The Incredible, Shrinking Presidency of Barack Obama

According to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, Barack Obama now ranks among the least popular presidents in the last century. In fact, his approval rating is lower than Bush’s was in his fifth year in office. Obama’s overall approval rating stands at a dismal 43 percent, with a full 55 percent of the public “disapproving of the way he is handling the economy”. The same percentage  of people “disapprove of the way he is handling his job as president”.  Thus, on the two main issues, leadership and the economy, Obama gets failing grades.

An even higher percentage of people are upset at the way the president is implementing his signature health care system dubbed “Obamacare”.  When asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Obama is handling “implementation of the new health care law?” A full 62% said they disapprove, although I suspect that the anger has less to do with the plan’s “implementation” than it does with the fact that Obamacare is widely seen as a profit-delivery system for the voracious insurance industry.  Notwithstanding the administration’s impressive public relations campaign, a clear majority of people have seen through Obama’s health care ruse and given the program a big thumb’s down.

Of course, Obamacare is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The list of policy disasters that preceded this latest fiasco is nearly endless,  including everything from blanket pardons for the Wall Street big-wigs who took down the global financial system, to re-upping the Bush tax cuts, to appointing a commission of deficit hawks to slash Social Security and Medicare (Bowles-Simpson), to breaking his word on Gitmo, to reneging on his promise to pass Card Check, to expanding to wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, to droning 4-times as many civilians as the homicidal maniac he replaced as president in 2008.

Obama’s treatment of undocumented immigrants has been particularly shocking although the details have been kept out of the media, presumably because the news giants don’t want to expose the Dear Leader as a heartless scoundrel who has no problem separating mothers from their children, locking them up in privately-owned concentration camps and booting them out of the country with nothing more than the shirt on their back.  Check out this blurb which sums up Obama’s “progressive” immigration policy in one paragraph:

“Obama is on track to deport 3 million immigrants without papers by the end of his second term, more than any other president. George W. Bush deported about 2 million over two terms. Obama will likely hit that mark this month….. The average daily count of immigrants in detention now is about 33,000. In 2001, it was 19,000. In 1994, it was 5,000, according to the Detention Watch Network. Almost all of the detainees and deportees are Latino. True, the population of illegal immigrants has also doubled in that time to more than 11 million. But the detainee and deportee counts have escalated more than twice as fast.

“He could go down as the worst president in history toward immigrants,” said Arturo Carmona, executive director of the liberal activist group Presente.org.

Hooray for the Deporter in Chief! You’re Numero Uno, buddy. You even beat Bush! Is it any wonder why the man’s ratings are in freefall?

All told, Obama has been bad for the economy, bad for civil liberties, bad for minorities,  bad for foreign wars, and bad for health care. He has, however, been a very effective lackey-sock puppet for Wall Street, Big Pharma, the oil magnates, and the other 1% -vermin Kleptocrats who run the country and who will undoubtedly attend his $100,000-per-plate speaking engagements when he finally retires in comfort to some gated community where he’ll work on his memoirs and cash in on his 8 years of faithful service to the racketeer class.

But, let’s face it; no one really gives a rip about “drone attacks in Waziristan” or “hunger strikes in Gitmo”. What they care about is keeping their jobs, paying off their student loans, putting the food on the table or avoiding the fate of next-door-neighbor, Andy, who got his pink slip two months ago and now finds himself living in a cardboard box by the river. That’s what the average working stiff worries about; just scraping by enough to stay out of the homeless shelter.  But it’s getting harder all the time, mainly because everything’s gotten worse under Obama.  It’s crazy. It’s like the whole middle class is being dismantled in a 10-year period. Wages are flat,  jobs are scarce, incomes are dropping like a stone, and everyone’s broke. (Everyone I know, at least.)  Did you know that 76% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Check it out:

“Roughly three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings, according to a survey released by Bankrate.com Monday.

Fewer than one in four Americans have enough money in their savings account to cover at least six months of expenses, enough to help cushion the blow of a job loss, medical emergency or some other unexpected event, according to the survey of 1,000 adults.

Meanwhile, 50% of those surveyed have less than a three-month cushion and 27% had no savings at all….

Last week, online lender CashNetUSA said 22% of the 1,000 people it recently surveyed had less than $100 in savings to cover an emergency, while 46% had less than $800. After paying debts and taking care of housing, car and child care-related expenses, the respondents said there just isn’t enough money left over for saving more.”

Savings?!?

Are you kidding me? What’s that? Who do you know that’s able to save money in this economy? Maybe rich uncle Johnny whose lived on canned sardines and Akmak for the last 50 years, but nobody else can live like that. Subtract the rent, the groceries, the doctor bills etc, and there’s barely enough leftover to fill the tank to get to work on Monday. Saving just isn’t an option, not in the Obamaworld, that is.

Now check this out from Business Insider:

“Thousands of Americans aged 55 and older are going back to school and reinventing themselves to get an edge in a difficult labor market, hoping to rebuild retirement nest eggs that were almost destroyed by the recession….

According to the Federal Reserve, household financial assets, which exclude homes, dropped from a peak of $57 trillion in the third quarter of 2007 to just over $49 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, the latest period for which data is available.

A survey to be released this summer by the Public Policy Institute of AARP, an advocacy group for older Americans, found a quarter of Americans 50 years and older used up all their savings during the 2007-09 recession. About 43 percent of the 5,000 respondents who took part in the survey said their savings had not recovered.” (“Unemployed Baby Boomers Are Getting Hired By Going Back To School”, Business Insider)

Sure they’re going back to work. What do you expect them to do? They’re broke! They got wiped out in Wall Street’s mortgage laundering scam and they’re still behind the eightball five years later. And what’s left of the money they set aside for retirement is yielding a big zilch thanks to the Fed’s zero rate policy which is forcing people back into another decade of penal servitude at minimum wage. That’s why you see so many hunched over graybeards in red vests with “Happy to Serve You” splattered on their chests lugging shopping bags out to the cars for old ladies. Because they’re broke and out of options. Everyone knows someone like this unless, of course, they’re one of the fortunate few who make up the Nobel 1%; aka–The Job Cremators. Then they don’t have to fret about that sort of thing.

Here’s another gem you might not have seen in USA Today a few months back:

“Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend….

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63% of whites called the economy “poor.”

“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it doesn’t generate much income….

Nationwide, the count of America’s poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15% of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white…

“Poverty is no longer an issue of ‘them’, it’s an issue of ‘us’,” says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. “Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need.”  (“4 in 5 in USA face near-poverty, no work”, USA Today)

Does Obama have any idea of the damage he’s doing with his Rich-First policies? The country is in a terrible state and yet Obama continues to approve bills that throw millions of people off unemployment benefits, sharply cut government spending, or undermine vital safetynet programs that keep the sick and the elderly from dying on the streets.  It’s like he’s trying to reduce 300 million Americans to grinding third world  poverty in his short eight-year term. Is that the goal?

Did you know that–according to Gallup–20.0% of all Americans did not have enough money to buy food that they or their families needed at some point over the past year? Or that –according to a Feeding America hunger study–more than 37 million people are now using food pantries and soup kitchens? Or that one out of six Americans is now living in poverty which is the highest level since the 1960s? Or that the gap between the rich and poor is greater than any in history?

Everything has gotten worse under Obama. Everything. And, not once, in his five years as president, has this gifted and charismatic leader ever lifted a finger to help the millions of people who supported him, who believed in him, and who voted him into office.

These latest poll results indicate that many of those same people are beginning to wake up and see what Obama is really all about.

Options For Syria

Addressing the annual Jamestown Foundation conference of terror experts on December 12, former CIA chief Michael Hayden outlined three possible outcomes of the ongoing conflict in Syria. The first would be further escalation of violence between ever more extreme Sunni and Shiite factions. The second possible outcome—which Hayden described as the most likely but also the most destabilizing for the region—is the dissolution of Syria and the end of a single state within the borders defined by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. “Option three is Assad wins,” Hayden went on, “and I must tell you at the moment, as ugly as it sounds, I’m kind of trending toward option three as the best out of three very, very ugly possible outcomes.”

The first option is not really an “outcome,” but a discrete stage in the conflict which is practically over: Sunni jihadists have already defeated the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the dwindling fighting force of the U.S.-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC). Two weeks ago General Salim Idris, the FSA commander, even suggested that he might join forces with the government army in fighting Al Qaeda. On December 6 fighters belonging to the Islamic Front—a recently founded, Saudi-backed alliance of seven jihadist groups—captured the SMC bases and warehouses near the Turkish border, where vehicles and other U.S.-supplied “nonlethal” equipment were kept. They also forced Gen. Idris too flee Syria for Turkey. He later tried to put a brave face on the debacle, but the FSA is finished as a viable player.

The Administration initially reacted by suspending the $260 million rebel aid program, but there have been signs in recent days that the White House may give up on the “moderates” altogether and divert future supplies to hard-core Islamist groups, provided they are not affiliated to al-Qaeda. “It’s a pivotal point,” a senior U.S. official told the CNN. “We need to figure out, what extremists do we deal with?”

Dealing with Islamic extremists is never a good idea, but the White House will likely resolve it by calling the Islamic Front “moderate.” As it happens, the Islamic Front’s charter, released on November 26, calls for the establishment of an Islamic state and the imposition of Sharia. It also endorses jihad and welcomes the Muhajireen (foreign fighters) as “brothers.” One of the seven groups within the Islamic Front, the Ahrar al Sham, routinely conducts joint raids with al-Qaeda’s two Syrian branches, the Al Nusrah Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). The assault on the Christian town of Malula last September was one such joint operation.

Michael Hayden should be commended for stating so bluntly what we have repeatedly argued since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, that Bashar al-Assad’s victory would be the least bad outcome for Western interests in the region. This view is gaining credence. “We need to start talking to the Assad regime again” about counterterrorism and other issues of shared concern, Ryan Crocker, a respected veteran diplomat, told the New York Times on December 3. “It will have to be done very, very quietly. But bad as Assad is, he is not as bad as the jihadis who would take over in his absence.” As The Independent reported on the same day, Western security agencies now believe that returning jihad-veterans pose the most serious threat of terrorism in Europe and the United States.

Bashar’s army and police have performed surprisingly well for almost three years now. Over the past year they have been able to consolidate their positions in about one-half of the country they still control, but eradicating the rebellion altogether will prove impossible for as long as weapons and money are provided by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and jihadist volunteers keep arriving from all over the Sunni Muslim world. The current stalemate may create conditions for Syria’s eventual disintegration along both religious and ethnic lines.

The fragmentation of Syria and its end as a single state within the borders defined by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement may not be as destabilizing as General Hayden suggests. There is nothing sacrosanct about the lines of partition of the Ottoman Empire into Anglo-French spheres of influence, drawn rather arbitrarily by a British civil servant and a French diplomat almost a century ago. Syria’s effective partition along ethno-religious lines was introduced in 1922, during the French Mandate.

It is arguable that the breakup has already happened, and that Syria no longer exists as a single political entity. The government enjoys majority support along a wide belt extending from the heavily Druze southern border with Jordan and the Israeli-held Golan Heights, through Damascus and Homs, and up to the disputed city of Aleppo in the northwest. This belt—about 40 percent of Syria’s territory, with one-half of its people—also includes Syria’s strategically important Mediterranean coastline, which is inhabited mainly by Bashar’s fellow Alawites and Christians. The rebels are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims—which is not to say that all Syrian Sunnis support the rebels—and they control extensive tracts in the north and center of the country, and along the valley of the Euphrates to the sparsely populated Iraqi border in the east. The front lines are fluid, but it is a safe guess that the rebels dominate in one-half of Syria, with perhaps 40 percent of the population. Finally, Syria’s two million Kurds, ten percent of its people, have set up a de facto state in the northeast of the country (ca. 10% of Syria’s territory), with its own armed forces, police, courts, license plates, and Kurdish-language schools. They say that they would only seek autonomy within a future federalized Syria, but at the same time they reject any solution that would fall short of that goal.

Syria’s effective breakup would be followed by population exchanges, which is preferable to the chaotic ethno-religious cleansing of which Syria’s Christians have been the main victims. It is likely that, in addition to Alawites, Christians, Shia and Druze, many educated, urban Sunnis would also opt for the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state of southern and coastal Syria, governed by secularists, in preference to the putative Islamic Caliphate in the north and along east, with rival factions vying for power. It is also possible that outside forces—Turkey in particular—will insist on the maintenance of a single-state façade. It is not possible for Syria to be recreated as a centralized, secularist-governed state, however, and it is equally impossible for the jihadists to terrorize two-thirds of Syria’s 23 million people into submission.

Bibi And Bandar Badger Obama: Better Six Billion Than Six Trillion

Damascus – The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states—Bahrain, , , , , and the —along with certain Arab League countries, plus Turkey and Israel, have this past week reportedly committed themselves to raising nearly $6 billion to “beef up” the just-hatched Islamic Front (IF) in Syria. These “best friends of America” want the Obama administration to sign onto a scheme to oust the Syrian government by funding, arming, training, facilitating and generally choreographing the movement of fighters of this new front, a front formed out of an alliance of seven putatively “moderate” rebel factions.

Representatives of Saudi intelligence chief Bandar bin Sultan reportedly told staff members on Capitol Hill that committing several billions to defeat the Assad regime by supporting the IF makes fiscal sense and will cost much less than the six trillion dollar figure tallied by the recent study by Brown University as part of its Costs of War project. According to the 2013 update of the definitive Brown study, which examined costs of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the total amount for all three topped six trillion dollars. This never before released figure includes costs of direct and indirect Congressional appropriations, lost equipment, US military and foreign contractors fraud, and the cost of caring for wounded American servicemen and their families.

Among the Islamist militia joining the new GCC-backed coalition are Aleppo’s biggest fighting force, Liwa al-Tawhid (Tawhid Brigade), the Salafist group Ahrar al-Sham, Suqour al-Sham, al-Haq Brigades, Ansar al-Sham and the Islamic Army, which is centered around Damascus. The Kurdish Islamic Front also reportedly joined the alliance.

IF’s declared aim is to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government, whatever the human and material cost it may require, and replace it with an “Islamic state.” Abu Firas, the new coalition’s spokesman, declared that “we now have the complete merger of the major military factions fighting in Syria.”

Formally announced on 11/22/13, the IF includes groups from three prior umbrella organizations: the Syrian Islamic Front (SIF), the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front (SILF), and the Kurdish Islamic Front (KIF). From the SIF, Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyya (HASI), Kataib Ansar al-Sham, and Liwa al-Haqq all joined, as did the KIF as a whole, and former SILF brigades Suqur al-Sham, Liwa al-Tawhid, and Jaish al-Islam. None of these groups have been designated foreign terrorist organizations by the US, and therefore, as an Israeli official argued in a meeting with AIPAC and Congress this week, nothing stands in the way of US funding and support for them. The Israeli official in question is the country’s new national security advisor, Yossie Cohen, who assures key congressional leaders that the tens of thousands of rebels making up the IF will all support “one policy and one military command.” Cohen also pledges that the new group is not as “insane” as other Muslim militia—Daash or al-Nusra or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, for instance—that comprise the IF’s chief rivals. Cohen and AIPAC are further telling Congress members and congressional staffers that the emergence of the IF is one of the war’s most important developments, and he vows that the new organization in effect brings seven organizations into a combined force that will fight under one command, a force estimated by the CIA to number at around 75,000 fighters. Reportedly the objective will link the fight in the north with that in the south in a manner that will stretch loyalist forces, and the Saudi-Israel team is also asking the Obama Administration to more than double the monthly “graduation class” of CIA-trained rebels in Turkey, Syria and Jordan—from its current level of 200 per month, up to 500 a month.

What the GCC/Arab League/Israeli team is asking of its western allies (meaning of course mainly the US) is to immediately fund the IF to the tune of $ 5.5 billion. This, Israeli security officials argue, is pocket change compared to the $6 trillion spent in US terrorist wars of the past decade. Plus it will have the presumed “benefit” of toppling the Assad regime and truncating Iran’s growing influence. The plan has reportedly been dismissed by some in the Obama administration as “risible and pathetic.” Nonetheless, Tel Aviv, the US Congressional Zionist lobby, and to a lesser extent Ankara, are pressing ahead under the assumption that linking with the IF now makes sense and that they can take their chances will al-Qaeda later. Ironically these are some of the same voices from AIPAC’s Congressional Team who four years ago were claiming that al-Qaeda was “on the ropes and will soon collapse.” Yet they are optimistic that if Assad goes, “we can deal with the terrorists and it won’t cost six trillion dollars.”

One House member who strongly agrees with AIPAC is Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who recently declared that “in my heart I am a Tea Party guy.” A member of the House Armed Services Committee, Hunter believes the US should use nuclear weapons against Tehran. In a Fox TV interview this week he declared his opposition to any talks with Iran, insisting that US policy should include a “massive aerial bombardment campaign” utilizing “tactical nuclear devices” to set Iran “back a decade or two or three.”

According to sources in Aleppo and Damascus, the IF’s top leadership positions have been parceled out among five of the seven groups. This at least is as of 12/5/13. Four days after the IF was announced, the organization released an official charter. In terms of its basic architecture, the document is similar to that put out by the SIF in January, but the new version is filled with more generalities than other militia proclamations, and seems designed to accommodate differing ideas among member groups. The charter calls for an Islamic state and the implementation of sharia law, though it does not define exactly what this means. The IF is firmly against secularism, human legislation (i.e., it believes that laws come from God, not people), civil government, and a Kurdish breakaway state. The charter states that the group will secure minority rights in post-Assad Syria based on sharia, which could mean the dhimma (“protected peoples”) system, or de facto second-class citizenship for Christians and other minorities. According to Saudi officials in Lebanon, the IF seeks to unify other rebel groups so long as they agree to acknowledge the sovereignty of God. Given this ‘moderate’ wording, the expectation of some is that that the southern-based Ittihad al-Islami li-Ajnad al-Sham will join the IF.

According to the Netanyahu government, the IF’s leading foreign cheerleader, this new coalition gives substance to that which states who have been wanting regime change in Syria have been calling for. One analyst on the Syrian conflict, Aron Lund, believes a grouping of mainstream and hardline Islamists, excluding any al-Qaeda factions, is significant. “It’s something that could be very important if it holds up,” he explained. “The Islamic Front’s formation was a response to both regime advances and the ‘aggressive posture’ of jihadists against other rebels, plus a good deal of foreign involvement, not least of which is Saudi and GCC pushing to unify the rebels.”

Contrary to reports out of Occupied Palestine that the Netanyahu regime is not worried about or much interested in the crisis in Syria, a measure of delight seems to be felt in Tel Aviv that Muslims and Arabs are once more killing each other, along with smugness over Hezbollah’s loss of key mujahedeen as it faces, along with Iran, its own “Vietnam experience.” Yet all this notwithstanding, near panic is reported to have been felt in Israeli government circles over Hezbollah’s achievements in Syria. Truth told, Tel Aviv knows that despite manpower losses by Hezbollah, the dominant Lebanese political party is bringing about major enhancements of its forces. It also knows that there is no substitute for urban battlefield experience with regard to effecting such force regeneration, and Israeli officials have also stated their belief that the Resistance is organizing non-Hezbollah brigades that share one goal in common despite disparate beliefs. That sacred goal is liberating Al Quds by any and all means.

A US Congressional source summarized the Obama administration’s take on this week’s assassination of a key Hezbollah commander as part of a major new Netanyahu government project to weaken Hezbollah. Hassan Houlo Lakkis’ assassination on the night of December 3-4 is deemed in Washington to be particularly significant since Lakkis was in charge of strategic files related to Israel and the Palestinians and also oversaw a number of key operations. The Resistance commander was deeply involved in the development of drones for Hezbollah, as well as smuggling weapons to Gaza via Egypt. He also had good relationships with the Palestinian factions in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon. Lakkis was known by Washington to be a highly important cadre and a second rank Hezbollah official. According to one analyst “Israel appeared as if it was telling Hezbollah, come and fight me. Israel is upset over the Western-Iranian agreement. It is also upset over the new position that the West has concerning Hezbollah whereby the West is now viewing the party as a force that opposes the Takfiris. Thus, Israel’s objective behind the assassination is to lure the party into a confrontation thus allowing Tel Aviv to tell the West: Hezbollah is still a terrorist organization.”

According to sources on the US Foreign Relations Committee, the White House is being heavily pressured by the US Zionist lobby and the Netanyahu government to take “remedial measures” for the “catastrophic historic mistake” it made in defusing the Iranian nuclear issue and refusing to bomb Damascus. The measures being pushed for, of course, are funding and support for the IF, though doubts persist in Washington as to how “remedial” they will in fact be. The $5.5 billion “investment” is to be paid in large part by GCC/Arab League countries, with US and Zionist contributions. Cash from the latter two sources will come directly and indirectly out of the pockets of American taxpayers—with Israel paying nothing.

Some Washington officials and analysts are wondering if US participation would help unify notoriously hostile rebel ranks and curtail the growing power of al-Qaeda in Syria, or whether it is simply another zany Bander bin Sultan-concocted project, the latest of many—in this case to create a hierarchical revolutionary army with the aim of fighting the Syrian regime essentially alongside al-Qaeda? Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel expressed his personal suspicions this week that “the Israel-Saudi team is trying to drag the US back into a potentially deepening morass,” alluding to what apparently is an effort to head off any plans the Obama administration may have of living with the Assad government until such time as Geneva II happens, that is if it happens, according to one congressional staffer.

Many among the American public also have doubts because they have been told that their government was ‘winding down’ its Middle East wars in favor of rebuilding America’s infrastructure, roads, health care and education systems, all of which, especially the latter, appear to be suffering dramatically. According to the most recent international survey, released this week, the average Chinese student, aged fifteen in Shanghai, is two full years ahead of America’s best students surveyed in Massachusetts. Recent top scores among secondary school youngsters, particularly in , were considerably lower than those achieved by students in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Japan. The US is far down the list and declining, and the survey suggests that the gap is widening.

It’s too early to say whether this latest Saudi-Israel-Arab League collaboration will fail as others have recently, but given the continuing Obama administration efforts at taking back US Middle East policy from Tel Aviv, plus the perceptible movement away from support for the Netanyahu government along with growing angst among American taxpayers over funding the occupation of Palestine, it just might collapse.

The War On Terrorism … Or Whatever

“U.S. hopes of winning more influence over Syria’s divided rebel movement faded Wednesday after 11 of the biggest armed factions repudiated the Western-backed political opposition coalition and announced the formation of an alliance dedicated to creating an Islamist state. The al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is the lead signatory of the new group.” 1

Pity the poor American who wants to be a good citizen, wants to understand the world and his country’s role in it, wants to believe in the War on Terrorism, wants to believe that his government seeks to do good … What is he to make of all this?

For about two years, his dear American government has been supporting the same anti-government side as the jihadists in the Syrian civil war; not total, all-out support, but enough military hardware, logistics support, intelligence information, international political, diplomatic and propaganda assistance (including the crucial alleged-chemical-weapons story), to keep the jihadists in the ball game. Washington and its main Mideast allies in the conflict – Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia – have not impeded the movement to Syria of jihadists coming to join the rebels, recruited from the ranks of Sunni extremist veterans of the wars in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, while Qatar and the Saudis have supplied the rebels with weapons, most likely bought in large measure from the United States, as well as lots of of what they have lots of – money.

This widespread international support has been provided despite the many atrocities carried out by the jihadists – truck and car suicide bombings (with numerous civilian casualties), planting roadside bombs à la Iraq, gruesome massacres of Christians and Kurds, grotesque beheadings and other dissections of victims’ bodies (most charming of all: a Youtube video of a rebel leader cutting out an organ from the chest of a victim and biting into it as it drips with blood). All this barbarity piled on top of a greater absurdity – these Western-backed, anti-government forces are often engaged in battle with other Western-backed, anti-government forces, non-jihadist. It has become increasingly difficult to sell this war to the American public as one of pro-democracy “moderates” locked in a good-guy-versus-bad-guy struggle with an evil dictator, although in actuality the United States has fought on the same side as al Qaeda on repeated occasions before Syria. Here’s a brief survey:

Afghanistan, 1980-early 1990s: In support of the Islamic Moujahedeen (“holy warriors”), the CIA orchestrated a war against the Afghan government and their Soviet allies, pouring in several billions of dollars of arms and extensive military training; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia which gave hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year; pressuring and bribing Pakistan to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary.

It worked. And out of the victorious Moujahedeen came al Qaeda.

Bosnia, 1992-5: In 2001 the Wall Street Journal declared:

It is safe to say that the birth of al-Qaeda as a force on the world stage can be traced directly back to 1992, when the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic issued a passport in their Vienna embassy to Osama bin Laden. … for the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia. This has gone on for a decade. 2

A few months later, The Guardian reported on “the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims – some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in “the war against terrorism”. 3

In 1994 and 1995 US/NATO forces carried out bombing campaigns over Bosnia aimed at damaging the military capability of the Serbs and enhancing that of the Bosnian Muslims. In the decade-long civil wars in the Balkans, the Serbs, regarded by Washington as the “the last communist government in Europe”, were always the main enemy.

Kosovo, 1998-99: Kosovo, overwhelmingly Muslim, was a province of Serbia, the main republic of the former Yugoslavia. In 1998, Kosovo separatists – The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) – began an armed conflict with Belgrade to split Kosovo from Serbia. The KLA was considered a terrorist organization by the US, the UK and France for years, with numerous reports of the KLA having contact with al-Qaeda, getting arms from them, having its militants trained in al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan, and even having members of al-Qaeda in KLA ranks fighting against the Serbs. 4

However, when US-NATO forces began military action against the Serbs the KLA was taken off the US terrorist list, it “received official US-NATO arms and training support” 5 , and the 1999 US-NATO bombing campaign eventually focused on driving Serbian forces from Kosovo.

In 2008 Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, an independence so illegitimate and artificial that the majority of the world’s nations still have not recognized it. But the United States was the first to do so, the very next day, thus affirming the unilateral declaration of independence of a part of another country’s territory.

The KLA have been known for their trafficking in women, heroin, and human body parts (sic). The United States has naturally been pushing for Kosovo’s membership in NATO and the European Union.

Nota bene: In 1992 the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs reached agreement in Lisbon for a unified state. The continuation of a peaceful multi-ethnic Bosnia seemed assured. But the United States sabotaged the agreement. 6

Libya, 2011: The US and NATO to the rescue again. For more than six months, almost daily missile attacks against the government and forces of Muammar Gaddafi as assorted Middle East jihadists assembled in Libya and battled the government on the ground. The predictable outcome came to be – the jihadists now in control of parts of the country and fighting for the remaining parts. The wartime allies showed their gratitude to Washington by assassinating the US ambassador and three other Americans, presumably CIA, in the city of Benghazi.

Caucasus (Russia), mid-2000s to present: The National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House have for many years been the leading American “non-government” institutions tasked with destabilizing, if not overthrowing, foreign governments which refuse to be subservient to the desires of US foreign policy. Both NGOs have backed militants in the Russian Caucasus area, one that has seen more than its share of terror stretching back to the Chechnyan actions of the 1990s. 7

“Omission is the most powerful form of lie.” – George Orwell

I am asked occasionally why I am so critical of the mainstream media when I quote from them repeatedly in my writings. The answer is simple. The American media’s gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission. It’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. So I can make good use of the facts they report, which a large, rich organization can easier provide than the alternative media.

A case in point is a New York Times article of October 5 on the Greek financial crisis and the Greeks’ claim for World War Two reparations from Germany.

“Germany may be Greece’s stern banker now, say those who are seeking reparations,” writes theTimes, but Germany “should pay off its own debts to Greece. … It is not just aging victims of the Nazi occupation who are demanding a full accounting. Prime Minister Antonis Samarass government has compiled an 80-page report on reparations and a huge, never-repaid loan the nation was forced to make under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1945. … The call for reparations has elicited an emotional outpouring in Greece, where six years of brutal recession and harsh austerity measures have left many Greeks hostile toward Germany. Rarely does a week go by without another report in the news about, as one newspaper put it in a headline, ‘What Germany Owes Us’.”

“The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt. … Some members of the National Council on Reparations, an advocacy group, are calling for more than $677 billion to cover stolen artifacts, damage to the economy and to the infrastructure, as well as the bank loan and individual claims.”

So there we have the morality play: The evil Germans who occupied Greece and in addition to carrying out a lot of violence and repression shamelessly exploited the Greek people economically.

Would it be appropriate for such a story, or an accompanying or follow-up story, to mention the civil war that broke out in Greece shortly after the close of the world war? On one side were the neo-fascists, many of whom had cooperated with the occupying Germans during the war, some even fighting for the Nazis. Indeed, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, acknowledged in August 1946 that there were 228 ex-members of the Nazi Security Battalions – whose main task had been to track down Greek resistance fighters and Jews – on active service in the new Greek army. 8

On the other side was the Greek left who had fought the Nazis courageously, even forcing the German army to flee the country in 1944.

So guess which side of the civil war our favorite military took? … That’s right, the United States supported the neo-fascists. After all, an important component of the Greek left was the Communist Party, although it wouldn’t have mattered at all if the Greek left had not included any Communists. Support of the left (not to be confused with liberals of course) anywhere in the world, during and since the Cold War, has been verboten in US foreign policy.

The neo-fascists won the civil war and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency, named and modeled after itself, the KYP. For the next 15 years, Greece was looked upon much as a piece of real estate to be developed according to Washington’s political and economic needs. One document should suffice to capture the beauty of Washington’s relationship to Athens – a 1947 letter from US Secretary of State George Marshall to Dwight Griswold, the head of the American Mission to Aid Greece, said:

During the course of your work you and the members of your Mission will from time to time find that certain Greek officials are not, because of incompetence, disagreement with your policies, or for some other reason, extending the type of cooperation which is necessary if the objectives of your Mission are to be achieved. You will find it necessary to effect the removal of these officials. 9

Where is the present-day Greek headline: “What The United States Owes Us”? Where is the New York Times obligation to enlighten its readers?

The latest step in the evolution of America’s Police State

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

So say many Americans. And many Germans as well.

But one German, Ilija Trojanow, would disagree. He has lent his name to published documents denouncing the National Security Agency (NSA), and was one of several prominent German authors who signed a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her to take a firm stance against the mass online surveillance conducted by the NSA. Trojanow and the other authors had nothing to hide, which is why the letter was published for the public to read. What happened after that, however, was that Trojanow was refused permission to board a flight from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, to Miami on Monday, September 30. Without any explanation.

Trojanow, who was on his way to speak at a literary conference in Denver, told the Spiegel magazine online website that the denial of entry might be linked to his criticism of the NSA. Germany’s Foreign Ministry says it has contacted US authorities “to resolve this issue”. 10

In an article published in a German newspaper, Trojanow voiced his frustration with the incident: “It is more than ironic if an author who raises his voice against the dangers of surveillance and the secret state within a state for years, will be denied entry into the ‘land of the brave and the free’.”11

Further irony can be found in the title of a book by Trojanow: “Attack on freedom. Obsession with security, the surveillance state and the dismantling of civil rights.”

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who oversees the NSA and other intelligence agencies, said recently that the intelligence community “is only interested in communication related to valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes.” 12

It’s difficult in the extreme to see how this criterion would apply in any way to Ilija Trojanow.

The story is a poignant caveat on how fragile is Americans’ freedom to criticize their Security State. If a foreigner can be barred from boarding a flight merely for peaceful, intellectual criticism of America’s Big Brother (nay, Giant Brother), who amongst us does not need to pay careful attention to anything they say or write.

Very few Americans, however, will even be aware of this story. A thorough search of the Lexis-Nexis media database revealed a single mention in an American daily newspaper (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch), out of 1400 daily papers in the US. No mention on any broadcast media. A single one-time mention in a news agency (Associated Press), and one mention in a foreign English-language newspaper (New Zealand Herald).

Notes

1. Washington Post, September 26, 2013 ↩
2. Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2001 ↩
3. The Guardian (London), April 22, 2002 ↩
4. RT TV (Moscow), May 4, 2012 ↩
5. Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2001 ↩
6. New York Times, June 17, 1993, buried at the very end of the article on an inside page ↩
7. Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frogs Post, “Barbarians at the Gate: Terrorism, the US, and the Subversion of Russia”, August 30, 2012 ↩
8. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, October 16, 1946, column 887 (reference is made here to Bevin’s statement of August 10, 1946) ↩
9. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, Vol. V (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), pp. 222-3. See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, chapter 3 for further details of the US role in postwar Greece. ↩
10. Associated Press, October 2, 2013 ↩
11. Huffington Post, “Ilija Trojanow, German Writer, Banned From US For Criticizing NSA”, October 1, 2013 ↩
12. Washington Post, October 5, 2013 ↩

Liar-In-Chief

I could barely make out Barack Obama’s Syria speech to the nation on my old car radio as I negotiated the narrow curves of Route 79 on the western banks of the Mississippi River in central Missouri last Tuesday night. What I could hear sounded very much like more of Obama’s by now standard if stunning arch-mendacity.

“To Take This Debate to Congress”

Looking at the speech transcript and video online[1] recently, my suspicions were richly confirmed. Speaking from the end of the same long red carpet where George W. Bush delivered his demented announcement of the invasion of Iraq, Obama claimed that he has turned to Congress for authorization to use force against Syria because “I’m…the President of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy” and “believe[s]…it [is] right, in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security, to take this debate to Congress.”

That is certainly a lie. He did no such thing in the case of Libya, subjected to a five-week U.S. bombing campaign (though it posed no “direct or imminent threat to [Americans’] security”) because he didn’t have to, politically. This time it’s different, as the liberalMiddle East historian Juan Cole has explained: “Obama did not need Congress in the case of Libya. He had the Arab League, the UN Security Council, and NATO…But [he has] became more and more isolated [on Syria]. The Arab League declined to call for intervention… Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and other Arab countries forthrightly denounced the idea of foreign military intervention in Syria, a very different stance than many of them took in 2011 with regard to Libya…Then NATO declined to get involved, with Poland, Belgium, and others expressing reluctance…Then the British Parliament followed suit.” Failure to garner any meaningful fig leaf of formal international support is why Obama ran to Congress this time.

“I Possess the Authority”

Obama claimed he has gone to Congress “even though I possess the authority to order military strikes.” The former “liberal” constitutional law professor with a degree from Harvard Law certainly knows that the U.S. Constitution grants war-making authority in Congress alone. He should know further that it is thoroughly criminal under international law for him to attack any sovereign nation in the absence of any direct or imminent threat to the U.S.

Claims of Humanitarian Concern

Obama’s claim to be moved to act by civilian deaths in Syria, citing the horrors of “children writhing in pain, and going still on a cold hospital floor.” This claim is contradicted by the grim determination with which he has regularly murdered innocent civilians (including large numbers of women and children) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere – “collateral damage” in the dirty global war on/of terror he inherited from Cheney-Bush and then expanded. One horrific example – neither the first nor the last among many – occurred in the May of 2009. That’s when U.S. air-strikes killed 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. Villagers brought tractor trailers full of the pieces of human bodies to the provincial governor’s office to prove that the casualties had occurred. “Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene,” one observer reported.”[2]

The initial response of the Obama administration and Pentagon to this appalling incident (one of many mass civilian-butchering U.S. aerial killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world under Obama) was to absurdly blame the civilian deaths on “Taliban grenades.” Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “regret” about the loss of innocent life, but the administration refused to issue an apology or acknowledge U.S. responsibility for the blasting apart of civilian bodies in Farah Province.[3]

The matter was quickly dropped and forgotten, sent down George Orwell’s memory hole, with deep media complicity, as the Pentagon wrote checks to the Afghan government to give families a couple thousand dollars per corpse. The U.S. subsequently conducted a dubious “investigation” that reduced the civilian body count drastically and blamed the Taliban for putting civilians in the way of U.S. bombs.[4]

There have been many crimes like Bola Boluk under Obama. People who command glass houses of a sociopathic, mass-murderous empire should not expect to be taken seriously when throw “humanitarian” stones at other butchers.

If Obama is so dismayed by the spectacle of a government “killing its own people,” why is he not calling for missile strikes against the military dictatorship in Egypt, which recently slaughtered hundreds if not thousands of civilians to stop popular protests against the regime? Is it okay to kill your own civilians as long as you are a U.S.-allied regime and/or do the killing with “conventional” weapons?

But why does Obama think we should believe that he can advance humanitarian goals by lobbying cruise missiles at anyone? Two days after Obama’s speech, the New York Times published an Opinion-Editorial from Russian president Vladimir Putin. “The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders,” Putin reasonably observed. “A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.”[5]

Selective History and Terrible Weapons

In his discussion of the past horrors of chemical weapons (by European powers during World War I and by the Nazi holocaust) last Tuesday night, Obama deleted the United States’ vicious deployment of dioxin during the Vietnam War. That example of chemical warfare caused an explosion of birth defects among other terrible results in Southeast Asia. The president also failed to mention that Washington helped Saddam Hussein use nerve gas against Iranian soldiers and the U.S. Marines used white phosphorous in their massive assaults on the civilian population of Fallujah, Iraq in November of 2004.

Will Obama threaten Tel Aviv with cruise missiles for using white phosphorous against Palestinian civilians in Gaza? Of course not: the Palestinians are officially unworthy victims, like the East Timorese and countless others who have been killed and tortured by governments that are allied with the inherently good United States and therefore officially incapable (like the U.S.) of crimes against humanity.

Obama painted out Syria as a rogue state because it has not signed a treaty against chemical weapons like “189 governments that represent 98 percent of humanity.” He did not mention that Syria’s neighbors Syria and Egypt (both U.S. allies) have also not signed the treaty.

Obama had nothing to say, of course, about the even greater dreadfulness of nuclear and radioactive ordnance. The U.S. stands alone in having incinerated and poisoned civilians with atomic weapons – quite unnecessarily in August of 1945. And thanks to America’s deployment of depleted uranium in Iraq, the toxic legacy of the U.S. attacks on Fallujah was worse was that of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An epidemic of cancer, leukemia, and birth defects quickly followed in Fallujah.[5A]

“We Know the Assad Regime was Responsible”

“We know,” Obama said, “the Assad regime was responsible” for the Syrian chemical weapons attack of August 21, 2013. Not so. The proof offered by the president, a former lawyer, was hardly impressive. It contained nothing remotely like a smoking gun. Obama made no attempt to disprove other theories of what might have happened, including some German journalists’ finding that the attack was conducted by a rogue Syrian officer acting without Assad’s approval. Nor did he address what left commentator Glen Ford rightly calls “credible reports (everybody’s reports are more credible than the Americans) that rebels under U.S. allied control were told to prepare to go on the offensive following an American retaliation to chemical attack that would be blamed on Assad’s forces.”[6]

“No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria,” Putin wrote in his Times editorial: “But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with [Islamic] fundamentalists.” That is a reasonable judgment.

Nobody should doubt the monstrosity of the Assad regime, but Obama’s proof of Assad’s culpability for the attack in questions amounts pretty much to this: “because I say so.”

“These Things Happened:” The Memory Hole

“When dictators commit atrocities, they depend upon the world to look the other way until those horrifying pictures fade from memory,” Obama said. “But these things happened. The facts cannot be denied.”

An interesting thing to hear from an American president! “From the end of World War Two through the present, the U.S. Empire has caused “the extinction and suffering of countless human beings. The United States,” William Blum Pilger noted eight years ago, “attempted to overthrow fifty governments, many of them democracies, and to crush thirty popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, twenty-five countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more.”[7]

The leading American imperial crimes include a massive U.S. assault on the peasant nation of Vietnam – an epic attack that killed 3 million Indochinese – and the illegal invasion of oil-rich Mesopotamia, whose terrible human consequences (including at least 2 million Iraqis dying prematurely) remain essentially unmentionable in “mainstream” (dominant) U.S. media. Chemical weapons were deployed in both of these grand imperial transgressions.

Over these decades, the U.S. has been what Noam Chomsky calls “ a rogue state, the leading rogue state, radically violating international law, refusing to accept international convention” and even maintaining “self-authorization to commit genocide.”[8]

Is it any wonder that, as Putin noted in the Times, “Millions around the world …see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us’” (emphasis added).

“The Anchor of Global Security”

There should be little surprise that knowledgeable observers the world over cringe and/or roll their eyes when U.S. presidents say things like this, from Obama’s Tuesday night address:”My fellow Americans, for nearly seven decades, the United States has been the anchor of global security…The burdens of leadership are often heavy, but the world is a better place because we have borne them” (emphasis added).

That is a blatant lie, as Obama surely knows. Tell it to the survivors of the millions who have been snuffed out by rogue state America, consistently identified by the global populace for many years as the leading threat to peace and security in the world. Tell it to the people of Chile. Two days ago they commemorated the 40th anniversary of their 9/11 – the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist president Salvador Allende. The coup was assisted and supported by Washington, determined to install a vicious military dictatorship that executed thousands of leftists and others and became a leading center of international terror. The U.S. would not permit the continued existence of democratic socialist government in “our hemisphere.”

What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., say about Obama’s claim that the U.S. has been “the anchor of global security” since World War II? In 1967, well within the timeframe of Obama’s sweeping historical claim, King identified the U.S. as “the leading purveyor of violence in the world today.” The Vietnamese, King said, “must see Americans as strange liberators” as they “languish under our bombs….as we he herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps. They know they must move or be destroyed by bombs. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops [with chemical weapons]. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one ‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them – mostly children…” [9]

Looking at the historical literature on the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequent moment of supreme nuclear danger, a living King (who would be 84 today had he not been assassinated or perhaps executed inside “the anchor of global security” exactly one year to the day after publicly declaring his opposition to the Vietnam War at the Riverside Church in New York City) today might also like to mention (among other things) the remarkable degree to which the Ahabs of Washington have been willing to risk global thermonuclear war (very barely averted in October 1962) in their quest for unchallenged global supremacy.[10]

“It Never Happened”

But in the U.S, and indeed across much of the West, the record of ongoing, mass-murderous American criminality is airbrushed out of the official history and mass culture. It is tossed down Orwell’s memory hole, consistent with Big Brother’s dictum in Nineteen Eighty Four: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” As Harold Pinter noted in his biting acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, the reigning Western cultural authorities behave as if U.S. crimes simply did not occur. When it comes to America’s transgression against civilized norms and international law, “nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening,” Pinter added, “it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”[11] Dominant U.S.-led Western cultural codes mandate that the only victims meriting acknowledgement and compassion are those assaulted by officially designated enemies. The larger number victimized by the U.S. and its clients and allies (e.g., the Palestinians suffering under Israeli occupation and apartheid) do not qualify for sympathy or even existence. They don’t exist. The crimes against them didn’t take place.

Detour and Lost Cool

Eleven minutes into his war speech, Obama had to strangely shift gears and acknowledge the need to delay his hoped-for war vote in light of Russia and Syria’s last-minute proposal to demolish Syria’s chemical weapons under international supervision and control. He tried to save militaristic face by attributing the Russian and Syrian move to his threatened use of force. He seemed to expect his listeners to preposterously believe that a peaceful, diplomatic, and international solution is his idea.  Obama wants us to think that the United Nations route was his preferred path all along.

That’s nonsense. Obama is an aggressive commander of a rogue military state that prefers force and unilateral action in the names of unimpeded hegemony and “American exceptionalism.” He and many of his fellow fake-humanitarian cruise missile liberal imperialists have been itching for a bigger war in the Middle East, one that will let him attack the great regional enemy Iran and wrap the remainder of his lame-duck presidency in the splendor of war-fed patriotism.

Like the British Parliament’s vote against attacking Syria, Putin and Assad’s peace gambit is a great humiliation for Obama. It knocked more stuffing out of his failing fake-humanitarian effort to rally a reluctant, war-weary citizenry plagued by massive domestic problems (including remarkably durable “homeland” poverty and unemployment alongside stunning, New Gilded Age levels of inequality that have only increased under Obama’s supposedly progressive presidency) behind another expensive imperial campaign.

Expect the defeated president to do his best to get the nation back on a unilateral war footing. For now, he has been defeated not simply by other politicians but also by public opinion – by the citizenry in whose name he claims to speak. Imagine that. Along the way, Barack “The Empire’s New Clothes” Obama may well have lost his public cool, the swagger in his step, once and for all. Syria may prove his undoing –the moment when the outwardly nice and smooth-talking “leader” is most clearly revealed for what he really is: a cold-blooded sociopath and pathological liar. That’s long overdue, but its better late than never.

Paul Street () is the author of many books, including The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010), Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008), Crashing the Tea Party (2011), and They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm Publishers, forthcoming in January 2014). 

Selected Notes

1. ;
2. Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah, “Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War,” New York Times, May 6, 2009.
3. Gall and Shah, “Civilian Deaths;”
4. Paul Street, “Niebuhr Lives, Civilians Die in the Age of Obama,” ZNet (June 15, 2009), read athttp://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21701. By contrast around the same time in 2009, there was a brief media frenzy over a very different occurrence, enough to elicit a full apology and to fire a White House official. The problem was that the White House had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-soot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people below of 9/11. SeeChristina Boyle, “President Obama Calls Air Force One Flyover ‘Mistake’ After Low-Flying Plane Terrifies New York,” New York Daily News, April 28, 2009; Michel Muskai, “Presidential Plane’s Photo-Op Over New York Coast as Much as $357,000,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2009; Peter Nicholas, “Louis Caldera Resigns Over Air Force One Flyover Fiasco,” Los Angeles Time, May 9, 2009.
5. Vladimir Putin, A Plea for Caution From Russia,” New York Times, September 12, 2013.
5A. Patrick Cockburn, “Toxic Legacy of U.S. Assault on Fallujah ‘Worse Than Hiroshima,” The Independent, July 24, 2010,http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us-assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html; “Fallujah More Radioactive Than Hiroshima,” RT, uploaded on July 29, 2010, . A useful history of U.S. use and encouragement of chemical and biological weapons at home and abroad can be found in William Blum,Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe. ME: Common Courage, 2005), 136-160.
6. Glen Ford, “Obama’s Humiliating Defeat,” Black Agenda Report (September 11, 2013),http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-humiliating-defeat
7. Blum, Rogue State, 1-2. Honduras and Libya must (at the very least) be added to the list of countries where the U.S. has acted to overthrow governments since Blum wrote. Libya and Somalia must (at the least) added to the list of countries bombed by the U.S.
8 Noam Chomsky, “Instead of Illegal Threat to Syria, U.S. Should Back Chemical Weapons Ban in All Nations,” Democracy Now! (September 11, 2013), http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/11/chomsky_instead_of_illegal_threat_to
9. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break the Silence” (Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967), audio recording at 
10. Noam Chomsky, Address to Left Forum, New York City, 2013, 
11.Quoted in John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation Books, 2007), 4.
Via Z Net

Too Many Years of Lies: From Mossadeq To 9/11

Washington has been at war for 12 years. According to experts such as Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, these wars have cost Americans approximately $6 trillion, enough to keep Social Security and Medicare sound for years. All there is to show for 12 years of war is fat bank balances for the armament industries and a list of destroyed countries with millions of dead and dislocated people who never lifted a hand against the United States.

The cost paid by American troops and taxpayers is extreme. Secretary of Veteran Affairs Erik Shinseki reported in November 2009 that “more veterans have committed suicide since 2001 than we have lost on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.” Many thousands of our troops have suffered amputations and traumatic brain injuries. At the Marine Corps War College Jim Lacey calculated that the annual cost of the Afghan war was $1.5 billion for each al-Qaeda member in Afghanistan. Many US and coalition troops paid with their lives for every one al-Qaeda member killed. On no basis has the war ever made sense.

Washington’s wars have destroyed the favorable image of the United States created over the decades of the cold war. No longer the hope of mankind, the US today is viewed as a threat whose government cannot be trusted.

The wars that have left America’s reputation in tatters are the consequence of 9/11. The neoconservatives who advocate America’s hegemony over the world called for “a new Pearl Harbor” that would allow them to launch wars of conquest. Their plan for conquering the Middle East as their starting point was set out in the neoconservative “Project for the New American Century.” It was stated clearly by Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and also by many neoconservatives.

The neocon argument boils down to a claim that history has chosen “democratic capitalism” and not Karl Marx as the future. To comply with history’s choice, the US must beef up its military and impose the American Way on the entire world.

In other words, as Claes Ryn wrote, the American neoconservatives are the “new Jacobins,” a reference to the French Revolution of 1789 that intended to overthrow aristocratic Europe and replace it with “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” but instead gave Europe a quarter century of war, death, and destruction.

Ideologies are dangerous, because they are immune to facts. Now that the United States is no longer governed by the US Constitution, but by a crazed ideology that has given rise to a domestic police state more complete than that of Communist East Germany and to a warfare state that attacks sovereign countries based on nothing but manufactured lies, we are left with the irony that Russia and China are viewed as constraints on Washington’s ability to inflict evil, death, and destruction on the world.

The two pariah states of the 20th century have become the hope of mankind in the 21st century!

As Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick prove in their book, The Untold History of the United States, the American government has never deserved its white hat reputation. Washington has been very successful in dressing up its crimes in moralistic language and hiding them in secrecy. It is only decades after events that the truth comes out.

For example, on August 19, 1953, the democratically elected government of Iran was overthrown by a coup instigated by the US government. Sixty years after the event declassified CIA documents detail how the secret CIA operation overthrew a democratic government and imposed Washington’s puppet on the people of Iran.

The declassified documents could not have spelled it out any clearer: “The military coup that overthrew Mossadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government.”http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/19/politics/cia-iran-1953-coup 

In the 21st century Washington is attempting to repeat its 1953 feat of overthrowing the Iranian government, this time using the faux “green revolution” financed by Washington.
When that fails, Washington will rely on military action.

If 60 years is the time that must pass before Washington’s crimes can be acknowledged, the US government will admit the truth about September 11, 2001 on September 11, 2061. In 2013, on this 12th anniversary of 9/11, we only have 48 years to go before Washington admits the truth. Alas, the members of the 9/11 truth movement will not still be alive to receive their vindication.

But just as it has been known for decades that Washington overthrew Mossadeq,
we already know that the official story of 9/11 is hogwash.

No evidence exists that supports the government’s 9/11 story. The 9/11 Commission was a political gathering run by a neoconservative White House operative. The Commission members sat and listened to the government’s story and wrote it down. No investigation of any kind was made. One member of the Commission resigned, saying that the fix was in. After the report was published, both co-chairmen of the Commission and the legal counsel wrote books disassociating themselves from the report. The 9/11 Commission was “set up to fail,” they wrote.

NIST’s account of the structural failure of the twin towers is a computer simulation based on assumptions chosen to produce the result. NIST refuses to release its make-believe explanation for expert scrutiny. The reason is obvious. NIST’s explanation of the structural failure of the towers cannot survive scrutiny.

There are many 9/11 Truth organizations whose members are high-rise architects,
structural engineers, physicists, chemists and nano-chemists, military and civilian airline pilots, firemen and first responders, former prominent government officials, and 9/11 families. The evidence they have amassed overwhelms the feeble official account.

It has been proven conclusively that World Trade Center Building 7 fell at free fall which can only be achieved by controlled demolition that removes all resistance below to debris falling from above so that no time is lost in overcoming resistance from intact structures. NIST has acknowledged this fact, but has not changed its story.

In other words, still in America today official denial takes precedence over science and
known undisputed facts.

On this 12th anniversary of a false flag event, it is unnecessary for me to report the voluminous evidence that conclusively proves that the official story is a lie. You can read it for yourself. It is available online. You can read what the architects and engineers have to say. You can read the scientists’ reports. You can hear from the first responders who were in the WTC towers. You can read the pilots who say that the maneuvers associated with the airliner that allegedly hit the Pentagon are beyond their skills and most certainly were not performed by inexperienced pilots.

You can read David Griffin’s many books. You can watch the film produced by Richard Gage and Architects & Engineers for 9/11 truth. You can read the 9/11 Toronto Report, International Hearings on 9/11. You can read this book: http://www.international.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9319:hijacking-americas-mind-on-911-counterfeiting-evidence&catid=66:oped&Itemid=151

Actually, you do not need any of the expert evidence to know that the US government’s story is false. As I have previously pointed out, had a few young Saudi Arabians, the alleged 9/11 hijackers, been capable of outwitting, without support from any government and intelligence service, not only the CIA and FBI, but all sixteen US intelligence services, the intelligence services of Washington’s NATO allies and Israel’s Mossad, the National Security Council, NORAD, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Traffic Control, and defeat Airport Security four times in one hour on the same morning, the White House, Congress, and the media would have been demanding an investigation of how the National Security State could so totally fail.

Instead, the President of the United States and every government office fiercely resisted any investigation. It was only after a year of demands and rising pressure from the 9/11 families that the 9/11 Commission was created to bury the issue.

No one in government was held accountable for the astonishing failure. The national security state was defeated by a few rag tag Muslims with box cutters and a sick old man dying from renal failure while holed up in a cave in Afghanistan, and no heads rolled.

The total absence from the government for demands for an investigation of an event that is the greatest embarrassment to a “superpower” in world history is a complete give-away that 9/11was a false flag event. The government did not want any investigation, because the government’s cover story cannot stand investigation.

The government could rely on the mega-media corporations in whose hands the corrupt Clinton regime concentrated the US media. By supporting rather than investigating the government’s cover story, the media left the majority of Americans, who are sensitive to peer pressure, without any support for their doubts. Effectively, the American Ministry of Propaganda validated the government’s false story.

Common everyday experiences of Americans refute the government’s story. Consider, for example, self-cleaning ovens. How many American homes have them? Thirty million? More? Do you have one?

Do you know what temperature self-cleaning ovens reach? The self-cleaning cycle runs for several hours at 900 degrees Fahrenheit or 482 degrees Celsius. Does your self-cleaning oven melt at 482 degrees Celsius. No, it doesn’t. Does the very thin, one-eighth inch steel soften and your oven collapse? No, it doesn’t.

Keep that in mind while you read this: According to tests performed by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), only 2% of the WTC steel tested by NIST reached temperatures as high as 250 degrees Celsius, about half the temperature reached by your self-cleaning oven. Do you believe that such low temperatures on such small areas of the WTC towers caused the massive, thick, steel columns in the towers to soften and permit the collapse of the buildings? If you do, please explain why your self-cleaning oven doesn’t weaken and collapse.

In Section E.5 of the Executive Summary in this NIST reporthttp://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=101019 it says: “A method was developed using microscopic observations of paint cracking to determine whether steel members had experienced temperatures in excess of 250 degrees C. More than 170 areas were examined . . . Only three locations had a positive result indicating that the steel and paint may have reached temperatures in excess of 250 degrees C.” Analysis of steel “microstructures show no evidence of exposure to temperatures above 600 degrees C for any significant time.”

In section 3.6 of the NIST report http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=860495NIST states: “NIST believes that this collection of steel from the WTC towers is adequate for purposes of the investigation.”

How did these truths get out? My explanation is that the NIST scientists, resentful of the threat to their jobs and future employment opportunities and chaffing under the order to produce a false report, revealed the coerced deception by including information that their political masters did not understand. By stating unequivocally the actual temperatures, NIST’s scientists put the lie to the coerced report.

The melting point of steel is around 1,500 degrees C. or 2,600 degrees F. Steel can lose strength at lower temperatures, but the NIST scientists reported that only a small part of the steel was even subjected to moderate temperatures less than those obtained by the self-cleaning oven in your home.

If you need to think about this a bit more, obtain a copy of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Have a look at the streetcar in photo 108. The caption reads: “The Hiroshima fireball instantly raised surface temperatures within a mile of the hypocenter well above 1,000 degrees F.” Is the streetcar a melted lump of steel? No, it is structurally intact, although blackened with burnt paint.

Washington would have you believe that steel that survived intact the atomic bomb would melt from low temperature, short lived, isolated office fires. What do you think of a government that believes that you are that stupid?

Who would support a government that lies every time it opens its mouth?

The three WTC buildings that were destroyed were massive heat sinks. I doubt that
the limited, short-lived, low temperature fires in the buildings even warmed the massive steel structures to the touch.

Moreover, not a single steel column melted or deformed from softening. The columns
were severed at specific lengths by extremely high temperature charges placed on the columns.

On this 12th anniversary of 9/11, ask yourself if you really want to believe that temperatures half those reached by your self-cleaning oven caused three massive steel structures to crumble into dust.

Then ask yourself why your government thinks you are so totally stupid as to believe such a fairy tale as your government has told you about 9/11.

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Which Americans Will Arrive First To Syria?

Will 1000 American ‘human shields’ stop another criminal war?

Damascus — A sort of roller coaster atmosphere pervades Damascus these days with “good” and “bad” news rising and falling, often by the quarter hour. Much of the population is monitoring closely the news and quickly expressing their interpretations of the latest media reports and rumors as well as predicting the fairly precise timing of the now assumed American attack on their country.

In the very popular, and normally crowded Abaa Coffee House on the edge of the old city in what is called the Sarugha section, students and others enjoy the fine cool mist, as Damascenes have done for years, that is sprayed from ceiling pipes to provide welcome relief from the 37 degree Celsius (98 degrees F) outside temperatures. Many are clued to their laptops and/or in animated conversation analyzing the likely extent and timing of the soon believed to be arriving American missiles.

This observer often meets interlocutors in the Abaa because it’s very pleasant, large with dozens of tables, cheap and two blocks from my hotel.  I have noticed that common greetings are changing from “kif hallack”  ” (how are you?)  and “Arak lahekan” (see you later)  to “Get  home safely” and “Good luck with the checkpoints.”

But there is also a distinct growing esprit de corps and a broad coming together of much of the population here as the countdown to the American attack on Syria begins.  An evident rallying around the Assad regime, which one presumes is the opposite of what the White House was hoping would result from its threats.

A good friend from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent Society (SARCS) an humanitarian organization doing amazing rescue, and medical services for Syrians and Palestinians during this expanding crisis, described one way that her friends are preparing for the American attack.  “We gathered our important documents, birth, marriage certificate and passport and made photo copies.  Then we leave them with friends in “safe” areas or even bury them somewhere. No one knows how bad the Americans will bomb us. At work we have been told during our final practice drill last Saturday that the next siren will be the ‘real thing’ and we will do as we have planned for.” She added, “Many of my friends and family are leaving but it’s not easy and is very expensive now to go to Lebanon and they don’t want us– and my family has decided to stay in our home no matter what happens in the coming days.”

One common topic being discussed is the reluctance of the American public to attack Syria and how Obama can ignore it.  “What kind of Democracy do you have that your President can ignore the will of the American public?”  this observer is frequently asked.  One soldier who is stationed with his unit just outside my hotel seemed to speak from his heart: “You Americans claim you are trying to help the Syrian people.  Every child knows, both here and in your country I think, that the coming attack will make things much worse for the Syrian people and many others. The American people are good and we hope they can control their government, but we are preparing for the worst and there will be consequences you will come to regret as with Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.”

The government here is assuring the public that Syria is ready for the American attack and that public services will continue.  TV channels show around the clock images of heroic Syrian army exploits with marital and patriotic music. Youngsters, students and workers are gathering at presumed targets offering themselves as Human Shields in solidarity with their countrymen while challenging President Obama to bomb their beloved Syria.

Interestingly, an International Human Shield movement is coalescing according to informed sources here and abroad. One initiative is to bring 1000 Americans and thousands of others, to Syria within the next ten days to guard likely bomb sites reminding one of the International Solidarity Movement international volunteer’s efforts in Occupied Palestine in order to try to protect homes of Palestinians from Government bulldozing.

Some redacted specifics have been disclosed to this observer from an international organizing committee working around the clock on this Human Shield initiative.

Some descriptive excerpts:

“International Human Shields are planning on coming to Syria in solidarity with the Syrian people and in an effort to send a global message and hopefully deter an American attack next week.”

“Timing – While moves can be made fast and with all other key elements in place, time is not in our favor.  Ten mores days for preparation would be ideal. The HS initiative assumes that it must be done in such a way that very little time lapse from the official announcement of the action to the actual arrival of the Human Shields on the ground in Syria.”

“ Impact – In order to achieve a significant impact having at least 1000  Americans and several thousand international Human Shields deployed in Syria is the objective. With ideally at least one representative from every UN Member State, as evidence of the true ‘international community’ opposing the American attack.

The US activist-based steering committee is quickly bringing together professionals in IT, marketing, logistical planning and implementation, spokesperson(s), public relations, accounting, documentarians, and experienced project managers. Ferries from European ports are to be arranged to carry significant numbers of Human Shields from Major European cities. Ideally, several jumbo jets will be chartered to carry human shields from some of the world’s major cities and use of land convoys are under consideration.

An excerpt:  “HS/Government Relations – The first objective of the enemies of Syria will be to portray Human Shields as nothing more than pawns of President Bashar al-Assad. This was precisely what the mainstream media did in 2003, presenting Human Shields as pawns of Saddam.  In order for the Human Shields to have power they must be seen as independent supporters of the people of Syria who represent the will of the vast majority of people around the world who oppose the pending US-led western attack. The HS should however work with prominent leaders in the civilian sector of Syrian society and great effort should be made to produce daily news stories of the Human Shields and Syrian people working together to protect Syria from the ongoing foreign instigated aggression. There are once again many details here and these would need to be discussed and agreed if any action will be able to reach its full potential.”

“Strategy – The sites that Human Shields deploy to must be very well publicized and these sites must be identified as protected sites under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The White House is saying that they are not going to attack infrastructure (as they did with Iraq in 2003), but they must attack the infrastructure as the goal is to drive Syria into the stone age and make it so weak that Israel will through its agents eventually take Syria over. They know that the Syrian people and military cannot be defeated without massive attacks on the infrastructure.

So it is absolutely vital that all power plants, water treatment facilities, bomb shelters (if they exist), civilian communications sites, food storage sites and other such sites that are critical to the civilian population are the primary if not sole focus of sites for the HS to deploy. They cannot deploy to military sites, although I personally feel this is morally defensible, it will neutralize the power of the HS in the public relations realm and intelligent public relations is absolutely critical.

A comprehensive list of protected sites is to be produced immediately and these sites will need to be verified by the most independent sources we can manage to obtain. UN representatives or former representatives would be great, human rights attorneys, legal experts and others of this type are very useful.

There will be room to deploy to sites not specifically listed in the Fourth Geneva Convention, such as with ethnic and religious minority communities who are deathly afraid of the foreign invaders/terrorist. Special emphasis should be placed on Christian populations as the western audience sadly has more sympathy for Christians than Muslims. “

“Our goal is to personalize the people of Syria and show their suffering through the eyes of the HS with effective daily reports to be uploaded on the Internet and reported by legitimate news agencies such as Press TV, RT and Telesur. A massive effort must be made to educate the public about the reasons for the Fourth Geneva Convention (FGC) and the imperial powers undeniable record of knowingly destroying the lives of ‘protected persons’ as defined in the FGC. There must be high quality, well-spoken Arabic/English speaking spokespersons.

We should be ready to provide evidence of any attack on such sites the moment it happens and have legal briefs prepared to immediately charge the aggressors with war crimes. This is why it is critical that the HS are almost exclusively at sites that are protected by the FGC.”

The Action Plan concludes: “We cannot necessarily stop them from doing what they intend to do, but we can make their aggression harm them far more than Syria and its people in the end. Herein lays the power, using the enemies momentum against him in the most powerful way possible.

Time will tell which Americans will arrive first in Syria, the military or the American public.  Many Syrian are today praying it will be the latter and have pledged to join them to defeat the coming aggression.

Destroying Greece To Save It

Troika scoundrels are looting Greece. They’re destroying it. They’re waging financial war. They partnered with corrupt Greek officials.

They’re strip-mining Greece for profit. It’s the epicenter of global pillage. Ordinary people have no say. They’re victims of force-fed harshness.

The more Athens borrows, the greater its debt burden, the harder it is to get out from under. Greece is dying. It’s practically a corpse already. Only its obituary remains to be written.

Official unemployment tops 27%. It’s likely higher. Youth unemployment approaches 65%. An entire generation’s lost. It’s being systematically destroyed. It’s dying on the alter of pay bankers first. Whatever they want they get.

Greece’s New Democracy/PASOK coalition plans thousands more layoffs by yearend. On July 17, it enacted its seventh austerity package since 2010.

It calls for firing 15,000 state workers. About 25,000 will be gone by yearend. Up to 150,000 will be sacked by yearend 2014.

Troika scoundrels demand their pound of flesh. They insist in return for emergency loans. They reflect loan shark economics writ large.

Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis calls “Bankruptocracy in the Greek Sector of Bailoutistan” destructive. It’s “progressing in leaps and bounds.”

It’s doing so with “European taxpayers loan guarantees providing the capital and a bonfire of the Greek people’s hopes for the future supplying the energy.”

Greece is a black hole of inequity. It’s burning. It’s a model of self-destruction. It’s birthrate’s in decline. Stillbirths rose 20% since 2008.

Greece spends much less on education than other OECD countries on average (8.3% compared to 13.1%). It doesn’t matter. In mid-July, parliament approved thousands more teacher layoffs. They promise recovery ahead. Things do from bad to worse.

Around 40% of households lack healthcare. A late March Lancet study said Europe’s financial crisis poses major threats to health.

Greece is hardest hit of all. So are Spain, Portugal and Italy. Suicides and infectious disease outbreaks “are becoming more common in these countries, and budget cuts have restricted access to health care.”

Public health’s in crisis. Policy makers are largely silent. They’re dismissive. They’re indifferent to human need. John Pilger calls willfully destroying social justice the “Age of Regression.” Police state harshness enforces it.

It’s vicious. It’s the new normal. It reflects nations gone mad. Potemkin societies replace real ones. Black hole harshness reflects them. Greece is prologue for what’s deepening.

It’s spreading across Europe. It’s hammering Americans. It affects Canadians. It’s coming to a community near you. Imagine unaffordable basic services. Imagine unavailable healthcare when ill.

On April 20, the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) IP Policy Committee addressed Greece’s healthcare crisis. It did so by open letter to coalition officials, saying:

“This letter is an attempt by Greek scholars and physicians from diverse academic areas of specialization to raise our concerns regarding the current, dire, state of Health Care services in Greece.”

“Our country has fallen into a dismal state, and it is constantly challenged by extrinsic and intrinsic pressures, while the economic and social climate deteriorates further each day.”

“The Greek government, in total obedience to the irrational demands of the Troika, focuses on the obligations of the citizens towards the state, and seems to forget or ignore its own obligations towards its citizens.”

“The Government has imposed a brutal and self-defeating fiscal austerity; in a confiscatory manner, it tries to collect extra revenue from an already impoverished and afflicted populace, while it neglects its main role, as specified by the Constitution: The Protection of the Rights and the Welfare of the Citizen Body.”

Greece’s black hole deepens. Coalition partners shrank GDP by 25%. Doing so’s a shocking indictment of corrupt mismanagement.

Public health’s in disarray. It’s “collapsing on all fronts.” The health of an entire population is “seriously undermine(d).”

Mortality and morbidity are increasing. Troika subservience demands vital service cuts. Medical staff numbers are reduced.

Essential equipment deteriorates. Everything’s in short supply. “Patients now have to pay for consumables, for medical tests, and for surgeries.”

“This is all on top of what they already paid through their insurance funds.”

“Those who suffer from chronic diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, are forced to pay a 25% deductible for the cost of their medication, while prior to the crisis this deductible stood at 5%.”

“Cancer and kidney failure patients suffer not only due to the increased costs of specialized treatments, but also the general rundown of these facilities, loss of key personnel and dramatic shortages in medications.”

“Unable to receive treatment at home anymore, they have to travel far away for dear life, and wait in endless queues in the corridors of bureaucratic health-insurance offices and/or hospital clinics.”

Mental health services are greatly diminished. “Psychiatric hospitals in Greece can no longer perform at the level required to provide even basic treatment to patients diagnosed with serious mental illnesses.”

“Standard (surgery) rates” force patients to pay about 20% in advance for materials and services.

Doing so “makes both emergency and elective surgeries virtually unapproachable for a broad segment of the population.”

Millions of unemployed and underemployed Greeks have inadequate resources for expensive treatment. Many can’t afford rent, utilities, enough nourishing food, other basics, and other living expenses easily affordable years earlier.

Greece’s poor, unemployed and retired “have no choice but to forego basic, life-saving drugs and healthcare monitoring.”

They do it to afford minimal sustenance. Thousand of medical and other professionals emigrated. Prior to crisis conditions, Greece’s National Health System (ESY) provided exceptional services.

It now lacks basic resources. It has too few trained professionals. It’s “besieged at every level.” It’s “plundered with your consent.”

It’s dying a slow death. So is Greece. It’s beholden to foreign bankers. It’s “not a government of Greeks for Greeks.”

“The disastrous policies that undermine even the basic health of the Greek population must come to an end.”

Greece represents the worst of neoliberal harshness. Social services across the board are disintegrating. They’re in disarray. They’re disappearing in plain sight.

In 2013, martial law was imposed three times. Coalition gangsters wage war on their own people.

Central Athens demonstrations are banned. Police state harshness targets nonbelievers. Courageous people initiate change, said Pilger.

There’s no other way. They’re responsible for “taking back their own lives against (long) odds.” Civil disobedience is a noble tradition. Pilger says read Percy Shelley. “Ye are many; they are few.”

Victor Hugo said nothing’s stronger than “an idea whose time has come.” Seize it. “(D)o it,” said Pilger. The alternative is deepening dystopian harshness.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at .

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Groupthink In Service of Government

If the human race survives into the future, the history of the current age will be entitled – A Love Affair with Authority. As the 21st century unfolds, the existential struggle between group worship of government and an inherent autonomy revolt against a popular culture of state obedience seems to forecast doom for civilization. By any measurable standard of success, the prospects of rescuing a society based upon human dignity and natural law is vanishing in a technocratic system of coerced compliance and punitive punishment. The limits of individual behavior are severely restricted to the requirements of the State and the willful confines of self-induced conformity.

The prison of institutional establishment restraints, based upon a designed hallucination of media newspeak and trendy pop culture gullibility, has the populace adsorbed in trivia and addicted to a governmental version of reality. The practice of “Free Will”, relegated to the acceptance of government dependency and peer pressure harmony, is common among the ranks of the conflict challenged. The motivation of individual liberty is foreign in the cultural cloning society that makes up the collectivist public consciousness.

Before placing primary blame on the usual suspects – corporatists, banksters, and politico sociopaths – understand the fact that the top down authoritarian framework operates on the tenet that public acceptance of the system is indispensable. What possible psychological disorder is in play that differentiates the current generations from their ancestors?

This inauspicious culture, dominated by the disorder of Groupthink, is explained in an informative power point presentation, from Psychologists for Social Responsibility. From the perspective of an “application of psychological knowledge and expertise in addressing today’s pressing societal challenges and in building cultures of peace with social justice” this left learning society offers the following breakdown.

What is Groupthink?

Groupthink, a term coined by social psychologist Irving Janis (1972), occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment” Groups affected by groupthink ignore alternatives and tend to take irrational actions that dehumanize other groups.　A group is especially vulnerable to groupthink when its members are similar in background, when the group is insulated from outside opinions, and when there are no clear rules for decision making.

Symptoms of Groupthink

Janis has documented eight symptoms of groupthink:

1. Illusion of invulnerability – Creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks.

2. Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions.

3. Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.

4. Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.

5. Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.

6. Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.

7. Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.

8. Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.

A critique to this Janis research presented by The Independent Review, in an abstract by Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern – Groupthink in Academia: Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid, references the subject and offers an example from the ivory tower.

“The groupthink theorist wants to gain standing as a social theorist and therefore wants to avoid unnecessary controversy. Accordingly, groupthink theorists—at least those like Janis and Hart—have focused on episodes where, in hindsight, the judgment of failure (or error) is uncontroversial. The need for uncontroversial judgment is one reason why the scope of groupthink applications has been quite limited.

In this article, we apply groupthink theory to a setting where the presupposition of failure is anything but uncontroversial.”

“Perhaps the clearest way to illustrate how we see the problem of social-democratic groupthink in the humanities and social sciences is to perform a thought experiment. Imagine a doctoral student who unabashedly holds classical-liberal ideas. Ask yourself whether such a student would be able to find warm support in the elite departments of political science, sociology, history, and so forth. Ask yourself whether the student, no matter how solid his research, would be likely to win grants, have his articles published by the most respected journals, and succeed on the academic job market.”

Groupthink does not escape the bastion of mainstream conservative outlets. Maisie Allison editorial digital director of The American Conservative write in Beyond Fox News makes a valid point about The Rise of Post-Movement Conservatism.

“The groupthink is so extensive that several conservative publications seem to exist only to promote the work of other, indistinguishable movement outlets. (One typical headline from the Washington Free Beacon: “Fox News Cites Free Beacon Report.”) Here the mission ranges from “use journalism to advance the movement” to “war.” As one attendee at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual conference told Atlantic reporter Molly Ball last year, “You couldn’t get in an argument around here no matter how hard you tried.”

Whether in academia or the elite media, Groupthink is a requirement for career survival. Yet, in the View from the Mount article, Ideology Matters, But What Is It?, the essential component in the Totalitarian Collectivism fellowship eludes the cultural war merchants who want to avoid controversy.

“‘TC’ now rules! Few are willing to challenge the bureaucratic mechanism that is designed to compel insidious compliance. The operative standard is now one of dreadful despair while pious arguments are presented that society is advancing. Most people understand that they are now at the mercy of the commissar, but are unwilling to reject this abuse and defend their own rights. As long as this submissive Ideology is accepted, surrender is inevitable. Self-respect is in short supply, while self-esteem is fostered as a substitute for truth and honor.”

The public Groupthink is a product of the government school indoctrination, the media filter and the herd mentality to adopt acceptable behavior. The preordained outcome is the tyranny of the mob. Rewarding Idiots with Democratic Totalitarianism, invariably lead to Despotism.

“Ivory tower utopians march in the ranks of statist totalitarians by choice. Many seek to lead the charge. The “rank and file” that digs the ditches, usually lacks the skills to think independently for their self. Nonetheless, they are usually the first to rally to the cause of their sanitized Führer that preaches hope and change, with every loss of freedom. No one political theory has a monopoly on despotism. Yet the “peaches and cream” slogans of fairness and equality, that come from the ultra extreme wing of the Democratic Party, out does the worst of the GOP civil libertarian destroyers.

Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest is the end product of the collectivist education system that indoctrinates impressionable brains with reverence for the dependency society. Mush minds come out of this corrosive process. Voting for entitlements and the expansion of the democratic totalitarianism becomes the norm.”

Individual responsibility is avoided like the plague. People rationalize blame on every other factor other than their own inaction. The recent popularity of social network services and forums has demonstrated a frightening trend to extinguish Free Speech from the web. The impersonal selection of dislike or the “PC” Groupthink comments on content that offends the defenders of the cult of government are the true cowards.

The Jacobin Clubs of advocates for the public sector are prime candidates to bloody their hands in the coming terror meant to stamp out any earnest dissent against the old regime. Dropping the guillotine on the heads of anti-establishment traditionalists is good fun for the Groupthink statists that deceive themselves into believing they are “social justice” advocates.

Censorship in thought precedes freedom of behavior in deeds. Civil liberties are dirty words in the urbanity of cultural authoritarianism. Elegance of polite discourse has given way to the suppression of bourgeois demeanor. The mere mention of anything positive about Christianity earns you a trip to the re-education internment camp for social consciousness.

This perverted cultural Groupthink is a religion of government worship. The reason “Strappado Wrack” essays are termed political torture, resides in the absurdity of the failed political process that has brought us all to the point of total tyranny. The believers that cling to a faux legitimacy of the Federal government are codependent Groupthink asylum nutcases.

The Federal beast would collapse of its own weight, when the enablers of the oppression seek to heal their affliction and turn away from the dark side. The Janis #3 point – Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions is at the axis of the destruction in the character and courage that once existed in this country.

Government group thinkers are wholly confused or simple dishonest participants. The duty of every loyal citizen is not to the state but to the spirit of the America Revolution.

Ear Tickling, Entertainment, And Irrelevant Exposition

At some point, one has to wonder why America’s churches are the largest block of irrelevant, impotent, and insignificant institutions in the entire country. And make no mistake about it: when it comes to influencing societal conditions, culture, and the political philosophy of the nation, for all intents and purposes, they ARE irrelevant, impotent, and insignificant.

Think about it: according to the latest available statistics, over 75% of America’s adults classify themselves as Christians. That’s over 159 million people. Over 43% of America’s adults attend the more than 300,000 churches regularly. That’s over 90 million people. Yes, both of these statistics are WAY DOWN from just a few years ago, but those statistics still represent a HUGE block of the American population. So why do these Christians and churches have so very little influence in America’s society, culture, and politics? Asking it bluntly, why is America going to hell in a handbasket with all of these churches dotting the landscape?

There is no mistaking the fact that from before the American Revolution, after the American Revolution, throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, and through the first half of the Twentieth Century, the American Church was a major voice and influence in virtually every facet and sphere of American society. However, with the exception of a temporary resurgence in the 1980s, the influence of the Church in the last half of the Twentieth Century and continuing now into the Twenty First Century is nada. Zilch.

For all intents and purposes, the activist arm of conservative churches, the Religious Right, Christian Coalition, Moral Majority, call it what you will, is clinically dead. It is not comatose; it is dead. When it comes to influencing the culture and politics of the nation, the modern Church is dead. Pastors are dead. Denominations are dead. Christian schools and universities are dead.

Think of it: 159 million Christians, 90 million churchgoers, and 300,000 churches cannot effectively influence even the smallest change of direction in America’s society, culture, and political philosophy. America is in a societal, economic, and political tailspin, and the Church sits irrelevant and impotent. And don’t forget: we are not talking about an enslaved, oppressed country such as communist China where millions of Christians are forced at gunpoint to submit to the machinations of the state.

While it is true that the underground church in China (the REAL church in China) is seeing great growth, without a revolution such as America experienced in the late 1700s, Chinese Christians will never be able to effect societal and political change in that country. And, of course, the communist government in China has all but guaranteed that such a revolution will not take place by completely disarming the citizenry.

In America, we are talking about a nation in which citizens (including Christians) are able to lobby, redress government, protest, rally, organize opposition, speak, vote, form PACs, march, petition, etc. Christians are as free to influence their societies and governments as are any other group of people in the United States. Furthermore, name the other group in this country that can boast 75% of the population who identify with it in name or 43% of the population who regularly attend its public meetings? What would the country look like if the ACLU could boast these numbers? Or the SPLC? Or labor unions?

Labor unions comprise only 11% of the adult workforce. The ACLU membership is reported to be about 500,000. And, of course, the people who belong to the SPLC could fit in a phone booth. By comparison, these groups comprise a miniscule percentage of the population as opposed to America’s churches, yet their influence is exponentially greater. So, what has happened?

The great Nineteenth Century revivalist and major contributor to America’s Second Great Awakening, Charles Finney, said this: “Christians must vote for honest men and take consistent ground in politics. God cannot sustain this free and blessed country, which we love and pray for, unless the Church will take right ground. Politics are a part of a religion in such a country as this, and Christians (and citizens) must do their duty to the country as a part of their duty to God. It seems sometimes as if the foundations of the nation are becoming rotten, and Christians seem to act as if they think God does not see what they do in politics.”

Finney also said, “If there is a decay of conscience, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the public press lacks moral discernment, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the church is degenerate and worldly, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the world loses its interest in Christianity, the pulpit is responsible for it. If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it. If our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it.”

It is no hyperbole to say that, on the whole, the American Church has been mostly ineffective since immediately after World War II. The Church sat mute when God was expelled from America’s public life in the 1960s. It sat mute when the government gave license to the premeditated murder of preborn babies in the 1970s. And today it continues to sit mute in the face of a burgeoning police state. There seems to be virtually no abridgment of liberty, no national scandal, or no threat against our constitutional form of government egregious enough to warrant an outcry from America’s pastors and churches.

For the most part, today’s pastors are not prophets and watchmen; they are cheerleaders and CEOs. Our churches are not “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Timothy 3:15 KJV); they are centers of social interaction, recreation, and feel-good indoctrination. Preachers are not reprovers, rebukers, and exhorters (II Timothy 4:2); they are ear-ticklers, entertainers, and expositors of irrelevance.

Let me ask you: what good does it do to teach the stories of Daniel and the lions’ den, and the three Hebrew children in the burning fiery furnace, and Esther, and John the Baptist, and Elijah, and Simon Peter saying, “We must obey God rather than men,” and Samson, and Gideon, etc., ad infinitum, if you are not going to apply those stories to the practical, day-to-day events we are experiencing now? What good does it do to preach expository messages on the Bible if one does not make those messages relevant to the times and circumstances in which we live? Yet, ear-tickling, entertainment, and irrelevant exposition seem to be what the modern church in America excels in. The result: ineffective, impotent, weak, unprepared, and sheepish Christians.

Yes, I know there are many churches and Christian ministries that are doing admirable work. We need homeless shelters, food banks, pregnancy resource centers, addiction ministries, etc. We most definitely need pastors and churches to preach the Gospel of Christ. We need missionary outreach. But we also need pastors and churches to teach the Biblical Natural Law principles of liberty and to prepare their congregations to guard and defend our freedom.

I tell you the truth: Christians in persecuted lands are not enamored with entertainment, recreation, and irrelevant Bible exposition. You don’t have to bring in some big-name rock band to entice them to fellowship. You don’t have to give their teenagers a big gymnasium. You don’t have to give their young adults coffee shops and espresso machines. You don’t have to shy away from criticisms of tyrannical government. And you certainly are not going to score any points with your fallacious “obey-the-government-no-matter-what” interpretation of Romans 13.

The time is soon coming in this country when it is going to “rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45 KJV) Mark it down, Christian: when persecution and tribulation comes to America (and it has already begun), you and your family will NOT be exempt. When a jetliner falls out of the sky, everyone in it (Christian or not) goes down with the plane. And when a nation falls, everyone in it (Christian or not) goes down with the country.

The church was not created to teach Christian sugars how to recreate on a playground, but to teach Christian soldiers how to fight on a battlefield.

So many of our Christian brothers and sisters seem to be literally enslaved or addicted to some form of church formality. They need a certain music fix, or entertainment fix, or teaching fix, or liturgical fix, or a hundred other fixes. They demand a certain delivery, a certain style, or a certain personality. They intend to do nothing with what they hear, but it makes them feel good hearing it. The carnality, rancor, envy, and meanness inside the church is equal to, or superior to, that which is outside the church. Many Christian businessmen are just as greedy, just as dishonest, and just as duplicitous as businessmen professing no faith. Many deacons and church officers are just as untruthful and cowardly as anyone in the outside world.

What have all of these Sunday School lessons done for us? What have all of these pacifist expositional messages done for us? What have all of these gymnasiums, youth programs, self-esteem classes, and counseling centers done for us? Pastors and churches have been teaching all forms of Bible prophecy for decades. Generations of Christians have come and gone arguing over the nuances of Eschatology. What good has it done us? While we have been playing, partying, prancing, promoting, pouting, pontificating, patronizing, and philosophizing, a fire has been burning the foundations of our country; and we have not lifted a pail of water to help extinguish the inferno.

Truly did the Lord Jesus say, “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” (Matthew 5:13 KJV)

The word “savour” here means “saltiness.” Salt is a preservative that retards decay and ruination. God has sprinkled “salt” in the form of Christian people all over the country. We are here to be a preservative and protection against rot and ruin. But when Christians lose their saltiness, Jesus said, they are “good for nothing” and are destined to be “trodden under foot of men.” That is a word description of tyranny and oppression. Can anyone say Jackboot?

Unfortunately, many pastors and churches today are “good for nothing.” They have lost their saltiness; they no longer preserve and protect. And, ladies and gentlemen, the Jackboots have gotten out the shoe polish as we speak.

It doesn’t matter that America has 300,000 churches, 90 million people attending those churches, and 159 million people calling themselves Christians unless those churches and Christians are actively and tenaciously preserving and protecting the foundations and pillars upon which both the church and the country are built.

As God pruned Gideon’s army down from 32,000 to 300, so, too, God may need to prune the Church in America. Let the majority of churches rot on the vine; let them intoxicate themselves on the opiate of entertainment and feelgoodism; let the hirelings in the pulpit lust after ease and social acceptance; let the willfully blind bask in their ignorance; and let the sheepish servants in the sanctuary lick the hands of their oppressors.

Those who choose to fight with Gideon’s army, leave these fancy churches, which are nothing more than ornate tombs, and run to the sound of battle! Gideon’s captains are strategically placed all around the mountains. Join them! God has never needed a majority to prevail; He never will.

The great Christian patriot and “Father of the American Revolution,” Sam Adams, said, “It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in the people’s minds.”

Let the majority of churches be irrelevant, impotent, and insignificant. Even now, God is raising up unconventional fellowships. A fire for liberty churches is ablaze in the hearts of millions of Americans. The establishment churches are dead; shake off the dust of your feet and move on. Already, we have over 700 patriot pastors and churches that appear on our Black Regiment web page. There may be one near you.

See the list of patriot pastors and churches here:

The Black Regiment

If you can’t find a patriot pastor near you, consider watching our service live at Liberty Fellowship each Sunday afternoon at approximately 2:30pm Mountain Time. Watch us here:

Live Stream

If you cannot watch the service live, you can watch my archived messages at:

Video Sermons

A majority of pastors, churches, and Christians may be irrelevant, impotent, and insignificant; but you and I don’t have to be. Already, God is resurrecting Gideon’s army. Will you join us?

Presidential Puppetry And Revolt In Ashtabula County

None of the twenty-five activists for the Ashtabula County Charter Initiative, designed to move power back into the hands of Americans on how their county is governed, had read, or even heard of the newly released book, “Presidential Puppetry,” by Andrew Kreig.

They had come together in the tiny meeting room of the Board of Elections in Jefferson, Ohio, to let their voices be heard as the Board considered whether or not to honor the opinion issued by County Prosecutor Thomas Sartini, which cast doubt on the fate of a measure which has brought together people from every political viewpoint.

As they coalesced around returning power to the people they became another point of action in a country which is rejecting partisan politics and moving toward a civic model which echoes the vision which still lives in the minds and hearts of people around the world. Kreig’s book provides the reasons why Americans must move past the politics of parties, embracing the power to locally determine how their government will work – for them.

The four members of the Board of Elections for Ashtabula County listened to, and came to agree the will of the people could not be extinguished. The impassioned arguments advanced by the Charter activists, they saw, should not be sidelined because one sentence, printed in all CAPS, was not also bolded.

The County Prosecutor Thomas Sardini had left stopping the Initiative as his recommendation before leaving for another vacation in Florida on July 3rd, setting the meeting for the day after Independence Day, July 5th.

“WHOEVER COMMITS ELECTION FALSIFICATION IS GUILTY OF A FELONY OF THE FIFTH” This appears directly above where the circulators sign, under penalty of ‘election falsification.’ The reader can not easily miss the text.

If passed, the new form of government would cut back staff positions and lowers the compensation paid to the individual elected to fill the office of Prosecutor. It was pointed out by several individuals that, perhaps, Sartini should have recused himself. Sartini had, actually made pointed remarks on his facebook denouncing the Initiative, reposting these to other pages.

The Charter Initiative is, in the experience of local people, the only shred of hope they have had in years for a county government which works for them.

In Ashtabula, children are going hungry. Disabled people are being abandoned, without bus services to return to their homes. Costs for providing services, which fail to provide for those in need are spiraling out of control and no one will account for these increases in cost.

The attitudes of corruption, entirely controlling both major parties, have seeped down into local government across the country. Here too, partisan politics is used to divide and control.

In Ashtabula, the people are putting their hands to the wheel to enact change. Kreig’s book holds promise as a way for people to come together, past the divide of politics by providing understanding of how this happened. The facts kill illusions on both sides of the aisle.

Andrew Kreig, an attorney, activist, and journalist, wrote his first book, “Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America’s Oldest Newspaper,” published, Oct 1987, documenting the corporate take over of America’s formerly independent media. Subsequent insights awakened him to the driving need for Americans to realize the presence of master illusionists, such as Karl Rove, and the transfer of power from even federal government to the murky faces which today pull the strings at the White House and around the world.

Hope, says Kreig, must come with understanding if it is to lead us to happiness.

“Presidential Puppetry,” by Andrew Kreig, is now available at Amazon. Reading it is dangerous to illusions but essential for reclaiming our freedom.

Giulio Andreotti: A Career

Almost two months have passed since the death of Giulio Andreotti, arguably the most powerful politician in Italy’s post-World War II history. In recent weeks I have struggled with a draft obituary of this complex man who deserves to be better known abroad, but the task proved daunting. There are too many loose ends, strange events, and unexplained mysteries in Andreotti’s long life that require detailed expert knowledge of the setting and dramatis personae, harking all the way back to the Fascist era; so I’ve asked Slobodan Janković, a research fellow at Belgrade’s Institute of International Politics and Economy, an alumnus of Rome’s La Sapienza and a leading expert on Italian politics, to help me tell the story.

That story needs to start with Italy’s current predicament. Since April 28 the country has had a new government, headed by “a new Mario Monti,” Enrico Letta (46). This man, oddly charmless for an Italian, is a fanatical Eurocrat, a participant in the deliberations of the Trilateral Commission, an associate of the Bilderberg Group, and vise-president of the Aspen Institute in Italy; in other words, a member of the globalist elite par excellence. As a prominent leader of Italy’s “center-left,” in 2006-2007 he was Secretary to the Council of Ministers in the second Prodi Cabinet. (Interestingly, he was preceded and succeeded in that post by his uncle Gianni Letta, a stalwart Berlusconi loyalist.)

Having started his political career in 1990 in the youth organization of the Italian Christian Democrats, Enrico Letta quickly rose to the presidency of the youth division of the European People’s Party (EPP), a conservative bloc in the European Parliament. By the mid-1990’s, however, he moved to the Partito Popolare Italiano, which marked his decisive turn to the left following the collapse of Christian Democracy (DC). At 31 he became the PPI’s deputy leader. Within years he joined a motley crew of ex-communists and leftists to form the Ulivo  (olive tree) party, on whose list he was elected first to the European Parliament and then to the Italian parliament, before rising to the senior government post under Prodi. In 2007, Ulivo joined the former communists to form the Democratic Party (PD). Once again, Letta was in the middle of the action, as Der Spiegel’s commentator has noted; but when he set out to become party leader, he was badly beaten: “When it came time to tally the ballots—which were filled out not only by party members but by all interested citizens—he ended up with just 11 percent, putting him in third and last place. His victorious rival Walter Veltroni received about 75 percent of the vote. By the time he was nominated … for Rome’s top political office, he had more or less put his career in party politics behind him.”

Letta’s career indicates the extent to which Italy is ruled by men who are devoid of popular support, whose sole ideology is power, and who are servile to supranational interest groups in order to enjoy the privileges that come with such servility. As Slobodan Janković says, how else can we explain the fact that Emma Bonino was first considered for the post of the President of Italy, and then on April 28 was appointed the country’s foreign minister, in spite of her crushing defeat in the general election of February 24-25, when her list received one-fifth of one percent (0.20%) of the popular vote? How can someone so odious to Italy’s voters be in the race for presidency, and then receive a key cabinet post? “Maybe for that very reason,” according to Janković. “Perhaps this was the way to give yet another European nation a slap in the face, to tell that nation that such choices are not made by her people but by someone else.” Bonino’s appointment was suggested by another protégé of the transnational elite, former prime minister Mario Monti.

This was a strange choice, coming from the man who last February headed an electoral list that included the remnant of the Christian Democratic remnant. “Bonino is a prominent hater of life,” Janković points out. “She was Italy’s leading advocate of free abortion on demand in the 1970’s, ostentatiously taking part in illegal abortions well before the procedure was made lawful in 1978, and gloating that she’d have a good laugh while throwing fetuses into trash.” Bonino was arrested once, having been caught red handed while performing ‘vacuumization’ with a bicycle pump, but was let off scot free. She went into politics instead of going to jail, making a name for herself as an advocate of “LGBT rights,” euthanasia, and legalization of hard drugs. Far from being “a radical rebel,” Bonino soon became a participant in the Bilderberg Group meetings, a friend of George Soros, and the recipient of his Open Society Foundation’s annual award for 2004. Bonino’s career is but one of countless examples of Italy’s multifaceted decline, Janković says:

“If the process of Italy’s transformation from a traditional Roman Catholic country into the current spiritually and materially devastated land is to be linked to a single name, that name is Giulio Andreotti . . . The life-long Senator died last May 6, and took many secrets to the grave. For decades he was the éminence grise of Italian politics, helping make it what it is today. On top of that, there is ample evidence that for much of his political career Andreotti was the true capo di tutti capi.“

The extent of Andreotti’s power is incomprehensible without some grasp of the remarkable influence of Freemasonry, first on the Risorgimento, and later on the political, economic and social life of modern Italy. Giuseppe Mazzini, the founder of Young Italy and the prophet of Risorgimento, became a mason as a student and died a 33rd degree master. An early advocate of the United States of Europe, in 1831 Mazzini joined the Carbonari, a secret society dedicated to Italy’s unification, which was strongly anti-Catholic and organized in the fashion of Masonic lodges. His vision of a future united Italy was reflected in the crude mockery of Christian rites he staged at the Vatican on Easter Sunday 1849.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was the best known grand master of the Grand Orient of Italy, receiving the highest, 33rd degree of initiation in 1864. His landing in Messina, and his subsequent conquest of Sicily and the South, would not have been possible without the help of local British masons among the merchant expatriate community, and the support from The Royal Navy. The capture of Rome in 1870 was the moment of triumph of Freemasonry over the Catholic Church. The pope was confined to the walls of the Vatican, and the new Kingdom became part-Masonic El Dorado, part-Tammany Hall.

The Vatican’s reconciliation with the Italian state became possible only after 1925, when Mussolini simultaneously and successfully clamped down on rural banditry in the South and outlawed Freemasonry. The latter paved the way for the Concordat of 1929. As Janković points out, at the time of the Concordat for the first time since the fall of the Western Roman Empire Italy had a strong central power—but Italian Freemason émigrés did not give up: “In the 1930’s they regrouped in exile. One of their leaders, Randolfo Pacciardi (a 30th degree initiate) went to Spain in 1937 to lead the Italian battalion Garibaldi, an important unit within the notorious International Brigades which fought Franco’s forces.”

After the Spanish Civil War Pacciardi repeatedly visited the United States. After 1945 he was a prominent member of four successive Italian governments, most of that time as defense minister (1948-1953). In that capacity he arranged Italy’s entry into NATO, campaigned against monarchy, and enthusiastically supported the country’s accession to the European Coal and Steel Community. In these endeavors he worked closely with two fellow Masons who spent the war years in the United States, foreign minister Carlo Sforza and Italy’s first postwar ambassador in Washington Alberto Tarchiani.

“It is widely assumed that the Allied landing in Sicily was carried out in coordination with the Mafia.” Janković says, “It defies logic that an organization thoroughly suppressed by Mussolini could play a significant role, yet it did because the Americans wanted it that way.” Had Biaggio Max Corvo had his way, Janković adds, this would not have happened. Born in Sicily but raised in the United States since the age of 8, Corvo volunteered for the U.S Army in 1941 and on his own initiative drew up plans for operations against Mussolini. His work impressed senior officers, and he was soon transferred to the Italian Secret Intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. A devout Catholic and a life-long antifascist, in addition to rejecting contacts with the Mafia, Corvo was also opposed to cooperation with the Masonic Mazziniani—the approach favored by the British—or with the Communist-dominated resistance forces. He established links with the Catholic secret group Pro Deo (founded in Portugal in 1941) instead, and maintained friendly relations with Don Luigi Sturzo, the 1919 founder of the Italian People’s Party (Partito Popolare Italiano, PPI), who spent the war in exile in the U.S. Through his Vatican connections Corvo even managed to contact Japanese diplomats who had realized that their country was doomed and wanted to establish channels of communication with the U.S.; but in early 1945 Washington severed the link. According to Janković,

“Young Corvo was rewarded for his work with the papal Lateran Cross, but he had powerful enemies on both sides of the Atlantic. The British preempted his efforts to save Mussolini’s life in April 1945 and to obtain the trove of documents the fallen dictator was carrying on his person during that doomed trip north. Yes, the story of the British-American rivalry in Italy in the final days of the Second World War is yet to be told. In the United States Corvo’s enemies included Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and the Office of Naval Intelligence, which unabashedly cultivated the Mafia connection. In 1943 the ONI released 850 Mafia members imprisoned by Mussolini in Palermo, and subsequently relied on the advice of Lucky Luciano and Calogero Vizzini in political and personnel matters.”

Other trusties, who became uomini d’onore after the war, included personal translator to Col. Charles Poletti, the 46th governor of New York and the U.S. Army civil affairs officer in Italy. This was none other than “don” Vito Genovese, who had fled New York in the 1930s to escape prosecution for murder and subsequently became il capo di tuti capi. Another was Max Mugniano, who was placed in charge of all U.S. Army medical warehouses in Italy at a time when penicillin was worth many times its weight in gold (as per The Third Man), and who subsequently became Luciano’s superintendant of the narcotics trade.

The Mafia was backin action, after two lean decades under Mussolini. In Italy’s 1947 Peace Treaty with the Allies, a short but highly significant provision—Article 16—was inserted almost as an afterthought: “Italy shall not prosecute or molest Italian nationals, including members of the armed forces, solely on the ground that during the period from June 10, 1940, to the coming into force of the present Treaty, they expressed sympathy with or took action in support of the cause of the Allied and Associated Powers.” Of course “including members of the armed forces” was just a smokescreen. The real benefactors were the “sympathizers” and “activists” in the Allied cause, like Genovese, Mugniano, their 850 cohorts from the Palermo jail, and many other persons south of Naples, known and unknown. The Italian authorities were prevented from seeing, let alone vetting, the names of those “Italian nationals” protected by the Treaty.

After Mussolini’s murder, which was carried out by communists but arranged by the British, power was taken by an uneasy alliance of Christian Democrats and Freemasons—the latter group including Pacciardi, the International Brigades commander who duly became a born-again anticommunist. The party’s leader was Alcide De Gasperi, one of the founders of what is today the European Union. A veteran leader of the Popular Party after the Great War, persecuted by the fascist regime, De Gasperi recruited a student by the name of Giulio Andreotti into the ranks of the semi-clandestine Italian Catholic Federation of University Students (Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana, FUCI) in 1941. According to Andreotti’s account, they met by chance in the Vatican Library, where De Gasperi worked at the time, and Andreotti was looking for some books. The Federation’s president was Aldo Moro, a young lecturer in law and devout Catholic from Apulia. When Moro was drafted into the Italian army in 1942, Cardinal Cesare Montini—who was to become pope Paul VI—supported De Gasperi’s suggestion that Andreotti be appointed to the newly vacant post.

In the turbulent months of 1945 De Gasperi appointed Andreotti to the provisional National Advisory Council, the precursor of Italy’s republican parliament. In 1947, at the age of 28, Andreotti became a junior minister in the prime minister’s office. In that position he had more real power and patronage than some cabinet members. “It caused envy in other politicians,” he later remembered, which caused them to wonder about the source of his power. Even as a young man, he struck others as cynical and devoid of passion. His un-Italian disdain of grimaces and gestures helped cultivate the image of focused power. His sardonic quips could be viciously funny, mostly at other people’s expense. Aloof and secretive, he was disliked by his peers but respected by the senior party leaders as a hard worker. He was elected to the Constitutional Assembly in 1947 and remained a member of parliament for 66 years; he died as a senator-for-life. Andreotti stayed as De Gasperi’s undersecretary in several successive governments (1947-1954), when at the age of 34 he became minister of the interior. In the ensuing decades he occupied one ministerial post or another 27 times, eight times as minister of defense. He was Italy’s prime minister an unprecedented seven times, known as divo Giulio to friends and enemies alike—not because he was touched by divine grace, but because he was inordinately powerful. As Andreotti acquired reputation for sinister dealings, his foes dubbed him Beelzebub. “Giulio is so capable in everything,” De Gasperi said in the late 1940’s, “that he could become capable of anything.” Many decades later Margaret Thatcher wrote in her memoirs that Andreotti “seemed to have a positive aversion to principle.”

Aldo Moro was a different type of person: deeply but unostentatiously pious, witty, scholarly. He survived the war and returned to politics, while initially maintaining a teaching position at the University of Bari. (Andreotti, by contrast, had no fall-back professional option: all his life he was a full-time politician.) Moro also was destined to occupy influential posts in the years to come. He, too, was a deputy of the constituent assembly and a lawmaker until his early death. He became head of the Christian Democrat parliamentary group in 1953, DC party secretary (1959-1964), and president from July 1976 until his murder in 1978. He was Italy’s prime minister five times. “The two men came to embody two faces of Italy’s Christian Democracy,” Janković says, “as well as Italy’s two divergent post-war paths”:

“Moro was a statesman and a patriot. In the 1950’s he put together a team of men focused on Italy’s development, on her industrialization and technological advance, and who were committed to enhancing her weight and reputation in international affairs. Moro was also a Catholic traditionalist—a political moderate and economic reformer, but culturally a conservative. Andreotti was opposed to Moro’s strategy of state-guided economic recovery, favoring foreign private investors instead. He was an economic ‘neoliberal’ in the 1950’s-60’s meaning of the term. He also opposed the 1962 Christian Democratic-Socialist (DC-PSI) coalition, which gave Italy over a decade of relative stability and unprecedented prosperity.”

Moro’s policy of creating large public enterprises, especially in the energy sector, was the foundation of Italy’s economic miracle. The banks were encouraged to provide easy credit to domestic investors, with the central bank (Banca d’Italia) playing an active role. Between 1951 and 1972 Italy’s average growth rate was 5.3 percent, slightly below that in Germany (5.7 percent) but well above that in Britain and the United States. The DC-PSI coalition reformed the dysfunctional taxation system, secured years of industrial peace through long-term agreements with the unions, and put Italy on the map as a global economic player.

By the early 1960’s Andreotti emerged as the informal leader of opposition to Moro’s strategy on the Christian Democratic “right.” Heavily Masonic in composition, Andreotti’s wing of the party included individuals connected with large multinational corporations, especially in the energy sector. There is strong evidence that some of these people were involved in the murder of Enrico Mattei in 1962. A Catholic resistance veteran, in 1945 Mattei was put in charge of dismantling the state petroleum company Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli), founded by the Fascist regime in 1926. He changed his mind about the project, however, when he realized that several U.S. oil companies were eagerly waiting to grab Agip’s assets for a song. Mattei reorganized the company into the National Fuel Trust (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, ENI) instead. Under his direction ENI negotiated key oil concessions in the Middle East and a drilling agreement with the Soviet Union, all of which helped break the previous stranglehold of the “Seven Sisters” (a term he coined to refer to the dominant oil companies) on the oil industry. To the multinationals’ horror, Mattei also inaugurated the ENI rule that any country in which it operated would receive 75 percent of the profits. This secured important concessions in Iran and North Africa. By the late 1950’s ENI was competing with giants like Esso andShell. In 1960, after concluding the agreement with the Soviet Union and while negotiating with China, Mattei publicly declared that the American oil monopoly was over.

On October 27, 1962 on a flight from Catania to Milan, Mattei’s executive jet crashed and all three men on board were killed: Mattei, his pilot, and an American journalist. The official inquiry—personally overseen by Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s defense minister at the time—declared it “an accident.” It is now known that crucial evidence was immediately destroyed at the crash site, and all flight instruments were dissolved in acid. In October 1995, the exhumation of Mattei’s remains resulted in the discovery of metal debris fragments—indicative of an explosion—embedded deep in his bones. In 2005 the incident was reclassified as homicide, with perpetrator(s) unknown.

(An additional mystery connected with this case remains unresolved. While working on the documentary The Mattei Affair in 1970, Francesco Rosi asked Mauro De Mauro, a prominent investigative journalist, to join the project. De Mauro soon obtained what he termed important evidence about Mattei’s final days, but disappeared eight days later without a trace. His body has never been found. Several investigators involved in the search for De Mauro were later killed, including the Carabinieri general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.)

Mattei’s murder did not interrupt Italy’s longest period of calm and prosperity in modern history. Starting in 1969, however, a wave of terrorist attacks hit the country, allegedly perpetrated by the far left or the far right. Most of them remain unresolved to this day. Two fascists were convicted in 1995 of planting a bomb at the railway station in Bologna which killed 85 people and wounded 200 others in August 1980. We still do not know who ordered the attack and with what motive in mind. We do know that the probe was side-tracked for 15 years by Andreotti’s associate Licio Gelli, who later gained notoriety as the grand master of the secretive Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge. In November 23, 1995, Italy’s Court of Cassation convicted  Gelli and three other Masons, Francesco Pazienza and SISMI officers Pietro Musumeci and Giuseppe Belmonte, of obstructing investigation into the Bologna Massacre. (“He was a politician highly trained and honest, ready to tackle the tasks that were entrusted to us,” Gelli (93) said upon learning of Andreotti’s death. “He knew how to keep the secrets that were entrusted to him. Andreotti did his duty, using the secrets to promote the well-being of the people. He kept the secrets, and he took them with him. What a man…”)

One of those secrets concerns Andreotti’s role in setting up and developing a clandestine NATO “stay-behind” network in Italy during the Cold War known as Operation Gladio. The role of the CIA in sponsoring Gladio and its involvement in terrorist attacks during Italy’s Years of Lead remains contentious. The origin of the operation itself is not: it was based on confidential “NATO protocols,” committing the secret services of all member states to prevent communist parties from coming to power. A briefing minute of June 1, 1959, reveals that Gladio, “in case of a Soviet military invasion,” would organize resistance by internal subversion. More significantly, it was to play “a determining role… also in the politics of emergency.” Secret arms arsenals were set up and personnel recruited and sworn to secrecy.

Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s defense minister at the time of the 1959 memorandum, denied “unequivocally” Gladio’s existence under oath on two occasions—in 1974 and 1978—to judges investigating the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. On October 24, 1990, as Prime Minister, Andreotti finally acknowledged Gladio’s existence to the Chamber of Deputies; by that time it had ceased to be a secret. In his admission Andreotti described Gladio as a “structure of information, response and safeguard,” with arms caches and reserve officers. He gave the parliamentary commission in charge of investigations on bombings, a list of 622 civilians who were allegedly part of Gladio; but the list subsequently proved to be incomplete. Andreotti said that 127 arms depots had been dismantled.

Following the revelation, the P2 Lodge treasurer, General Siro Rosetti, launched a spirited defense of Gladio’s concept and importance. Later that year, a decade after the Bologna massacre, Judge Libero Mancuso—who had led the investigation and secured the initial convictions of the bombers—broke his silence to the (London) Guardian: “We [investigators] are isolated, and the objects of a campaign of aggression. This is what has happened to the commission into the P2, and to the magistrates. The personal risks to us are small in comparison to this offensive of denigration, which attempts to discredit the quest for truth. In Italy there has functioned for some years now a sort of conditioning, a control of our national sovereignty by the P2—which was literally the master of the secret services, the army and our most delicate organs of state.”

In the course of his 1990 admission, Andreotti assured the deputies that Gladio had not been involved in any of the terrorist attacks. A decade later, however, in 2000, the Italian Senate published a report which stated that “[t]hose massacres, bombs, and military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.” The report claimed that US intelligence agents were informed in advance about several attacks, including the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later, but did nothing to alert the Italian authorities or to prevent the attacks from taking place.

General Gianadelio Maletti, commander of the counter-intelligence section of the Italian military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975, told the March 2001 Piazza Fontana bombings trial that the CIA had foreknowledge of the event and approved terrorismas a means of preventing Italy’s leftward slide. “Don’t forget that Nixon was in charge. “Maletii added, “and Nixon was a peculiar man, a very intelligent politician but a man of rather unorthodox initiatives.” Slobodan Janković does not consider such claims too far fetched:

“The U.S. elite did not look with approval on the Italian economic model. Its financial interests were threatened outside Italy as well, especially by ENI’s expansion. The Americans tried to smear Moro by implicating him in the Lockheed bribes scandal, but he successfully defended himself in the court of law. More dangerous than public slanders were threats, especially when coming from people capable of carrying them out. According to the 1980 testimony by Moro’s widow to the parliamentary commission of investigation, during a visit to Washington in 1974 Moro was openly warned not to pursue his policy of “historic compromise” with the Left, or else he’d ‘pay a price.’ Moro paid that price on March 16, 1978, when he was kidnapped and all five of his bodyguards killed in an attack allegedly carried out by the Red Brigades. His body was found on May 9 in the trunk of a car. The kidnappers, according to the official version, saw Moro as a symbol of ‘imperialism’ who deserved punishment, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Moro was a patriot, a Catholic, a statesman and a family man. On the day of his kidnapping a new government, headed by Giulio Andreotti, was supposed to be formed. This was eventually done, but because of Moro’s kidnapping the historic compromise was abandoned.”

During his seven-week captivity, Aldo Moro wrote several letters to various political figures, including Andreotti. In October 1990, a cache of previously unknown letters was discovered in a Milan apartment which had once been used as a Red Brigade hideout. One of those letters made reference to the involvement of both NATO and the CIA in an Italian-based secret “parallel army.” That safe house had been searched at the time of Moro’s death by Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the head of counter-terrorism division who was put in charge of investigating the kidnapping. Dalla Chiesa was murdered in 1982.

Moro’s kidnapping and murder were also investigated by a government committee under the guidance of then-prime minister Giulio Andreotti. It included the heads of two security agencies (General Santovito of SISMI and General Grassini of SISDE) and the commander of the Financial Police (Guardia della Finanza), General Raffaele Giudice. All three of them were members of P2. The only service chief who was not a Mason, Prefect Gaetano Napoletano ofCESIS, was removed by Andreotti in the early stages of investigation and replaced by yet another P2 member, General Walter Pelosi. The committee proceeded to make several spectacular lapses. One of them was the fact that telephone lines suddenly went down in the area where Moro and his escort were passing—five minutes before the attack—and came back to normal half an hour later. This caused a delay in alerting the authorities to the attack. Director-General of SIP (the telephone company) was Michele Principe, yet another P2 member. The police commissar in charge of liaison with SIP was Antonio Esposito—yes, you’ve guessed it, also a P2 member. Furthermore, years later it became known that someone at the SIP switchboard prevented the monitoring of phone calls which the kidnapers were making to Moro’s family.

Immediately following Moro’s death, investigative journalist Mino Pecorelli wrote that Dalla Chiesa was in danger and would be assassinated. He drew a connection between Gladio and Moro’s death. Pecorelli, who was on Licio Gelli’s list of P2 members discovered in 1980 but had fallen out with Gelli before Moro’s death, was assassinated on March 20, 1979. It was immediately suspected that Pecorelli’s murder was related to the Prime Minister, but there was no proof. Almost two decades later, when a former Mafia member testified that Andreotti had ordered the hit, the aging senator-for-life was charged and brought to trial. In 2002 Andreotti was sentenced to 24 years in prison for his role in the murder. That sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeals, however; he never went to jail.

Two days after Moro’s kidnapping and the formation of a new government, Licio Gelli (b. 1919) gathered in Rome the representatives of all 496 Grant Orient Loges of Italy. Gelli was confirmed as Italy’s grand master and as leader of the more secretive and influential P2. Gelli, known under the nickname Belfagor, was a fascist in his youth, a double (German-communist) agent during the war, a U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) asset after the war, and a key man in setting up Operation Gladio. In his diaries (Diari 1976-1979) Andreotti mentions meeting Gelli in the aftermath of Moro’s murder—but only to discuss Latin America! The security services appear to have had no active files on Gelli, which seems unbelievable in view of his prominence and activities. Some of his files were likely burned in 1974, when Andreotti ordered the destruction of 157,000 personal dossiers. Only the Financial Police kept three reports on active file, concerning Gelli’s illegal arms deals in the Middle East and South America and his contacts with Junio Valerio Borghese’s banned far-right group, prior to the latter’s mysterious death in Spain in 1974. Of the four investigators who composed those reports, one was murdered, one committed suicide, one went into early retirement… and one joined Gelli’s P2 Lodge.

When asked in 2009, about his links with the P2, Andreotti replied. “Ah, yes… That strange lodge—Gelli’s one.” The Guardian’s reporter was stunned: “He said it distractedly, with the air of a man recalling the bridge circle he had once heard was run by the wife of the friend of a very distant cousin. You would never have thought the revelation of the P2’s activities infused Italian politics with scandal for years—years in which Andreotti was a leading player, if not the leading player, on the political scene.” He denied being a mason, although the wife of Roberto Calvi, the banker found mysteriously hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, testified that he was. More than just a member, in fact: “he was accused of being the hidden string puller behind the lodge [P2] to which Calvi belonged.”

The most damaging, and most extensively proven accusations against Andreotti concerned his links to organized crime. An early connection concerned Salvatore “Salvo” Lima, described in the final report of the first Antimafia Commission (1963–1976) as one of the pillars of mafia power in Palermo. Developing his political career in the DC that began in the 1950s, Lima became close to Andreotti in 1964. He was often referred to as Andreotti’s “proconsul” in Sicily and once held a junior cabinet post, which resulted in the ministry’s most senior civil servant resigning in protest. In 1992 Lima was shot dead by a Mafia assassin, presumably for failing to deliver on some pledges. Years later the Guardian’s John Hooper put it to Andreotti that he must have known he was dealing indirectly with the mafia. “But Lima never spoke to me about these things” Andreotti replied. “A lot of people in Sicily have links with the mafia. That isn’t just true of the Christian Democrats, but of others.” “Lima never spoke to me about these things” did not sound like an overly spirited denial, especially for a man of Andreotti’s experience and acumen.

In the mid-1990s a string of mafia informers emerged to testify that Andreotti had been Cosa Nostra’s protector in Rome, known as “uncle Giulio.” Andreotti was charged and the judges ruled that, prior to 1980, there had been “concrete collaboration” between Andreotti and the mafia, which “induced its members to feel protected at the highest level.” He was not convicted or sentenced because his crimes were covered by a statute of limitations. “The only thing they haven’t said about me,” Andreotti quipped years later, “is that I’m a freemason.” It would be funny, but for the trail of bodies and corruption which il Divo had left in his wake.

Following the Tangentopoli scandal and the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) investigation, Italy’s affairs passed into the “capable” hands of Giuliano Amato—now retired on a $40,000 monthly pension—and Mario Draghi, now head of the European Central Bank. Eurofanatics and blind followers of the Washington Consensus, in the 1990’s they carried out a privatization plan as catastrophic for Italy’s economy as anything seen east of the Iron Curtain following the collapse of communism. A century and a half after Italy shook off first Austrian rule and French tutelage, it still proved vulnerable to the vincolo esterno, the external constraint—this time to the international bankers, Brussels bureaucrats, and the IMF.

Berlusconi’s three terms as prime minister did not change much. He had failed to create, enact and apply a bold vision of Italy for the 21^st century. As I wrote in 2011, his private peccadilloes and dubious business practices could have been overlooked had he not left Italy, after almost ten years in office, in no better state than he found her in 1994:

“The economy is grotesquely over-regulated, yet the old system of corrupt government contracts and phony jobs for the well-connected is alive and well. The central bureaucratic machine is as bloated and inefficient as ever. An estimated third of potential tax revenues remain uncollected. Italy is, in terms of growth, the sick man of Europe: only Zimbabwe and Haiti had lower GDP growth than Italy in 2000-2010. The public debt, at $2.6 trillion, is 120% of GDP. A quarter of Italy’s under-30s are unemployed and another quarter is subsisting on dead-end, 1,000 euros-per-month jobs in mamma’s care, thus contributing to a demographic collapse far worse than that in Central and Northern Europe. There was no improvement in productivity under Berlusconi: Italy’s international competitiveness has actually declined over the past decade. Public spending has been outstripping growth for years; since 2009, it has accounted for more than one-half of the GDP.”

Slobodan Janković’s assessment is also grim: “Between 1945 and 1992 there were many ranking Italians of professional and personal integrity at all levels of the state and society who were prepared to risk much, even their lives, in the struggle against organized crime, secret societies, and power centers connected to foreign political and financial interests. In the present era of Monti, Letta and Bonino, however, the patriots and traditional Catholics have no power and no voice.”

Berlusconi’s seven-year prison sentence for abusing power and having sex with an underage prostitute changes nothing. He will appeal, the sentence will be overturned, and the current unnatural coalition will continue on its long road to nowhere in particular. The economy will continue to stagnate, and the process of moral and spiritual decay will continue to turn one of the most civilized countries in the world into a shadow of its former self.

Alas, poor Italy…

Hydrofracking Boom Or Bust

The economics of oil or natural gas hydrofracking are seldom analyzed from the perspective of the American consumer. Most discussions focus upon the investment opportunities of specific companies, royalties to leaseholders, windfall tax revenues that state governments will benefit from and the bonanza that local communities will enjoy from the added business activity. Missing is a clear understanding of the pricing points and factors that will determine the actual selling charge and total all inclusive retrieval costs in the domestic market. Will the price of energy drop precipitously or will the net effect be that the native end user sees no direct benefit from the rush to drill?

The environmental risks of the fracking process are real. Policymic presents an assessment of the merits of Hydrofracking Fact and Fiction: What You Need to Know About the Controversial Practice.

“Hydrofracking uses a lot of water: it may take several million gallons of water to properly frack a single well. Water is the main ingredient in hydrofracking; the sand is used to help keep the fractures open once they are created, while the mix of chemicals helps the process along and eases the flow of gas/oil. It is hard to say what chemicals are used since most firms treat their frack mixtures as proprietary secrets, and thanks to industry lobbying efforts, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled in 2005 that companies do not have to disclose their frack mixtures. Much of the water used in hydrofracking eventually comes back up to the surface contaminated with hydrocarbons, sand and other chemicals. Treatment and disposal of this used water is a major challenge to any hydrofracking operation. Environmentalists are sounding the alarm over hydrofracking-related groundwater contamination, contending that methane gas and fracking chemicals are migrating up from the frack locations and into local water tables.”

The next point starts with a specious assumption:

“The economic benefits of hydrofracking are obvious, but is the process too inherently dangerous to use, or can its environmental risks be mitigated? That is the question to ponder. Unfortunately both the oil and gas industry, and environmentalists are doing their best to make an informed debate on the issue impossible.”

Who really reaps economic gains from this process? Clearly, the corporatists have a strategy that benefits from international sales, while burdening local jurisdictions with the reclamation expenses from the negative eco aftermaths. Also, the effect from actual greater production extraction costs results in selling in to markets willing to pay top prices for the oil or gas.

Opponents of hydrofracking warn of the Fracking Economics Revealed as Shale Gas Bubble, Not Silver Bullet.

The reports, Drill Baby Drill by veteran coal and gas geologist David Hughes and Shale and Wall Street by financial analyst Deborah Rogers, assess the economic sustainability of the tight oil and shale gas booms that are sweeping America.

Together, the authors conclude that rather than offering the nation a century of cheap energy and economic prosperity, fracking will provide only a decade of gas and oil abundance, at most, and is creating a fragile new financial bubble that is already starting to deflate. Additional research conclusions discussed at the briefing included:

1.The shale gas and tight oil booms have been oversold. According to actual well production data filed in many states, shale gas and shale oil reserves have been overestimated by operators by as much as 400-500 percent.

2.Wall Street has played a key behind-the-scenes role in hyping the fracking boom through mergers and acquisitions and transactional fees, similar to the pattern seen in the housing boom that led to the financial crisis.

3.High productivity shale plays are not common. Just five gas plays and two oil plays account for 80 percent of production of those energy sources, while the most productive areas constitute relatively small “sweet spots” within those plays.

4.Production rates are already in decline in many shale plays. The high rates of per-well investment required to maintain production mean U.S. shale gas production may have already peaked and maintaining production will require high rates of potentially unsustainable, high-cost drilling.

Deborah Rogers points out the most significant economic consequence from hydrofracking.

“Exporting is a last ditch effort to shore up a failing balance sheet. Exportation will drive the price higher in the U.S.There’s no doubt about it. The question is how high will it go. When you are producing a commodity and have produced it to such a high extent, you want to find someone who will buy it, and in this case, it will be the Asians.”

Here is the key issue. If the energy resources from fracking are destined for an export market, sold at a dramatically higher price overseas, the pressure will increase to raise domestic prices when the oversupply vanishes.

The greed from the Fracking Boom Prompts Foreign Export Of U.S. Gas, Could Drive Up Prices At Home, inevitably demonstrates that the public will never experience the benefits of low cost energy produced from our own soil.

“In recent months, however, production has begun to level off as the glut of natural gas keeps U.S. prices down. In response, producers have begun pushing to export the fuel to Europe and Asia, where prices are far higher.

Approval of all the projects currently under review by the Energy Department could result in the export of more than 40 percent of current U.S. production of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which is gas that’s been converted to liquid form to make it easier to store or transport.”

Energy internationalists, opportunistic politicians, Wall Street banksters and irresponsible developers would stash ill-gotten gain from the pillaging of our domestic resources, as our energy rich residents get to pay a higher price for their energy needs. Add into the equation the enormous environmental chemical pollution of our finite ground water and you have a monumental disaster in the making.

Since safeguards and less caustic additives can be substituted within the fracking technology, the bare minimum course is to protect the water supply. In addition, production from such development needs to have a direct benefit to the American consumer. No fracking for export sales is the national interest.

Media Once Bitten, Forever Scorn

Hurrah, the worm has turned! Or has it? The corporatist controlled mass media love affair with the puppet spinmeister seems to be on the rocks. For progressive propagandists, the profession of journalism has long sunk into the sewer. Withal, the elitist snobbery of the self-appointed gatekeepers for the globalist power structure got a slap in the face and a wakeup call, from Associated Press spy-gate. The reporter darlings for the Obama “Chicago Outfit” protection racket just got a taste of unexpected payback appreciation. Slow on the uptake, Obama Lapdog Andrea Mitchell on IRS Scandal: “One of the most outrageous excesses I’ve seen in all my years in journalism” “Wait until this fossil finds out about AP records being seized.”

 

This sentiment typifies the insincere shock from the hypocrites that ignored the criminal pattern of governance for the last four plus years. Just listen to their temper tantrum in the YouTube video, . Oh, woe is I, how can our esteemed profession be treated in such a way by our celebrity creation rock star? How could he betray us, after we covered for him at every turn?

Well, the fact that the “Chicago Gangster Organization” of the Obama crew targeted the electronic communications of the press should not be a shock in the age of the Patriot Act. The real bombshell is that the Justice Dept. Wiretapped the House of Representative’s Cloak Room. “California congressman Devin Nunes made the claim yesterday that the Justice Department wiretapped telephones in the House of Representative’s Cloak Room, an exclusive part of the Capitol where members are able to privately interact with one another.

“Will the newly invigorated and hardy souls of the “Fourth Estate” become bloodhounds and sniff out the ugly stories behind the headlines? Before the long beleaguered news consumer regains confidence that the muckraker tradition of theWashington Merry-Go-Round has returned, consider who really benefits from this miraculous turn of conscience.

Let’s get right down with the despicable truth that most mainstream news is simply a product of disinformation that benefits the shadowy forces that control the editorial content of the spin. Polite company is supposed to ignore that Zionism and the Mediahas an Israel-First agenda in reporting. The direct links of tribe ownership, editorial approval and journalists staffing is simply a fact within the industry.

The linkage of a systemic slanted viewpoint and sympathy for an ideology that conflicts with traditional Americanism is a reality that cannot be denied by any honest observer. Prodigious lies from politicians are expected, but repeating the prevarications, while professing a claim that objective journalism is their trade, is a primary reason whypresstitutes are so despised.

In order to understand the current media scorn towards the Obama regime needs a shot of bold courage for analysis of the geo-political influence that dictates the perspective that goes into print. Since the mass media is a top down cabal of groupthink, it is entirely explicable that some political objective is at the core of the “so called” fabricated media outrage.

The Obama administration has demonstrated a reluctance to do the bidding of the most bellicose pro Zionists. The significance that an illegal preempted strike on Iran, a priority for Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, has not received approval from Barry Soetoro means that the string is running out on Obama usefulness. Interminable media speculation has been registered about Barack Hussein Muslim sympathies. Leaving the extent of such motivations aside, the critical question is whether a teleprompt reader, tutored by the CIA to become an asset for the agency, is really making foreign policy decisions.Consider that the red line has passed for Obama, and that operations for false flag distractions are firmly in the hands of his controllers. Stripping the imposter in chief of his political capital and placing blame on his inept and gonzo behavior is a natural for the skilled character blackwash of media assassins.

The most reasonable conclusion from an analysis of the sudden turn by a uniform media is that the order, from on high, went forth that ignoring greater Israel interests, has consequences. From none other than the oracle of Zionist supremacy, the New York Times editorial board Spying on The Associated Press, expresses their new found denigration.

“For more than 30 years, the news media and the government have used a well-honed system to balance the government’s need to pursue criminals or national security breaches with the media’s constitutional right to inform the public. This action against The A.P., as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press outlined in a letter to Mr. Holder, “calls into question the very integrity” of the administration’s policy toward the press.”

The mere mention of the Attorney General from the Department of Injustice, mildly stated is just a little late. “Fast And Furious” Eric Holder is the poster boy for careerist corruption going back to the Oklahoma City Bombing. Why now is the media turning on an AG that makes one longing for the resurrection to office of John Mitchell?

The POTUS proclaims, I Have ‘Complete Confidence’ In Holder.

“President Barack Obama continues to back Attorney General Eric Holder following the fallout over the Justice Department secretly obtaining two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press.

During a Rose Garden press conference, the president stated that he has “complete confidence” in the job Holder is doing.”

And why would Obama not back his buffoon sibling in law-breaking? Know NothingHolder is either the minister of incompetence or the sheriff of selective memory.

“Attorney General Eric Holder used the phrase “I don’t know” or some variation, at least 57 times during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee today as House Republicans grilled him over controversies including the IRS’ targeting of Tea Partiers, the Justice Department’s seizure of journalist phone records, and the security lapses surrounding the Boston bombing.

Holder, who says he has recused himself from an intelligence leak probe in which the Department of Justice subpoenaed phone records from Associated Press reporters, repeatedly dodged questions about the growing scandal.

When asked whether the DOJ attempted to work with the AP before seizing the phone records, Holder said, “I don’t know what happened. I was recused from the case.”

The Daily Mail expands in the article, Eric Holder points finger at his DEPUTY, “Holder said that he recused himself from the making the controversial decision to subpoena the phone records of Associated Press journalists, saying that it was made by Deputy Attorney General James Cole.”For all those remaining Obama supporters, why isn’t Eric Holder indicted for obstruction of justice as a prelude to impeachment of his boss?

Already we are hearing that many more disclosures are about to break. One such disgrace, coming out of a broadcaster, notable for their ESPN coverage, is the account of the IRS Official in Charge During Tea Party Targeting Now Runs Health Care Office.

“Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.”

The sport of network political coverage has been more about entertainment than accountability coverage. The application of investigative inquiry and objective criteria is mostly absent from the half-truths and feel good treatment of favored political causes and personalities. Quality investigatory reporting of a Robert Novak, Seymour Hersh or a Jack Anderson is very rare today. The standards that they practiced need to be applied by the Washington press corps.

Will the media demonstrate the same intensity of scrutiny, when querying Press Secretary Jay (Ron Ziegler, Jr) Carney as they did during Watergate? Dream on folks, the asymptomatic embellishment in reporting by the progressive media is embedded in their genes. Their function is to enable the collectivist cover-up that has a primal goal of dismantling our constitutional republic.

Independent news organizations need to get down to veracity and confront the power structure with the same vigor and intensity of John Peter Zenger. The publishing trade honed by Benjamin Franklin is dishonored by the journalists that grovel for career recognition from media conglomerates that write deliberate falsehoods.

Journalists know that their editor can strip out any item that does not conform to the “PC” policy of the publisher. The real Associated Press scandal is that the moguls of media stories are in the business of serving the political agenda of their ownership masters.

The reason that alternative news sites are dangerous to the establishment version of information is that the internet readers obtain none filtered content and are able to assess their own conclusions. The rightful contempt due for government political propaganda also applies to the slick talking heads that mouth the scripts of their internationalist overlords. Whom do you trust? The globalist adaptation of reality has no credibility.

Eroding Freedom In America

US democracy is illusory. America never was beautiful. It’s not the land of the free and home of the brave. It wasn’t created that way. More than ever, it’s not now.

Freedom is a four-letter word. It’s fast disappearing. It’s an endangered species. Wealth, power and privilege alone matter. America’s war on terror priorities advance them.

International, constitutional and US statute laws are spurned. Rogue state ruthlessness replaced them. Boston’s unprecedented lockdown suggests what’s coming. It covered a two hundred square mile area. An important threshold was crossed.

Martial law terrorized city residents. Constitutional rights were suspended. Perhaps it was prelude to what’s coming. It can happen anywhere across America. It can show up nationwide.

Thousands of heavily armed militarized police, National Guard troops, FBI Swat teams, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operatives, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and perhaps other federal, state and local enforcers showed what full-blown tyranny looks like.

Defying public diktats risked arrest or getting shot. Helicopters hovered low over neighborhoods. House-to-house searches ordered pajama-clad families outside.

Without probable cause, some were handcuffed and/or placed face down on sidewalks. Others were publicly strip-searched. Imagine what’s coming next time. Freedom in America’s on the chopping block for elimination.

What’s ongoing already includes:

• numerous police state laws;

• waging war on humanity;

• indefinite detentions without evidence, charges or trials;

• forced disappearances;

• targeted assassinations;

• torture and other forms of abuse;

• Big Brother surveillance;

• warrantless searches;

• other privacy invasions;

• false flag national security abuses;

• war on terror fear-mongering;

• military commission trials, including for US citizens;

• domestic military force deployments;

• secret FEMA concentration camps;

• racial profiling and persecution;

• militarized local police;

• criminalizing whistleblowers; and

• targeting non-believers for supporting right over wrong.

Tyranny isn’t in the eye of the beholder. It’s escalating in plane sight. It’s just a matter of time until it’s full-blown. Washington’s bipartisan criminal class plans it.

It’s hard-right, unbridled, reactionary, and pro-corporate. It’s anti-democratic, anti-dissent, anti-freedom, anti-civil and human rights, anti-social justice, anti-environmental sanity, and anti-government of, by and for everyone.

It’s dangerous living in America at the wrong time. Supporting right over wrong is threatened. Anyone can be targeted for any reason or none at all. Guilt by accusation is policy. Diktat authority has final say.

The National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF) includes national and local organizations. Its mission is:

“To educate the public about the erosion of civil and political freedoms in the society, and the abuses of prisoners within the US criminal justice system especially after 9/11, and to advocate for the preservation of those freedoms and to defend those rights according to the US Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related UN Conventions, and the Geneva Conventions.”

Civil liberties are threatened, it warns. Public safety at the expense of freedom assures neither.

Post-9/11, thought crime prosecutions followed. Individuals and groups were targeted for “their beliefs, thoughts, or associations.”

Doing so violates constitutional protections. First Amendment freedoms are compromised. They’re fundamental. Without them, all others are at risk.

They include free speech, a free press, free thought, culture and intellectual inquiry, assembly, freedom to practice the religion of one’s choice, and to petition government for redress of grievances.

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) “defend(s) the rule of law and rights and liberties challenged by overbroad national security and counter-terrorism policies.”

It “support(s) an ideologically, ethnically, geographically, and generationally diverse grassroots movement to protect and restore these principles by encouraging widespread civic participation; educating people about the significance of our rights; and cultivating grassroots networks to convert concern, outrage, and fear into debate and action.”

Its “Campaign for the Constitution” headlines: “Building a Movement. Restoring Rights. Reclaiming Our Constitution.” At issue is restoring lost rights. Bipartisan complicity compromised them en route to eliminating them altogether.

Rule of law protections “withered under warrantless surveillance, rampant racial and religious profiling, and torture – and even human experimentation – with impunity.”

The ACLU highlights lost digital age civil liberties. New technologies compromised existing protections. Post-9/11, they’ve undergone serious erosion.

Web site visits are tracked. Cell phones log our movements. Emails and social network communications are monitored and stored. Warrantless spying is policy.

“Things we once thought could only happen in far-away enemy states or distant dystopias are suddenly happening here in America” said ACLU.

Privacy laws haven’t kept up with technology. War on terror priorities matter most.

Protecting civil liberties in the digital age requires “ensur(ing) that expressive, associational, and privacy rights are strengthened rather than compromised by new technology.”

It’s also about “protect(ing) these core democratic rights against intrusive corporate and government practices that rely on new technology to invade these rights.”

They’re being systematically destroyed. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Washington “consistently (doesn’t) recognize the protections afforded by the US Constitution and international law, and in doing so, it has failed in its responsibility to maintain a democratic society that is both open to, and accountable to, the people.”

Government is shrouded in secrecy. Checks and balances no longer matter. Bill of Rights freedoms are fading. They’re fundamental in democratic societies.

War on terror priorities breached First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment freedoms. At issue are search and surveillance authority, indefinitely detaining citizens and non-citizens uncharged, and undermining free expression, due process, and equal protection.

Washington’s criminal class is bipartisan. Ahead expect much worse. Old time radio listeners recall a memorable Jack Benny skit. “Your money or your life,” a robber asked?

After a pause, he was asked again. He responded saying “I’m thinking it over.”

Today no one’s asked. It isn’t either-or. It’s both.

A Final Comment

Fixing America’s dysfunctional system demands fundamental change. It starts by reforming the nation’s sham electoral process. Throwing out bums assures new ones.

Both major parties are two sides of the same coin. Not a dime’s worth of difference separates them. Secrecy and back room deals substitute for a free, fair and open process. Duopoly power rules.

Party bosses chose candidates. Big money owns them. Voters have no say. They get the best democracy money can buy. It happens every time.

The entire process was constitutionally flawed by design. Over time, things got worse. Bipartisan politics serves serves wealth, power, and privilege. Popular interests go begging.

Money power runs America. It games the system. It does so destructively. Controlling money, credit and debt for private enrichment assures speculation, booms, busts, inflation, deflation, instability, crisis, recessions and depressions.

It assures transferring enormous amounts of wealth from ordinary people to corporate giants and super-rich elites already with too much.

Washington is Wall Street occupied territory. What financial giants want, they get. They’re waging financial war on humanity. They’re more powerful than standing armies.

Economies are strip-mined for profit. Communities are laid waste. Ordinary people are impoverished and left out. Vital needs go begging.

Money power in private hands and democracy can’t co-exist. Complicit politicians betray the public trust. They do so for benefits they derive.

Social injustice defines official policy. Class war rages more than ever. America’s on a fast track toward tyranny. Stopping it requires free, fair and open elections. It’s also about returning money to public hands where it belongs.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at .

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

 

Source: ICH

The Biggest Peaceful Coup In World History

The American Middle Class Is Almost Gone…

The culture of the United States of America is beginning to adjust to the new economic status brought on by the trade treaties and the world government legislation passed by our elected officials.  The vibrant middle class that was a Hallmark of the nation has succumbed to the exportation of millions of high paying jobs to cheaper locales and the retail outlets that were supported by that former affluence are beginning to close their doors.

A poorer society cannot support the broad selection of retail opportunities American shoppers have enjoyed and store closings are beginning to restrict the selection in marginal cities.

Prior to the Real Estate debacle the Florida town where I live was expanding at a record rate.  A South Florida developer had purchased a large horse farm and gotten approval to construct homes and a major outdoor shopping center.  Construction began.  Dillards opened, Dicks Sporting Goods, Old Navy, Barnes and Noble, Kohls, H. H. Gregg, McAllisters Deli, Panera Bread and McDonalds.  Scores of additional stores were constructed and several small businesses leased space.  The real estate crash halted construction.  Many of the smaller stores went out of business leaving acres of newly constructed retail spaces and residential lots that may never be used.  The anchor stores now stand as lonely lumps in an emaciated skeleton starved by the death of the middle class.

On the other side of a major highway an older indoor shopping Mall has lost two anchor stores and has several vacancies.  The Gap just closed.  New renters are textile stores on short leases; some of these have opened and closed within a month or two.  A new shop just opened offering a Chinese foot massage. The Mall was built in the 1980s and the high end jeweler that closed the beginning of this year and the men’s clothing store that just closed a couple of months ago were anchor stores.  These are stores that like The Gap have been supported by the upper Middle class.

Wikipedia has a list of significant business failures by year going back into the 1930s.  I counted the failures during the last decade of the Twentieth Century and the First decade of the Twenty First Century.  My figures may not be exactly accurate but the comparative rates are astounding.  I counted 87 failures during the 1990s compared to 327 from 2000 through 2010.  Read recent statistics here.

According to a Pew survey the middle class net worth dropped 28 percent in the decade following 2001 while the upper one percent edged higher.  They attributed this distinction to plummeting home values that impacted the middle class while wealthier people held broader based assets.  While inflation has torn away at the value of the dollar middle class family income has declined by about 4 percent in the new century.  From 1970 into the new century the percentage of total income enjoyed by the wealthy has risen from 29 percent to 46 percent while the middle class share has declined from 62 percent to 45 percent.  Read the results of the survey here.

In this new world created over the heads of the American people the United States will bear no resemblance to the proud, affluent and powerful nation that emerged victorious after WWII.  The objective is to flatten out the nations of the world making them more homogeneous and easier to govern.  United States wealth is long gone replaced by trillions of dollars of debt that will enslave its citizens for generations..

Hitler’s Germany has been propagandized as the primary Satan of the Twentieth Century but it is a myth created to hide the wholesale wickedness of the Russian Revolution.  Several decades ago Norman Dodd, then Director of Research to the Reece Committee, visited Alan Gaither, President of the Ford Foundation to explain why Congress was investigating foundations. Before he could explain, Mr. Gaither said, “Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here, have had experience operating under directives, the substance of which is, that we use our grant-making power so as to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.”

It seems apparent now that what Henry Kissinger and President Nixon promised the Chinese during their visits in 1971 and 1972 was the United States of America offered up like the head of John the Baptist.  No wonder the Chinese were interested!  A scant 30 years later China is not only beneficiary of our manufacturing base but it also holds mortgages on our massive supplies of coal and oil.

A stupendous world change has occurred during the past several decades.  Assets of the world’s wealthiest nation were peacefully removed by a legislative agenda sold to the people as beneficial and passed by their democratically elected politicians. This legislative agenda was planned in advance with the wile of The Serpent and as the devastating results set in a War on Terrorism was used to hide them and to deflect the animosity.  The United States of America has now become the puppet of the money powers who have cannily used debt to enslave the world.

The time for redemption has passed.  The horse is out of the barn.  America cannot be redeemed!  We are no longer a nation of pseudo-Christians with European roots.  Immigration policies have filled our fruited plains with a variety of hungry immigrants who have been granted an opportunity made possible by several generations of hard working legally upright citizens.  It was given away as if it had no value and used as a tool to balkanize and divide the country. Consensus is now extremely difficult.  The goal has been accomplished, it cannot be stopped.

It has been the biggest peaceful coup in the history of mankind

While giant, world-wide, corporations spawned and nourished in America are forced to move their production to low wage countries by international agreements made over the heads of citizens, our balkanized nation must compete with this cheap labor.  The competition includes China, Japan, India, Singapore, and Korea. These are nations of hungry, intelligent, well educated, industrious people that are willing to work seven days a week to acquire some of the luxuries Americans have enjoyed for decades.  This transition will take more than a generation and by the time it is over the United States will be an insignificant part of the world.

It was not honest competition that sank the good ship America but a massive burglary carried out in darkness.  So far the theft has been successful.  We know who the burglars are but they are holding the citizens hostage while they remain free..

We are no longer the righteous nation that Alexis de Tocqueville so brilliantly described nearly two centuries ago.  The transition started in earnest with the success of the ACLU’s  legal challenges to Christianity.  Under the false assumption that separation of church and state meant that Christianity had to be removed from government and from the public square the ACLU conducted a legal war against Christianity that succeeded in banning any overt conduct of the nation’s primary religion.  This Kosher war against Christianity was not only evident in government but included our institutions of higher learning as well.  The Christian Church failed to mount an aggressive counter attack allowing Satan’s minions to achieve a victory.

Now, as the American middle class disappears and businesses begin to close we can begin to see the fruition of what Alan Gaither of the Ford Foundation said to Norman Dodd over fifty years ago.  We are beginning to resemble the Soviet Union.

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