Bulletin N° 871
The Power Principle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhj-WsjFj9w
or
(in 3 parts)
directed by Scott Noble
(4h 25min)
This
film explores how the US establishment promotes a culture of fear in order to
secure increased military expenses, year after year. It claims the US
government and the military-industrial complex, together with the US media
developed a powerful propaganda machinery (inspired in good part from Nazi
propaganda) in order to scare and convince the public that US invasions like
those in Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), US support for brutal
mass-killings, terror campaigns like those in Guatemala (1954), Indonesia
(1965), El Salvador (1979), US-designed assassination plots like those in
Nicaragua (1981) and in huge parts of Latin America (Operation Condor) and
support for overthrowing democratically elected governments like those in
Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973) were needed in order to prevent the spread of
communism, using mainly the domino theory.
The
movie also points at the help provided by the Western countries to fascist
regimes in order to counter movements supporting workers rights (socialism,
communism, anarchy). The fascism is presented as an instrument in the hands of
the plutocracy for oppressing and enslaving the working class.
The
meaning of the movie's title, "The power principle" is revealed as
the Mafia principle, which is "not allowing disobedience" - in this
case not allowing the countries in the developing world to have governments
that try to improve the life of the many.
The
movie traces the roots of the US establishment (both Republican and Democrat
parties) mindset into the doctrine of Edward Bernays,
pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, who believed the
democracy is hard to handle and people are just too stupid to govern themselves
in democracy, so there is a need of an elite, public guardians who manage the
society and there is a need of public relation practitioners who would be
professionals in working for the government for managing, manipulating the
public and engineering consent.
Subject : The Capitalist
Conspiracy, Part 7 : 'Artificial Intelligence,' ‘artificial
scarcity’ & the old mafia ‘protection racket.’
December
16, 2019
Grenoble,
France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
We
return momentarily to F. William Engdahl’s book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil
Politics and the New World Order (1992), to examine a radical analysis of US
foreign policy, with its roots embedded in the decisions of a power elite, who
are groomed for specific qualities generation after generation since the
founding of nation.
Engdahl introduces
chapter 9, “Running the World Economy in Reverse: Who made the 1970’s Oil
Shocks?”, with a description of President Nixon in a
financial panic at the end of his first term of office,
. . . in
1969, the U.S. economy had again gone into recession. In order to combat the
downturn, U.S. interest rates by 1970 were sharply lowered. As a consequence of
the falling interest rates, speculative ‘hot money’ began once more to leave
the dollar in record amounts, seeking higher short-term profits in Europe and
elsewhere.
One result of by now almost a decade–long
American refusal to devalue the dollar, and her reluctance to take serious
action to control the huge unregulated Eurodollar market, was an increasingly
unstable short-term currency speculation. As most of the world’s bankers well
knew, King Canute could pretend to hold the waves back for only so long.
As a result of Nixon’s expansionary
domestic U.S. monetary policy in 1970, the capital inflows of the previous year
reversed, and the U.S. incurred a net capital outflow of $6.5 billions. But, as
U.S. recession persisted, as interest rates continued to drop into 1971, and
money supply to expand, these outflows reached then-huge dimensions, totaling
$20 billions. Then, in May of 1971, the United States recorded its first
monthly trade deficit as well, triggering a virtual international panic sell-off
of the U.S. dollar. The situation was indeed becoming desperate.
By 1971 U.S. official gold reserves
represented less than one quarter of her official liabilities, meaning that
theoretically if all foreign dollar holders demanded gold instead, Washington
would have been unable to comply without drastic measures.
. . .
On
August 15, 1971 Nixon took the advice of a close circle of key advises which included
his chief Budget adviser, George Shultz, and a policy group then at the
Treasury Department including Paul Volcker, and Jack Bennett, who later went on
to become a director at Exxon. That sunny quiet August day, in a move which
rocked the world, the President of the United States announced formal
suspension of dollar convertibility into gold, effectively putting the world
fully onto a dollar standard with no gold backing, and by this, unilaterally
ripping apart the central provision of the 1944 Bretton
Woods system. No longer could foreign holders of U.S. dollars redeem their
paper for U.S. gold reserves.
. . .
By declaring to world dollar holders their
paper would no longer be redeemed for gold, Nixon ‘pulled the plug’ on the
world economy, setting into motion a series of events which was to rock the
world as never before. . . .
De Gaulle’s defiance of Washington in
April 1968 on the issue of gold and adhering to the rules of Bretton Woods, had not been sufficient to force through the
badly needed reordering of the international monetary system, but it had
sufficiently poisoned the well of Washington’s ill-conceived IMF Special Drawing
Rights scheme to cover over the problems of the dollar.
The suspension of gold
redemption and the resulting international ‘floating exchange rates’ of the
early 1970’s solved nothing. It only bought some time.
An eminently workable solution would have
been for the U.S. to set the dollar to a more realistic level. From France, de
Gaulle’s former economic adviser, Jacques Rueff,
continued to plead for a $70/oz. gold price, instead of the $35 level the U.S.
unsuccessfully defended. This would calm world speculation and allow the U.S.
to redeem her destabilizing Eurodollars balances abroad, without plunging the
domestic U.S. economy into any serve chaos, Rueff
argued. If done right, it could have given a tremendous spur to U.S. industry
as its exports could cost less in foreign currency. American industrial
interests would again have predominated over financial voices in U.S. policy
circles. But reason was not to prevail.
. . .
The real architects of the Nixon strategy
were in the influential City of London merchant banks. Sir Siegmund
Warburg, Edmond de Rothschild, Jocelyn Hambro and
others, saw a golden opportunity in Nixon’s dissolution of the Bretton
Woods gold standard the summer of 1971, London was once again to become a major
center of world finance, and again on ‘borrowed money,’ this time with American
Eurodollars.
After August 1971, dominant U.S. policy,
under White House National Security Adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, was to control,
not to develop, economies throughout the world. U.S. policy officials began
proudly calling themselves ‘neo-Malthusians.’ Population reduction in
developing nations, rather than technology transfer and industrial growth
strategies, began to be the dominating priority during the 1970s, yet another
throwback to nineteenth-century British colonial thinking. How this transformation
took place we shall soon see.
. . .
Permanent
instability had been introduced into world monetary affairs in a way not seen since
the early 1930’s, but this time, strategists in New York, Washington and the
City of London were preparing an unexpected surprise to regain the upper hand
and recover from the devastating loss of the monetary pillar of their system. (pp.155-158)
Engdahl goes on to elaborate
on the importance of the conspiratorial meeting of international power elites
held in Sweden in the spring of 1973, and the central role played by Henry
Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State.
The design behind Nixon’s August 15, 1971
dollar strategy did not emerge until October 1973, more than two years later
and even then few persons outside a handful of insiders grasped the connection.
The August 1971 de-monetization of the dollar was used by the London-New York
financial establishment to buy precious time, while policy insiders prepared a
bold new monetarist design, a ‘paradigm shift’ as one preferred to term it.
Certain influential voices in the Anglo-American financial establishment had
devised a strategy to create again a strong dollar, and one again to increase
their relative political power in the world, just when it appeared they were in
decisive rout.
In May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the
dollar still vivid, a group of 84 of the world’s top financial and political
insiders met at the secluded island resort of the Swedish Wallenberg banking
family, as Saltsjoebaden, Sweden. This gathering of
Prince Bernhard’s Bilderberg Group, heard an American
participant outline a ‘scenario’ for an imminent 400 percent increase in OPEC
petroleum revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjoebaden
meeting was not to prevent the expected oil price shock, but rather, plan how
to manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars, a process U.S.
Secretary of State Kissinger later called ‘recycling the petro-dollar flows.’(pp.158-160)
What the powerful men grouped around Bilderberg had evidently decided that May, was to launch a
colossal assault against industrial growth in the world, in order to tilt the
balance of power back to the advantage of Anglo-American financial interests, and
the dollar. In order to do this, they determined to use their most prized
weapon – control of the world’s oil flows. Bilderberg
policy was to trigger a global oil embargo, in order to force a dramatic
increase in world oil prices. Since 1945, world oil trade had by international
custom been priced in dollars as American oil companies dominated the postwar
market. A sharp sudden increase in the world demand for U.S. dollars to pay for
the necessary oil, therefore, meant an equally dramatic increase in world
demand for U.S. dollars to pay for that necessary oil.
Never in history had such a small circle
of interests centered in London and New York, controlled so much of the entire
world’s economic destiny. The Anglo-American financial establishment had
resolved to use their oil power in a manner no one could imagine possible. The
very outrageousness of their scheme was to their advantage, they clearly reckoned.(pp.163-164)
The
next step in creating the “oil shock” to further the plan of population control
and world domination, according to Engdahl, was the
carefully orchestrated “Yom Kippur War” (October 6-25, 1973).
On
October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, igniting what became known as
the ‘Yom Kippur’ war. Contrary to popular impression, the ‘Yom Kippur’ war was
not the simple result of miscalculation, blunder or an Arab decision to launch
a military strike against the state of Israel; The entire events surrounding outbreak
of the October
war were secretly orchestrated by Washington and London, using the powerful diplomatic
secret channels developed by Nixon’s White House National Security Adviser,
Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger effectively controlled
the Israeli policy response through his intimate relation with Israel’s
Washington ambassador, Simcha Dinitz.
As well, Kissinger cultivated channels to the Egyptian and Syrian side. His
method was simply to misrepresent to each party the critical elements of the
other, ensuring the war and its subsequent Arab oil embargo.
. . .
One
enormous consequence of the ensuing 400 percent rise in OPEC oil prices was
that investments of hundreds of millions of dollars by British Petroleum, Royal
Dutch Shell and other Anglo-American petroleum concerns in the risky North Sea could produce oil at
a profit. It is a curious fact of the time that the profitability of these new
North Sea oil fields was not at all secure until after Kissinger’s oil shock.
Of course, this could have only been a fortuitous coincidence.
By
October 16, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, following a meeting
on oil price in Vienna, had raised their price by a then-staggering 70 percent,
from $3.01/barrel to $5.11. That same day, the members of the Arab OPEC countries,
citing the U.S. support for Israel in the Mideast war, declared an embargo on
all oil sales to the United States and Netherlands – the major oil port of
Western Europe.
Saudi µArabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Abu
Dhabi, Qatar and Algeria announced on October 17, 1973 that they would cut
their production below the September level by 5 percent for October and an
additional 5 percent per month, ‘until Israeli withdrawal is completed from the
whole Arab territories occupied in June 1967 and the legal rights of the
Palestinian people are restored.’ The world’s first ‘oil shock,’ or as the
Japanese termed it, ‘Oil Shokku’ was underway.
. . .
Most
governments across Europe fell in this period, victim to the consequences of
the oil shock on their economies.
. . .
But the economic impact on the developing
economies of the world – for at this time they still could be rightly called
developing, rather than the fatalistic Third World designation so in vogue
today – the impact of an overnight price increase of 400 percent in their
primary energy source was staggering. The vast majority of the world’s
less-developed economies, without significant domestic oil resources, were
suddenly confronted with an unexpected and unplayable 400 percent increase in
costs of energy imports, to say nothing of costs chemicals and fertilizers for
agriculture derived from petroleum. During this time, commentators began
speaking of ‘triage,’ the wartime idea of survival of the fittest, and
introduced the vocabulary of ‘Third Word and ‘Fourth World’ (the non-OPEC
countries).
India in 1973 had a positive balance of
trade, a healthy situation for a developing economy. By 1974, India had total
foreign exchange reserves of $629 millions with which
to pay – in dollars – an annual oil import bill of almost double that of $1,241
million. Sudan, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand and throughout Africa and Latin
America country after country was faced in 1974 with gaping deficits in their
balance of payments. As a whole, developing countries in 1974 incurred a total
trade deficit of $35 billions according to the IMF, a
colossal sum in that day, and, not surprisingly, a deficit precisely 4 times as
large as in 1973, or just in proportion to the oil priced increase.
Following the several years of strong
industrial and trade growth of the early 1970’s, the severe drop in industrial
activity throughout the world economy in 1974-75 was greater than any such
decline since the war.
But while Kissinger’s 1973 oil shock had a
devastating impact on world industrial growth, it had an enormous benefit for
certain established interests – the major New York and London banks, and the
Severn Sisters oil multinationals of the U.S. and Britain. Exxon replaced
General Motors as the largest American corporation in gross revenues by 1974.
Her sisters were not far behind, including Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and Gulf.
The bulk of OPEC dollar revenues,
Kissinger’s ‘recycled petrodollars,’ was deposited with the leading banks of
London and New York, the banks which dealt in dollars as well as international
oil trade. Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America,
Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank, all enjoyed the windfall profits of the oil
shock. We shall later see how they recycled their ‘petro-dollars’ during the
1970’s, and how it set the stage for the great debt crisis of the 1980’s.(pp.164-170)
Thus
we see the origins of “Artificial Scarcity” as it was executed by
Anglo-American policymakers in the 1970s, through the coordination of oil,
finance, and diplomatic/military policies.
This
strategy of population control
replacing economic development, according
to Engdahl, included orchestrated attacks on
nuclear energy by huge petroleum interests and it embraced the Anglo-American
green agenda.
Beginning in the 1970’s an awesome
propaganda offensive was launched from select Anglo-American think-tanks and
journals, intended to shape a new ‘limits to growth’ agenda, which world insure
the ‘success’ of the dramatic oil shock strategy. The American oilman present
at the May 1973 Saltsjoebaden meeting of the Bilderberg group, Robert O. Anderson, was a central figure
in the implementation of the ensuing Anglo-American ecology agenda. It was to
become one of the most successful frauds in history.(p.173)
. . .
Robert
O. Anderson also contributed significant funds to a project initiated by the Rockefeller family at
the Rockefeller’s estate at Bellagio, Italy with Aurelio Peccei
and Alexander King. This Club of Rome, and the U.S. Association of the Club of
Rome, in 1972, gave widespread publicity to their publication of a
scientifically fraudulent computer simulation prepared by Dennis Meadows and
Jay Forrester, titled; ‘Limits to
Growth.’ Adding modern computer graphics to the discredited essay of
Malthus, Meadows and Forrester insisted that the world would ‘soon perish for
lack of adequate energy, food and other resources. As did Malthus, they chose to
ignore the impact of technological progress on improving the human condition.
Their message was one of unmitigated gloom and cultural pessimism.
One of the most targeted countries for
this new Anglo-American anti-nuclear offensive in this time was Germany. While
France’s nuclear program was equally if not more ambitious, Germany was deemed
an area where Anglo-American intelligence assets had greater likelihood of
success given their history in the postwar occupation of the Federal Republic.
Almost as soon as the ink had dried on the Schmidt government’s 1975 nuclear
development program, an offensive was launched.
A key operative in this new project was to
be a young woman whose mother was German and stepfather American and who had
lived in the U.S. until 1970, working for U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, among
other things. Petra K. Kelly had developed close ties in her U.S. years to one
of the principal new Anglo-American anti-nuclear organizations created by McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation, the Natural Resources
Defense Council. The Natural Resources Defense Council included Barbara Ward
(Lady Jackson) and Laurance Rockefeller among its
board at the time. In Germany, Kelly began organizing legal assaults against construction
of the German nuclear program during the min 1970’s, resulting in costly delays
and eventual large cuts in the entire German nuclear plan.
Engdahl
concludes this chapter on “The World economy in Reverse” with a brief
description of Malthusian theory of population growth and how this theory was adopted in the 1970s to
promote “population control” as an instrument for US “national security”:
In
1798 an obscure English clergyman, professor of political economy in the employ
of the British East India Company’s East India College at Haileybury,
was given instant fame by his English sponsors for his ‘Essay on the Principle
of Population.’ The essay itself was a scientific fraud, plagiarized largely
from a Venetian attack on the positive population theory of American Benjamin
Franklin.
The Venetian attack on µFranklin’s essay
had been written by Giammaria Ortes
in 1774. Malthus’ adaptation of Ortes’ ‘theory’ was
refined with a façade of mathematical legitimacy which he called the ‘law of
geometric progression,’ which held that human populations invariably expanded
geometrically, while the means of subsistence were arithmetically limited or
linear. The flaw in Malthus’ argument, as demonstrated irrefutably by the
spectacular growth of civilization, technology and agriculture productivity
since 1798, was Malthus’ deliberate ignoring of the contribution of advances in
science and technology to dramatically improve such factors
as crop yield, labor productivity and such.
By the mid-1070’s, indicative of the
effectiveness of the new propaganda onslaught from the Anglo-American establishment,
American government officials were openly boasting in public press conferences
that they were committed ‘neo-Malthusians,’ something for which they would have
been laughed out of office a mere decade or so earlier. But nowhere did the new
embrace of British Malthusian economics in the United States show itself more
brutally than in Kissinger’s National Security Council.
On April 24, 1974, in the midst of the oil
crisis, White House National Security adviser, Henry Alfred Kissinger, issued a
National Security Council Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), on the subject of
‘Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas
Interests.’ It was directed to all cabinet secretaries, the military Joint Chiefs
of Staff as well as the CIA and other key agencies. On October 16, 1975, on Kissinger’s
urging, President Gerald Ford issued a memorandum
confirming the need for ‘U.S. leadership in world population matters,’ based on
the contents of the classified NSSM 200 document. The document made
Malthusianism, for the first time in American history, an explicit item of
security policy of the government of the United States. More
bitter the irony, was the fact that it was initiated by a German-born
Jew. Even during the Nazi years, government officials in Germany were more
guarded about officially espousing such goals.
NSSM 200 argued that population expansion
in select developing countries which also contain key strategic resources
necessary to the US economy, posed potential U.S. ‘national
security threats’. The study warned that under pressure from an expanding
domestic population, countries with needed raw materials will tend to demand
better prices and higher terms of trade for their exports to the United States.
In this context, the NSSM 200 identified a target list of 13 countries singled
out as ‘strategic targets’ for U.S. efforts at population control. The list,
drawn up in 1974, no doubt, as with all other major decisions of Kissinger,
also involving close consultation with the British Foreign Office, is
instructive.
Kissinger explicitly stated in the
memorandum, ‘how much more efficient expenditures of population control might
be than (would be funds for) raising production through direct investments in
additional irrigation and power projects and factories.’ British 19th-century
Imperialism could have expressed it no better. By the middle 1970’s the government
of the United States, with this secret policy declaration, had committed itself
to an agenda which would contribute to its own economic demise as well as
untold famine, misery and unnecessary death throughout the develop sector. The
13 target countries named by Kissinger’s study were Brazil, Pakistan, India,
Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey,
Ethiopia and Colombia.(pp.176-179)
In
the following Chapter 10, titled, “Europe, Japan and a Response to the Oil
Shock,” F.
William Engdahl gives a detailed description of “the
petrodollar monetary order” that followed the 1974 oil price inflation that was
engineered by Kissinger and the Bilderberg Group. The
“developing world” was irretrievably devastated:
While
industrial countries experienced a certain slow recovery from the initial oil shock
by 1975, the overall position of developing economies deteriorated as a result
of the quadrupling of primary oil prices. Total current-account deficit of all
developing countries rose from a average of some $6 billion per year during the
early 1970’s, to more than $26 billion in 1974 (again, a quadrupling parallel
with the price of oil), and an unbearable seven-fold increase to $42 billion by
1976, with the vast majority of this deficit in countries of the developing sector
whose per capita income levels were the lowest in the world.
Under the threat of losing access to
further borrowing from the World Bank and private industrial-nation banks,
these less developed countries were forced to divert precious funds from
industrial and agricultural development into simply reducing this ‘balance of
payment’ deficit. Their oil imports had to be paid in dollars, while the cost
of their raw materials exports had fallen sharply in the global recession of
1974-75. The countries were forced to borrow short-term, to pay the huge oil
import payments and the only major lenders ready to
Lend
where the US and British ‘Eurodollar’ banks, recycling their huge new
Petrodollar windfall. The entire Indian subcontinent, most of Africa and entire
regions of Latin America were in serve economic and political crisis as a
result.
Private U.S. and European banks stepped in
to the breach, under the Bilderberg ‘petrodollar
recycling’ strategy, to lend to these countries, but only to ‘balance’ accounts
which had been left in shambles by the Anglo-American oil shock, not to finance
creation of necessary production infrastructure or technology development.
These private petrodollar loans came from London ‘Eurodollar’ banks of the
United States and Britain. OPEC oil revenues, paid to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
other countries, were paid in dollars and those dollars were channeled and
‘guided’ into offshore London Eurodollar banks for relending to the victims of
the new oil shock in the developing sector’.
Dr. Kissinger and friends left nothing to
chance in the process.(pp-183-184)
Engdahl goes on to
describe how the so-called “Third World” countries (no longer called
“developing countries”) eventually responded in an effort for self-defense, and
how this effort was systematically smashed.
[In
August] of 1976 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, heads of state and senior cabinet
officials of 85 nations, members of the so-called Group of Non-aligned Nations,
met under the host government of Prime Minister Sirimavo
Bandaranaike. Included among the leaders present were India’s Indira Gandhi, and numerous heads of state or officials of
African, Asian and Latin American governments, … [as
well as] Algeria, and Iraq.[p.188)
. . .
The
explosive issue of the foreign debt had been placed on the negotiating table
for the first time, not by a single government, but by 85 governments acting
collectively.(p.189)
At
the end of September 1976, Guyana’s Foreign Minister Frederick Wills had been
designated to present the demands of the Colombo group before the United
Nations General Assembly, where he dropped a “political bombshell” :
“The
International Monetary Fund and the monetary system of Bretton
Woods must provide a place for alternative structures such as international
development banks, which have as their goal, not the recovery and
reconstruction of Europe or preferential agreements for development of a market
economy, but rather the just development of the gains from an unequal global economic system.
“.
. . The burning problem of the debt and debt service has taken on a special
importance. Developing countries are not able to manage their basic
requirements, as noted in Colombo, without resort to some form of debt
restructuring or moratoria. We must make every effort to oppose attempts to
divide us through ‘case-by-case’ techniques. We cannot allow ourselves to mortgage
future unborn generations to the burdensome debt repayment and destructive debt
service. The time for debt moratorium has arrived.”(p.190)
Willis
challenged the authority of the United States and its British ally in their
draconian measures of what later would be called “genocidal policies of
austerity”:
“The
only Third World raw material that did well in the economic arena was oil, but
the large oil reserves were centered in the Middle East, and manipulation of
inter-Arab and Arab-Israeli conflicts, together with inculcation of a penchant
for prestige projects meant that Third World oil could no be used as factors in
Third World development. One by one Third World
countries were gripped by inflation and starvation, by low life-expectancy and
high infant mortality. The Old Order of Canniing and Castlereagh, Pitt and Disraeli remains.”(p.192)
Here
Engdahl remarks : “The reference to the methods of
British 19th-century Foreign Minister, Castlereagh,
the master artisan of British Balance of Power diplomacy at the 1815 Congress
of Vienna, was appropriate. The principal active opponent who deployed the full
power and force of the U.S. Government, intelligence services and economic
clout to destroy the dynamic set off at Colombo in 1976 was Secretary of State,
Henry Kissinger, a devout student of Castlereagh.”(p.192)
Kissinger’s
tried and proven tactic of
“divide and rule” prevailed against his European opponents who
had expressed solidarity with the Colombo Non-Aligned declaration. And as for
the strategists of this bold Declaration, within months they were forced out of
office, as Kissinger would term it, “case-by-case.” Indira
Gandhi was forced into elections in February 1977 and out of office by March,
less than six months after Willis present the declaration of the Non-Aligned
nations at the United Nations General Assembly. By May 1977 Sirimavo
Bandaranaike was out of office, following a wave of strikes that paralyzed her
country that were reportedly led by “Trotskyites” close to British intelligence
services. And on February 14, 1978, Guyana’s Foreign Minister, Frederick Wills,
the key strategist of the Non-Aligned initiative on economic development, was forced to
resign.(p.194)
The Third World threat to the
Anglo-American order and their regime of global taxation through petrodollars,
had apparently been eaten back. The floodgates were opened by the leading
Eurodollar banks of London and New York to lend ever grater sums to select
states of the Third World who agreed to the draconian IMF terms, to refinance
their oil-related deficits.(p.194)
We
are told of similar interventions when so-called Third World countries attempted
to develop an “atoms for peace” to replace oil as a primary energy supply in
order to permit economic development.
In
1977, Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
was overthrown in
a military coup led by General Zia ul-Haq.
Before
his death by handing, Bhutto had accused U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger of being behind this overthrow because of Bhutto’s insistence on
developing Pakistan’s independent nuclear program. Writing his defense from his
prison cell before his execution, Bhutto declared, ‘Dr. Henry Kissinger, the
Secretary of State of the United States, has a brilliant mind. He told me that
I should not insult the intelligence of the United States by saying that
Pakistan needed the Reprocessing Plant for her energy needs. In reply, I told
him that I will not insult the intelligence of the United States by discussing
the energy needs of Pakistan, but in the same token, he should not insult the
sovereignty and self-respect of Pakistan by discussing the plant at all . . . I
got the death sentence.’
General Zia reversed Bhutto’s independent
foreign policy and quickly embraced Washington, and abundant U.S. military
assistance followed.(p.196)
The creation of the Trilateral
Commission.
In
April 1975, at a private closed-door meeting in Tokyo - organized by David
Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank , and George W. Ball, the founder
of the Bilderberg
group - future polices of Rockefeller’s newly formed Trilateral
Commission were discussed by representatives of Anglo-American oil and banking
concerns.
What concerned the hundred or so
influential policy-makers at the April meeting of Rockefeller’s . . . Trilateral
Commission was the dangerous risk to the Anglo-American establishment of
continuing the offensive U.S. foreign policy stance against the rest of the
world, associated with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Republican
administration. Kissinger’s hard-line ‘divide and rule’ tactics had been to
isolate one after another country, whether European, developing sector or OPEC,
of portraying OPEC as the villain to developing countries whose economic growth
had been destroyed by the Bilderberger’s 1973 oil
shock policy.
By 1975, his thinly-veiled ‘thug’ approach
to international diplomacy was risking creating an enormous international
backlash. A new ‘image’ was needed to sell the world on the need for continued
American hegemony. Therefore, at the Tokyo gathering of the Trilateral
Commission that April;, little more than a year-and-a-half from the 1976
American presidential elections, David Rockefeller introduced a man to his
influential international friends, who was presented by Rockefeller as the next
president of the United States. Few Americans, let alone foreigners had ever
heard of the small-town Georgia peanut farmer who preferred to be called,
‘Jimmy’ Carter.
. . .
The public profile of Carter’s presidency
was ‘human rights’ for the Third World, ‘negotiation, not confrontation.’ He
portrayed himself as an ‘outsider’ to the Washington power establishment, but
the content of U.S. policy under Carter, with his pre-selected crew of
establishment advisers, was to maintain the American Century at all costs.
Under a rhetorical façade of ‘reforming the old order’ of U.S. foreign policy
the Carter Administration continued the
basic Anglo-American neo-Malthusian strategy initiated by Kissinger at the
National Security Council under National Security Study Memorandum 200. Third
World development was to be blocked, and a ‘limits to growth’ post-industrial
policy was to be imposed, to maintain the hegemony of the dollar imperium. Carter’s ‘human rights’ was to become a bludgeon
to justify unprecedented U.S. intervention into the internal affairs of
targeted Third World nations.
The strategy was to fail miserably.(p.198-200)
As
early as 1977, the European Community showed an interest in stabilizing their
currencies in the aftermath of the oil shocks. With the leadership of Juergen Ponto, chairman of Dresdner Bank, the vision
developed to restore order in the European economies by creating a stable
monetary system which would be based on a new alliance with southern Africa,
including South Africa, the Ivory Coast, and Angola.
Angola was rich in oil,
South Africa had industrial technology and infrastructure needed by Angola and
other African states. The region required financial investment and
secure foreign trade outlets for it to work. In late 1974, South African
Finance Minister Nicolaas Diederichs
publically called for a revaluation of the international central bank gold
price to market level, echoing the debate in Europe. ‘I have consistently
pressed for monetary authorities to be allowed to sell gold among themselves at
a market-related price . . . gold in official vaults of central banks would be
revalued; and there would be much more money to pay the Arabs; secondly, the dollar
would lose vale,’ he noted.
At
the same time, German and Italy initiated a bilateral agreement under which
gold was used as collateral for a German loan with gold valued at 80% of the market
price of $150. European discussions around some effective use of gold as an alternative
to the tyranny of the dollar standard were clearly growing in import.
. . .
Then, on July 31 in Frankfurt Dresdner
Bank head Juergen Ponto was assassinated by
terrorists claiming to be the Baader-Meinhof. Some
weeks later, in Cologne the chairman of the German Employer’ federation, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, was
kidnapped and later murdered by the same organization. While the assassins’
trail led back to the East, there was significant reason to believe that
certain powerful western intelligence services had a role in both
assassinations. In the event, West Germany was plunged into political chaos and
gripped by fear as never in the postwar period. The possibility of any
significant development initiative towards South Africa had been killed along
with Ponto and Schleyer. The initiative to break with
the dollar imperium had been stalled for the moment.(pp.200-202)
. . .
[D]espite all
efforts since the early 1970s, the ‘danger’ of independent industrial and trade
growth which undercut the prized domination of the dollar imperium,
was clearly becoming real in the minds of policy-shapers in Washington and
London. Even more drastic shocks were required to stop the insistence of
nations to pursue scientific and industrial development.
Drastic shocks they were.
In November 1978, President Carter named
the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, like Carter a
member was a member as well of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special
White House Iran
Task Force under the National Security Council’s Brezezinski.
Ball recommended Washington drop support of the Shah of Iran and support the
fundamentalist Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini, Robert Bowie for the
CIA was one of the lead ‘case officers’ in the new CIA-led coup against the man
their covert actions had placed into power only 25 years earlier.
Their scheme was based on detailed study
of the phenomenon of Islamic Fundamentalism as presented by British Islamic
expert, Dr. Bernard Lewis, then on assignment at Princeton University in the United
States. Lewis’ scheme, which was unveiled in the May 1979 Bilderberg
meeting in Austria, endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind
Khomeini, to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near
East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage
autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites,
Ethiopian Copts, Azerebaijani Turks and so forth. The
chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc of Crisis,’ which would spill over
into the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.
The coup against the Shah, as that against
Mossadegh in 1953, was run by British and American
intelligence, characteristically, with the bombastic American, Brzesinski, taking public ‘credit’ for getting rid of the
‘corrupt’ Shah, while the British remained safely in the
background.(pp.204-205)
. . .
Carter’s Security Adviser, Brzezinski, and
Secretary of State Vance, implemented their ‘Arc of Crisis’ policy, spreading
the instability of the Iranian revolution throughout the perimeter around the
Soviet Union. From Pakistan across Iran, U.S. initiatives created instability
or worse.
. . .
In October 1979, a devastating new Anglo-American
financial shock was unleashed on top of the second oil shock of that year. That
August, on the advice of David Rockefeller and other influential voices f the
Wall Street banking establishment, President Carter appointed Paul Volcker, the
man who, back in August 1971, had been a key architect of the policy of taking
the dollar off the gold standard, to head the Federal Reserve. Paul A. Volker,
a former official at Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, and of course , a
member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, was President of the New
York Federal Reserve at the time of his nomination to the post as head of the
world’s most powerful central bank.
. . .
The policy strategists based in the City
of London and New York, then resolved to impose a Malthusian monetary shock on
top of the oil shock, to tilt the balance of world development decisively to
their relative advantage.
In October 1979, Volcker unveiled a
radical new Federal Reserve monetary policy. He deceived a shocked Congress and
a desperate White House, by insisting that his radical monetarist cure was
aimed at ‘squeezing inflation out of the system.’ It was aimed at making the
U.S. dollar the most eagerly sought currency in the world, and, to stop
industrial growth dead in its tracks, in order that political and financial power
flow back to the dollar imperium. Volcker’s cold
rationalization to Congress was that ‘restraint on growth in money and credit,
maintained over a considerable period of time, must be an essential part of any
program to deal with entrenched inflation and inflationary expectations.’
The defect in Volcker’s monetary shock
therapy was that he never addressed the fundamental origins of the soaring
inflation – two oil price shocks since
1973, which had raised the price of the world’s basic energy and transportation
by 1,300% in six years. And Volcker’s insistence on restricting the U.S. money
supply by cutting credit to banks, consumers and the economy
was a calculated fraud. Volker knew fully, as did every major banker in New York
and London, that control of America’s domestic dollar supply was a minor part
of a far larger problem. Volcker knew well that his actions had little control
on the estimated $500 billion outside the United States, circulating in the
so-called Eurodollar markets of London and the Cayman Islands and such offshore
hot money havens. At the time of the October 1979 Volcker monetary shock
therapy, Morgan Guaranty Trust calculated the gross size of dollars in the Eurodollar
offshore markets at fully 57% of the entire domestic U.S. money supply. The
American citizen was to pay the cost of this rampant offshore money pool, as
thought it never existed.
In both his objectives, Volcker succeeded.
U.S. interest rates on the Eurodollar market soared from 10%
to 16%, on their way up to levels of 20% in a matter of weeks, as the world
looked on in stunned disbelief. Inflation was indeed being ‘squeezed’ as
the world economy was plunged into the deepest depression since the 1930’s. And
the dollar began what was to be an extraordinary five year long ascent.
The oil shock and the Volcker shock were
combined with a decision as well by the leading circles of the establishment to
‘take the bloom off the nuclear rose’ once and for all, in order to ensure that
the alarming trend of developing worldwide nuclear energy resources to replace
reliance on Anglo-American oil, was decisively ended.
Unprecedented diplomatic and legal
pressures from the Carter White House since 1977, had not succeeded in significantly blunting the attraction
of nuclear power. But on March 28, 1979, in a town in the center of
Pennsylvania, a bizarre event occurred, which was then portrayed to the world
press in fictitious terms as though it were a Hollywood movie script, or a
remake of H.G. Wells’ 1938 ‘War of the Words’ radio broadcast.
Unit-2 of the Three-Mile Island nuclear power
reactor complex in Harrisburg, underwent an improbable
sequence of ‘accidents.’ Later investigation revealed that critical valves had
been illegally and manually closed before the event, preventing emergency cooling
water from entering the reactor’s steam generator system. Within 15 seconds
emergency back-systems had brought the nuclear fission process to a stop. But
then, a plant operator violated all procedure and intervened to shut off
cooling water into the reactor core. The details of what then happened have
been documented elsewhere extensively.
On August 3, 1979 in its official report
on the event the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission posed sabotage or criminal
negligence as one of six possible causes for the Three-Mile Island event. But
even after eliminating the other five possible causes, the government refused
even to consider the possibility of sabotage seriously.
News to the world’s media during the
entire Harrisburg drama was strictly controlled by the newly-established White
House Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). No government or nuclear plant
official was allowed to speak to press except when screened by FEMA censors.
. . .
Curiously
as well, the same month, a spectacular Hollywood movie, ‘The China syndrome,’
starring Jane Fonda, portrayed a fictional account almost exactly parallel with
the Harrisburg events, further fuelling public hysteria over dangers of nuclear
energy.
By the end of 1979, the hegemony of the Anglo-American
financial establishment over the world’s economic and industrial potentials had
been reasserted in a manner never before imagined. Their control of world oil
flows had again been a central weapon of their peculiar brand of Malthusian
policy. Out of the chaos of Khomeini’s Iran and Volcker’s dollar shocks, these
influential policy arbiters saw themselves as virtual gods of Mt. Olympus.
Within a short decade their lofty mount, however, was to feel the rumblings of
an underlying volcano.(pp.207-211) .
. . .
The
23 + items below contain articles and essays offering information and interpretations which invite us to meditate
on our collective condition and to carefully examine the web of power relationships around us - both
international and domestic; to analyze them and better understand the forces
that govern our lives. Once our feet are on the ground, the inevitable question
is where do we stand in this torrent of events, animated
by corporate greed and its dire imperative to control entire populations and neutralize resistance
at any cost.
Francis
Feeley
---
Professeur honoraire de l'Université Grenoble-Alpes
Ancien Directeur des
Researches
Université de Paris-Nanterre
Director of The Center for the Advanced Study
of American Institutions and Social Movements
(CEIMSA-in-Exile)
The University of California-San Diego
http://www.ceimsa.org
a.
F. William Engdahl:
Lecture in
Moscow
(October 2011)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_NzsuyULoI
(28:40)
+
“On CIA, Arab
world, Arab spring, religious fanaticism”
(July 2013)
(8:21)
William Engdahl during his
visit in Moscow within the Initiative Postglobalization
delivered a lecture devoted to shale revolution, Arab spring and Eurasia. At
this part famous expert is speaking about CIA, Arab spring and the truth of
interest of the USA at the Middle East.
+
“On Lebanon, Syria, Katar,
Israel and Putin”
(July 2013)
(7:49)
During his visit in Moscow William Engdahl met with audience, which has an interest in
geopolitics and told about Arab Spring, situation at the Middle East and more
-- he is convinced that Russia position is rights in this conflict.
+
“On China, Russia and Iran as a resistance against
global fascism”
William Engdahl within Initiative
Postglobalization came to Moscow, where he delivered
a lecture about shale gas, Arab spring and Eurasia. There a short piece of the lecture, where expert
speaks about China and Russia and Iran resistance to global fascism.
+
"On Destruction of the USSR,
American economy, findings of new sources of financing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFQCwc3HJ0&feature=youtu.be
William Engdahl within Initiative Postglobalization
came to Moscow, where he delivered a lecture about shale gas, Arab spring and
Eurasia. There a short piece of the lecture, where expert explains motives of
the destruction of the USSR and attempts of the USA to find new source of
financing.
==========
b.
Crisis Management:
Kissinger, McNamara, and Rice
(July 2013)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbIdCPwzROw
(25:48)
from
This week Uncommon Knowledge brings us interview
excerpts from two former secretaries of state and Hoover fellows Henry
Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, and former secretary of defense Robert
McNamara. All three have influenced American foreign policy through the years
and through different crises, and all three believe that the United States
possesses a particular responsibility in the world.
+
Roger Waters Onstage ‘Attack’ Video Stuns Pink Floyd
Fans
https://www.alternativenation.net/roger-waters-onstage-attack-video-stuns-pink-floyd-fans/
+
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Subject: [MCM] Say it ain't so: Chris
Hedges and the Intercept join forces with the US war machine
Great
essay on the propaganda tactic of deploying trusted "leftist" voices
to defuse
resistance.
MCM
The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control
http://edwardcurtin.com/the-art-of-doublespeak-bellingcat-and-mind-control
by Ed Curtin
In
the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the
average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and
needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain. In a number of
books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays,
who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for
the ruling elites. Bernays had honed his skills
while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and
after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York
City.
There
is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self, where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp,
reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed
in his wake. He says the reason he couldn’t call his new business
“propaganda” was because the Germans had given propaganda a “bad name,” and so
he came up with the euphemism “public relations.” He then adds that “if
you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for
peace.” Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate
public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically
elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with
fake news broadcasts). He says “the Germans gave propaganda a bad name,”
not Bernays and the United States with their vast
campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for
going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction). He
sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it
led to support for the “war to end all wars” and subsequently to a hit movie
about WWI, Yankee Doodle Dandy,
made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn’t achieve
its lofty goal.
As
Bernays has said,
The American motion picture is the
greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda
in the world today.
He
was a propagandist to the end. I suspect most viewers of the film are
taken in by these softly spoken words of an old man sipping a glass of wine at
a dinner table with a woman who is asking him questions. I have shown this film
to hundreds of students and none has noticed his legerdemain. It is an
example of the sort of hocus-pocus I will be getting to shortly, the sly
insertion into seemingly liberal or matter-of-fact commentary of statements
that imply a different story. The placement of convincing or confusing
disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays
knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.
In
the following years, Bernays, Lippman,
and their ilk were joined by social “scientists,” psychologists, and sundry
others intent on making a sham out of the idea of democracy by developing
strategies and techniques for the engineering of social consensus consonant
with the wishes of the ruling classes. Their techniques of propaganda
developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the
CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency’s courting of
what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s “the compatible left,”
having already had the right in its pocket. Today most people are, as is said,
“wired,” and they get their information from the
electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots
with government propagandists. Ask yourself: Has the power of the
oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks
increased or decreased over your lifetime. The answer is obvious: the average
people that Lippman and Bernays
trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.
This
is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called
“average” people’s thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also
adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who
consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or
have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different
perspectives on a topic. This is what some call the professional and
intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not
the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces. It
is this segment of the population that considers itself “informed,” but the
information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both
intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public
matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.
Recently
I have noticed a group of interconnected examples of how this group of the
population that exerts influence incommensurate with their numbers has
contributed to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Within this
group there are opinion makers who are often journalists, writers, and cultural
producers of some sort or other, and then the larger number of the intellectual
or schooled class who follow their opinions. This second group then
passes on their received opinions to those who look up to them.
+
NOTE: Concerning Ed Curtin's piece on Bellingcat,
and the participation of some leftist voices in the exaltation of that
propaganda mill, a friend who knows the background of Chris Hedges' involvement
writes that "he was duped into presenting the Emmy to Bellingcat—and, from what I hear, he believes it was
done intentionally to smear him."
As this friend is someone I (and many others) quite admire for his
integrity and bravery, and as it's wholly plausible that Hedges would have been
set up, I am reserving judgement on his action, and
urge people on this list to do so, too.
This caveat does not detract from the essential soundness of Ed Curtin's
thesis: that the
lords of propaganda are
extraordinarily skilled at co-optation of the opposition.
MCM
+
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Vanessa Beeley, who knows more than anyone (outside the CIA) about the White Helmets, "de-platformed" throughout Canada for planning to discuss it
Attached here is Vanessa's excellent presentation on the White Helmets, which
I sent out back in the summer of 2017.
MCM
Award-Winning Journalist Vanessa Beeley Faces “Deplatforming” at Six Canadian Venues
Vanessa Beeley's final Canadian stop in Winnipeg - December 12 at 7pm
https://www.globalresearch.ca/award-winning-journalist-vanessa-beeley-faces-deplatforming-at-six-canadian-venues/5697546
By Michael Welch
Global Research, December 12, 2019
Vanessa Beeley, the award-winning journalist who has gained notoriety for her on the ground reporting on the Syrian conflict has faced opposition in her efforts to speak to Canadian audiences at the invitation of local anti war activists.
According to Ken Stone of the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War, a lead organizer of Beeley’s cross-Canada speaking tour, six venues have so far backed away from hosting the UK journalist’s talks. These include Palestine House in Mississauga, the Steelworkers Hall in Toronto, St. Paul’s University in Ottawa, the University of Montreal, the University of Winnipeg, and the Millenium Library, also in Winnipeg.
Stone explains that the withdrawal from agreements at each venue to host Beeley were preceded by the circulation of at least two hit pieces on the journalist upon her arrival in Canada – one by La Presse in Quebec and one by the Huffington Post. Stone explained that the decision to cancel in each case was precipitated by the circulation of these articles by unknown actors.
Says Stone,
“There wasn’t an organized effort, but there were people in individual cities where she was speaking who took it upon themselves to circulate these articles behind the scenes – shadowy figures who tried their very best to scare the managers of various venues into cancelling, and they did so six times.”
The proper name of the tour is ‘Canada’s Dirty War on Syria: The White Helmets and the Regime Change War billionaires.’ Ms. Beeley was intent on presenting her research into Canada’s role in undermining the government of President Bachar Al Assad. Beeley’s message directly contradicts mainstream reporting on the conflict, particularly her research into the White Helmets, which she and other independent journalists classify as a propaganda construct providing public relations cover for regime change efforts and continued economic sanctions that are decimating the country.
The justification for one venue after another cancelling is not clear, as none have officially provided any explanation. According to Stone, however, there were two venues on the tour that allowed the Beeley presentation to take place in spite of this unexpected opposition. One was the New Vision Church in Hamilton. The other was the Knox Metropolitan United Church in Regina. Both Ministers highlighted concerns from a complainant about ‘hate speech’ being directed toward the White Helmets, and the prospect of traumatizing vulnerable Syrian refugees.
lick on the link for the rest.
+
Bernard Lewis and Norman Podhoretz discuss the Middle East on Uncommon Knowledge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEmZAS3DnH8
==========
c.
Paul Volcker’s Long Shadow
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/paul-volckers-long-shadow/
by Ellen Brown
+
Central banks worldwide buying up
massive amounts of gold in a shift away from US dollar – Goldman Sachs
Gold prices will climb to $1,600 per ounce over the
next year, Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs projects. It says that central banks
are consuming a fifth of the global supply of the yellow metal.
“De-dollarization
in central banks – demand from central banks for gold is biggest since the
Nixon era, eating up 20 percent of global supply,” the head of global commodities research at Goldman,
Jeff Currie, told Bloomberg. “I am
going to like gold better than bonds because the bonds won’t reflect that
de-dollarization.”
Citing “fear-driven
demand” for the precious metal, Goldman analysts said last week
that investors should diversify their long-term bond holdings with gold.
“Going long-term
depends on what is going to happen to global growth. The further out you go,
the higher the probability that the US is going to hit a recession. We have
$1,600 holding out through 2021,” Goldman
Sachs analyst Mikhail Sprogis told Kitco News. Gold was trading at $1463.30 per ounce on
Tuesday.
Sprogis said that central bank gold demand will be driven
by demand from Russia, Turkey, China, and other countries, including Poland.
Statistics showed that hedge funds and other large
speculators boosted their bullish bets on the precious metal by 8.9 percent in
the week ended December 3. That is the biggest gain since late September.
For more stories on economy & finance
visit RT's business
section
+
Fed says no hikes in 2020.
What about gold?
https://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2019-12-13/Fed-says-no-hikes-in-2020-What-about-gold.html
+
The Wealthy Are Hoarding Physical Gold - Peter
Schiff's Gold News
https://schiffgold.com/key-gold-news/the-wealthy-are-hoarding-physical-gold/
==========
d.
The State of the Canadian Debt Slaves, How They
Compare to American Debt Slaves, and the Bank of Canada’s Response
+
Cornel West and Richard Wolff talk about Capitalism
and White Supremacy
+
William K. Black | The Real
News Network
https://therealnews.com/bios/william-k-black
==========
e.
The Oligarch
Takeover of US Pharma and Healthcare – And the
Resulting Human Crisis
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52658.htm
by Jon Hellevig
The
United States runs the by far biggest and most bloated healthcare sector in the
world when measured as a share of the total economy. Its annual value was $3.7
trillion, amounting to 17.9% of GDP (2018). That is nearly double the average
of developed Western countries (as a share of GDP). The enormous expense does
not buy Americans any better health than the Europeans get for half the price, in fact the health outcomes are far inferior in the US.
In life expectancy, the US has fallen down to 33rd place, even
overtaken by Cuba.
Exorbitant
prices on drugs, medical treatment and health insurances are crushing
consumers. Half of working age American adults have either no insurance at all
or only an inadequate insurance and therefore risk being financially ruined for
any kind of medical treatment – even just checking in at a hospital and leaving
the same day could land you with a five-figure bill. Studies have shown that
two-thirds of Americans are not able to afford a $500 unexpected cost for
medical emergency, a sum which will not get you even past reception at an
American hospital. According to the American Cancer Society, 137 million
Americans suffered medical financial hardship in 2018. They then had to resort
to borrow a total of $88 billion only to cover their necessary medical
expenses. Medical bills are now the primary factor in two-thirds of all
personal bankruptcies in the United States.
In
a unique study covering the entire US healthcare sector, Awara
Accounting https://www.awaragroup.com/
has dug into the problems of the US pharma and
healthcare industries, and the findings are shocking. The Awara
study shows https://www.awaragroup.com/blog/us-healthcare-system-in-crisis/
that in addition to the original sin of corporate greed, the exorbitant costs
of the US healthcare system stem from layers upon layers of distortions with
which the system is infested. Each part of the healthcare industry contributes
to what is a giant monopoly scam: the pharmaceutical companies, medical
equipment manufacturers, drug wholesalers, drug stores, group purchasing
organizations, health insurance companies, doctors, clinics and hospitals, and
even what should be impartial university research. And on top of that, there’s
the government as a giant enabler of monopolized corporations running roughshod
over the American consumer and patient.
But
it is worse than that. All the monopolists (in official parlance, oligopolies)
are in turn owned by the same set of investors in what is called horizontal
shareholding. The same some 15-20. investors have the controlling stake in all the leading
companies of the entire pharma and healthcare
industry.
That’s
not all. Two of the investors, BlackRock and
Vanguard, are the biggest owners in almost every single one of the leading
companies.
Furthermore,
BlackRock is owned by Vanguard, BlackRock’s
biggest owner being a mystical PNC Services, whose biggest owner in turn is
Vanguard. Vanguard itself is recorded directly as BlackRock’s
second biggest owner. Moreover, BlackRock and
Vanguard are the two biggest owners of almost all the other 15-20 biggest
investors, which most are cross-owned and together own the entire US pharma and healthcare sector. Ultimately, then we might
have the situation that the whole healthcare sector and Big Pharma
are controlled by one giant oligarch clan (and the very real people who stand
behind them), one single interest group of oligarch investors.
Besides,
it’s the same for the entire US economy. Those two investors control almost all
major US companies.
Incredible? Read on, the
evidence with charts and details is below in the text.
Now,
this means that we are not exaggerating when we talk about an oligarch takeover
of the US pharma and healthcare industries. It’s
real. And very real people suffer for real.
As
far as we know, this is the first report to reveal this mind-boggling extent of
monopolization and concentration of ownership in US pharma
and healthcare. This monopolization is fast approaching Soviet levels, with the
same lethal consequences.
Another
particularly important thing in the Awara report is
that the US healthcare crisis and global comparisons serve as a marvelous case
study to show what is wrong with neoliberalism and
how the so-called free-market is not necessarily better than a mixed economy.
At the very core of the US healthcare crisis, is the American ideological
precept that healthcare must be a private corporate for-profit business – never
mind any level of predatory monopolies. But compared with European countries
the US loses hands down on every parameter. European life expectancy and health
outcomes are far better at half the cost. In a European-style system all
citizens have nearly equal access to general health services without having to
incur financial hardship in a medical emergency. It has then been clearly shown
that, the European mixed system of universal healthcare with public insurance
and public hospitals, coupled with government regulation of drug prices and
their availability, works best. And there’s a lesson for the wider economy,
too.
Yet
when you mention government regulation, price controls and universal
healthcare, US politicians from both parties and most analysts (of the type
that make it into mainstream media) pull out the socialism card. But this is
not a question of the free-market vs. socialism. There can be no such question
because, first, a mixed economy is not socialism. And, second, there is no free
market in the United States any longer. What used to be a free market aka Capitalism, is nothing but a crony capitalist monopoly
ridden system almost exclusively controlled by an ever more consolidating group
of oligarchs. The choice is not between socialism and capitalism, but between a
real market economy and the present oligarchy.
[Note. Wherever the
original Awara Accounting study on US healthcare https://www.awaragroup.com/blog/us-healthcare-system-in-crisis/
contain the source references and links, they have as a rule not been
duplicated here.]
A
Healthcare System Run Amok
Drug
prices
in the United States are the highest in the world, American prices for
prescription drugs being two
to six times higher than those of the rest of the world. Prescription
drug prices in the US increased nearly 100% in only the past six years. Before
that, between 1997 and 2007, drug prices had already tripled.
==========
f.
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2019
Subject: [MCM] The Big Money's using Greta Thunberg (and AOC) to screw
all the rest of us (MUST-READ)
"Make no mistake. When the most influential multinational
corporations, the world’s largest institutional investors including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, the UN, the World Bank, the
Bank of England and other central banks of the BIS line up behind the
financing of a so-called green Agenda, call it Green New Deal or what, it is
time to look behind the surface of public climate activist campaigns to
the actual agenda. The picture that emerges is the attempted financial eorganization of the world economy using climate, something
the sun and its energy have orders
of magnitude more to do with than mankind ever could—to try to convince us
ordinary folk to make untold sacrifice to 'save our planet.'"
Climate
and the Money Trail
Global Research, September 25, 2019
Theme: Environment, Global Economy
In-depth Report: Climate Change
Climate.
Now who wudda thought. The
very mega-corporations and mega-billionaires behind the globalization of the
world economy over recent decades, whose pursuit of shareholder value and cost
reduction who have wreaked so much damage to our environment both in the
industrial world and in the under-developed economies of Africa, Asia, Latin
America, are the leading backers of the “grassroots” decarbonization
movement from Sweden to Germany to the USA and beyond.
Is
it pangs of guilty conscience, or could it be a deeper agenda of the financialization of the very air we breathe and more?
Whatever
one may believe about the dangers of CO2 and risks of global warming creating a
global catastrophe of 1.5 to 2 degree Celsius average temperature rise in the
next roughly 12 years, it is worth noting who is promoting the current
flood of propaganda and climate activism.
Green
Finance
Several
years before Al Gore and others decided to use a young Swedish school girl to
be the poster child for climate action urgency, or in the USA the call of
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a complete
reorganization of the economy around a Green New Deal, the giants of finance
began devising schemes for steering hundreds of billions of future funds to
investments in often worthless “climate” companies.
In
2013 after years of careful preparation, a Swedish real estate company, Vasakronan, issued the first corporate “Green Bond.” They
were followed by others including Apple, SNCF and the major French bank Credit Agricole. In November 2013 Elon
Musk’s problem-riddled Tesla Energy issued the first solar asset-backed
security. Today according to something called the Climate Bonds Initiative,
more than $500 billion in such Green Bonds are outstanding. The creators of the
bond idea state their aim is to win over a major share of the $45 trillion of
assets under management globally which have made nominal commitment to invest
in “climate friendly” projects.
Bonnie
Prince Charles, future UK Monarch, along with the Bank of England and City of
London finance have promoted “green financial instruments,” led by Green Bonds,
to redirect pension plans and mutual funds towards green projects. A key player
in the linking of world financial institutions with the Green Agenda is
outgoing Bank of England head Mark Carney. In December 2015,
the Bank for International Settlements’ Financial Stability Board (FSB),
chaired then by Carney, created the Task Force on Climate-related Financial
Disclosure (TCFD), to advise “investors, lenders and insurance about climate
related risks.” That was certainly a bizarre focus for world central bankers.
In
2016 the TCFD along with the City of London Corporation and the UK Government
initiated the Green Finance Initiative, aiming to channel trillions of dollars
to “green” investments. The central bankers of the FSB nominated 31 people to
form the TCFD. Chaired by billionaire Michael
Bloomberg of the financial wire, it includes key people from JP MorganChase; from BlackRock–one
of the world’s biggest asset managers with almost $7 trillion; Barclays Bank;
HSBC, the London-Hong Kong bank repeatedly fined for laundering drug and other
black funds; Swiss Re, the world’s second largest reinsurance; China’s ICBC
bank; Tata Steel, ENI oil, Dow Chemical, mining giant BHP Billington
and David Blood of Al Gore’s Generation Investment LLC. In effect it seems
the foxes are writing the rules for the new Green Hen House.
Bank
of England’s Carney was also a key actor in efforts
to make the City of London into the financial center of global Green Finance.
The outgoing UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, in July 2019
released a White Paper, “Green Finance Strategy: Transforming Finance for a
Greener Future.” The paper states, “One of the most influential initiatives to
emerge is the Financial Stability Board’s private sector Task Force on
Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), supported by Mark Carney and
chaired by Michael Bloomberg. This has been endorsed by institutions
representing $118 trillion of assets globally.” There
seems to be a plan here. The plan is the financialization
of the entire world economy using fear of an end of world scenario to reach
arbitrary aims such as “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.”
Goldman
Sachs Key Actor
Click
on the link for the rest:
+
Why a 'Green New Deal' must be decolonial
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/green-deal-decolonial-191202134707310.html
by Vijay Kolinjivadi
+
“Shame!” Indigenous Leaders & Delegates
from Global South Stage Dramatic Walkout at COP25 in Madrid
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/11/cop25_walkout_indigenous_leaders_global_south
with Tom
Goldtooth, from Indigenous Environmental Network, and
Karin Nansen, from Friends of the Earth International
==========
g.
Operation Condor 2.0
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52684.htm
by Peter
Koenig
+
We can't leave Afghanistan now, says Gen. Petraeus, because they have trillions of dollars worth of
minerals
+
Global weapons sales up; US leads market
https://www.koamnewsnow.com/news/world-news/global-weapons-sales-up-us-leads-market/1149528220
==========
h.
https://wikileaks.org/+-Government-+.html
+
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Why did the CPJ exclude Assange from its annual list of jailed journalists?
Why Did Respected Press
Freedom Organization Exclude Assange From Annual List
Of Jailed Journalists?
by Kevin Gasztola
A prominent press freedom organization in the United States declined to
include WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
in its annual list of journalists jailed throughout the world.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), based in New York City,
anticipated a backlash to the exclusion, and CPJ deputy executive director
Robert Mahoney wrote a post intended to head off criticism. But the post
raises several questions and invites further scrutiny.
Can a laudable press freedom organization claim Assange
is not a journalist without aiding the political case brought by prosecutors in
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department?
+
Warrant targeting Assange
supporter reveals scope of US government campaign against WikiLeaks
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/13/bean-d13.html
+
Lawyers complain about lack of access to Julian Assange in jail
+
Ex-Australian Deputy PM on Julian Assange’s US Extradition: Where Does This One Stop?!
+
Hundreds of journalists around the world sign open letter
demanding freedom for Assange
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/09/jour-d09.html
by Oscar
Grenfell
+
Sheldon Adelson, hired “security” company to spy on Julian Assange?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52700.htm
by
Philip Giraldi
There are many possible suspects
The
Julian Assange drama drags on. Though he continues to
sit in a top security British prison awaiting developments in his expected
extradition to the United States, the Spanish High Court has been given permission
to interview him. Assange is claiming that the
Spanish company contracted with by the Ecuadorean government to do embassy
security in London spied on him using both audio and video devices. The
recordings apparently included conversations with Assange’s
lawyers outlining his defense strategies, which is an illegal activity under
Spanish law. The prosecution has also indicted the company director, former
military officer David Morales, on associated criminal charges of bribing a
government official and money laundering. Morales has
said that he is innocent.
Aware that
he might be monitored by the British government as well as by other interested
parties, Assange would often meet his legal team
using a white noise machine or in women’s bathrooms with the water running, but
the firm, UC Global, anticipated that and planted devices capable of defeating
the countermeasures. It planted microphones in the embassy fire extinguishing
system as well as in numerous other places in the building. The recordings were
reportedly streamed, undoubtedly encrypted, to another nearby location,
referred to in the trade as a listening post. The streamed material was also
reportedly transcribed and copied at the UC Global offices in Andalusia, but
hard copies of the material were made as well on CDs and DVDs to be turned over
directly to the client.
The
Spanish newspaper El Pais, which has
seen much of the evidence in the case, also mentioned how UC Global fixed
the windows in the rooms actually being used by Assange
so they would not vibrate, making it possible to use laser microphones from a
nearby line of sight building to record what was being said. Presumably the
listening post also served as the line-of-sight surveillance point.
The
British government willingness to let the interview take place is apparently
due in part to the Spanish judiciary’s claims that it has obtained an
overwhelming amount of documentary and other evidence that demonstrates that Assange is basically telling the truth.
And there
is inevitably more to the story. David Morales, who managed the project,
reportedly returned from a trip to the United States and told colleagues that
the UC Global would henceforth be doing some work “for the dark side” at
“another league” level. According
to the New York Times,
which has examined the documents obtained by El Pais and accepted that they are
authentic, “In the court filing, the prosecution asserts that Mr. Morales
returned from a security fair in Las Vegas in 2015… He signed a contract with
Las Vegas Sands, the casino and resort company of Sheldon Adelson,
and the prosecution contends that Mr. Morales passed information about Mr. Assange to security officials at the company, saying it
acted as a go-between with the C.I.A.”
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Assange 'blocked from seeing evidence' over extradition to US.
WikiLeaks founder remains in prison ahead of full hearing over extradition in February
Julian Assange has been blocked from seeing evidence in his extradition case as he battles against being sent to the US, a court has heard.
Lawyers representing the WikiLeaks founder told a hearing they were not being given sufficient access to their client in prison.
Mr Assange appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court via a video link on Friday for the hearing, which was about extending his custody at HMP Belmarsh.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/newsfromunderground/CAGxB6W-vvqZz1yJ7gQEcv8L2wFRtrYAOyhA4zPEZnnCy%2BJwYmA%40mail.gmail.com.
==========
i.
NATO Names China as New
Target, Alongside Russia
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/12/05/nato-names-china-as-new-target-alongside-russia
China to be added to 'challenges' for the first timeJason Ditz
Posted onDecember 3, 2019==========
j.
From: Mark
Crispin Miller
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Subject: [MCM] What Google's doing—and why it must be stopped
(MUST-READ)
"Suppressing negative search suggestions can be
used to shift opinions about any topic—even about Google itself."
Dr. Google Will See You Now
Posted
on:
Friday,
November 22nd 2019 at 5:00 pm
Written
By:
https://www.greenmedinfo.health/blog/dr-google-will-see-you-now
Authoritarianism has emerged in Silicon Valley. Google no longer
helps you find what you are truly looking for. Instead, they now customize
results to satisfy their wants and needs. Individual results might vary
Google's
audacious tyranny, which includes censorship, surveillance, and mind control, is
accelerating at a wicked clip. It's hard to keep up. The planet's leading
search engine is stealthily infiltrating areas/sectors of our society,
including elections, news,
finances, health, not to mention your mind, all the while 'vacuuming'
and usurping data, to become a megalithic repository.
November
1st:
Google's
parent company Alphabet acquired FitBit for a cool
$2.1 billion, adding it to the other 200 companies it owns.
November
12th:
The Wall Street Journal reports
via an anonymous 'source' within Google that the company has been accessing
millions of patients' personal health data alongside Ascension, the largest
Catholic health system in the world, without patient consent.
The
deal between Google and Ascension authorizing the data transfer was formally
signed hours after The Wall Street
Journal broke the story.
The
same day, Ascension put
out a notification stating that there was no breach of data and that their
collaboration is (somehow) entirely compliant with The Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations of 1996 (more on this
later).
November
14th:
The Wall Street Journal reports
that attorney generals representing 48 states, as well as the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico, announced the opening of a sweeping antitrust
investigation into Google.
The Guardian publishes
an opinion piece titled "I'm the Google whistleblower. The medical
data of millions of Americans is at risk."
Mind
Control, Surveillance, Wicked Genius
The
amount of surveillance, manipulation, and mind
control that Google is guilty of beckons the
slogan: "Make George Orwell Fiction Again."
+
Democracy without Journalism?
Confronting the Misinformation Society
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/democracy-without-journalism-9780190946760
by Victor Pickard
The first scholarly book to historicize
the current American journalism crisis and situate it within long-term
structural problems that plague the entire commercial news industry
A timely intervention that brings
normative questions about journalism's democratic imperatives back into focus
and proposes structural alternatives to today's failing commercial news models
Scrutinizes major transformations in
American journalism while offering policy proposals for creating a more
democratic media system
+
News Is Becoming Reality TV
with
Rick Sanchez
+
Will Artificial Intelligence Destroy Us or Simply
Make Humans Irrelevant?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52675.htm
by Paul Craig
Roberts
+
Noam Chomsky interview, Tucson, 28 October 2019
+
Relive Office
Hours with Professor Chomsky on his birthday, Dec 7!
Premiered Dec 7, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xebTB_Lh8I8
==========
k.
From: Mark
Crispin Miller
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2019 3:06 AM
Subject: [MCM] Hit the deck: US Army prepares
biggest deployment to Europe in 25 years.
As
not reported in the New York Times, or (correct me if I'm wrong)
anywhere else that where it would be more visible than on this
website. And why is that? Because it contradicts the Trump-as-Putin's-
puppet narrative? Because too clear a story of US aggression would foul up the
propaganda casting Putin as "expansionist"?
Whatever
the reason(s) for it, this press silence is yet one more shocking abdication of
responsibility by "our free press."
MCM
US Army Prepares Biggest
Deployment to Europe in 25 Years
https://theantimedia.com/us-army-prepares-biggest-deployment-to-europe-in-25-years
by Jason Ditz
(ANTIWAR.COM) — In 2020, the US
Army will be carrying out its biggest deployment in 25 years into Europe. The
deployment will send 20,000 US troops, and 13,000 pieces of
equipment across Europe for wargames
beginning in May and running through June.
US Gen. Christopher Cavoli
would not define the operation as aimed at Russia, but did tie it to Russia’s
2014 annexation of Crimea, saying it “changed everything.” The large deployment
will be difficult.
That’s because as with most recent operations, the
US will be sending forces largely into former Warsaw Pact countries, and those
countries have railroads incompatible with Western Europe. Moreover, the
bridges in those countries were built without envisioning having to support the
heaviest of US tanks.
+
From: Mark
Crispin Miller
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Ukraine and IMF reach $5.5 billion agreement
As
my friend Michael Buergermeister notes, the IMF, by
its own rules,
is not permitted to
lend money to Ukraine, because the latter has
defaulted on its loans
from Russia. Yet the IMF is doing so anyway.
And
God help the people of Ukraine.
MCM
Ukraine and IMF
Reach $5.5 Billion Agreement
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ukraine-and-IMF-Reach-5.5-Billion-Agreement-20191208-0006.html
The
agreement was reached in a telephone call between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and IMF
Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva.
Ukraine’s
government and the International Monetary Fund have reached an agreement
Saturday on a new three-year US$5.5 billion loan, which will encompass
economic and policy reforms.
RELATED:
Ukraine Ready to Accept 'Reasonable
Compromise' on Conflict
The
agreement, which still must be approved by the fund’s management and the
Executive Board, was reached in a telephone call between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and IMF
Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva.
“...
the effectiveness of the arrangement will be conditional on the implementation
of a set of prior actions,” Georgieva said in a
statement, referring to the set of neoliberal structural reforms traditionally
demanded by the agency to give out the loans.
These
usually include austerity measures such as a reduction in social spending,
liberalization of markets and financial sector, massive layoffs, elimination of
welfare schemes, and liberalization of labor laws. The IMF would then process
the deal in the context of what it calls an Extended Fund Facility (EFF) over
three years.
An
EFF is used "to assist member countries in
overcoming balance of payments problems that stem from structural problems,”
highlights IMF’s debt policy. Although details of how the money would be used
over the plan’s three years weren’t given.
The
growth of Ukraine’s gross domestic product (GDP) in July-September 2019
amounted to 4.2 percent compared to the same period in 2018, while in the
second quarter the growth rate was higher and amounted to 4.6 percent, in the
first quarter it amounted to 2.5 percent, according to the State Statistics
Service.
According
to the Ministry of Economy, the economic projection for 2020 stands at a
3.7 percent increase in real GDP instead of the previously projected 3.3
percent, but the estimate of economic growth in the next two years has not
changed: in 2021 economic growth is expected to reach 3.8 percent, in 2022 some
4.1 percent.
+
$738bn: NDAA sanctions Russia, arms Israel &
Ukraine
==========
l.
We can't leave Afghanistan now, says Gen. Petraeus, because they have trillions of dollars worth of
minerals
+
Why Did A Saudi
Pilot Kill U.S. Sailors While Three Others Filmed It?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52702.htm
by Doug Bandow
The U.S. military is training Saudi Arabian pilots
here in States, who later leave to slaughter Yemeni civilians thousands of
miles away. Unfortunately, some of that violence was turned against us, when a
Saudi trainee killed three American sailors at Pensacola Air Station on
December 6.
In fact, a half dozen Saudis were arrested in the
incident. Three of them apparently filmed the murders, presumably to post
online. Yet afterward President Donald Trump spent more time justifying the
Saudi royals than supporting the victims’ families.
Every time a terrorist commits murder and mayhem,
Americans ask why? U.S. officials usually insist that it is because we are so
“good.” If only.
Why terrorists kill should not be a mystery since
they themselves tell us why. And none of them has said it is because the U.S.
has the First Amendment, holds democratic elections, or leads the world in
charitable giving.
Consider Mohammed Saeed
al-Shamrani, the Saudi pilot-in-training at
Pensacola. On Twitter he declared: “I’m against evil, and America as a whole
has turned into a nation of evil.”
He explained: “I’m not against you for just being
American, I don’t hate you because [of] your freedoms, I hate you because every
day you [are] supporting, funding and committing crimes not only against
Muslims but also humanity.” Al-Shamrani’s complaint
is against U.S. foreign policy, which today so often means bombing, invading,
and occupying other nations and killing their peoples.
==========
m.
“Booming” Economy Means More Bad Jobs and Faster Race to the
Bottom
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52686.htm
by
Glen Ford
For the past 30 years, no matter which party has been in
power, the US economy has produced more and more “bad” jobs – because the Race
to the Bottom is ruling class policy.
“Whole sectors have become precarity zones.”
A Brookings Institution study shows 44 percent of all American workers toil
in “low-wage” jobs, with median earnings of $18,000 a year. Most of them are
adults in their prime working years, whose paychecks provide the main
sustenance for their families, 20 percent of which live at below 150 percent of
the poverty line. Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented in low-paid employment, but more than
half of these bad jobs are held by whites.
The corporate consensus, shared by its monopolized media, is
that the economy is booming – which only confirms that the Race to the Bottom
is ruling class policy, no
matter how much the “liberals” at places like Brookings bemoan the hardships
inflicted on the working poor.
Working class precarity is built
into the system, by design. Another study, measuring the Job Quality Index , shows that the
proliferation of low-paid work isn’t a hangover from the 2008 meltdown, but a
characteristic of late stage capitalism. "In 1990, the jobs were
pretty much evenly divided" said one of the creators of the index.
"We discovered that 63% of all jobs that were created
since 1990 were low-wage, low-hour jobs." The data show the Race to the
Bottom has accelerated for U.S. workers under both Republican and Democratic
administrations: the elder and younger Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and
now Trump, who is running for re-election on the strength of the economy.
“Precarity
is built into the system.”
The duopoly system is a magnificent mechanism of corporate
rule and working class ruin. When only corporate parties are permitted to
govern, and corporate mouthpieces monopolize the media, capitalist-inflicted
misery is made to seem natural and inevitable. The highly-educated researchers
at Brookings can imagine only one way out of the downward spiral for those
localities where bad jobs are the norm: “attract and grow more high-wage jobs
by drawing new companies in and helping existing companies grow and increase
their productivity.” In other words, more capitalism, of the
more socially-conscious kind. But clearly, the stock market favors precarity capitalism, which it rewards with high returns,
and punishes capitalists that don’t immiserate their
employees or farm them out to low-wage contractors.
+
https://truthout.org/articles/swimming-against-the-loan-sharks/
==========
n.
President
al-Assad: Europe was the main player in creating chaos in Syria
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52677.htm
with President al-Assad
The interview
that Italian Rai News 24 refused to broadcast
Damascus, SANA-President Bashar al-Assad
said that Syria is going to come out of the war stronger and the future of
Syria is promising and the situation is much better, pointing out to the
achievements of the Syrian Arab army in the war against terrorism.
The President, in an interview given to Italian Rai News 24 TV on November 26,2019
and was expected to be broadcast on December 2nd and the Italian TV refrained from broadcasting it for
non-understandable reasons, added that Europe was the main player in creating
chaos in Syria and the problem of refugees in it was because of its direct
support to terrorism along with the US, Turkey and many other countries.
President al-Assad stressed that since the beginning
of the narrative regarding the chemical weapons, Syria has affirmed it didn’t
use them.
The President affirmed that what the OPCW
organization did was to fake and falsify the report about using chemical
weapons, just because the Americans wanted them to do so. So,
fortunately, this report proved that everything we said during the last few
years, since 2013, is correct.
==========
o.
“Dark Day for Everyone Who Believes in Justice”:
U.K. Tories Defeat Labour in Landslide Election
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/13/uk_election_boris_johnson_jeremy_corbyn
+
From: Mark
Crispin Miller
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Some tricks that cut the Labour vote
Aside
from smearing Corbyn as a rabid anti-Semite, and
otherwise defaming him, the forces backing Boris Johnson have played several
dirty tricks to cut the Labour vote, as a good friend
of mine explains:
First,
one of the best UK election/parliament blogs is the YouTube channel "A
Different Bias" by Phil Moorhouse. Check out one of
his recent video commentaries. Unfortunately if you don't know about his
channel, or his website https://www.patreon.com/adifferentbias, they're nearly
impossible to find, as Google has buried them.
Moorhouse describes the
dire situation of UK expats living abroad, unable to vote in their home
country's General Election.
Although still eligible to vote, they have not received their postal ballots in
time to send them in by the deadline, as happened with the May 2016
election:
British Citizens Not
Allowed to Vote in the General Election
There
also seems to be some truth to claims of Labour postal
ballots being delivered/counted late. Apparently there were hundreds of thousand of postal ballots that never got delivered or were
delivered too late, for example on the
day of the election,
preventing many UK citizens living abroad to to cast
their vote:
I've
also learned that approx. 60% of the 5 million UK citizens living abroad are
unable to cast a vote in the Dec 2019 General Election because of a rule
stating that a UK citizen who has lived abroad for over 15 years becomes ineligible, as described in
this article below:
It’s estimated just under five million Britons are now living overseas, either
in retirement or for work, with around 60% now denied the
human right to cast a vote in one of the most crucial general elections since
WWII. Spain is home to many thousands affected by this cruel rule, with the
result likely to destroy their chosen lives unless the Spanish government allows them an
unconditional stay. Even should this happen, British expats now making regular
visits to their extended families still in the UK may well be
hamstrung by the cost and bureaucracy involved in a short-term return to the
home
country followed by
re-entry into Spain.
Some
articles on the anti-Labour disinformation campaign:
See
also:
https://www.politico.eu/article/britons-overseas-arrange-proxy-votes
|
+
All Is Not Lost for Labour
https://therealnews.com/stories/all-not-lost-for-labour
with Tariq Ali
==========
p.
The Great American Shakedown
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52676.htm
by
Chris Hedges
The Democratic Party and its liberal supporters are
perplexed. They presented hours of evidence of an impeachable offense, although
they studiously avoided charging Donald Trump with impeachable offenses also
carried out by Democratic presidents, including the continuation or expansion
of presidential wars not declared by Congress, exercising line-item veto power,
playing prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to kill individuals, including
U.S. citizens, anywhere on the planet, violating due process and misusing
executive orders. Because civics is no longer taught in most American schools,
they devoted a day
to constitutional scholars who provided the Civics 101 case for
impeachment. The liberal press, cheerleading the
impeachment process, saturated the media landscape with live coverage,
interminable analysis, constant character assassination of Trump and giddy
speculation. And yet, it has made no difference. Public
opinion remains largely unaffected.
Perhaps, supporters of impeachment argue, they
failed to adopt the right technique. Perhaps journalists, by giving voice to
opponents of impeachment—who do indeed live in a world not based in
fact—created a false equivalency between truth and lies. Maybe, as Bill
Grueskin, a professor at the Columbia University
Journalism School, writes, impeachment advocates should spend $1 million to
produce a kind of movie trailer for all those who did not sit through the hours
of hearings, to “boil down the essentials of the film” and provide “a quick but
intense insight into the characters, setting the scene with vivid imagery—to
entice people to come back to the theatre a month later for the full movie.” Or
perhaps they need to keep pounding away at Trump until his walls of support
crumble.
The liberal class and the Democratic Party
leadership have failed, even after their defeat in the 2016 presidential
election, to understand that they, along with the traditional Republican
elites, have squandered their credibility. No one believes them. And no one
should.
+
Sure, Impeach
Trump, But Let’s be Honest
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52691.htm
by Scott Tucker
Congress is the
front office of the ruling class.
Sure, impeach Trump for legitimate reasons
explicitly stated in the Constitution. But let’s be honest that an 18th
century document did not include slaveholding among high crimes against
humanity, and certainly has no specific clauses covering modern war crimes and
state terrorism.
The New York
Times has a recent article
(“Republican Tactic: Using Impeachment Hearings to Smear Biden on Ukraine,” by
Katie Glueck and Maggie Haberman,
Dec. 7, 2019) delicately threading the needle on the issue of Hunter Biden’s
dealings with Burisma Holdings in Ukraine. Anyone who
pretends to believe that Hunter’s dad had no actual wrongdoing influence in
gaining his son a gig with the Ukrainian gas market should try to pitch that
point of view on MSNBC. Or indeed in the pages of The New York Times, where Glueck and Haberman wrote the following:
“Hunter Biden did hold a lucrative position on the
board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while
his father was vice president, and while there is no evidence of wrongdoing,
the arrangement struck some Obama administration officials as unseemly given
the elder Mr. Biden’s role in Ukraine policy.”
Unseemly.
Well, that’s both high-toned and begrudging, but only an afterthought since
“there is no evidence of wrongdoing.” To be sure, the Republicans are claiming
a false equivalence between business as usual nepotism
and presidential corruption explicitly forbidden by the Constitution. Even so,
the Democratic Party is also striving to change the subject whenever its own
partisan policy in Ukraine gains too high a profile in the daily news.
Though I must not wander too far afield of my
subject here, I do advise readers willing to follow this trail of evidence
through the career of Victoria Nuland, a former
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United
States Department of State, a former CEO of the Center for a New American
Security, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, and the Brady-Johnson Distinguished
Practitioner in Grand Strategy at Yale University. She served under Vice
President Dick Cheney, and in the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama. On February 4, 2014, a recording of a phone call between Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, then
the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was published on YouTube. Nuland
and Pyatt discussed how to get the US State
Department’s favored candidate, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the post of Prime Minister of Ukraine. Yatsenyuk duly took that job on February 27, 2014. In this
phone call, Nuland stated her strong preference for
the United Nations as mediator rather than the European Union, adding: “Fuck
the EU.” To which Pyatt responded, “Oh, exactly . .
.”
==========
q.
Indigenous Bolivia Ready to Go to War Against Fascism
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52698.htm
by
Andre Vltchek
“We will all
fight those evil beings who declared themselves our rulers."
Bolivia, December 2019, three weeks after the
fascist coup. It is devilishly cold. My comrade’s car is carefully navigating
through the deep mud tracks. Enormous snow-covered mountain peaks are clearly
visible in the distance.
The Bolivian Altiplano;
beloved, yet always somehow hostile, silent, impenetrable.
So many times, in the past I came close to death
here. In Peru as well as in Bolivia. More often in Peru.
Now, what I do is totally mad. Being a supporter of
President Evo Morales from the beginning until this
very moment, I am not supposed to be here; in Bolivia, in the Altiplano. But I am, because these mud huts on the left and
right, are so familiar and so dear to me.
My comrade is a Bolivian farmer, an indigenous man.
His hands are red, rough. He usually does not talk much, but after the coup, he
cannot stop speaking. This is his country; the country that he loves and which
has been stolen from him, from his wife and from his children.
We can both get screwed here, but if we do, that’s
life; we know the risk and we are happy to take it.
Carlos (not his real name), my driver and a friend,
explained:
“I called them, the elders, and they said it is ok
that you come. I sent them your essays. You know, people here now read, even in
the deep villages. After 14 years of Evo’s
government, the entire country is covered by the mobile phone network. They
read your stuff translated into Spanish. They liked what they read. They agreed
to give you a statement. But they said, ‘if he is not really a Russian-Chinese
left-wing writer, but instead some Camacho crony, we will break his head with a
stone.’”
Camacho; Luis Fernando Camacho, a member of the
fascist, U.S.-backed Revolutionary
Nationalist Movement, and the Chair of the Civic Committee of Santa Cruz
since 2019. A major
adversary of Evo Morales, a man who during the 2019
Bolivian general election, sided with the West, with the treasonous Bolivian
military (trained in the United States), and demanded Evo’s
resignation, on 5 November 2019.
I am fine with what they say. We are going.
We drive up, and then, at approximately 4,100 meters
above sea level, we level up.
A new, wide road is being constructed. Of course, it
is a project from the days of Evo’s presidency.
But it is not only the road building that can be
detected all around us. There are water towers and water pumps and faucets in
every village. Water is free, for all. There are schools, medical centers as
well as sport facilities, and carefully attended fields.
The drive is long, tough. But at one point, we see a
few buses and cars parked on the top of a hill.
There is a small plateau, and a giant white speaker
sitting in the middle of the field.
People in colorful outfits are scattered all around
the site: men, women and children. A group of elders is seated in a closed
circle. They are chanting, and their appeal is broadcasted through the speaker.
They are addressing what is sacred to them: Mother Earth. They need strength in
order to go on, to struggle, to defend themselves.
I am first ‘scanned’ by the people, and only then
allowed to approach the elders. I explain who I am, and soon, the formalities
are over.
“Please record but do not film our faces, for
security,” I am told. “But later, you can film the gathering.”
Soon after, I sit down, and they begin to talk:
“The situation which we are living in these days in
our country, in the communities up here, in the Andean communities is very
difficult. In reality we feel frustrated, often abandoned because during the
previous government led by President Evo Morales, we
as farmers and indigenous people, felt very good. Even
if, sometimes, we did not receive too much help, still, the government, the
very President Evo Morales, is of our own blood, our
own class. For that reason, we were supporting him. And we keep supporting
him.”
“And this, what we have, now is a government –
dictatorship. They say the contrary, but it is a fascist government. It is a
government which is burning Wiphala, our symbol. It
dishonors us. We feel humiliated, we feel discriminated against. For that
reason, we realize that we cannot fail; we cannot stay here like this, we will
continue fighting. There will be elections in our country, and we will continue
supporting that one person who has elevated our name; the name of the native people,
of workers, of working people, and of the poor.”
“First, we will go to the elections, if of course
there are elections. We will go and support our people; our leaders. In case
that they will produce electoral fraud, then yes, we will rise!”
I told them that I have known their country, and Altiplano, for more than 25 years. Everything has
changed. The villages consisting of mud huts came to life. They woke up,
began to bloom. Water for all began to run through the pipes provided by the
government. Modern ambulances have been deployed, serving all corners of the
nation. Health centers opened their doors to millions of students, and so did
schools, and vocation centers. New roads have been built. The government
encouraged ecological farming. |
Bolivia, for decades and centuries living under
monstrous apartheid has been exploited, humiliated and robbed of everything,
but lately has begun rising to its feet.
I told them this. I told them how I used to come
here, again and again, in the 1990’s, from Peru; a country devastated by the
so-called “Dirty War” which I have described in my novel “Point
of No Return”. Peru was terribly broken, but here, in Bolivia, people were
half-alive. There was no hope, only silent, frightening misery.
Now Bolivia, once the poorest country in South
America, has been way ahead of Peru, a state which has been relentlessly
cannibalized by the neo-liberal economic model, while still racially and
socially divided to the extreme.
I asked the elders, whether they agreed. They did.
“Certainly.
Because with our own eyes we have seen enormous economic changes and we have
witnessed how Bolivia rose and after those 14 years, got ahead of this entire
Latin American region.”
I filmed, photographed.
Before we left, an elderly woman approached the car,
and screamed something in a local language.
Carlos translated:
“We will all fight those evil beings who declared
themselves our rulers. If they don’t disappear, soon again we will close the
roads between El Alto and La Paz, and they will have to eat their own
excrement. Our people will never again be defeated. Say this wherever you go!”
I said that I will.
+
Venezuela will begin airdropping petros
next week – Decrypt
https://decrypt.co/14659/venezuela-airdropping-petros-next-week
==========
r.
From: Mark
Crispin Miller
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2019 9:58 PM
Subject: [MCM] "A Very British Coup" (1988) is a MUST-SEE at
this dark time—as powerful as it is prescient
"A Very British Coup"
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/a-very-british-coup
+
Students in Cardiff weren't allowed to
vote (like many other Britons far and wide)
It
seems that students over there—a constituency likely to vote Labour—were kept from voting just as students over here
have been disenfranchised time and time again, from the presidential races in
2000 and 2004, to Scott Walker's "election" and
"re-election" in Wisconsin, to several Democratic primaries in 2016,
among other of our many rigged elections.
MCM
+
Labour has been waging a culture war against its own base
for decades, fixating on liberalism instead
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/475846-labour-culture-war-voters/
with
George Galloway
+
The Tory "victory" has Dr.
Goebbels grinning in the flames
Here
Caitlin Johnstone nails the epic smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, who was overwhelmingly "defined,"
throughout the British (and US) press, as both a Kremlin tool
and closet Nazi, with a "long history of embracing
virulent anti-Semites"—two slanders that, by no coincidence,
have been used expertly, and widely, Over Here. Thus Corbyn was subjected to the same
false, strident and relentless defamation that was one of Dr.
Goebbels' specialties, now routinely used by our CIA-connected
"free press," and its Israeli adjuncts, to "neutralize"dissenters
of all kinds, from Jill Stein and (especially) Julian Assange
to anyone who criticizes Israel.
Thus
the US "meddled" zestfully in that election, through organs like (of
course) the New York Times, whose view of Corbyn
has been just as fair and honest as its view of Bernie Sanders, or Assange, or Bashar al-Assad, or Nicolås Maduro, or whoever else
is on the CIA's shit-list. Yesterday (UK's Election Day), the Times joined
the attack with a ferocious op-ed by Bret Stephens— "A Vote for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party Is a Vote
for Anti-Semitism"— from which I took that bit above, about Corbyn's "long history" as a Nazi sympathizer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/opinion/uk-elections.html
That
excremental screed is really something, coming, as it does, from a
newspaper that
played down the Holocaust while it was happening, hailed
the
neo-Nazi junta in Ukraine as a bulwark of "democracy," and is
now
blacking out
the fascist crackdown in Bolivia—all the while comparing
Trump
to
Hitler, and endlessly deploring "white supremacy" (as
well as
"anti-Semitism").
Caitlin
is quite right: This disgraceful episode affirms—or, rather,
re-affirms— that propaganda works (a fact that's also
evident in the astonishing success of many other campaigns raging now, from the
impeachment farce and measles panic to the corporate-driven "climate
movement" and transgender cult—just to name a few).
And
yet we must be careful not to see such propaganda as the only reason
for the Tory sweep,
which depended also on election theft—to what degree
we don't yet know,
and must find out, through rigorous investigation.
MCM
Someone Interfered in the UK Election & It
Wasn’t Russia
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/13/someone-interfered-in-the-uk-election-it-wasnt-russia/
by Caitlin Johnstone
+
The Most Unpopular Government in UK Political
History
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/14/the-most-unpopular-government-in-uk-political-history/
+
We won the argument, but I regret we didn’t convert
that into a majority for change | General election 2019
+
Corbyn’s defeat has slain the left’s last
illusion
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52711.htm
by Jonathan Cook
The corporate
class – the 0.001% – has been in control of our political life uninterrupted
for 40 years.
This was an election of two
illusions.
The first helped persuade much of
the British public to vote for the very epitome of an Eton toff, a man who not
only has shown utter contempt for most of those who voted for him but has spent
a lifetime barely bothering to conceal that contempt. For him, politics is an
ego-trip, a game in which others always pay the price and suffer, a job he is
entitled to through birth and superior breeding.
The extent to which such illusions
now dominate our political life was highlighted two days ago with a
jaw-dropping comment from a Grimsby fish market worker. He said he would vote Tory for the first time because “Boris
seems like a normal working class guy.”
Johnson is precisely as working
class, and “normal”, as the billionaire-owned Sun and the billionaire-owned
Mail.
The Sun isn’t produced by a bunch of working-class lads down the pub having a
laugh, nor is the Mail produced by conscientious middle managers keen to uphold
“British values” and a sense of fair play and decency. Like the rest of the
British media, these outlets are machines, owned by globe-spanning corporations
that sell us the illusions – carefully packaged and marketed to our sectoral interest – needed to make sure nothing impedes the
corporate world’s ability to make enormous profits at our, and the planet’s,
expense.
The Sun, Mail, Telegraph, Guardian
and BBC have all worked hard to create for themselves “personalities”. They
brand themselves as different – as friends we the public might, or might not,
choose to invite into our homes – to win the largest share possible of the UK
audience, to capture every section of the public as news consumers, while
feeding us a distorted, fairytale version of reality that is optimal for
business. They are no different to other corporations in that regard.
Media wot
won it
Supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury,
Lidl and Waitrose similarly brand themselves to
appeal to different sections of the public. But all these supermarkets are
driven by the same pathological need to make profits at all costs. If
Sainsbury’s sells fair trade tea as well as traditionally produced tea, it is
not because it cares more than Lidl about the
treatment of workers and damage to the environment but because it knows its
section of consumers care more about such issues. And as long as it makes the
same profits on good and bad tea, why should it not cater to its share of the
market in the name of choice and freedom?
The media are different from
supermarkets in one way, however. They are not driven simply by profit. In fact, many media outlets struggle to make
money. They are better seen as the loss-leader promotion in a supermarket, or
as a business write-off against tax.
The media’s job is to serve as the
propaganda arm of big business. Even if the Sun makes an economic loss, it has
succeeded if it gets the business candidate elected, the candidate who will
keep corporation tax, capital gains tax and all the other taxes that affect
corporate profits as low as possible without stoking a popular insurrection.
==========
s.
Bought And Paid For
GOP lawmaker tries to get
Georgetown funding pulled over alleged ‘anti-Israel, pro-Islamist’ bias
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52706.htm
by Michael Arria
In September
Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) traveled to Israel as
part of an AIPAC-sponsored trip .
On December 11, President Trump signed
an executive order that effectively weaponizes antisemitism as a cudgel to beat back BDS activities on
college campuses. The order threatens to withhold federal funding from
universities if the government determines that they’ve failed to prohibit
discrimination.
Trump’s move was barely announced
before a member of congress attempted to use the new playbook. Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) has sent a letter to Secretary of
Education Betsy DeVos asking for Georgetown
University to be investigated over its alleged anti-Israel bias. The news was
reported on Twitter by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief
Ron Kampeas.
“I have recently become aware of systematic support
for biased, anti-American, pro-BDS individuals and scholarship at Georgetown
University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies that are not in accordance
with the mission of Title VI funds and contrary to America’s national security
interests…The so-called Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a
dagger aimed at the heart of one of America’s closest allies, Israel,” reads
the letter. Riggleman cites a report on Georgetown
faculty from Islamophobic commentator Daniel Pipes’s website
as the basis behind his concerns.
+
From: GAZA
PALESTINE [mailto:anahona366@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday,
December 14, 2019 4:13 AM
Subject: Do not
leave us these days ... the injured people tremble in the cold ... I
desperately need your support for us now this winter. An emergency matter
We
need your support in helping us to get more first aid to help the injured get
the basic treatments, medicines and basic treatments necessary to provide them
with good health conditions.
We
need more first aid kits, more medicine and first treatments like iodine,
solutions and some painkillers.
I
am sorry that I send you mail every short time, but really we need you, we need
your support, and we need everything you can give us.
I
thank all those who supported us, stood with us, stood with my team, and with
the wounded inside the Gaza Strip.
I
always come under pressure and stop our accounts, so we have created a new
campaign so that we do not have any problems with us.
I
cannot say much because I wrote a lot. You do not know what is happening inside
the Gaza Strip. It is something like a fantasy. I don’t know why life continues
like this. The residents of the Gaza Strip are very patient.
I
hope you will support us through the following new link
==========
t.
Former Spy Details Israel’s Main
Motive Behind Epstein’s Sexual Blackmail Operation
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52712.htm
by Whitney Webb
MintPress speaks with Ari Ben-Menashe, a former
Israeli spy who worked closely with Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine
Maxwell’s father, as part of their work with Israeli military intelligence and
had frequent encounters with Jeffrey Epstein.
Ari Ben-Menashe, is a former Israeli spy who worked
closely with Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s
father, as part of their work with Israeli military intelligence.
MONTREAL — In recent weeks,
renewed attention has been brought to the allegations that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking and sexual blackmail
operation was run on behalf of Israeli military intelligence. Those claims
revolve around statements made by a former Israeli military intelligence
official turned public relations consultant Ari Ben-Menashe,
whose allegations regarding the Epstein scandal were reported by MintPress this past October.
Ben-Menashe’s claims related to
Epstein first surfaced in an interview between Ben-Menashe
and Zev Shalev of the independent news outlet, Narativ. As detailed in a MintPress summary and commentary of that
interview, Ben-Menashe claimed to have seen Jeffrey
Epstein in the office of Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine
Maxwell’s father, several times in the 1980s.
At the time, Ben-Menashe was in
close contact with Robert Maxwell regarding their work mutual work with Israeli
military intelligence. Maxwell, in addition to heading a media empire and being
a one-time member of U.K. parliament, was a longtime operative for Israeli
intelligence, so much so that his 1991 funeral was attended by no less than six serving and former heads of Israeli
intelligence as well as several high-ranking Israeli politicians and prime ministers.
Maxwell is alleged to have
recruited Jeffrey Epstein for Israeli intelligence and later introduced Epstein
to Ben-Menashe and another operative, Nicholas
Davies. Epstein was introduced to Ben-Menashe as
having been pre-approved by leading figures in Israel’s military intelligence
directorate, known as Aman.
MintPress recently conducted its own
interview with Mr. Ben-Menashe as part of an ongoing
investigation on the life and connections of the now-infamous Jeffrey
Epstein.
Part of that interview is
provided below with relevant commentary, particularly regarding claims related
to the relationship between Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak, Epstein’s trip to Tel Aviv immediately prior to his first arrest, and
the reasons for Israeli military intelligence’s interest in orchestrating and
financing a major sexual blackmail operation targeting top U.S. politicians.
“Israel Requested that Epstein
Target Clinton”
MintPress News first asked Ben-Menashe about Robert Maxwell, a known asset and operative
for Israeli intelligence, having recruited Jeffrey Epstein. Ben-Menashe = confirmed this to MintPress
and also noted that, after their initial meeting, Epstein was frequently
present in Maxwell’s office in London.
During the 1980s, as MintPress previously
reported, Epstein claimed to have been an intelligence
operative and so-called “bounty hunter” in the world of shadow finance. During
this time, he was known to have developed close relationships with several
British arms dealers, particularly Sir Douglas Leese.
Thus, Epstein appeared to frequently be traveling between the Middle East and
London, which is also supported by Epstein’s now-infamous Austrian passport
which he was believed to have carried during this period of time.
Ben-Menashe
told MintPress that he had not only met
Epstein after Epstein had been recently recruited by Israeli military
intelligence, but had seen him on several occasions thereafter as Epstein “used
to be in [Robert Maxwell’s] office [in London] quite often” and would arrive
there between trips to and from Israel.
In addition, Ben-Menashe revealed his understanding of why Epstein was
eventually shepherded into acting as a professional sexual blackmailer on
behalf of Israeli military intelligence. Per Ben-Menashe,
there were concerns among Israeli intelligence figures that, following the Reagan
Era, a new president would push for Israel to make peace with the
Palestinians, something those officials sought to avoid by any means
necessary. |
ABM | Here’s the thing… Mr. Carter…
as in President Carter… the Israelis feared that Mr. Clinton, when he was
campaigning for President, will be a repeat of Mr. Carter. He wanted to press
them for peace with the Palestinians and all that stuff. They feared… Clinton
wasn’t that… but they feared he was that… And I think Mr. Epstein was sent
early on to catch up with President Clinton.
MintPress News (MPN) | Well, that’s interesting
because the first year Clinton was in office, Epstein was already attending
donor dinners at the White House and making White House visits as well.
ABM | Yeah, that’s right. That’s
right. I believe his biggest client was Mr. Clinton catch, or catch, or
whatever, and he had a few other congressmen and what not but Clinton was, was his biggest catch.
Thus, Ben-Menashe
argues, when Bill Clinton’s candidacy in the 1992 U.S. Presidential election
became clear, efforts were made to target him via sexual blackmail and Jeffrey
Epstein was chosen for that purpose. Bill Clinton was eventually
blackmailed by the state of Israel and his administration was also targeted
by Israeli espionage as part of the “Mega”
spy scandal. Epstein’s involvement in the Clinton administration and his
visits to the White House date
back to Clinton’s first year in office. More information on the
Epstein-Clinton relationship can be found in this
MintPress report.
In addition, MintPress also asked Ben-Menashe
if he was aware of Ghislaine Maxwell being directly
involved with her father’s intelligence-related
activities prior to his death in 1991. Ben-Menashe
noted that Ghislaine accompanied her father so
frequently, including on a now-infamous 1989 party on Maxwell’s yacht where Donald Trump and
several key figures in the PROMIS
software scandal were in attendance, that she was involved in his
intelligence-related activities to some extent. However, he stopped short of
saying how involved she was or what she has specifically been involved in prior
to her father’s death.
When did Epstein really meet
Ehud Barak . . . ?
+
Today’s Allies Are Tomorrow’s
Enemies
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52716.htm
by Philip Giraldi
The U.S. is
burdened with a number of false allies that use the relationship with
Washington to enable their own schemes.
One might postulate that the United
States is regularly supporting so-called allies whose very nature will
eventually generate blowback that will do terrible damage to actual American
interests. The recent example of the mass shooting at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida
by Saudi Second Lieutenant Mohammed Alshamrani is
illustrative. Alshamrani killed three American
sailors while three other Saudi students filmed what was taking place,
presumably for posting on social media.
Though the U.S. and The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have no actual alliance, the American and Saudi militaries
have a relationship that began during the Second World War. Currently,
Washington supports Riyadh as a force multiplier and extension of U.S. power in
the Persian Gulf region to serve as a check on what if perceives to be as
hostile Iran. Saudi Arabia, nurturing its own regional ambitions, clearly sees
Iran as its principal enemy. As the White House also appears keen to do
whatever is necessary to bring about regime change in Tehran, the tendency in
Washington to serve as an apologist for whatever Riyadh does will continue for
the foreseeable future. And, as an added bonus, the Saudis buy billions of
dollars’ worth of American made weapons annually.
Someone has to train the people who
fly the expensive warplanes, so Saudi Air Force “students” are sent to American
bases like Pensacola where they undergo language and flight training that is
normally conducted by civilian contractors. The student pilots, surely
carefully screened by Saudi security, would be unlikely candidates for staging
a terrorist attack in the United States, but the Alshamrani
incident suggests that there is more dissidence bubbling beneath the surface
than is apparent from the rosy assurances about The Kingdom coming out of the
White House and the Royal Palace in Riyadh.
The investigation of Alshamrani continues, but it seems
clear that he was unhappy with aspects of America’s pro-Israel and
interventionist foreign policy. He also connected with radical
websites on social media and his colleagues report that he would
periodically return to the U.S. from home leave in Saudi Arabia “more
religious.” On the night before the incident, he showed a film that included a
mass shooting.
==========
u.
On Rogues and Rogue States
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52714.htm
by Fred Reed
How did Nazi Germany differ from
the United States today?
I have just finished reading
William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. (This
may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first encountered it in
high school. It is of course Shirer’s account as a correspondent in Germany of
the rise of the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis, who
had control over the domestic press, convinced the German population that the
Poles were threatening Germany, as plausible as Guatemala threatening the
United States. The Poles were said to be committing atrocities against Germans.
Then the Reich, with no justification
whatever, having absolute air superiority, attacked Poland, bombing undefended
cities and killing huge numbers of people. It was a German pattern several
times repeated. Many reporters told of the smell of rotting bodies, of refugees
dying of hunger and thirst. Today the Reich is endlessly remembered as a
paragon of evil. It was.
How did Nazi Germany differ from
the United States today? There is the same lying. Washington insisted that
Iraq was about to get nuclear weapons, biological agents, that it had
poisonous gas. None of this was true. The government, unimpeded by the media,
persuaded over half of the American population that Iraq was responsible for
Nine-Eleven. Now it says that Iran works to get nuclear weapons, and of
course that the Russians are coming. The American press, informally but
strictly controlled, carefully doesn’t challenge any of this.
Having prepped the American public
as the Nazis prepped theirs, Washington unleashed a savage attack against Iraq,
deliberately destroying infrastructure, leaving the country without power or
purified water. The slaughter was godawful. But, said
America, the war was to rid the Iraqi people of an evil dictator, to bring them
democracy, freedom, and human rights. (The oil was entirely incidental. The oil
is always incidental.)
+
Watch: Julian Assange's
dad details son's torture
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52710.htm
by
Independent Australia
Independent
Australia together with QCCL hosted an event to raise awareness for the
plight of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, featuring his father John Shipton.
DESPITE THE
oppressive humidity in a Brisbane hall packed to twice its capacity, the
attention of the crowd did not falter. All eyes were on John Shipton
as he spoke quietly and eloquently, detailing his son’s torture. John’s son is
Julian Assange, currently rotting in Belmarsh Prison in the UK, awaiting potential
extradition to the U.S. and facing 175 years in prison.
The conditions
under which Assange is being held are worse than
those of mass murderers and child sex offenders. Essentially in solitary
confinement, he is not permitted internet usage. His visiting rights are
limited to two half-hour visits per week. He cannot contact family or friends
and his ability to prepare his own defence has been
severely thwarted.
This, according
to UN Special Rapporteur on
Torture Nils Melzer, is:
"prolonged
exposure to psychological torture … and abuse [which] may soon end up costing his life.” |
The event,
co-hosted by Independent Australia and the Council of Civil Liberties (QCCL) was intended to mobilise support for the journalist and WikiLeaks
founder. Managing editor David
Donovan and executive editor Michelle Pini interviewed Mr Shipton, along with anti-war activist Ciaron
O’Reilly.
John Shipton spoke of his son's commitment to truth-telling and
said of his son:
"Not once has Julian complained.
Not once did he complain or moan about his situation. I don’t know if he thinks
it’s worth it, but as far as I can see from the outside, his resolve is
undiminished… I’ve never found any bitterness in Julian."
Ciaron O'Reilly described Assange's
popularity thus:
Where Julian is popular Is at the extremities of empire – he’s really big in
Bangladesh... and the Congo – where he’s not popular is at the centre of
empire. There's a lot of hostility in the UK and there was quite a lot of
general sympathy with the liberal Left in the U.S. until Clinton blamed her
election loss on WikiLeaks. There's a lot of scepticism in Australia.
Mr Shipton said the
allegations against his son amounted to a distraction tactic to divert the
limelight from the war crimes WikiLeaks exposed, and
that this was the reason Assange is not
receiving diplomatic assistance:
"Julian has had 100 consular
"assistances" in one form or another, which is a testament to failure
because he’s there still...
You, and us together, hold Julian up.
Not the politicians or the big wigs. It’s us – we hold him up."
==========
v.
From: Les Mutins de Pangée [mailto:contact@lesmutins.org]
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2019 8:18 AM
Subject: Noël est annulé
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w.
George
Orwell's '1984' revisited: What Oceania and Israel
have in common
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52703.htm
by
Adam Raz
The
aim of war is not a conquest of one kind or another, but the preservation of a
hierarchical society of “high” and “low.”
George Orwell is one of the most
widely read English-language authors, and has certainly been one of the most
quoted ones for more than a half-century. There is no need to mention the many
concepts associated with him: “Newspeak,” “thought police,” “Orwellian” and so
on. At the same time, the man who strove, as he himself said, to turn political
writing into an art and who declared that everything he wrote after 1936
(subsequent to his participation in the Spanish Civil War, against fascist
forces) was written against totalitarianism and in favor of democratic
socialism, continues to be perceived, ultimately, as a storyteller.
In contrast to the approach of the
vast body of writing that exists about Orwell, and about his novel “1984” in
particular, I will argue here, in brief, that his output needs to be seen as
belonging to the realm of of political theory. In
other words, Orwell is (also) a political theoretician (in the conventional
sense of the term: a person who espouses a theory about the social reality).
Moreover, and especially in his 1949 dystopic novel,
he contributed significantly to the understanding of the dynamics of modern
politics and in particular of the phenomenon the Roman historian Tacitus called
the “secrets of governing” (arcana imperii). “Every new political theory, by whatever name it
called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation,” Orwell wrote.
Any consideration of Orwell’s
writing cannot ignore the fact that he chose the literary genre as the most congenial
for giving expression to his views. Writing was for him a tool for changing
social reality, and the literature he wrote was political. In fact, it often
seems as though the narrative interferes with his attempt to set forth his
views about modern capitalism (and about democracy, on the one hand, and
fascism, on the other). Indeed, when he encountered difficulties in plot
construction, he was known to deal with them by devious literary means, so as
to retain his political point.
A vivid example of this is his
insertion of a completely theoretical text running to dozens of pages in
“1984,” by means of a literary stratagem of introducing a fictitious
book-within-a-book. The text, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism,” is manifestly a sociopolitical analysis of trends in modern
industrial society and a historic description of the phenomenon called
“government.” Some people advised him to remove the “book” from the book.
Happily for us, he ignored them.
‘It depends on you’
Orwell did not in any systematic way
read the classic works of political thought and theory (as opposed to
contemporaneous political writing, about which he was extremely knowledgeable),
and that may help us understand why he chose the literary genre rather than
focusing on philosophy or political science. In his works he gave expression
to, and provided an explanation (theoretical) for, developments in modern
society. Shortly before his death, in 1950, he made it unequivocally clear that
the appalling picture of the future starkly depicted in “1984” was not some
imaginative exercise for him. “Don’t let it happen. It depends on you,” he
asserted toward the end of his life. In his view, the dystopia had already
begun to materialize.
What is the “it” he warned against?
He is referring to the fact that in the struggle to impose limits on political
power, society is at a disadvantage. Orwell went a few steps further,
developing the analysis of José Ortega y Gasset, who
in his book “The Revolt of the Masses” (1932), wrote, “This is the gravest
danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of
all spontaneous social effort by the state… The result of this tendency will be
fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State
intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live
for the State, man for the governmental machine.” In “1984,” Orwell showed how
that scenario could be realized in everyday life.
His writing from the 1930s onward
displays a persistent effort to identify the socioeconomic forces that were
pushing toward the emergence of a society whose features resemble those he
would portray in “1984” and to warn against them. For this reason, Orwell’s
final book was a very frightening one. He was out to scare his readers, because
he wanted to make them think about the direction in which modern society was
being led. “Power is not a means, it is an end,” he wrote at the end of “1984.”
Then, as now, the public had trouble
conceiving of the fact that there are sociopolitical elements whose goal is to
preserve a class society. In other words, precisely in an era in which
technology is creating great abundance, unparalleled in human history, it is
scarcity that rules. (“In principle the war effort is always so planned as to
eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the
population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated,
with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of
life,” Orwell wrote.)
In his view, this state of affairs
was not the result of a mistake, a “hidden hand” or a government of fools; it
was a deliberate policy advanced by an exploitative elite. And it isn’t by
accident that the masses don’t grasp what is happening: “In the long run, a
hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” In
other words, there are forces whose vested interest is to preserve “high” and
“low.” The rationale for this was explained as early as the 17th century by the
French statesman Cardinal Richelieu in his “Political Testament”: “All students
of politics agree that when the common people are too well off, it is
impossible to keep them peaceable… It would not be sound to relieve them of all
taxation and similar charges, since in such a case they would lose the mark of
their subjection and consequently the awareness of their station.”
Orwell died young, aged 46 – younger
than the age at which many thinkers in the realms of humanities and social sciences
have written their magnum opus. From this point of view, it’s hard to imagine
how our world would look if Niccolo Machiavelli (who
died at 58), Karl Marx (at 64), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (66), Immanuel Kant (79)
or Thomas Hobbes (91) had died when they were still in their forties. By the
same token, it’s tempting to imagine how our world of ideas would look if
Orwell had lived another 40 years.
A survey of his development as a
thinker, beginning from his period of service in the Imperial Police in Burma
(when he was in his 20s), shows one thing clearly: The issues that troubled
Orwell beginning in the 1930s won a richer and more complete theoretical
expression in “1984.” Indeed, when we consider the stage his intellectual
progress had reached in the autumn of his years, we find new directions, not
yet fully matured, in his analysis of modern politics.
Mechanism of power
What I’ve written so far is meant to
justify my reading of “1984” as political theory, and not just as a novel. The
general plotline is well known and needs no elaboration. I will only mention
that the book covers a short period in the life of Winston Smith, a citizen of
Oceania (a region congruent with much of today’s Western world), which is under
tight totalitarian rule as part of a one-party system and where life plays out
under the watchful eye of “Big Brother.”
Over the years, what has drawn the
most attention in the book – and is also considered Orwell’s legacy – is the
description of the totalistic means of supervision and control that exist in
Oceania, and in particular the “telescreen” that
monitors people nonstop and identifies “deviations” from the government’s
sadistic path. And, of course, the notion of the media as
serving political interests. (“Most of the material that you were
dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the
kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie,” Orwell wrote). In the
wake of the technological and political developments of recent decades,
references to him are only increasing, but often those references miss the crux
of the book: not the mechanism of power, but the motif that generates it.
Two great questions arise from the
book: How did it happen and why did it happen? That is, how did humanity reach
a situation in which a small elite possesses spiritual
and physical power over the entire population? Or, in Orwell’s famous
formulation in “1984”: “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.”