India seeks Israel help in killing Muslims in Occupied Kashmir

HERE IS AN EXPLANATION FOR THE MANY “TERRORIST ATTACKS” (COUNTER-INSURGENCY OPERATIONS) AGAINST AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN, AS WELL AS “FALSE FLAG” ATTACKS UPON INDIA BY ELUSIVE NEW GROUPS (“Indian Mujahideen”)

INDIA WANTS ISRAEL TO REPLICATE THE FAILED GEORGIAN PROVOCATION IN KASHMIR.

India seeks Israel help in killing Muslims in Occupied Kashmir

India has turned to Israel for assistance in fighting so-called militants in the disputed Kashmir region, the Israel Today magazine reports.

Quoting Israeli media reports this week, the magazine said Israeli Gen Avi Mizrahi, head of Israel’s Ground Forces Command, reportedly paid a visit to Indian-held Kashmir (IHK) last week to assess India’s counterterrorism efforts and the preparedness of Indian forces.

The visit ended with a proposed agreement under which Israel will send teams of commandoes to train Indian soldiers in counterterrorism tactics and urban warfare, the report said. Mizrahi’s trip was kept secret for fear of sparking unrest among Indian Muslims, but has since been widely reported in the Indian and Pakistani press, the report said.

Could An American Nationalist Party Make a Difference?

Could An American Nationalist Party

Make a Difference?

Richard Cook

The U.S., as the main agent of expansion for global finance capitalism, has been declared “functionally bankrupt” by economists close to the Federal Reserve. (Journal of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, August 2006). But no one has wanted to listen. What is really behind the ongoing financial collapse is the ruin wrought by a debt-based monetary system, and it is clear that those who run the system have no answer.
The financial collapse is dragging down the producing economy as job losses mount. But relations with other nations are affected as well.

Nations outside the Western sphere of influence, most notably Russia, have declared that “enough is enough.” For Russia and nations such as Venezuela and Iran, and likely many more struggling with the question of where their real interests lie, a unipolar world where the U.S. military serves as the police force for the New World Order’s outrageously overextended financial empire is no longer acceptable.

Through the election of 2008, the citizens of the U.S. have the latitude to choose their next step, though some say they don’t, because the Republication Party knows how to rig the electoral process. But the public also has the ability to put a stop to that if they so choose. Human beings are not innocent of their fate.

Basically there are only two options for a nation that has painted itself into a corner by hosting a predatory financial system, including the system of dollar hegemony where other nations purchase that nation’s debt to finance its fiscal and trade deficits. So what does that nation do when those other nations start to resist?

The options are 1) to continue to subjugate those other nations through covert or overt warfare, which is what the U.S. has been doing since the national security state took over in the 1950s; or 2) change its financial system to one that is non-predatory and does not require a steady diet of victims to assuage its internal contradictions and appetite for gain.

With the foregoing as a touchstone, we can evaluate the desirability of voting for one or another of the current presidential candidates.

Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin may be the most dangerous political candidates in the history of the U.S. They are the representatives of the Bush-Cheney-Neocon-Zionist-Cabal that seems to view World War III as not only the favored method to avoid facing our economic plight but also something really exciting and justifiable in its own right. McCain fits in perfectly with that view–the only thing that really seems to turn him on is the prospect of more war.

McCain admits he knows little about economics, yet he has endorsed George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. This plan would result in large fees and commissions for the financial industry while reducing benefits for most workers. (Dean Baker, “McCain Would Privatize Social Security,” Truthout Perspective, September 15, 2008) McCain has also declared the present U.S. economy “fundamentally sound.”

“Caribou Barbie” Palin serves as a comely cheerleader to get Christian Zionist fundamentalism behind the ticket. She is a member of an aggressive right-wing Christian cult known as “Joel’s Army,” an offshoot of Dominionism, which says that in the “end times” they will “rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God.” (Bruce Wilson, Sarah Palin’s Churches and the New Wave Apostolic Reformation, http://www.endtimespropheticwords.wordpress.com.)

The Religious Right gives the impression of frightened and ignorant people whose angst is being diverted toward political extremism by unscrupulous preachers who are being paid off by the financier-corporate elite so their flocks will not take a hard look at the financial system which is driving them toward poverty. German psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich captured some of the flavor of this phenomenon during Hitler’s rise to power in his famous book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Palin has spoken casually of war with Russia as a real possibility. The Republican party platform is heavily oriented toward preemptive and aggressive war. The fact that a huge segment of the U.S. economy makes its living off military spending obviously predisposes a large number of voters to select the candidates who seem to provide them with job security.

There are people in my family who work for military contractors and believe that only under a Republican regime will they have jobs. Also supporting McCain/Palin are the beneficiaries of “Big Oil,” since they would gain substantial tax breaks under McCain’s proposals.

In a column titled “Blizzard of Lies,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes that the Republicans are running the most blatantly dishonest campaign in history: “What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.”

Democrat Barack Obama, far from being the peace candidate he seemed to be early in his election bid, when he said he opposed the Iraq War from the start, has clarified his position to mean that he opposed that war because we should have been focusing our military efforts more on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Obama accepts permanent bases in Iraq, so has bought into the George W. Bush policy of U.S. military conquest of the Middle East. He has thereby lost much support and enthusiasm among the progressives who typically vote Democratic.

He also said, in accepting the Democratic Party nomination for president, that he would “truly stand up for Georgia” and “curb Russian aggression.” Vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden referred in his speech to “Russia’s challenge to the free and democratic country of Georgia.”

These positions, which justify thoroughly documented U.S. aggression, misjudgment, and falsehoods in the Georgia debacle, are utterly irresponsible. Though Obama and Biden do not seem to be as pathologically attached to warfare as McCain/Palin, their passive acquiescence to the imperatives of a foreign policy based on armed world conflict could just as easily lead to World War III.

Obama-Biden appear to be the candidates most favored by the U.S. establishment elite, headed by the New York financial circles that provided the backbone of the Democratic Leadership Council which put Bill Clinton into office.

The Clinton economic recovery of the 1990s was based on a huge influx of foreign capital that inflated the dot.com bubble. That opportunity does not exist for Obama, who wants to apply some progressive band-aids, like tax cuts for the middle class, to a hemorrhaging economy that is overwhelmed by bankruptcies, foreclosures, and lost jobs.

The response of the so-called Third Party candidates, including Ralph Nader, has been strident but fragmented.

Nader has come to constitute America’s “official opposition.” In 2000 he served the purposes of the Radical Right by drawing off enough votes from Al Gore to make the designation of George W. Bush by the Supreme Court a possibility.

Nader has not really gotten beyond complaining about corporate corruption, though he has recently come out in favor of an assessment of the Federal Reserve System and a new 9/11 investigation. But he has never seemed to understand or strongly question the underpinnings of the debt-based monetary system as the cause that drives our nation to bankruptcy at home and war abroad.

With all due respect to Dr. Ron Paul, who has led the way in criticizing the Federal Reserve, his solution to our economic ills of letting the Libertarian faithful use gold and silver for money while anyone else who wants to do so can continue to use Federal Reserve Notes, is a ludicrous suggestion for managing an industrial economy. (Dr. Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto, 2008.)

Running for president for the Libertarian Party is former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr. Barr recently asked Ron Paul to run as his vice-presidential candidate though Paul has refused this invitation in the past. Unfortunately, the Libertarians’ anti-government message is not much more than a prescription for anarchy.

It comes at a time when the failure of government to work on behalf of the people rather than the corporate and financial controllers is clearly the real problem. Government has an essential role to play in assuring prosperity and fairness, which Libertarianism is ideologically incapable of addressing.

The Green Party, while having a progressive platform that includes monetary reform, has never presented a practical and coherent strategy for redirecting the economy, Its presidential candidate, Cynthia McKinney, will not gather more than a handful of votes. The Green Party has never had the leadership and credibility at the national level to make an impact.

There are a number of other parties that may attract a few voters, including the Progressives, the Socialists, and the Constitution Party, which may have excellent ideas but little effective following. Past reform movements such as the Reform Party, Common Cause, etc., had a temporary impact, especially when Ross Perot ran in 1992 as the Reform Party candidate, but no staying power.

Lyndon LaRouche, as usual, says he is running for president, but he is in his 80s and is advocating as a main platform plank that the Federal Reserve raise interest rates. LaRouche, for all the good he has done in exposing the control of the financiers over the world political and economic system, is still a central bank advocate. He is a self-admitted “New Hampshire Whig” in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, who started the U.S. on its trajectory of out-of-control debt over two centuries ago.

Of course the laws and traditions of the U.S. strongly favor a two-party system, and Third Parties have never had a chance at mainstream media coverage. This does not mean that a new political party with grassroots support could not emerge where others have failed.

But all the Third Parties have a fundamental problem in that real reform must move from the top down as well as from the bottom up. Certainly what the present system lacks is a voice for the people. But throughout world history such a voice has been most effective when spoken by strong leaders, who join with the people to fight against the oligarchs who would take away their freedom.

Strong presidents like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt governed on this pattern, which was why, after Roosevelt died, a constitutional amendment limited the number of terms a president could serve to two.

Another such pattern occurred in Tsarist Russia. Contrary to decades of Western pro-communist propaganda that portrayed Russia’s pre-Revolution peasantry as downtrodden, that country had a tradition of an autocratic czar working against the Russian oligarchs in favor of the peasant class. Actually the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded because of the stresses of war and because Lenin and Trotsky had money provided them by the Western financiers. The financiers saw business opportunities through confiscating the money the Tsar had on deposit in the Rothschild banks and in action by the Rockefellers in taking over the Baku oil fields.

The pattern of the strong leader battling the oligarchs is also being followed by Vladimir Putin in Russia today. This is why he has such a high approval rating in the Russian public opinion polls and why he is hated so much by the Western financier press.

A good example is the recent deeply dishonest anti-Putin screed in Vanity Fair, entitled “Dead Soul.” Actually, most of the democracy-loving Russian businessmen which the Western press blames Putin for oppressing are little more than gangsters.

The same phenomenon of a strong, popular anti-oligarch leader can be seen in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez. What we need in the U.S. today is a strong president, someone like Putin or Chavez, who will do battle with the financial and corporate elite in order to take back the freedoms of the people. The first of the freedoms which must be addressed is real income security, not freedom to go ever deeper into debt to purchase the necessities of life or freedom to scrounge desperately for a job that may or may not pay a living wage.

A political party that could bring about real reform must be organized from the top down in order to meet the appeal for justice and humanity that is coming today from the bottom up. Such a party can only be organized by individuals from the American leadership class, including experienced corporate, military, intelligence, academic, and political figures who understand and are truly disgusted by what is coming out of the existing political parties.

Over the last several decades the financial controllers have worked through their minions in the intelligence and police agencies to eliminate or marginalize such leaders. It’s why JFK, MLK, RFK, Paul Wellstone, and JFK, Jr., were gotten rid of. It’s why the remaining New Deal Democrats in Congress were purged in the 1970s. Key to the New World Order strategy is to assure that no strong leader who cares about the interests of ordinary people ever takes power, or, if any do, they are rendered helpless to govern.
Certainly Bill Clinton had populist leanings. But he was harassed throughout his two terms by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, the Republicans in Congress who impeached him, and the European controllers who unleashed NATO against Yugoslavia with U.S. forces that Clinton had little control over.

Hillary Clinton was the favorite of the working class in the 2008 Democratic primaries, but she was fiercely attacked by the media who seemed to be a deciding factor in influencing the superdelegates to hand the nomination to Obama.

Today, if any genuine populists still exist among the American ruling class they must come forward now, because their country is being destroyed. They know very well that grassroots movements without top down support will be murdered in the cradle.

Any political party that seeks to make a difference must have a strong nationalistic orientation and be dedicated to reforming the nation by replacing the power of the global financial elite with a party based on the welfare of the people as expressed by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

This movement could either be one that takes over the existing Democratic Party or a new party that combines the appeal of the Third Parties with a new element of elite support. The platform of such an American Nationalist Party could represent real “change” and should include such features as the following:

Nationalize the bankrupt U.S. monetary, financial, and banking system.

Nationalize the energy industry, including oil.

Place the U.S. national debt under bankruptcy reorganization.

Institute an immediate annual citizens’ dividend, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund, of $12,000 per legal adult resident and $4,000 per child.

These four elements alone would constitute a Second American Revolution. Of course some would call this a socialist agenda and oppose it solely on those grounds. But the fact is that any modern industrial economy must be a mixture of public and private sector activity. And it must be done if the U.S. economy is to be saved.

What we have today with unbridled finance capitalism is not a free economy at all. It is one where the rich own the government, privatize resources and utilities that should be part of the societal commons, pay with bribes and campaign contributions to get the political leadership they want, and put ordinary people increasingly into debt and poverty.

Under a program with a nationalistic agenda, the money supply would be issued by the government through payments for services, infrastructure financing, and a citizens’ dividend. The energy industry should be nationalized, because every public and private activity depends on energy for its functioning.

This agenda would address the number one economic problem that faces the the U.S. today. This is the wholesale collapse of consumer purchasing power due to the fact that in an industrial economy earned income is always insufficient to match the prices of production. The main reason is that prices must include enough savings–retained earnings–for technological innovation to counter the rate at which resources are used up. A secondary problem is the export of millions of well-paying manufacturing jobs overseas and the destruction of labor unions as a political force.

This conundrum of an endemic gap between prices and purchasing power was identified decades ago by the British Social Credit movement which understood that the gap could be filled by monetizing savings through a citizens’ dividend. Instead this gap is filled by bank lending, which is the underlying cause of the gigantic debt pyramid that is destroying the U.S. economy.

The one political party which today has identified this problem and has a platform to meet it is not a U.S. party. It is the Democratic Party for Social Credit of New Zealand. (See http://www.democrats.org.nz.)

The party platform states: “Development of modern banking has resulted in nations losing the power to issue most of their own money. The present economic system, worldwide, is based on debt” Among its platform provisions are:

A social credit economy based on a citizens’ dividend and consumer price subsidies;
A guaranteed basic income regardless of employment status;

Grants and interest-free loans for public works and community projects;

A strong public health system;

Fair regulations and reduced compliance costs for business;

A fair tax system based on a financial transactions tax;

Publicly-funded education with no student loans;

Full public ownership of strategic assets; and

A national program of public housing.

If the U.S. adopted these policies, along with national single-payer health insurance and public financing of all federal, state, and local elections, an entirely new type of economic and monetary system would come into existence. It would be a system that would eliminate the need for the U.S. to cover up its economic and financial failures through foreign conquests. The following measures could then be taken:

Begin negotiations with Russia for a full-spectrum economic, military, and cultural alliance.

Freeze all U.S. military combat activity overseas until withdrawals can be negotiated.

Outlaw all acts of undeclared covert warfare by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Such policy changes as the foregoing would be a real prescription for “change” in the 2008 presidential election. The fact that these are not likely to happen shows the desperation of the present situation, the paralysis of the U.S. political system, and the failure of those running for office. Consequently, individuals and groups who understand what is going on must take action now to protect themselves in the face of chaos that can only get worse.
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Copyright © 2008 by Richard C. Cook

America Needs A “Shadow Government”

Tim Gatto

I think I can speak for many Americans when I say that our government has been less than responsive as far as ending militarism and holding our civil liberties sacrosanct. In fact, less than responsive is being generous, as we have seen this nation totally scrap the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, station troops in bases world-wide in over 130 different nations, and wage aggressive war on three nations, become complicit with another nation to wage war (Georgia) and institute trade sanctions (another Act of War by International law) on Iran.

During the past two terms of this Presidency we have learned in-depth about signing statements, the “Unitary Presidency”, numerous Executive Orders that remain secret from the Congress, extraordinary “rendition”, and torture to include inflicting injuries on another human being “to the point of, but not exceeding organ failure”. We know of places such as Abu Graib, and Guantanamo and watched as our Army dropped white Phosphorus on innocent civilians in a city called Fallujah where photographs of women and children showed burned blackened corpses while the clothes and blankets they were wrapped in weren’t even singed. We learned about depleted uranium and exposed our soldiers and Iraqi citizens to ionizing radiation that causes cancers, leukemia, and birth defect among other things. Radiation that we brought to Iraq and Afghanistan has a half-life of eight billion years.

We watched as Congress enabled the President to commit vast sums of money on an aggressive war in the Middle-East, taking money away from the taxpayer that could have been used to build schools, hospitals and to fix crumbling infrastructure in this country. We could have offered every American student tuition free higher education instead of dumping it into Iraq in the quest for global resources like oil. We could have taken the trillion dollars that we spent on these wars and used it to promote alternate energy resources. Instead of looking out for the taxpayers, the Congress, controlled by BOTH major corporate political parties, squandered our nation’s wealth on war and weapons of war for a global empire nobody voted on and nobody wants save those that are now in government.

Congress voted for The Patriot Act, The Military Commissions Act, The John Warner Defense Bill (The re-vamped Insurrection Act), the enhanced FISA Bill that gave the telecom companies retroactive immunity for illegally wiretapping American citizens for the Executive Branch which was against the law. Congress ignored Articles of Impeachment against the President and Vice-President time and time again. Congressional subpoenas have been ignored by members of the Executive Branch and Congress does not impose inherent contempt charges on these individual and send Capitol Police to arrest them for willfully disobeying Congress. The checks and balances that were built into our Constitution are broken from neglect and disuse. Congress has allowed the Executive Branch to supersede those powers that were expressly given to Congress by our Constitution.

We are now facing an election in which the nominees were presented to us by a compliant corporate led media. Before a single vote had been cast, two of the Democratic nominees had been barred from taking part in the Primary Debates. We saw, according to The Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org), corporate money in bundles campaign donations go to two Democrats almost exclusively before a vote was cast in the primaries. The two major party nominees both support more war and more military spending, while ignoring the fact that we have lost a majority of our civil liberties that were stated in the Bill of Rights.

Meanwhile the media is controlled by the same interests that now control our elected officials from the two major parties, and tout only two candidates, the Democrat and the Republican. To illustrate that there is hardly a difference between them, they must rely on “straw man” arguments such as gay rights, abortion, taxes and education. These are the same issues that are brought up time after time, election after election, yet most of these issues should be settled by the States, not the Federal Government. They fail to bring up the loss of our constitutional rights like freedom of speech and the press, unrestricted search and seizures without a warrant. Non-lethal force such as tasers, rubber bullets and riot gas being used on demonstrators in violation of their free speech rights, as they are rounded up from “free speech” zones. The candidates neglect to bring up the fact that the Unites States of America spends 48% of the entire world’s spending on the military. The candidates threaten Russia as we encircle them with nuclear -tipped missiles and American military bases. We demonize Venezuela and Hugo Chavez while we interfere in the internal affairs of Bolivia against the democratically elected government of Evo Morales by giving five provinces rich in natural gas, hundreds of thousands of dollars to succeed from Bolivia.

Our Federal government has allowed unchecked predatory capitalism to thrive in this country, offering mortgages to people with suspect credit, knowing full well that these people would never be able to pay the ballooning mortgages in the future in order to make a quick buck. Our economy is going belly-up by these “lassie faire” practices that have raped the taxpayers while the government bails out the banks and brokers with “corporate welfare”. The top 10% of the wealthiest people in this nation own 71% of its wealth! This gives the remaining 90% of us 21% to share together.

I have written about all of this before. There are examples that for sake of brevity I have not mentioned instances which are just as egregious as those mentioned above like the Federal assistance after Katrina and the saber-rattling towards Iran. I needed to restate all of these things to illustrate that our federal government is totally out of control, and is not concerned about the well-being of the American taxpayer. The simple fact is that after this election, with the two candidates they are running and the third parties shut out of participating in an honest election because of impediments set up by the two-party duopoly, we will have no change in the foreseeable future. Others besides me have predicted that we will have more of the status quo if McCain or Obama are elected. Unless this nation comes to an epiphany and all at once gets behind Nader or McKinney which is very doubtful, our votes will not win this election. This election will be decided by the mass media’s coverage of the two corporate candidates that are both more of the same, and the general public that has been dumbed-down by the same media and the lack of honest news.

So what can we do? I propose a “Shadow Government” that be made up of all the third parties and the disaffected Republicans and Democrats that are tired of the American Empire and the squandering of our nation’s wealth on wars while our civil liberties are being taken from us. It can be formed at a conference much like the one last week-end at Andover, Mass. We are looking at a police state that operates outside the rule of law that we have operated on for over two hundred years. This shadow government will be divided up much like the Federal Government. Instead of individuals holding office however, there will be committees that will monitor every action by every part of every branch of this government to insure that they are following the laws, and not operating outside the rule of law which is US code and the Constitution.

These committees will have not power but to seek indictments against those in the federal government that break US law. They can seek relief in local, State and Federal Courts. Every move that this corporate government makes will be followed closely by this shadow government to insure that the excesses that happened in the last decade are not allowed to continue. The shadow government can also lobby for campaign finance reform to get corporate money out of political elections. All other partisan issues will be left to political interests lest they take the focus off of what the shadow government was designed to do.

Drastic times call for drastic measures. This country is rapidly coming apart at the seams and our government continues as if this is what is expected of them. It’s time to tell them what is expected of them by banding together, left, right, liberal, conservative the old paradigms’ no longer matter. So for now it is not between left and right, only between right and wrong, and it’s about time.

The Pentagon Strangles Our Economy

The Pentagon Strangles Our Economy:

Why the U.S. Has Gone Broke

By Chalmers Johnson
26/04/08 ” Le Monde ” — The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room” — the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay or repudiate. This fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to the U.S. debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defense” projects that bear no relation to the national security of the U.S. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures — “military Keynesianism” (which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic). By that, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of the U.S. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing.

Fiscal disaster

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush’s two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

Before we try to break down and analyze this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: “A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon’s (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it.” Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defense budget is ‘black,'” meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.

There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand — including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defense, and the military-industrial complex — but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defense jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense. In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security, has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalized either department for ignoring the law. All numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.

In discussing the fiscal 2008 defense budget, as released on 7 February 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D Hartung of the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative and Fred Kaplan, defense correspondent for Slate.org. They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4bn for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment. They also agree on a figure of $141.7bn for the “supplemental” budget to fight the global war on terrorism — that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4bn to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional “allowance” (a new term in defense budget documents) of $50bn to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This makes a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5bn.

But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the U.S. military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4bn for the Department of Energy goes towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3bn in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt and Pakistan). Another $1.03bn outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and re-enlistment incentives for the overstretched U.S. military, up from a mere $174m in 2003, when the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7bn, 50% of it for the long-term care of the most seriously injured among the 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4bn goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

Missing from this compilation is $1.9bn to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI; $38.5bn to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6bn for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200bn in interest for past debt-financed defense outlays. This brings U.S. spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year, conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.

Military Keynesianism

Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. That statement is no longer true. The world’s richest political entity, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, is the European Union. The E.U.’s 2006 GDP was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the U.S. Moreover, China’s 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the U.S., and Japan was the world’s fourth richest nation.

A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we’re doing can be found among the current accounts of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. In order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88bn per year trade surplus with the U.S. and enjoys the world’s second highest current account balance (China is number one). The U.S. is number 163 — last on the list, worse than countries such as Australia and the U.K. that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5bn; second worst was Spain at $106.4bn. This is unsustainable.

It’s not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On 7 November 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the “debt ceiling” to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures.

The top spenders

The world’s top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each currently budgets for its military establishment are

Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration’s policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology, and have now become so entrenched in our democratic political system that they are starting to wreak havoc. This is military Keynesianism — the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.

This ideology goes back to the first years of the cold war. During the late 1940s, the U.S. was haunted by economic anxieties. The great depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of the second world war. With peace and demobilization, there was a pervasive fear that the depression would return. During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR’s European satellites, the U.S. sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging cold war. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated 14 April 1950 and signed by President Harry S. Truman on 30 September 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the U.S. pursues to the present day.

In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: “One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living.”

With this understanding, U.S. strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment, as well as ward off a possible return of the depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of 6 February 1961: “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience” — the military-industrial complex.

By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in U.S. manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined U.S. military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, U.S. reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is a form of slow economic suicide.

Higher spending, fewer jobs

On 1 May 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, DC, released a study prepared by the economic and political forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. The U.S. economy has had to cope with growing defense spending for more than 60 years. Baker found that, after 10 years of higher defense spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a scenario that involved lower defense spending.

Baker concluded: “It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.”

These are only some of the many deleterious effects of military Keynesianism.

It was believed that the U.S. could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities. The historian Thomas E Woods Jr. observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all U.S. research talent was siphoned off into the military sector. It is, of course, impossible to know what innovations never appeared as a result of this diversion of resources and brainpower into the service of the military, but it was during the 1960s that we first began to notice Japan was outpacing us in the design and quality of a range of consumer goods, including household electronics and automobiles.

Can we reverse the trend?

Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the U.S. spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the U.S. possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America’s secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly-skilled jobs within the economy.

The pioneer in analyzing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the U.S. preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the cold war. Melman wrote: “From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000bn on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life, by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration.”

In an important exegesis on Melman’s relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes: “According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over $7.29 trillion … The amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock.”

The fact that we did not modernize or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools, an industry on which Melman was an authority, are a particularly important symptom. In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed “that 64% of the metalworking machine tools used in U.S. industry were 10 years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States’ machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end of the second world war. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry.”

Nothing has been done since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment — from medical machines like proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany, and Japan) to cars and trucks.

Our short tenure as the world’s lone superpower has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written: “Again and again it has always been the world’s leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence and cultural influence. It’s no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over the job of being the world’s leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world’s leading lending country. In fact we are now the world’s biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone.”

Some of the damage can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that the U.S. urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to national security and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program.

If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don’t, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.

© 2008 Le Monde diplomatique All rights reserved

The Rise Of The Fourth Reich

The Rise Of The Fourth

Reich

Michael Rivero

Everyone likes to say, “Hitler did this”, and, “Hitler did that”. But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class tyrant, but the evil actually done by the Third Reich, from the slave-labor camps to WW2 was all done by German citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.The German people of the late 1930s imagined themselves to be brave. They saw themselves as the heroic Germans depicted by the Wagnerian Operas, the descendants of the fierce Germanic warriors who had hunted wild boar with nothing but spears and who had defeated three of Rome’s mightiest legions in the Tuetenberg Forest. But in truth, by the 1930s, the German people had become civilized and tamed, culturally obsessed with fine details in both science and society. Their self-image of bravery was both salve and slavery. Germans were required to behave as if they were brave, even when they were not. It’s easy to look back and realize what a jerk Hitler was. But at the time, Hitler looked pretty good to the German people, with the help of the media. He was TIME Magazine’s Man Of The Year in 1938. The German people assumed they were safe from a tyrant. They lived in a Republic, after all, with strict laws regarding what the government could and more importantly could not do. Their leader was a devoutly religious man, and had even sung with the boy’s choir of a monastery in his youth. The reality was that the German people, as individuals, had lost their courage. The German government preferred it that way as a fearful people are easier to rule than a courageous one. But the German people didn’t wish to lose their self-image of courage. So, when confronted with a situation demanding individual courage, in the form of a government gone wrong, the German people simply pretended that the situation did not exist. And in that simple self-deception lay the ruin of an entire nation and the coming of the second World War. When the Reichstag burned down, most Germans simply refused to believe suggestions that the fire had been staged by Hitler himself. They were afraid to. But so trapped were the Germans by their belief in their own bravery that they willed themselves to be blind to the evidence before their eyes, so that they could nod in agreement with Der Fuhrer while still imagining themselves to have courage, even as they avoided the one situation which most required real courage; to stand up to Hitler’s lies and deceptions. When Hitler requested temporary extraordinary powers, powers specifically banned under German law, but powers Hitler claimed he needed to have to deal with the “terrorists”, the German people, having already sold their souls to their self-delusions, agreed. The temporary powers were conferred, and once conferred lasted until Germany itself was destroyed. When Hitler staged a phony invasion from Poland, the vast majority of the German people, their own self-image dependant on continuing blindness to Hitler’s deceptions, did not question why Poland would have done something so stupid, and found themselves in a war. But Hitler knew he ruled a nation of cowards, and knew he had to spend the money to make the new war something cowards could fight and win. He decorated his troops with regalia to make them proud of themselves, further trapping them in their self-image. Hitler copied the parade regalia of ancient Rome, to remind the Germans of the defeat of the legions at the Tuetenberg Forest. Talismans were added from orthodox religions and the occult to fill the soldiers with delusions of mystical strengths and an afterlife if they fell in battle. Finally, knowing that it takes courage to kill the enemy face to face, Hitler spent vast sums of money on his wonder weapons, airplanes, submarines, ultra-long range artillery, the world’s first cruise missile and the world’s first guided missile, weapons that could be used to kill at a distance, so that those doing the killing need not have to face the reality of what they were doing. The German people were lured into WW2 not because they were brave, but because they were cowards who wanted to be seen as brave, and found that shooting long range weapons at people they could not see took less courage than standing up to Hitler. Sent into battle by that false image of courage, the Germans were dependent on their wonder-weapons. When the wonder-weapons stopped working, the Germans lost the war. I remember as a child listening to the stories of WW2 from my grandfather and my uncles who had served in Europe. I wondered how the German people could have been so stupid as to have ever elected Hitler dog catcher, let alone leader of the nation. Such is the clarity of historical hindsight. And with that clarity, I see the exact same mechanism that Hitler used at work here in this nation. The American people imagine themselves to be brave. They see themselves as the heroic Americans depicted by Western Movies, the descendants of the fierce patriot warriors who had tamed the frontier and defeated the might of the British Empire. But in truth, by the dawn of the third millennium, the American people have become civilized and tamed, culturally obsessed with fine details in both science and society. Their self-image of bravery is both salve and slavery. Americans are required to behave as if they are brave, even when they are not. The American people assume they are safe. They live in a Republic, after all, with strict laws regarding what the government can and more importantly cannot do. Their leader is a devoutly religious man. The reality is that the American people, as individuals, have lost their courage. The government prefers it that way as a fearful people are easier to rule than a courageous one. But Americans don’t wish to lose their self-image of courage. So, when confronted with a situation demanding courage, in the form of a government gone wrong, the American people simply pretend that the situation does not exist. When the World Trade Towers collapsed, most Americans simply refused to believe suggestions that the attacks had been staged by parties working for the US Government itself. Americans were afraid to, even as news reports surfaced proving that the US Government had announced plans for the invasion of Afghanistan early in the year, plans into which the attacks on the World Trade Towers which angered the American people into support of the already-planned war fit entirely too conveniently. But so trapped are Americans by their belief in their own bravery that they will themselves to be blind to the evidence before their eyes, so that they can nod in agreement with the government while still imagining themselves to have courage, even as they avoid the one situation which most requires real courage; to stand up to the government’s lies and deceptions. The vast majority of the American people, their own self-image dependant on continuing blindness to the government’s deceptions, never question why Afghanistan would have done something so stupid as to attack the United States, and as a result, Americans find themselves in a war. Now the US Government has requested temporary extraordinary powers, powers specifically banned under Constitutional law, but powers the government is claiming they need to have to deal with the “terrorists”. The American people, having already sold their souls to their self-delusions, are agreeing. The temporary powers recently conferred will be no more temporary in America than they were in Germany. The US Government knows they rule a nation of cowards. The government has had to spend the money to make the new war something cowards can fight. The government has decorated the troops with regalia to make them proud of themselves, further trapping them in their self-image. Talismans are added from orthodox religions and the occult to fill the soldiers with delusions of mystical strengths and an afterlife if they fall in battle. Finally, knowing that it takes courage to kill the enemy face to face, the United States government has spent vast sums of money on wonder weapons, airplanes, submarines, ultra-long range artillery, cruise missiles, and guided missiles, weapons that kill at a distance, so that those doing the killing need not have to face the reality of what they are doing.

As I mentioned above, Hitler was TIME Magazine’s Man Of The Year in 1938. Stalin was TIME Magazine’s Man Of The Year for 1939 and 1942. Both of these men, and many others also celibrated by the media, were unimaginable monsters. The lesson from these facts is that it isn’t easy to spot a genocidal tyrant when you live with one, especially one whom the press supports and promotes.Tyrants become obvious only when looking back, after what they have done becomes known. The German people did not stand up to Hitler because their media betrayed them, just as the American media is betraying the American people by willingly, voluntarily, even proudly, abandoning its traditional role as watchdog against government abuse.

It is the very nature of power that it attracts the sort of people who should not have it. The United States, as the world’s last superpower, is a prize that attracts men and women willing to do absolutely anything to win that power, and hence are also willing to do absolutely anything with that power once they have it. If one thinks about it long enough, one will realize that all tyrants, past and most especially present, MUST use deception on their population to initiate a war.No citizen of a modern industrialized nation will send their children off to die in a war to grab another nation’s resources and assets, yet resources and assets are what all wars are fought over. The nation that wishes to initiate a war of conquest must create the illusion of an attack or a threat to start a war, and must always give their population of cowards an excuse never to question that carefully crafted illusion.

It is naive, not to mention racist to assume that tyrants appear only in other nations and that somehow America is immune simply because we’re Americans. America has escaped the clutches of a dictatorship thus far only through the efforts of those citizens who, unlike the Germans of the 1930s, have the moral courage to stand up and point out where the government is lying to the people.Unless more Americans are willing to have that kind of individual courage, then future generations may well look back on the American people with the same harshness of judgement with which we look back on the 1930s Germans.

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See also: The 9/11 Reichstag Fire

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

Michael Rivero

What Really Happened

Dictators do not appear overnight. They must gradually assume more and more power over time so that the population does not realize what is going on, or does not feel it is worthwhile to object.

But to maintain control, dictators “seduce” their population into greater and greater atrocities, over time. There is more than simply acclimating the population involved to the dictator’s agenda. By tricking the population into acceptance of greater and greater atrocities, the dictator will eventually reach a position where the people will be too afraid to examine what they themselves have become. Trapped by the fear of examining themselves, such people turn into the most fanatical of the dictator’s supporters. They dare not look at the dictator’s evil for to do so is to look at their own. Once the dictator can trick his people past that point, they are his slaves. Hitler used this tactic. So did Stalin.

The people of the United States stand at that point right now. That the US Government is using torture on POWs (just as Hitler did) is beyond argument. One can either stand up and denounce that torture and demand the firing of all who took part in it (and the end of the war), or one is by default complicit, an accessory after the fact, seen by all to condone such barbarism.

Anyone who steps across that line is trapped. Unable to look at what they themselves have become they will refuse to look at what the government has become, indeed will create or accept any justification, no matter how thin and transparent, rather than question that government. And indeed this web site gets email from people who have already crossed that point, and are trying to explain why torture is really necessary “this time”.

So, you are down to a choice. There is no more being neutral, or sitting on the fence. As Bush himself said, you are either with him or against him, and unless you are actively against him and his war machine, then he wins by default. Unless you stop them now, sooner or later, Bush and the NeoCons will succeed in turning this nation into the 21st century version of Nazi Germany, powered by fanatics so afraid to look in a mirror that they will inflict any pain on any people, rather than do so.

Time to decide.

A Nation Damned

We are a nation damned.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We are past being able to pretend otherwise, no matter what comfort might be found in the deception. The United States Government has openly admitted there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The United States Government has openly admitted there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The United States Government has openly admitted there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9-11. The United States has invaded and conquered a foreign nation under false pretexts. President Bush and his cronies lied us all into a war.

But that is not why we are damned.

The culmination of decades of accumulated overspending by the government has created an aggregate debt for the United States federal and state governments of $14 trillion dollars. That’s fourteen million million dollars. Or, to put it in a more personal scale, more than $48,000 for every single living human being in the United States, plus the accumulating interest.

The interest on that government debt now exceeds all the personal income tax collected by that government. That means that the government isn’t keeping up with the interest on the debt, let alone able to pay down the principle. Even before the wars started with lies, the US Government was sinking deeper into debt by one third of a trillion dollars every year. With Bush’s war, the debt is increasing at another half trillion every year just at the Federal level. And because the federal Government, struggling with payments on past debts, is sending less money back to the states, the states are sinking deeper into debt as well.

But that is not why we are damned.

The national fiscal crisis is accelerating because of soaring unemployment, and the forced migration of workers from higher paying jobs to lower paying ones. This is occurring for two reasons. The first is that as tax revenues falter, the cash-strapped government raises tax rates. This increases the cost of products and services inside the United States without increasing their quality or desirability. Indeed American companies, struggling to keep prices competitive, are forced to sacrifice quality.

As an inevitable result, American companies have either been driven out of business by foreign competition able to sell superior products at lower prices, or been forced to outsource their own operations to regions with lower tax burdens.

The US Government attempted to conceal this loss of manufacturing with the so-called “Service Economy”, the ludicrous notion that one can prosper a nation by doing each other’s laundry for a fee. But while the moving of cash back and forth for services created more opportunities for taxation, fewer and fewer products were being made within the United States for sales to foreign countries. All the while, Americans were buying foreign-made products because they were of better quality and lower price than American products. Indeed many products needed for every day life are simply not made in the USA any more. When Ampex invented the VCR, they did not even bother approaching American manufacturers but licensed directly to the Japanese. When Seymour Cray was building his supercomputers, the chips he needed were only available from Japanese manufacturers.

Money is flowing out of the country at a billion and a half dollars per day. And as government debt drives taxes higher, the situation can only get worse.

But that is not why we are damned.

Despite the huge government debt, despite the loss of manufacturing over the last 30 years, despite soaring unemployment, despite American women and children sleeping in alleys and eating out of trash cans, the United States government hands out trillions of dollars as gifts to their friends (who used to be their enemies) and to make war on their enemies (who used to be their friends).

But that is not why we are damned.

Maybe the problem is the Congress. Congress is supposed to represent the people, but a body composed of millionaires and lawyers can hardly be expected to understand how to actually make things work. Maybe Congress would better serve the people if it were made up of teachers, doctors, road engineers, factory workers, bakers, people who actually know how to make a nation function, build an infrastructure, and know what it is like to have to live paycheck to paycheck in a nation where the government makes more money off of your work than you do and is always asking for more.

But that is not why we are damned.

We are damned because we know all the above and do nothing. Like the Germans of 1930s Germany we see Der Fuhrer trying to distract the populace from the self-serving choices the government makes by creating a war with lies and deceptions, yet stay silent, less we be accused of being traitors to the national security. We voice our outrage when a rock star bares her breast at a sporting event, because rock stars cannot after all hurt us, raise our taxes, or conscript our children to be crippled or killed in wars. But we remain silent, or at best speak in hushed tones with a trusted few of our concerns about the government, which does hurt us, which does raise our taxes, and which has and continues to conscript our children to be crippled or killed in wars.

We are damned by our silence. We are damned by our inaction. We are damned by our fear to speak out. We are damned by our weakness. We are damned by being sheep under a government of wolves.

We are damned unless and until you realize that your anger and outrage must be targeted where it is needed, not just where it is harmless. We are damned by our willingness to be angry with those who cannot affect our lives, while remaining too afraid to be angry with those who can. We are damned because individuals who refuse to obey the law morally offend us, but we remain enablers of a government that refuses to obey the Constitution. We are damned until WE THE PEOPLE remember that we ARE a people, and that this nation is US.

The President is not the nation. The media is not the nation. The selfish desires of a powerful few are not the nation. The Congress is not the nation.

This nation is 288 million teachers, doctors, bricklayers, road layers, bridging engineers, railroad workers, bakers, grocers, and thousands of others who actually make the nation work. But we seem to have forgotten that simple truth, that wisdom conveyed in those first three words to the Preamble to the Constitution, “We The People”.

The Constitution makes it clear that the nation is the people, and the government only a temporary custodian of our national sovereignty that rules by and only by the leave of the people.

We are damned because we have forgotten that the government is the employee of the people, and that like any employee the government is required to obey orders, not to give them.

We are damned because we have forgotten that as the employers of the government, we have the right to decide what our employees can do and more importantly, what they cannot.

We are damned because we have forgotten who is really supposed to be in charge.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/nationdamned.html

The Graet 2008 Transfer of Wealth

By Joan Veon

Americans are confronted with what appears to be the worse economic situation since the Great Depression. What will history say about the U.S. credit crisis turned global financial crisis? At every turn investors are faced with new problems, new crises, and less than desirable solutions which include debt, deflation and a transfer of wealth.

With regard to debt, the American taxpayer has been made the lender of last resort for international bank Bear Stearns and now the two Government-sponsored Enterprises-GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. On top of the $29B for Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie’s debt of $5.4T has been effectively transferred to the balance sheet of the USA. This is equal to the entire publicly traded debt of the U.S. which is also the same as the total of America’s mortgage-related assets. In addition to personal debt, every American now has a financial responsibility for Bear Stearns and Fannie and Freddie.

We, the people, have saved the foreign investors such as China which owns $376B, Japan which owns $228B, South Korea which owns $65B, Taiwan which owns $55B, and Australia which owns $33B, from losing faith in America. It is the stockholders, both common and preferred, that have been given the raw end of the deal. While large financial institutions such as JP Morgan, which owns $1.2B of Freddie and Fannie stock, said a complete loss would only erase one or two months of profits, contrast this to smaller banks such as the Central Virginia Bank in Richmond which has $20M in shares of Freddie and Fannie. That type of loss will put them in the same kind of trouble as Lehman Brothers, not enough capitalization. There are 15 other banks that hold 10% or more of their capital in shares of Freddie and Fannie.

The Federal Accounting Standards Board is requiring more stringent standards for banks and savings and loans to maintain a certain amount of capital to protect against insolvency. Those rules are in the process of being changed to conform to international rules issued by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland which Congress has voted on. These rules which were only to pertain to international banks are now being applied to national banks.

Furthermore those in retirement who thought their money was safe—invested in the highest ranked bonds in the country are going to lose their dividends. Depending on the price they invested, they could have principal losses of up to 80 or 90% of their investment. Ouch.

The credit crunch began a year ago when the various investment banks both here and abroad stopped buying each others paper, a very uncommon practice between them. As a result of no liquidity for mortgage paper caused by their decision, we have the most serious slowdown in real estate in decades. The decision to not buy mortgage paper includes the sub-prime loans made to home buyers that had no down payment. To relate, I recently met a young Latino who is worried about her home. Five years ago she bought a $370,000 townhouse with $14,000 down. Her interest rate varies causing her monthly payment to jump from $2700 per month to $3500. She cleans houses for a living.

Freddie and Fannie decided they could make more money by buying subprime mortgage paper. Today there is an eleven month inventory of unsold homes. Higher interest rates as a result of the hidden clauses on floating interest rates have put many people in jeopardy of foreclosure. All of these problems have given the Federal Reserve the opportunity to seize total control of powers they did not oversee in order to protect our economy. Perhaps we should ask where the desire to put poor people into homes came from? It was part of the Bush Administration’s policy to conform to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals unveiled in the year 2000.

Exacerbating the credit crunch have been the historically high oil prices which have caused pain at the gas pumps and a weak dollar which has made imports more expensive. To counter high oil prices, Americans have drastically reduced how many miles they drive and a number of buying habits. In light of a tight job market and job losses in housing and the automotive industries, we are confronted with higher energy costs to heat and cool our homes, increased costs for food, and the inability to refinance mortgages. Basically the economy is now in deflation. When people stop spending, it moves from deflation to stagflation—no matter how cheap an item becomes, people can’t afford to buy. All this without knowing what the real fall out will be from the bailout of Freddie and Fannie.

The situation we are confronted with did not happen in the last few years, but began in 1913 when a group of cunningly deceitful legislators passed the Federal Reserve Act on December 24 at 11:45 p.m., after those who were opposed went home for Christmas. The entire financial system of the U.S. was transferred from Congress to a private corporation that is NOT accountable to Congress. They create and destroy the business cycle by various means: raising and lowering interest rates. The government of the United States is in bondage to a group of individuals who own the Federal Reserve. The reason why the American people cannot forgive themselves the interest on our debt is because we do not owe it to ourselves we owe it to the Federal Reserve! Every single time since then that the Federal Reserve Act was amended, over 195 times, the Federal Reserve gathered more power over various aspects of our economy. However, they are in the final throes of stripping America of any remaining vestiges of sovereignty as has been laid out in the Treasury “Blueprint for a Modernized Financial Regulatory System.”

The Blueprint was written under the watchful eye of one of America’s most successful international bankers, former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, who is now our illustrious Treasury Secretary. Is this not a case of the fox in the chicken coup? Long time investment sage Marty Whitman commented on his actions, “Paulson thinks he is in Russia and is not giving any value to stockholders. It is outrageous that the Treasury Secretary is not giving any consideration to the shareholders.”

The Blueprint calls for key components of our financial system, not currently under Federal Reserve control, to be transferred to them. In order to do this, a number of changes will be necessary which Congress will have to approve. First, it recommends changing the banking charter to include all financial institutions, thus effectively transferring control over “national banks, federal savings associations, and federal [and state] credit union charters.” For your information, Washington Mutual is a savings and loan while Lehman Brothers is and Bear Stearns was an international bank. The Fed is to be given authority over the U.S. Payment and Settlement System thereby controlling the settlement process for securities. It will be given the role of Market Stability Regulator and it will have total control over the market. The Blueprint provides for the entire mortgage system of the U.S. to be federalized and to be under the control of the Mortgage Origination Commission. The Federal Reserve will be part of the Commission. Additionally the Federal Reserve will be given a say in the insurance industry which will be federalized and a new Office of Insurance Oversight will oversee its activities. The Federal Reserve will have a place on the Insurance Oversight commission.

By the time Congress votes on the Blueprint, there will be so many reasons for them to transfer the last vestiges of our financial sovereignty to the Federal Reserve that they will not even have to read the prepared legislation. So far, we have the bailout of Freddie and Fannie by giving Treasury a blank check to act; the Federal Reserve worked all weekend to find a buyer to Lehman, another international bank, their next project might be to rescue Washington Mutual, a savings and loan, and the Fed has been given initial powers to act as the Market Stability Regulator. The only component that is missing is the demise of an insurance company, AIG anyone?

For the record, at the heart of the Blueprint is changing our financial/banking and securities regulatory system from a national system to an international system to bring America into the world governmental system that functions above the nation-states. I have maintained that in order to get Congress to go along, we would have to have a huge problem which would allow Congress to be convinced that they need to act, however, the truth of the matter is they no longer have the power they once had because the majority has been transferred to the Federal Reserve.

History will determine how the final stage was set but I believe it started in 2000 with the Crash of the Nasdaq. Who would have ever thought that a stock would drop 90% in value? About $7T vanished from the balance sheets of investors. But we did not have to worry, as a result of 9/11, the Federal Reserve started to reduce interest rates to 45 year lows to get Americans to support the economy by buying the dream home. We bit the bait. It was the Roaring 20s all over again. At one point in the housing boom, one out of four jobs was created by the housing industry. No one asked if they could afford the debt, they only asked if they could afford the payment: a big difference. They did not ask the right questions about their mortgage because the mortgage industry was not required to disclose to them, when it should have. At one time the mortgage industry was run on honesty and integrity, but that changed too and people have been caught in a terrible snare.

The Bailout of Freddie and Fannie provide us with the latest excitement in the diabolical saga of the raping, robbing, and pillaging of America. Interestingly enough it took place 13 months after the beginning of the credit crunch. Lastly, I have maintained since the beginning of the credit crunch last August that it was planned and managed destruction in order to accomplish the final transfer of America’s financial sovereignty. All of the above only confirms my original suspicion. Sadly, only the strong will survive, only those who did not use their house as a checking account will survive, only those who turn to the Creator of the Universe, the Lord God who created heaven and earth, and His Son, Jesus, will survive in the midst of the Great 2008 Transfer of Wealth.

© 2008 Joan Veon – All Rights Reserved

US military chief makes unannounced visit to Pakistan

US military chief makes unannounced visit to Pakistan

Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, arrived in Pakistan on an unannounced visit Tuesday to discuss operations underway on the Afghanistan frontier with Pakistan’s leaders, the Pentagon said.

“He will meet with Prime Minister (Yousuf Raza) Gilani and General (Ashfaq) Kayani to discuss ongoing operations in the border region with Afghanistan,” the office of the Joint Chiefs told AFP, without elaborating.

The visit comes against a backdrop of tension between the two allies. Islamabad has vowed to defend itself against violations of its air space and incursions by US forces in Afghanistan, after a series of missile strikes blamed on US-led coalition forces left 38 people dead in Pakistan.

The Pentagon on Monday denied that US-led coalition helicopters based in Afghanistan were fired on in Pakistan and forced to turn back.

The incident “did not happen,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, adding that after studying the facts, a statement by a Pakistani security official “didn’t appear to be accurate.”

Earlier there were conflicting reports that shots were fired when US-led coalition helicopters based in Afghanistan neared the border with Pakistan.

The gunfire was said to have broken out late Sunday about 100 meters (yards) from the South Waziristan tribal area, where Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters are believed to be sheltering. There were no casualties.

“The US-led coalition troops in helicopters came close to the border and they tried to sneak into Pakistan territory but shots were fired by Pakistani troops and the coalition troops retreated,” a Pakistani security official said.

But Whitman said in Washington: “I can’t find any mission that correlates to the reports I saw.”

“I can’t find any report about helicopters being fired upon,” he added.

The incident was also denied by Pakistan army’s chief military spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas. “These reports are not correct,” he said.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, meanwhile, arrived Tuesday to the Afghan capital for talks with coalition force commanders and President Hamid Karzai amid increasing concern about the Taliban insurgency.

Recent alleged US incursions into the area that have raised alarm in Pakistan have been welcomed by Afghanistan, which has for years said that more attention should be paid to extremist sanctuaries across the border.

Federal Corruption and Meaningless Elections

Tim Gatto

Just as I expected, these political campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain are totally mindless and mind-numbing. This is unfortunate because our republic is probably teetering on the brink of extinction due to the self-serving, Empire fostering policies of the currant administration. Americans are experiencing a palatable anger toward the two- party duopoly that has followed its corporate leadership into wars for resources and the complete disregard for the Constitution.

It is apparent that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have no regard for the intelligence of their constituents. Since this Presidential race began, we have been sidetracked with barbs and inferences as well as “straw man” arguments. Neither corporate candidate has addressed the real concerns of Americans. The saddest part of this travesty we call an election is that both parties are well aware what arguments they want to put out in front of the people and what issues they would prefer not to talk about.

The term “principles over personalities” has not entered the mind-set of both campaigns. The United States is much like the Titanic, listing to one side and ready to take the long dive to the bottom. We have a 9.5 Trillion Dollar deficit that is being held by foreign countries. The biggest part of our economy, home ownership that makes up approximately half of the assets of our country in mortgages sold to trust funds, retirement plans and government bonds and other investment vehicles is quickly going “bottom up”. This isn’t conjecture, it is fact. A fact that both corporate parties have no answer to. We are facing a depression not seen since the 1930’s and the corporatist parties are still arranging the deck chairs.

We spend 48% of the entire world’s military expenditures’. The truth is that even with this massive amount of military spending; both candidates promise more of the same. The candidates appear on the corporate-controlled media and no media “personalities” ask them how they are going to pay for more military expenditures or why we need military bases in 140 different countries. Obama, the former “anti-war” candidate panders to the Republican base by promising to increase troop strength in the Army by 65,000 soldiers. As a former Army recruiter, I will say that would be a neat trick. Just how does he believe he will entice that many young people to join the Army when they see soldiers spending multiple tours in combat year after year?

The corporate duopoly doesn’t mention the debasement of our Constitution in the last seven years. They turn a blind eye as the Bill of Rights has been reduced to just another historical document that has only a sentimental value. The Republic is financed by a central bank that Americans are becoming increasingly aware of. The Federal Reserve, a privately owned bank sells us our own money at interest while it prints fiat money of no value. These issues are of no interest to the corporate parties, they won’t talk about the abandonment of the Constitution, The Bill of Rights or the failed economy that practices “corporate welfare” as thousands of Americans are thrown from their homes.

Both corporate controlled parties still echo the false rhetoric that Russia is the looming menace. They decry the “invasion” of Georgia when the facts are that the Georgians started the war with American and Israeli support. They are both committed to military superiority as the most important facet of our foreign policy. This is occurring in spite of the fact that our constitutional rights, our homes and our money are becoming worthless.

The time has come to give up the American Empire and concentrate on our own nation instead of trying to control all events that take place in the world. We can no longer afford our super-inflated military in a time when there is no direct threat of invasion from anywhere. The Democrats and Republicans throw issues out like “gay rights” and “a woman’s right to choose”, taxes and healthcare in order to take our minds off of what is really happening in this period of our history.

Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney, Ralph Nader and Chuck Baldwin are talking about these issues but the corporate controlled media won’t let them speak to the people. The time has come for the people of the United States to wake from their slumber and turn their backs on the Democrats and Republicans that have become corrupted by corporate money beyond redemption. There must be a third party candidate that rises above the others. We need a candidate that all of us can rally around. We can no longer play “party politics” with two political parties that no longer care about the interests of the people.

This election is not going to be a turning point regardless of who captures the Presidency. One man or woman or one political party is not going to save this nation from becoming just another failed state. This week-end, there was a Conference for the Planning for Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals. The following was discussed;

* What international and domestic crimes were committed, which facts show crimes under which laws, and what punishments are possible.

* Which high level Executive officials — and Federal judges and legislators as well, if any — are chargeable with crimes.

* Which international tribunals, foreign tribunals and domestic tribunals (if any) can be used and how to begin cases and/or obtain prosecutions before them.

* The possibility of establishing a Chief Prosecutor’s Office such as the one at Nuremburg.

* An examination of cases already brought and their outcomes.

* Creating an umbrella Coordinating Committee with representatives from the increasing number of organizations involved in war crimes cases.

* Creating a Center to keep track of and organize compilations of relevant briefs, articles, books, opinions, and facts, etc., on war crimes and prosecutions of war criminals.
We are at a time in our history when, like other societies that could no longer count on their government to govern by “The Rule of Law” to work outside of the Federal government. Conferences such as the one mentioned should be taking place on an ongoing basis. A “Shadow Government” should be established to monitor the legality of actions by the Federal government under domestic and international law.

The point that I am making is that our government is failing the vast majority of American citizens. We as citizens must hold them accountable for their actions. If that means coalescing into a united front to restore the rule of law in this country and take the government to court for their malfeasance than that is what our obligations should be. We can no longer trust the corporate controlled Democrats and Republicans to obey the Constitution, or International Law.

Labels: Corporate America, Democrats, Economy, Republicans

The Vampire, Struck by Sunlight

posted by Arthur Silber

Simplicity and directness would appear to be advisable, as we are all buried in a torrent of irrelevancies, self-justifications, explanations which explain nothing and serve only to confuse everyone (which is precisely their aim), and an unending stream of lies and half-truths. Perhaps it would be easier to think of it in the following terms, for vampire stories are very popular. The economy of the United States is disintegrating in the same way a vampire does when exposed to sunlight, and for the same reason. Having sucked the blood out of all the living creatures unfortunate enough to be nearby, the vampire becomes intoxicated with what he perceives as his own power. Heedless of the warnings screamed at him from the few sane voices that remain, the vampire frolics and gambols long past the appointed time for his return to the soil of reality, so drunk is he on the glory of his being. The sun has been slowly rising for quite a while. Anyone who is looking can see it. Anyone who knows the relevant facts is fully aware of what will happen when the sun’s rays strike the vampire. But almost no one is looking at the sun, and anyone who states the relevant facts is ignored.

Finally and now inevitably, the sun strikes the vampire. Within minutes, the vampire no longer exists. This is not a surprise. This is what happens — this is the only thing that happens — in these circumstances, given the nature and characteristics of the sun and the vampire.

Here are a few simple principles to keep in mind. Given the propaganda spewed by the ruling class, all of which is eagerly gulped down by most Americans, I should rephrase that: here are a few simple principles to understand, perhaps for the first time.

One: You can’t get something from nothing.

Didn’t your parents teach you this when you were four or five? Did you forget it? Or perhaps you never actually believed it. After all, most people want to believe they will win the big lottery. Fools, that’s what they are. If the description applies to you, put that shoe on, sister or brother.

Mike Whitney

:

The funny thing about capitalism is that you need capital to play. When the bank-vault is full of nothing but worthless mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and overvalued junk bonds; the whole thing goes belly-up fast. That appears to be the case with Lehman Bros, the century-old Wall Street warhorse that has joined the long procession of underwater banking establishments now hurtling towards the cliff. Lehman had a great go of it during the boom times when all it took to make oodles of money was a predictable flood of low interest credit from the Fed and a compliant ratings agency that would stamp every crappy securitized pool of mortgages with a big Triple A before hawking it to some gullible investor in Shanghai or Heidelberg.

Lehman travails are not much different from anyone else in the banking fraternity. The problem is that the entire system is under-capitalized and over-leveraged. When Bear Stearns went down last year, it was levered at a ratio of 26 to 1. When Hedgie Carlyle Capital blew up, it was levered at 32 to 1. And when Fannie and Freddie were finally taken over by the US Treasury; the two behemoths were levered at 80 to 1, which is to say that they had a one dollar capital cushion for every $80 they had loaned out.

A major part (perhaps the major part) of the U.S. economy has treated debts as assets for a long time. The best and brightest made it appear sophisticated and smart: they took debts and securitized them, chopped them up, repackaged them, recombined them, splintered them some more, repackaged and sold those, and on and on it went. This process doesn’t turn nothing into something: it spreads the nothing among more and more institutions and makes the entire system increasingly vulnerable. Everyone pretends that the nothing is backed by something, but it isn’t. To be more precise, as in the case of Fannie and Freddie, for example, there is $1 of something for every $80 of nothing. In fact, there’s much more nothing, when you add in the repackaging, recombining, splintering, selling and reselling. That’s a lot of nothing, and almost no something.

This is how con games work. Your parents probably explained this to you, many years ago. You forgot, or you didn’t believe it. Believe it now.

Two: You, the “ordinary” American, are the one who finally pays for all of this. You are the ultimate sucker.

My only criticism of Whitney’s latest article is that he buries the most critical sentence in the middle of a longer explanation:

Keep in mind, the biggest source of American power is its access to cheap capital via the US taxpayer.

Read that sentence again. Once more. Again. One more time.

You pay for all the depredations of empire: for the endless criminal wars of aggression abroad, and for the feast of the vampires here at home. It’s your blood that kept them going all this time — and it’s your blood that will still keep them going. The ruling class rigged the game a century ago. Short of leaving the country or dropping out of the system altogether, you can’t go somewhere else. There isn’t anywhere else to go. The system is designed by and for the benefit of the ruling class, and for no one else.

Now look at that sentence in the context of the longer passage:

When the net foreign purchases of US financial assets begin to slow; the game is over. The Fed will be forced to raise interest rates to attract foreign capital which will put downward pressure on the economy and accelerate the housing crash. Paulson’s decision to provide unlimited capital to Fannie and Freddie, will stack more and more debt atop the faltering dollar and US Treasuries. It is the equivalent of lashing the greenback to an anvil and tossing it overboard. Paulson’s attempts to stave off a systemic banking crisis ensures that the federal government will undergo an unprecedented funding crisis sometime in the near future. There will be higher taxes for the battered middle class and higher interest rates for businesses and consumers. This will trigger a protracted economic slowdown and weaker growth. Credit will get tighter, banks will default, unemployment will soar and GDP will shrivel. A negative feedback loop will develop from the faltering financial system to the real economy; a vicious circle ending in massive layoffs, weakening demand, falling stock prices, and withering consumer confidence. Welcome to Soup kitchen USA.

Presently, Paulson and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner are pressing Wall Street banking elites to pony-up enough money to buy up Lehman’s devalued real estate assets. The Fed’s proposal is similar to Greenspan’s rescue of Long-Term Management LP (LTCM) which roiled financial markets in the late 1990s. Paulson has signaled that there be NO government bailout like Bear Stearns when the Fed bought up $29 billion in mortgage-related assets. The Fed is tapped out, having already committed half of its balance sheet — nearly $500 billion — in repos through its “auction facilities” which have recently skyrocketed to record highs of $19 billion per week for the last 3 weeks. The crisis is deepening by the day. Similarly, the Treasury has hitched its wagon to Fannie and Freddie which expands the National Debt by another $5.2 trillion and seriously undermines the “full faith and credit” of the US in the process. Keep in mind, the biggest source of American power is its access to cheap capital via the US taxpayer. Paulson has now put that source of revenue at risk by nationalizing the housing industry and burdening the taxpayer with (potentially) astronomical future obligations, even though he knows full-well that the market could drop another 15 to 20 per cent before the end of 2010. Paulson’s recklessness has doomed the country to years of struggle

You’ve been conned, and the con is killing you and everyone you know. Whatcha gonna do about it? Not a damned thing, that’s what.

Three: As with every other crisis, the ruling class, which created the crisis in the first place, will tell us how to “solve” it.

As I wrote in, “Psst — While You Were Gibbering, the Ruling Class Rigged the Game and Won Everything“:

This election campaign will be especially awful for anyone still capable of the most minimal kind of rigorous thought, in significant part because we have the triple- or quadruple-twist of the Obama lies on top of all the lies that are regularly trotted out every four years (and on a lesser scale, every two). We are told about how “important” it is that we vote — although for many of us (including me, since I live in California), our votes are altogether meaningless on the presidential level, to say nothing of newer voting methods, which make one wonder if all of this is nothing but a charade for idiots — and we are told of the glories of “participatory democracy” and how splendiferous it is to hear “the people’s voice.”

These are the idiotically empty cliches and slogans of our civic religion, which serve to drug “the people” into apathy, into granting the ruling class still more power, into taking part in these vacuous exercises in “democracy,” and into colluding in a massive coverup of the truth of what has transpired over more than a century and is now set in stone: this is government of the ruling class, by the ruling class, and for the ruling class. Barring severe economic collapse (more than possible), widespread global war (also more than possible), repeated natural catastrophes (similarly more than possible), it shall not perish from the earth — until it implodes as the result of its own rot and corruption, as have all similar systems in the past. Assuming disasters on a massive scale don’t occur, it’s probably here for your lifetime at least.

…

This amalgamation of major business interests with state power, this system of oligopoly and governance of, by and for the ruling class, has metastasized beyond imagining since the Progressive era. It has expanded in every direction and subsumed virtually every industry and business in America, large and small. It is this system of “political capitalism” that dictates domestic and foreign policy, including a foreign policy of endless war, preparation for war, and various forms of “cleaning up” after war. You the ordinary citizen, you “the people,” figure nowhere in this — except to provide the necessary labor and, when required, your blood and your life.

…

[T]his “transformation of the American political narrative” was essentially completed during and immediately following the Progressive era, and then enshrined by the New Deal and World War II. We were fucked a very long time ago. What’s tragic is that it is only now that a few more people are beginning to notice — and even now, it is still only a very few additional people. These are truths that no politician will tell you, and that almost no commentators or bloggers will mention. Lies are what sustain you, lies are what you live on, lies are what you demand, and lies are what you’ll get and all you’ll get. If you keep this up, the lies without end will kill you, and a lot of other people as well.

Those people who have followed the foreign policy catastrophes of recent years are repeatedly struck by this phenomenon: all the “experts” who are supposedly so knowledgeable in this area — that is, all the “experts” who led us into the catastrophes and who were grievously, bloodily, murderously wrong about every significant matter — remain entrenched in the foreign policy establishment. Moreover, they are precisely the people to whom everyone turns for the “solution” to the disasters that engulf us, both now and the disasters likely to come. This is what it means to have a ruling class. As I have said, the ruling class rules. The ruling class exercises a lethal monopoly on the terms of public debate, just as it exercises a lethal monopoly on the uses of state power.

What you have seen over the last six months and more, and what you will see in the coming months and years, is the same phenomenon in the realm of economic policy. All of the solons who led us into this abyss of mounting debt, worthless securities, failing financial institutions, economic contraction and collapse, rising taxation, and all the rest, will now instruct us as to how we should “solve” the crisis that they have created. The crisis may be ameliorated to a degree, and the worst of the consequences may be postponed for a while. But whatever “solutions” are implemented, whatever reorganization and reregulation is imposed, it will all be done in accordance with the ruling class’s desires and goals. It will all be to protect their own wealth and power to whatever extent is possible, and to expand their wealth and power still more, if that remains at all feasible. And it probably will be feasible: your taxes can increase. They can increase a lot. You still have some blood that can be drained. And/or, if Obama is elected, you can look for his adoration of “voluntary” service to switch seamlessly to mandatory service very quickly, especially if the crisis deepens sufficiently. Almost no one will complain. Almost no one will remember the bloody history of those past regimes, of both left and right, that relied on mandatory national service.

The ruling class is the state. The state exists to serve the interests of the ruling class, and only the interests of the ruling class. They may promise you greater unemployment benefits, better health care, and a host of other government benefits — all benefits also paid for by you, please note (the ruling class does have a sense of humor, after all; vampires are often crudely funny creatures) — and those promises will cause most Americans to fall for the con still one more time.

Whatcha gonna do? Not a goddamned thing. Vote for McCain! Vote for Obama! It doesn’t matter. The ruling class wins either way. The ruling class always wins. That’s how the system was designed, and that’s how it works. For the ruling class, it works very admirably.

Whatcha gonna do?

Laugh. Laugh a lot.

Run On The Bank? Americans Could Lose Their Deposits

Run On The Bank? Americans Could Lose

Their Deposits

Paul Joseph Watson

You know things are bad when Yahoo.com, the most trafficked website in the world and usually a purveyor of mindless celebrity gossip, cooking tips and dating advice, features a top story about how Americans could lose their bank deposits following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

For the Internet giant to prominently report that there is already a “slow motion run on banks” is indeed a landmark event, and precludes even the most ignorant American from claiming they were not forewarned about the unfolding economic catastrophe.

The article points out that although the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. guarantees individual accounts up to $100,000, the FDIC fund only has about $50 billion to “insure” about $1 trillion in assets across the nation’s financial institutions.

When Americans realize the fact that banks are “going to run out of money”, the article nonchalantly states, a run on the banks will accelerate.

The warning comes from top economist Nouriel Roubini, of NYU’s Stern School and RGE Monitor, who correctly predicted the severity of the credit crunch. Roubini says there is already a “slow-motion run on retail banks” occurring nationwide.

He advises that people with accounts over $100,000 in value should at least spread them out among different firms.

The use of such inflammatory language like a “run on the bank,” especially from the most visited website on the entire planet, is phenomenal and other news websites as well as financial advisors have been cautious to use such terms in an effort to prevent panic.

For example, we read in today’s Seattle Post Intelligencer that, “Sara Hasan, an analyst with Seattle’s McAdams Wright Ragen Inc., said she didn’t even want to use the word “run” — as in “run on a bank” — during an interview, because “these are very touchy times.”

Other advisors are more up front with their warnings.

“First off, go ahead and make a run on your banks. If you have money with a brokerage firm or bank that is in trouble, get your money the heck out of there!” writes Joe Ponzio.

“In reality, I don’t want to cause a run on the banks; but, I won’t prevent one by saying that everything is fine and that you should wait until it is too late. My recommendation: Move your important savings and checking accounts to banks that have a higher likelihood of weathering the storm,” he adds.

The Palestinians of Sabra-Shatila: 26 years after the Massacre – Part One

Franklin Lamb

“Our Resistance continues, the Sacred Cause of all people of good will endures, and the Dream of our full Return shall never die!” – 14 year old Fairouz Husseini, Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Beirut, Lebanon

On September 16, 2008, at precisely 10:30 am, Fairouz Husseini and a gathering of survivors, relatives and friends of the Sabra-Shatila massacre victims, some foreign delegations, students, NGO representatives, a few government officials, dignitaries, and members of the Camp community will gather outside the Kuwaiti Embassy roundabout, on the edge of Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Beirut, Lebanon.

Their assembly point will be less than 100 yards from where on September 16, 1982, Ariel Sharon, Gen. Raphael Eitan, Gen. Amos Yalon and their henchmen, Lebanese Phalange Intelligence operatives Elie Hobeika and Fadi Frem, had encouraged, organized, monitored, supplied, assisted directed and finally, when the World learned of the carnage, after 43 hours of carnage, initially denied knowing anything about it.

Hobeika, who former US Ambassador Robert Dillon, at his 8th floor desk at the Beirut Embassy when it was bombed on April 18, 1983, refers to as “a pathological killer” was providing a running commentary to his friends at his East Beirut Phalange Headquarters from atop the the Kuwaiti Embassy. His Israeli sponsors were also present during one of the most barbaric massacres in history, gawking down into the Camp with binoculars and also perched atop the seven storied former Kuwaiti Embassy, as they all monitored the killing, between sunset on Thursday 16 through midday on Saturday the 18th.

“I was in Austria at the time. I first heard about it as you did from the news bulletins”, Hobeika claimed for years during Media interviews, until he contemplated turning ‘States evidence’ against Sharon in the Belgium case filed on June 18, 200l. Belgium scrapped the case after US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, told Belgium:

“It’s your goddamned Sharon Trial or NATO Headquarters, you choose!”

Once the word was out in Beirut bout that Hobeika was considering turning on Sharon, he was assassinated en route to his lawyers office on January 24, 2002, by a method very similar to that used against Hezbollah military commander Hajj Radwan (Imad Mughienh) last February (Interestingly, Forensic evidence of the Mughneih assassination, including his shoes, signature green cap, clothes and personal affects found in his pockets when he was killed, and now on display by Hezbollah in Nabetiyeh, near Sidon, Lebanon, establish that the bomb used to kill him was filled with unique BB sized pellets that sprayed throughout his body. The same with Hobeika.)

As the mid September 1982 chopping of camp residents with axes, disemboweling with knives, shootings with Israeli supplied silencers, hangings, burnings, live burials, and rapes entered its second day, the Beirut media started to hear ‘rumors’. Among the first heard from frantic women was that the Israeli forces were sealing the camps. It was learned three days later that this action was coordinated with the Phalange militia and the Israeli created army in South Lebanon named the “South Lebanon Army” (SLA), under the Command of Saad Haddad, and kept hundreds of women and children from fleeing for their lives. By the second morning (Saturday September 18), following several media and diplomatic inquiries, panic seized the Israeli command post and the organizers tried to cover up their project and flee the area.

The World was horrified at the spreading images and even US Envoy Richard Draper, who like many American officials in the current period of history grovel to the Israel lobby, until after leaving office when he became more ‘nuanced’, blamed Israel. “You sons of bitches! You were in control and you gave us your word” Draper roared to Sharon on Sunday September 19, 1982 according to Israeli military affairs writers, Ze’ef Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari.

It was journalist David Lamb who first wrote about the ‘walls of death’:

“Entire families were slain. Groups consisting of 10-20 people were lined up against wall and sprayed with bullets. Mothers died while clutching their babies. All men appeared to be shot in the back. Five youths of fighting age were tied to a pickup truck and dragged through the street before being shot” (LA Times, Sept. 20, 1982).

“False accusations like these” Israeli PM Menachem Begin, lectured reporters called into his office, “constitute a blood libel against every Jew, everywhere”, as he tried to dampen the international ground swell of accusations. Begin then added, “Goyim kill Goyim and they want to hang the Jews. We are the real victims”.

Fairouz, who did not know what either ‘blood libel’ or ‘Goyim’ meant, until this observer explained, will join the others assembled, on the short Memorial Walk to Martyr’s Square off Rue Sabra inside the 1982 killing field to pay her respects to the perished and receive a student laptop in a US citizen initiated project to raise the level of education in Palestinian classrooms.

According to one of the American organizers of the Sabra-Shatila Laptop Initiative which plans to distribute more than 200,000 laptops in Lebanon’s Palestinian Camps, to be used in a special Internet based teaching paradigm developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

“While it is true that this time the American Embassy rejected our request to sponsor even one laptop, citing budget shortfalls, hundreds will be distributed during the launching event at Sabra-Shatila on September 16th. Perhaps American taxpayers will encourage their government to assist later. Imagine the enormous educational benefit to disadvantaged Lebanese and Palestinian children here if the US government provided just one student laptop to Lebanon in 2008 for every cluster bomb dropped 2006”.

Fairouz, a completely sweet and charming child, whose grandparents were forced from their homes and into Refugee Camps in Lebanon in April of 1948, will join international delegates including nearly 50 from Italy alone, and American nurses who were witnesses to the barbarity and who worked in Camp hospitals at the time, and help release more than 1000 helium filled balloons, each meant to represent one person who was murdered or who disappeared during the carnage.

“I really hope the wind blows all the balloons into Palestine so maybe their souls can rest in Peace in their real homeland”, Fairouz says, while explaining how just three months ago, when new 30 inch diameter concrete sewage lines were laid six feet deep along Rue Sabra, the ‘main street’ ( or swamp, depending on the weather) of Shatila Camp, the workers uncovered yet more decomposed bodies and skeletons that no one but the killers, who nearly 20 years ago were given amnesty, knew were there.

” We think there are very likely still bodies all over this section of the camp”, Ahmad, the sewer project crew chief explains, as he gestures toward the entrance to the camp diagonal from AKKA hospital. “The killers were directed first into this area from across Kuwaiti Embassy road, the Bir Hasan neighborhood, and most of the first hours of killing took place in this area and then they fanned out from the main road here and from alleys along the Horst Tabet area, toward the East, West and North in the direction of Gaza Hospital and Shatila Mosque”.

Since being forced from their homes in Palestine starting in 1947-48, more than 120,000 Palestinians arrived in Lebanon and as of 1951, 106,800 had registered with the newly created International Institution, the UN Relief and Words Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Many Palestinians did not register with UNWRA because they supposed their emigration to be temporary or, being a proud people; they were too embarrassed to be seen accepting welfare.

Palestinians forced into Lebanon: 1948-1969

Following initial post-Nakba humanitarian aid and solidarity extended by the Lebanese people, the Refugees soon became thought of as a burden, and at 94% Sunni, a threat to Lebanon’s delicately balanced National Pact. Starting in 1951, severe security restrictions were imposed to keep the Palestinians inside the camps including not being able to build housing, work or settle into new areas.

A pointed finger and the taunting words, “Those are refugees!” were images burned into the memories of the new arrivals and they remain, among many, to this day. Lebanese hatred toward the Palestinians increased and had it not been for the Gulf states during the 1950’s and 1960’s absorbing into their economies and workforce thousands of Palestinians who remitted cash to the Camps, many of the Palestinian families in Lebanon may not have survived.

Due to increased Israeli shelling and internal pressure 4 of the original 16 camps were destroyed including Nabatiyeh, Jisr al-basha, and Tel al Za’tar, with Dbayyeh Camp being partially destroyed. Today, some Palestinians inside Shatila explain that their families moved from Nabatiyeh to Tal al Za’tar to Shatila or Damour and finally from Damour to Shatila.

Pressure on the Refugees increased monthly with detentions without trial, and preventing movements between camps, even for family weddings or funerals, was becoming the norm in this period. Torture, collective punishments, random beatings on spurious grounds by the notorious Deuxieme Bureau, increased.

From Welcoming to wanting them out

The Palestinian Refugee File was transferred from humanitarian agencies to the Ministry of the Interior on March 30, 1959 and in conjunction with Presidential decree, No. 927, on the same date, the Lebanese government targeted Palestinians with military cadres who brutally enforced the sprit and the letter of the scheme which was aimed at surveillance, control of refugees’ movements, political association, and complete neglect of the Refugees socio-economic needs.

One Shatila Massacre survivor summarized for this observer the period of the 1950’s and 1960’s:

“The Deuxieme Bureau came more than once and arrested my father, beat him in front of our eyes and took him away. To say the truth, we Palestinian Refugees suffered a lot…until the Revolution came”.

1970-1982 Lebanon: ‘A garden without a fence for Palestinian refugees’

The second period, from 1970-1982 saw the rise of Palestinian resistance organizations and the Cairo Agreement which gave the Palestinians some dignity until the latter Treaty was abrogated by the Lebanese Parliament in 1989.

The growth of the Palestine Liberation Organization following Black September in 1970 provided a relative economic boon and increased security for the Refugees in Lebanon. Given the power of the PLO, the social, health, education, housing (for the first time Refugees could ‘legally’ build more than one level to their homes), and the employment situation increased dramatically.

Camp boom towns

A general prosperity began in Shatila and the other camps which included asphalting of Rue Sabra, sewer lines added in 1975 and a doubling the number of schools. Norway and Denmark, as well as other countries and Palestinian popular committees such as women’s and labor unions, encouraged the growth of cottage industries and ‘solidarity’ projects.

Also alleviating pressure were some wealthy ‘Gulf Palestinians’ who invested in the Camps and Palestinians working abroad who remitted cash to their families. With the PLO covering their backs, Palestinians were able to realize many more civil rights. 1970-1982 was arguably the ‘best’ period for many Refugees during their 60 years in Lebanon.

1982-2008 Still controversial 26 years later, the fateful PLO decision to depart Lebanon in late August 1982

Israel’s occupation of nearly half of Lebanon, some 801 villages, the siege of Beirut, the departure of the PLO fighters and the collapse of PLO funded institutions left the Palestinians completely unprotected and marked the beginning of their most precipitous decline since their arrival in Lebanon.

This observer witnessed on August 8, 1982 one intense exchange on the subject of whether the PLO should leave, between the late Janet Lee Stevens, an American journalist, researcher, and Burj al Barjneh Camp volunteer, and Yassir Arafat (Abu Ammar). The confrontation took place in one of Arafat’s bunkers in the Fakahani District near Arab University. It was around 8:30 am on what later became known as Black Thursday, that Janet insisted on going to see ‘the old man’ about something that had been bothering her for days.

As Makmoud Labidi, in 1982 the Press Relations Director for the PLO,( Makmoud, later broke with Arafat partly over the departure which he strongly opposed and 15 years later he and Arafat finally reconciled) ushered us down three rubble strewn floors below street level, no one knew that the unusually heavy shelling that morning would turn into 14 hours of Israeli frenzy bombing and shelling becoming known as ‘Black Thursday’ and killing 250 and quite nearly Janet herself. Following the meeting, Janet walked thru the bombing south to ‘her people’ in ‘the Burj’ while her companion, sought shelter. “You will just slow me down, Janet said, “Meet me at AUB at 3 o’clock! “,she ordered.”

Janet had slept little the night before, was not happy and got directly to the point with the PLO leader. She demanded to know the truth about the rumors that the PLO was going to ‘abandon the camp residents to the Israelis and cut and run’.

Before Arafat recovered from his shock of Janet’s strong language, and wrapped Janet in his arms, she intoned the reasons leaving Beirut would be a huge mistake. “You must launch a ‘Stalingrad defense’; the international public will support it, Sharon is just using psychological warfare with Israeli threats to burn Beirut, yes the people have suffered in West Beirut, but we can take more, and the Soviets will not allow this to continue and will intervene, and you cannot believe the Reagan Administration Abu Ammar! Women and children are terrified of what might happen if their husbands and brothers leave them alone!! And you know the fayadeen don’t want to leave. You know that! They are not afraid of the Israelis and they want to fight them and drive them away from Beirut!”

Tears flowed down Janet’s face and welled up in Arafat’s eyes as well as Labadi’s, this observers and those of Arafat’s bodyguards including, quite possibly, Imad Mughneyeh. Imad was one of Arafat’s most trusted and skilled members of Force 17, who had joined Fateh eight years earlier at age 16 and was to leave Fatah the following year switching to Lebanon’s nascent Islamic Resistance.

Some have argued that had the PLO not left Beirut, some of their best people would not have left the PLO. Would Hezbollah have even been organized had it not been for the vacuum created by Arafat’s decision to depart?

As the very distraught Janet Stevens beat Arafat’s shoulder with her clinched fist, in front of his wide-eyed Kalashnikov toting security and cried, Abu Ammar patted her long brown hair and tried to console her: “Miss Janet, please Miss Janet” the fatherly military commander softly whispered. “Our Lebanese hosts have sacrificed enough for us. We are no longer welcomed here and we must leave.”

Regrets?

Arafat knew better, he later admitted to this observer, than to tell Janet Stevens that the Camp residents would be protected by American guarantees, a written copy of which he carried in his shirt pocket and an argument he used on others to reassure the Popular Committees in the Camps and well as some of his colleagues. “Janet would have beaten me more”, Arafat later admitted, as he smiled, “but perhaps she was right”.

Another doubter of the wisdom of the catastrophic evacuation that left Shatila and the other Camps unprotected, was the PLO’s number two, Khalil al- Wazir, (Abu Jihad), Arafat’s most trusted Deputy.

The model of discretion, Abu Jihad remained tight lipped before the International media during the period under review but he spoke frankly and with sadness with fighters who came to ask, within hours of sailing, what he thought they should do, for many were undecided. Janet, like many, urged them to stay. Abu Jihad told them:

“I can’t tell anyone to stay or leave…Our people are here, our children, in Shatila, in our camps, our hospitals and our schools; but I say to the one who stays that the Lebanese state isn’t about to come and build him a house and offer him a salary. The state may imprison him, just like all the Arab regimes, we have to face that fact.”

Then Abu Jihad became angry, an emotion he did not often exhibit, “For myself, I don’t want to leave you alone, I’d like to stay with you, but this is what’s happened, and those are our circumstances” (Sabra Shatila 1982, Bayan Al Hout, Pluto Press 2004).

The Camp residents’ protection gone, the Massacre followed within days and the steep slope into abject poverty and despair for today’s Palestinians resulted.

Franklin Lamb can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com. The SabraShatila website is www.sabrashatila.org. He is finishing a book on Hezbollah.

Part II – 26 years after the Sabra-Shatila massacre and the founding of Hezbollah: Can the Party of God deliver the Palestinians from exile?