tag of more than $2 trillion over several decades.]
Abby will talk about Red Hill, and I will talk about Camp Lejeune = Semper Fidelis or Das Kapital Uber Alles: From Eisenhower to Trump!
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. — Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (1935)
Now, I have had two veterans on my caseload in Portland, when I worked as a social services case manager, who I assisted in getting service-connected disability recognition and monthly monetary compensation for Parkinsonian symptoms from their time as Marines at Camp Lejeune.
ONE MILITARY base:
The precipitating factor behind a review of a 2011 documentary, Semper Fi: Always Faithful, directed and produced by Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon, is that I am working with a former Marine client as his social worker. In a homeless shelter for veterans; that moniker – social worker — is a deep one, a cover-all assignment, with wide-ranging responsibilities, some anticipated and others surprisingly serendipitous.
His case, age 63, former Marine, in at age 17 with parents’ permission, is complicated – as if the other cases are not. A lot of these cases involve young men and women, virtually boys and girls, getting out of Dodge. Some with a sense of patriotism, for sure, and a few with aspirations of turning the military into a career. But make no bones about it, these people many times got caught up in the rah-rah patriotism of the day, Apple Pie, Mom, Hot Dogs and Football. Some were in it for the macho badge, and others wanted to learn avionics, electronics, logistics and nursing, etc. Many were discharged because of physical injuries or some sort of mental strain, or many were rifted for the unjust downright downsizing.
I’ll call my man Larry, and he grew up on the Oregon Coast, ending up hitching up with the Marine Corps because he wanted out of bubble of the small town and wanted in with a band of brothers.
Today, he is still tall, but a bit hunched over. His face is frozen in a heavy screen of sadness and fear. Both hands he is attempting to calm, but Parkinsonian tremors have taken over; he can’t hold a tray of food and drink, and he has no signature left. He has bruises on his arms and shines from falling over, tripping. He repeats himself, and knows it, telling me his words are coming out slurred.
He spent two years in prison for what amounts to minor (in my mind) medical fraud with his company. Those two years, he tells me, were nirvana. “The prison guards told me they had never anyone say they were glad to be in prison. I told them this was the calmest and most level I had ever been, or for at least years.”
His life was one of overwork, overreach, clients all over the Pacific Northwest, gambling addiction, big money from his business, lots of toys and a big home, and children who ended up spoiled and broken as adults. Larry’s juggling a hoarder wife whose mother is dying, a heroin-addicted daughter with a child, another daughter in an abusive relationship, and countless appointments now to the VA, psychologists, counselors, OT and PT professionals, and support groups.
Today, he is quickly slipping into miasma of Parkinson’s, with all the symptoms and negative cycles of someone with Parkinson’s hitting him daily. He barely got a diagnosis, as early on-set, a few months ago; in fact, he’s been living with the Parkinsonian-triggered suite of maladies for up to 12 years, he tells me. “I remember my clients telling me I was repeating myself. I really think the stupid decision to defraud the state for a few hundred dollars was triggered by Parkinson’s.”
He and I have talked to support groups, looked at the literature around Parkinson’s, watched TED Talk shows focusing on the disease, gone to Michael J. Fox’s website, and just honed in on what his life will be like in a year, two years, and five.
Right now, his Parkinson’s is one of nine major maladies tied to service-connected disabilities the VA is now processing. This ties into the movie – Semper Fi – because my client was stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as part of the Marine Corps where learning the art of war was also combined with the silent spring of water contamination that eventually resulted in diseases that both affected the veterans but also their families, and civilians who used the water, as well as their offspring.
This is a three-decades long exposure, 1957 – 1987, with an estimated 750,000 to 1,000,000 people who may have been exposed to the cancer- and neurological disorder-causing chemicals. They consumed and bathed in tap water contaminated with “extremely high concentrations of toxic chemicals.”
Until then, words:
If I must die
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
Paul Haeder, Author 