Growing Illiteracy In America: Creating Entrenched Poverty

Let us consider the one word that defines poverty and human misery around the world:  illiteracy!  It creates destitution, loss of human dignity, starvation and chaos throughout any civilization. Examples: Haiti, Somalia, Mexico, Detroit-Michigan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan and dozens of other countries.

Because of illiteracy, today, in excess of 1.5 billion human beings cannot procure a clean glass of drinking water when they wake up.  In the neighborhood of 2.0 to 3.0 billion human beings will not enjoy a toilet or shower today.  This year, 18 million human beings will starve to death.

Why? Answer: illiteracy!

Each day in India, 1,000 children under the age of 12, die of diarrhea, dysentery and other water borne diseases.  No toilets, no clean water, no sanitation!  Again: illiteracy!   (Source: www.populationmedia.org)

In the United States today, according to CBS anchor Katie Couric, 13.4 million American children live below the poverty line.  Millions of these children suffer malnutrition and hunger as a daily reality.  Why?  Illiteracy of their parents!  Even our social services, welfare, food stamps and free lunch programs cannot keep up with the sheer magnitude of America’s new poor class.  Another 43 million Americans subsist on food stamps because they lack the educational skills to secure a job.  (Source: Reuters News Services)

Disturbing fact: 42 million Americans suffer functional illiteracy according to the National Right to Read Foundation.  They cannot read, write or perform simple math.  Another 50 million Americans cannot read past the 4^th grade level.

Illiteracy Statistics

• 42 million American adults can’t read at all; 50 million are unable to read at a higher level that is expected of a fourth or fifth grader.
• The number of adults that are classified as functionally illiterate increases by about 2.25 million each year.
• 20 percent of high school seniors can be classified as being functionally illiterate at the time they graduate.

Source: National Right to Read Foundation

Where Illiteracy Leads

• 70 percent of prisoners in state and federal systems can be classified as illiterate. [2.3 million Americans languish in jails]
• 85 percent of all juvenile offenders rate as functionally or marginally illiterate.
• 43 percent of those whose literacy skills are lowest live in poverty.

7,000 teens drop out of American high schools every day; one every 26 seconds

NBC anchor Brian Williams reported that 1.2 million teens hit America’s streets every June unable to read or write. Detroit, Michigan epitomizes this country’s educational dilemma: 76 percent dropout/flunkout rate. Dozens of cities across the country suffer 50 to 60 percent dropout rates.

CNN reported on August 30, 2010, “7,000 American high school students drop out every day; one every 26 seconds.”

ILLITERACY DEFINES THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES: ENTRENCHED AND INTRACTABLE

What causes illiteracy in third world countries?  Answer: culture, religion and diminished intellectual capacity!  In other words, citizens of Somalia live pretty much in the Stone Age as to their existence as hunter-gatherers. They remain at the mercy of their environment and conditions.

What happens when a first world civilization imports millions of people from third world countries where illiteracy maintains a strangle-hold on human beings?  Answer:  that first world country methodically dismantles its ability to educate, enlighten and lift such persons out of their cultural and intellectual deficits.

Today, the United States adds 3.1 million human beings from the most poverty-stricken areas of the world.  They rush into America so fast; we cannot educate them quickly enough to bring them into the mainstream.  How many?  We import 225,000 to 250,000 every 30 days.  They birth 900,000 babies annually.  Migrants crossing without papers add another 800,000 annually.  Total: 3.1 million!  (Source:www.cis.org, Washington DC, Dr. Steven Camarata, additionally, www.TheSocialContract.com)

Today, American taxpayers shell out $346 billion annually across 15 federal agencies for illegal and legal immigrants. Year in and year out!  (Source: Edwin Rubenstein report www.TheSocialContract.com)

The question anyone might ask:  what will happen to the American taxpayer within the next 24 years when the projected addition of 72 million more third world immigrants manifest within America?

Answer: intractable, entrenched and ruthless poverty on levels that cannot be educated, uplifted, fed, watered, housed or sustained.

Can anyone tell me I’m off base, wrong or erroneous in my calculations?  Am I wrong in my research that I stated with the sources given?  Do you not see it in your own cities?  I mean, dear reader, we already see illiteracy swamping Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, Denver, Cleveland, Kansas City and San Francisco.

As our educational systems implode, our own citizens become useless to themselves and our civilization as to becoming useful members.  As we degrade academic standards to make everyone else feel good, we diminish our country and deliver it into the hands of poverty, illiteracy and hopelessness now seen in one-third of the human race around the planet.

I don’t know about you, but our kids will find themselves paying for this human-illiterate-overload beyond their capacity to feed, house and educate their own families.  It will get too big, to expensive and too unyielding. It already is!

How can we save ourselves, our children, our communities and our civilization from the ravages of illiteracy?

• Suspend all immigration into this country for 10 years.
• Or, immediately reduce all immigration to less than 100,000 annually.
• Make sure all immigrants pass educational tests and English. comprehension before being admitted to the USA.
• Engage E-Verify as a mandate for all employers across America.
• Disengage from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya for savings of $15 billion a month to be applied to our educational systems.
• Stop “Free Trade” and bring back “Fair Trade” to bring manufacturing and other jobs back to America to employ our parents.
• Teach sex education and introduce birth control information into our inner cities and most distressed minority areas to help teen girls to make better choices.  Why? Today, according to a recent report by Dottie Lamm in the Denver Post, 68 percent of African-American teens are single mothers.  All of them draw on welfare that costs you billions of dollars annually for Aid to Dependent Children.
• Stop all birthright citizenship that continues at 400,000 dependent children annually.

What are the alternatives if we fail to act?  America will degrade into the same conditions that I have witnessed around the world on my bicycle travels.  It can only worsen if we fail to do something for future generations.

The next 20 years in America—immigration equation

We are SO unprepared for our future!

Part 3

As I said at the beginning of this series, the next 20 years will be nothing like the last twenty years. If you think gas prices rip money out of your wallet today—watch for water, heating costs and food prices to explode beyond your paycheck in 20 years.  Everything we took for granted for decades will change.

What confounds me stems from the fact that we bring this civilization-breaking predicament down upon ourselves—with no apparent understanding of our dilemma.  We could stop what’s coming at us by a suspension of relentless immigration of 3.1 million annually and another 72 million immigrants within 25 years—because that’s what’s driving our human overload.  If we add another 72 million immigrants as projected, just tell me how we’re going to feed, house, provide healthcare and jobs to that many people when we cannot provide jobs for 15 million of our own citizens today.

Every month, our Congress injects another 225,000 immigrants into this country, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.  We’re cracking up our country faster than Humpty-Dumpty.  Once we manifest another 72 million immigrants, everything will change in this country of ours. Everything!

The great French writer Jean Raspail told his beloved country the same thing in his book Camp of the Saints 35 years ago as a fleet of immigrants steamed toward France: “You don’t know my people—the squalor, superstitions, the fatalistic sloth that they’ve wallowed in for generations.  You don’t know what you’re in for if that fleet of brutes ever lands in your lap.  Everything will change in this country of yours.  They will swallow you up.”  Today, France staggers under its five million Muslim immigrant load that has created two Frances, two incompatible cultures, two languages and a very dim future for the French as they become outnumbered by their immigrants. Note: add UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy and Canada.

If you could imagine the entire island of Haiti with 9.5 million poverty- stricken, illiterate people immigrating into the United States—that’s what we’re doing to ourselves. Times a factor of eight!

“The United States is the only country in history that deliberately changed its ethnic makeup, and history has few examples of diversity creating a stable society,” said Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm.  By 2045, America’s new majority will become Mexican/Hispanic.

As dozens of ethnic tribes push for dominance in our communities, with their incompatible cultural proclivities, in their insupportable taxpayer-provided baby making, with their reliance to welfare, in their lack of educational propensities, with their crime, and in their drug use—we all lose.  It’s already happening at breakneck speed with flunkout/dropout rates of 7,000 high school kids quitting every day; more than 1.2 million annually. (Source: CNN)  What do you think uneducated people do?  They make more babies like themselves at a rate greater than we can pull them out of the ghetto situation.   We cannot maintain an educated workforce with functionally illiterate individuals.

Dr. George Colburn said, “It is insanity to add new cultures that promote disharmony within an existing peaceful culture.”  www.tomorrowsamerica.com

MULTICULTURALISM: UNCONTROLLABLE CHAOS

Dr. Garrett Hardin’s ‘The Ostrich Factor’ illustrates our folly as to turning our culture over to many cultures: “Multiculturalism presumes peaceful coexistence of many cultures within the boundaries of the same nation. Examples of multiculturalism from USSR, the Baltics, and Central Africa have resulted in violence generated by chaos.”

Hardin suggests the adoption of multiculturalism is based on a serious misunderstanding of culture. “The definition of culture by 19th century anthropologists: “the activities of a society – that is, of its members – constitute its culture” was intended to enlarge sympathy for daily rituals around the globe. The consequences of multiculturalism are much different when many cultures are placed within a single nation (intranational multiculturalism) rather than between nations (international multiculturalism).

“The unity and strength of a nation depends on maintaining the dominance of law-supported discriminations. To achieve world peace, spatially separated countries must obey different ethical mandates. A nation selecting to forbid genital laceration of young girls (Female genital mutilation) cannot tolerate internal diversity. Intranational (within our country) multiculturalism creates chaos and destroys national peace. By contrast, international multiculturalism can promote peace in the short term and still provide appreciation of culture through personal visits and information exchange.”

While the USA suffered(s) racial divides with its Blacks and Whites for the past 236 years, it will now experience greater separation with Blacks, Whites, Mexicans and Muslims—all competing from totally different cultural mandates and religions.  The great philosopher Kant said, “Religion and language are the two great dividers.”  As you can imagine, we’re in for a rough ride as English, Arabic and Spanish all fight for dominance—and completely different languages fighting to be understood within the USA.  Result: ultimately misunderstanding and confrontation on every level, i.e., Balkanization.

FINALLY, THE SHEER NUMBERS OF IMMIGRATION

While most Americans refuse to do anything about the ‘corroding’ of our culture, language and sustainability—it’s obvious in our $13 trillion debt, water shortages, endless wars draining us to death, medical care breakdown and general apathy toward everything.  Yet, the numbers keep rising toward adding 72 million immigrants and another 30 million Americans to reach 100 million by 2035—a scant 24 years from now.

Chris Hedges said, “Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. They become increasingly vulnerable. And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat by a terrified and confused population from reality, an inability to acknowledge the self-evident fragility and impending collapse. The elites at the end speak in phrases and jargon that do not correlate to reality. They retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court at Versailles, the Forbidden City or modern palatial estates. The elites indulge in unchecked accumulation of wealth and extravagant consumption. They are deaf to the suffering of the masses that are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted.” (Source: “This time we’re taking the whole planet with us”)

I see this ‘thing’ coming as surely as the dawn.  Many others do, too! The question:  how do we ‘get’ to our leaders before we degrade as a civilization?  How do we force them to change course?

“As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do,” said Hedges. “They launch more wars, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break the last vestiges of unions, slashed jobs, froze wages, threw millions of people out of their homes, and stood by idly as we created a permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed.”

I hope this column wakens you to what we all face in the next 20 years—or more importantly—what our children face.  It’s not pretty, but we can change it.   Ideas for a positive future:

• Moratorium on all immigration into the United States
• Enforce laws to repatriate 20 million illegal aliens
• Cease ‘free trade’ and engage ‘fair trade’
• Bring manufacturing back to America
• Elect a president with integrity, talent and economic skills
• 50,000 U.S. Marines on Mexican border
• Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan
• Engage massive conservation efforts for glass, metal and plastics
• Engage massive efforts  for energy efficiency, insulation, conservation
• Engage massive educational thrust for all American kids at every level
• Engage massive education as to nutrition, exercise and quality of life
• That means we cannot remain a nation of 68 percent obesity and expect to enjoy healthy lives or sustainable healthcare systems
• Regain personal accountability and personal responsibility as a way of life
• Elect politicians that work for America instead of liars and incompetents that now dominate Congress
• Your ideas?

These two videos visually tell you what I have written. Send them to all your friends. The more we understand, the more we will take action. The more we take action, the sooner we change our history toward a viable future for our children:

In a five minute astoundingly simple yet brilliant video, “Immigration, Poverty, and Gum Balls”, Roy Beck, director of www.numbersusa.ORG, graphically illustrates the impact of overpopulation.  Take five minutes to see for yourself:

“Immigration by the numbers—off the chart” by Roy Beck

This 10 minute demonstration shows Americans the results of unending mass immigration on the quality of life and sustainability for future generations: in a word “Mind boggling!” www.NumbersUSA.org

The Fed’s Credit Report; No Light in the Tunnel

On Monday, the Federal Reserve released its Consumer Credit Report which showed that consumer credit rose at an annual rate of 2.5% in January. That might sound impressive, but things are not what they seem. Non-revolving credit increased at a rate of 7% per anum, while revolving credit decreased at an annual rate of 6.5%. So, people are taking out more loans, but keeping their credit cards tucked away in their wallets. But there’s more to this story than meets the eye, and it’s important, because economists monitor credit expansion closely to see how the economy is doing. You see, when wages stagnate–as they have for the last 30 years—the only way that working people can increase their spending is by borrowing. And since consumer spending is roughly 70% of GDP, if consumers don’t borrow, then the economy doesn’t grow.

So, what’s in the report that’s so disturbing?

Well, for one thing, the two main areas of improvement are auto loans and student loans. And, both sectors are built on foundations of sand. After all, the reason that auto sales are booming is that the big car dealers are giving-away-the-farm to people with poor credit. As Autonation’s President Michael Maroone said last week on the Nightly Business Report:

“The big driver of the recovery in 2010 was the restoration of credit. The change in 2011 is we`re now seeing an improving environment for sub-prime. So last year prime and near prime were more normal and this year we`re starting to see the sub- prime segment come along and that`s very important for our industry.” (The Nightly Business Report)

So, we’re back to “Square 1″, right? GM is offering “72 months zero percent financing” to people with dodgy credit. And then the dodgy loans are being chopped up, glued together, and sold to as bonds to “yield seeking” institutional investors around the world. That’s the way the new financial system works, and that’s why the system broke down when investors tried to ditch these crappy bonds in the autumn of ’08. It triggered a run on the shadow banking system that led to worst financial crisis in 70 years. Now car dealers are back for a double-dip reviving subprime loans to inflate another bubble.

The uptick in auto sales has nothing to do with “organic demand” for autos. That’s baloney. It’s about getting anyone who can fog a mirror to sign on the dotted line so the contract can be sold to gullible investors looking for higher yield.

Even so, sales did increase on the month, so, technically speaking, there was a boost in credit. The question is whether subprime auto lending is a sign of recovery or not? The answer is “No”.

The other area of nonrevolving credit that improved was student loans, which basically represented all of the increase in non-revolving credit aside from auto sales. Think about that for a minute. In other words, the commercial banks, finance companies, credit unions, savings institutions, nonfinancial business and pools of securitized debts all barely squeaked-by or lost ground in January. That’s amazing. Virtually every area of non-revolving credit is still flat on its back a full 30 months after Lehman Bros collapsed except for student loans. And the media tries to spin this as good news?

The credit issued via student loans soared from $317 billion to $342 billion from December to January, a $25 billion windfall in just one month. But, as we pointed out in an interview with Professor Alan Nasser, the student loan business is the biggest swindle of all. Bigger than subprime by many orders of magnitude. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

MW–Is it fair to say that the student loan industry is a scam that targets borrowers who will never be able to repay their debts?

Professor Alan Nasser—It’s as fair as fair can be….How many of these students are subprime borrowers? That is, how closely do student loans resemble junk mortgages? The answer hinges on three factors: how these loans are rated, how likely the borrower is to repay, and the default rate on student loans.

The ratings of student loans are supposed to reflect the “health” of those loans, defined as the likelihood that the borrowers will default…..In September 2008, then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced in a news release that default rates on federal loans were “historically low”: only 5.2 percent of recent grads were in trouble. Spellings used the cohort-default rate to arrive at this figure. But the Department’s Inspector General Office employed a more realistic method in its 2003 audit, which calculated lifetime risk. It estimated that over their lifetime between 19 and 31 percent of college freshmen and sophomores would default on their loans (depending on the type of loan and when it was taken on). For community college students, the prospects were grimmer still: between 30 and 42 percent were expected to default. And the future was most discouraging for students at for-profits: between 38 and 51 percent were anticipated to default.

You can see that the default rate among student borrowers is expected to be higher than that for subprime home mortgages.”

Repeat: A default rate of 51%. This is predatory lending writ large.

So, when we talk about student loans, we’re not talking about something that strengthens economic recovery. We’re talking about a scam that targets vulnerable young people who want to play by the rules so they can make a positive contribution to society. These kids are getting fleeced by shyster banksters and loan sharks whose only interest is lining their own pockets. Most of these students will be in debt until the day they die. (Students are not afforded any of the consumer protections of other borrowers. They cannot shed their debts through bankruptcy.)

Here’s an e mail I just got from a reader that explains what’s going on at colleges across the country. (The name and state have been withheld)

“Here in Connecticut Higher Ed… students are allowed to enter college without being ready. They are allowed to fail 4 of 5 courses for 2 semesters without being expelled. Only if the trend continues at the end of the third semester are they expelled. Our colleges do not have the specialists needed to help such students. BUT THE COLLEGES WANT THE TUITION these students bring—from Pell Grants, loans, parents etc. These students are being conned. They will likely have significant debt when they finally are expelled. I am dealing with two such students this semester. They are very good people. But one was born in Haiti migrating here just 4 years ago; the other is military vet, first generation college student. No screening before admission. Both are very slow readers and the fellow from Haiti never had training in how to take notes in class….

Our governor–who has ordered an ersatz reorganization of most of Higher Ed in Washington— said he wants MORE students coming to college and graduating faster.”

signed, Name withheld

X-military and foreign students (in particular) have been targeted by this loan-laundering scam that is costing students and taxpayers billions each year.

So, apart from these dubious “improvements” in non-revolving credit, the Fed’s credit report is really pretty grim, much as one would expect when households are still deleveraging from a gigantic financial meltdown that cost them $11.4 trillion in personal wealth and home equity. And, as we noted earlier, revolving credit shrunk by 6.5% in one month alone. So, two and a half years into the so-called recovery, working people are still using their credit cards as little as possible. That’s a good indication of the true state of the economy, which is rotten.

Don’t believe the “Happy Day’s Are Here Again” blabber. The country is still in the throes of a severe multi-year depression. The Fed’s Credit Report just provides more proof.

Interview with George Katsiaficas

U.S. Human Rights Policy is Self-serving and Duplicitous: George Katsiaficas…

George Katsiaficas is a renowned university professor, sociologist, author and activist. He is a visiting American Professor of Humanities and Sociology at Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea where he teaches and does research on the 1980s and 1990s East Asian uprisings.

Katsiaficas has a Ph.D. of sociology from the University of California, San Diego. Since 1990, he has taught sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. During the period between 2006 and 2008, he was an Associate in Research at the Harvard University and Korea Institute.

He specializes in social movements, Asian politics, the U.S. foreign policy, comparative and historical studies and has written numerous books in these fields.

In 2003, he won the American Political Science Association’s Special Award for Outstanding Service and in 2008, received the Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Fellowship.

Among his major books are “The Battle of Seattle” by the New York’s Soft Skull Press, “Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party” by New York’s Routledge Press and “South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising” by London’s Routledge Press.

What follows is the complete text of interview with Dr. George Katsiaficas on the recent uprising in the Arab world, its impacts on the international developments and its implications for the United States and its European allies.

Kourosh Ziabari: After Tunisia and Egypt in which the revolutionary forces and people on the ground succeeded in ousting the U.S.-backed puppets, several other Arab nations joined them and staged massive street demonstrations to call for civil liberties, improved living conditions, freedom and democratic governments. Now the whole Arab world is in a state of turmoil and unrest and the U.S.-backed dictators are facing the bitter reality that their autocracies are about to fail and collapse. What factors led to the extension of anti-government protests to the whole Arab world? Can we interpret this collective uprising a result of the explosion of strong pan-Arabist sentiments?

George Katsiaficas: No one could have predicted that the suicide of a vegetable vendor in rural Tunisia would unleash long pent-up frustrations on such a scale. If we take a long historical view, the Arab world went into a steep decline after Europeans discovered how to round Africa and established direct trade with the East. While oil has provided a huge stimulus for recovery in the 20th century, its effects have been drastically mitigated by elite corruption. The Arab people are finally awakening from a long slumber. The masses of ordinary Arabs today know in their hearts that they are more intelligent than their rulers. They know that they could all live better lives if they could get rid of the corrupt and often stupid elites trampling on their freedoms and hogging the money that rightfully belongs to everybody.

The phenomenon of uprisings spreading from place to another and drawing in ever more sectors of the population is one that I first uncovered when I studied the global movement of 1968. Unlike armed insurrections of the early part of the 20th century, the New Left involved a rapid proliferation of popular unarmed revolts—historically a new phenomenon. As I pulled together my empirical studies, I was stunned by the spontaneous spread of revolutionary aspirations in a chain reaction of uprisings and the massive occupation of public space—the sudden entry into history of millions of ordinary people who acted in a unified fashion, intuitively believing that they could change the direction of their society. Although they were not united by any centralized organization or even loosely tied together by any coordinating body, everyone was inspired by the heroic struggle of Vietnam. All over the world—from Paris to Prague, Chicago to Mexico City, and Dhaka to Beijing—people’s revolutionary aspirations and actions were not only synchronized, but they were also remarkably similar to each other in their international solidarity and desire for self-government.

After analyzing the proliferation of the global movement, especially the strikes of May 1968 in France and May 1970 in the US, I coined the term the “eros effect” to explain the rapid emergence of global solidarity and love. From my case studies, I came to understand how in moments of the eros effect, universal interests become generalized at the same time as the dominant values of society are negated (such as national chauvinism, hierarchy, and individualism). At that time, for example, opinion polls consistently showed that Ho Chi-minh was more popular than Richard Nixon on American college campuses. See The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987.)

At first glance, the current revolt appears to be confined to the Arab world, but in fact, it has already had a much wider effect: Gabon, Iran, and China have all felt the tremors from the rising in Egypt. Even workers in Wisconsin, who are fighting cutbacks in their standard of living, expressed admiration for, and inspiration from, the Egyptian uprising. Certainly pan-Arab sentiments are a driving force, yet they are not essential. People feel in their bones that change is possible—and not only in the Arab world.

KZ: Many Iranians believe that the uprisings of Tunisia and Egypt have been inspired by Iran‘s Islamic Revolution of 1979. They compare the overthrowing of U.S.-backed Mubarak and Ben Ali to the dissolution of Mohammad Reza Shah’s government which was unconditionally supported by the United States and its European allies. Do you find such a relationship between these revolutions which took place during an interval of 32 years?

GK: Revolutions and popular uprisings have unexpected results—and not necessarily immediate ones. Even generations later, people’s memories and psyches assimilate lessons from previous eaves of struggles. The courage of Iranians in 1979, their withstanding of ferocious repression by the Shah and his forces, was evident for people all over the world, and inspired Haitians and Filipinos to overthrow their dictators. In 1987, I wrote that, “In the epoch after 1968, popular movements have internalized the New Left tactic of the occupation of public space as means of social transformation, and this tactic’s international diffusion led to the downfall of the Shah, Duvalier, and Marcos…the significance of the eros effect and the importance of synchronized world-historical movements will only increase.”

KZ: In your recent article, you’ve compared the new Middle East revolutions to the Korea’s 1987 June Uprising when after 19 consecutive days of massive street demonstrations, people could finally bring down the 26-year autonomy of military forces and hold direct presidential elections. In what ways are these movements similar to each other?

GK: In both cases, people basically fought with bare hands against mighty police forces and defeated them. Thousands of ordinary citizens claimed the right to remain together in public and refused to go home when ordered to do so. Small informal leadership circles emerged in the course of popular struggles, drawn initially from extant activist circles but also porous enough to admit many newcomers from a variety of constituencies. Most significantly, both revolts were quickly ended by the peaceful retirement of the incumbent president and vague promises made by the military—which in both cases remained in power as the uprising subsided. It took South Koreans another five years of struggle before the first civilian was elected president, and it took until 1996 to put the previous dictators in prison. While one agreed to the order to return some US$300 million that he had stolen from the public, Chun Doo-hwan famously testified he had less than $100 to his name—thereby losing his honor but keeping a fortune of perhaps $700 million. Both sums pale in comparison to the estimated fortune amassed by Mubarek. It remains to be seen how much of the Mubarek family holdings will be recovered—or, more importantly, whether or not Egypt will move toward substantive democracy. The longer people adopt a “wait and see” attitude, the less chance there is of change. Millennia of pharonic rule and dictatorships are not easily undone.

KZ: The Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is said to have deposited $90 billion in Italian and other European banks. Since 1990s, the European states moved towards normalizing their ties with the dictator and supported him both politically and financially. Now, these Western states with which the Libyan dictator was once a close friend are calling for a unified international action against him. The old friend has now become a bitter enemy. Isn’t this an exercise of double standards by the Western governments?

GK: This double standard is nothing new. The US has a long history of riding on the backs of dictators in Third World countries and then tossing them away like a used car once they have outlived their usefulness. Longtime Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos was ousted with US approval in 1986; the CIA maintained real time connection to the rebels and provided them with invaluable intelligence information. Much earlier, in 1961, Rafael Trujillo, who had ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist for decades, was assassinated. Many people suspect the CIA provided the assassins with the weapons they used. In 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had faithfully served US interests in South Vietnam from 1956 to 1963, was overthrown in a military coup about which the US had advance knowledge, and US refusal to assist him led to his assassination. Many people believe long-time US ally Park Chung-hee, ruler of South Korea from 1961 to 1979, was killed with advance US approval.

KZ: The media have reported that the mercenaries of Colonel Gaddafi have so far killed more than 6,000 protesters in Tripoli and other cities of Libya. What’s your prediction for the political future of Libya? Gaddafi has vowed to remain in power and “die as a martyr”; however, the protesters, despite the large-scale crackdown by the government haven’t retracted from their stance and are still calling for the ouster of the old dictator. What will be the outcome of these tumultuous clashes in Libya? Will the revolution finally end in the overthrowing of Muammar Gaddafi?

KZ: That is a life and death question for thousands of Libyans. It is too early for us to tell whether or not the armed revolt will prevail. With the US and NATO already overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Joints Chiefs are resisting the call by conservatives here to implement a no-fly zone and come to the assistance of the rebels. We should not forget that Gaddafi has played ball with the US in recent years, and he is certainly calling in every favor he is owed. In 1980, the US encouraged Korean General Chun Doo-hwan to suppress the democratic popular uprising in Gwangju. There can be no doubt that it may well stand by and watch as Gaddafi crushes those opposed to his rule.

KZ: Prof. Rashid Khalidi believes that the recent uprisings in the Arab countries have transformed and changed the mainstream media’s portrayal of the Muslim world. The people that were once introduced as fanatic terrorists and extremists are now being called freemen who sacrifice their lives for the sake of achieving freedom and liberty. Do you agree with this viewpoint? Has the communal uprising of the Arab world changed the public’s viewpoint regarding the Arabs and Muslims?

GK: In my view, US public opinion has not really shifted much. The self-organization of armed resistance to Gaddafi astounds American journalists. American young people note with amusement that soccer and dating web sites were used by young Libyans to organize their uprising, but my students complain that they feel burdened by the region’s peoples looking to the US for help.

I suspect the change in Arabs’ own self-understanding is far more significant. For too long, the role of public opinion and the importance of ordinary people has been disregarded in the region, especially by insurgencies, which instead of seeking to stimulate popular movements and raise consciousness, instead pinned their hopes on elites or organized armed commando actions. The first and most influential shift occurred with the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s. The people’s uprising was ruthlessly crushed—remember Yitzhak Rabin’s orders to break bones of unarmed children—but the spirit of popular resistance was kindled throughout the region.

KZ: We already know that the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya are among the major human rights violators in the world; however, the United States and its European cronies who frequently boast of their concerns about the preservation of human rights and freedom have been long indifferent to the persecution of political activists, incarceration of journalists and bloggers and other abuses of human rights in these countries. On the other hand, the superpowers have always employed the excuse of human rights for pressuring the independent and non-aligned nations such as Iran. What do you think about this dualistic approach?

KZ: From the very beginning, US human rights policy has been self-serving and duplicitous. In the name of democracy and enlightenment, the US exterminated millions of Native Americans. The US government broke nearly every treaty it ever signed with native peoples, a sad history known as the “Trail of Broken Treaties.” It would be laughable if it were not so tragic that a country based upon enslavement and murder of millions of Africans and genocide against Native Americans, a country that killed at least three million Koreans and more than two million Indochinese, a country that today is massacring thousands more in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, could seek to instruct anyone on “human rights.” Yet it is precisely a self-righteous belief in American freedom and superiority that motivates continuing genocide.

President Jimmy Carter, with whom the modern version of human rights policy is thought to originate, collaborated with Indonesian generals in the bloody invasion of East Timor. Carter approved the suppression of the Gwangju Uprising at the cost of hundreds of lives. Years later, when evidence of his actions could be assembled, a Peoples Tribunal found Carter and 7 other high US officials guilty of “crimes against humanity for violation of the civil rights of the people of Gwangju.” Five months afterwards, Carter was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. The hypocrisy continues unabated. Obama enlarges the war in Afghanistan and attacks Pakistan, and he, too, is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Should we be surprised that an award named after the inventor of dynamite provides international legitimation of Western imperialism and aggression?

KZ: As my final question, what’s your prediction for the future of Arab countries which have been engulfed by the waves of popular upsurge in the recent weeks? Will the autocratic regimes of the Persian Gulf region finally yield to the demands of the protesting revolutionaries?

Unfortunately, my prognosis is that the region will continue to be burdened by corrupt elites, but also that existing rulers will have to permit larger circles of economic innovators to emerge and grant people a wider range of civil liberties. With a population of 90 million, Egypt barely managed to manufacture what Costa Rica (population 900,000) could produce. Historically speaking, uprisings have opened the doors to subsequent economic development, as we readily see today in East Asia.

I suspect that substantive democracy in the Arab world (nor practically anywhere else for that matter) is not in the cards—at least for now. Elections may well be permitted but, as in the US, candidates will reflect the dominant parties, not any meaningful alternative. Military spending will continue to be lavish and result in enormous waste of resources. Militarized nation-states armed with weapons of mass destruction, although widely understood as historical anachronisms, will continue to reign supreme. Ordinary people’s dreams of a world at peace reveals a wisdom that far surpasses their rulers’ capacity to think, yet the resultant contradiction requires a globally synchronized effort to result in real change.

In my view, the synchronicity of revolts and occupation of public space that began in 1968 is continually widening its circles. Besides the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we saw a wave of uprisings after Gwangju that spread in six years from 1986 to 1992 through the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Thailand. This most recent emergence of the eros effect in the Arab world indicates that popular movements are building to an even more intense climax, to a global uprising that might finally bring an end to the scandalous control of humanity’s collective wealth by a handful of billionaires.

Abortion, Birth Control, Common Sense and Reality

Human beings perform 46 million abortions annually around the planet. Year in and year out! That’s 46 million women requesting and accepting an abortion of their fetus. According to the World Health Organization, 96 percent of those abortions represent a secondary form of birth control. That means they did not have access to birth control on the front end. It means they either couldn’t feed a child, shelter it or provide for it—or they already had birthed too many children they couldn’t feed or care for.

At the same time, eight million adults and 10 million children under the age of 12 die of starvation and related diseases annually around this planet—18 million human beings. Year in and year out! In my world bicycle travels, I witnessed such massive human die-offs personally. I also witnessed living conditions that would turn the stomach of an average Canadian, European, American. (Sources: Time Magazine, World Health Organization)

Two billion human beings live on less than $2.00 per day and over 1.5 billion human beings cannot procure a clean glass of drinking water. Over 2.1 billion humans do not have access to or use of flush toilets with water sewage treatment plants. In India, 1,000 children under the age of 12 die of dysentery, diarrhea and other water borne diseases every day of the year. (Source: www.populationmedia.org) Yet, without birth control, India grows by an added 12 million annually, net gain, on their way from 1.2 billion to 1.6 billion in 39 years. The Ganges River, which I witnessed, flows into the ocean loaded with raw sewage, chemicals and cremated human bodies. It forms a 10,000 mile dead zone at its mouth—where few marine creatures can survive the polluted waters. Today!

Another impoverished nation, Haiti, long before the earthquake, suffered under 9.1 million people on a tiny island desecrated by human overload. They cut 98 percent of their trees. Remember Easter Island’s human population fiasco? Result: extinction of their civilization! Haitians run billions of gallons of raw sewage into the ocean. They live in utter poverty, and yet, because the Catholic Church curtails any birth control, Haiti, already living in appalling human misery—expects to add another 3.1 million onto that island within another decade or so. Because of the lack of birth control, Haitian women birth thousands of children they cannot feed, care for or house. Illiteracy: almost 100 percent. Definition and cause of their poverty: illiteracy, religious mandates and babies.

The third world adds 80 million children annually, net gain. Fact: 57 million humans die off around the planet every year. Humans birth 57 million to replace them while birthing another 80 million to create a net gain—on our way to adding 2 to 3 billion more humans within 40 years.

In other words, the human race seems to love its suffering, its deaths by starvation via all religions that stand against birth control and family planning.

Here in the USA, according to Dottie Lamm, Denver Post last Sunday, “A full 69 percent of African-American children are raised by a single parent, usually the mother.”

They birthed those children because they either didn’t have money or access to birth control. Cost to U.S. taxpayers in Aid to Dependent Children: billions since 1965 when government programs paid for those women to be non-responsible for their actions. White, Black, Hispanic—no difference! Current food stamp usage: 43 million Americans too uneducated, too poor, or incapable of holding down a job to buy food! (Source: Reuters News)

Current high school dropout rates across the nation: 76 percent in Detroit, Michigan; 50 percent in Denver, Colorado; 55 percent in Los Angeles; and most other major cities. Result: 7,000 teenagers per day drop out of high school, 1 every 26 seconds—total of 1.2 million annually—illiterate teens hitting our streets. (Source: Brian Williams, NBC News, CNN)

We may prefer to ignore these sobering statistics, but they will not ignore us or our civilization—given enough time—complete breakdown of our welfare, educational, medical and prison systems.

THE GREAT ABORTION DEBATE

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted down funds for International Family Planning as well as in the United States, i.e., birth control, family counseling regarding “wanted births” as well as termination of pregnancy. They removed the very funds that could alleviate human suffering by providing birth control and family counseling for millions of America’s and third world poor.

Let me be clear: I am not in favor of abortion. Used as birth control, it remains insensible!

Common sense: I am in favor of birth control so that abortion would become largely obviated.

If the House carries through with its ‘charge’ to stop family planning, sex education and family size counseling—its collective choice will generate added millions to that 46 million annual abortions. At the same time, it will cause millions more starvations of adults and children that do become born. It will add to environmental devastation now taking place around the planet as we add 80 million humans annually.

CONSIDER THESE FINANCIAL OUTLAYS ON TOP OF HUMAN DEGRADATION

Cost of International Family Planning: $130 million annually. Planned Parenthood in the USA: Less than $50 million.

Cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: $12 billion every 30 days. That’s correct; we pay out $12 billion every month to kill people. We killed millions in Korea. We killed over 2.1 million in the Vietnam War. We masterfully snuff out lives in other countries. We have killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan while displacing 2.5 million as refugees.

I must ask: how many rational people reading this column think it’s okay to kill, maim and displace THAT many people in other countries—spend THAT much money on human death—and stand by to witness THAT much misery around the planet, as well as accelerating environmental carnage, while the majority of scientists assure us accelerating backlash by Mother Earth?

You find those actions unconscionable don’t you. Yet by refusing to speak out, you remain complicit in denying to support birth control for women that desperately need it in the USA and abroad.

Tell me—and your friends—why you support the Pope’s advocacy against birth control when you see the poignant results in Haiti, Mexico and every other Catholic-dominated country. The same goes for Islam, Buddhism, Hindus and other religions. What malady within humanity propels human wretchedness over common sense?

When will we Americans face up to the fact that it’s better to proactively prevent conception rather than abort a fetus at the back end of that conception? When will we come to our senses and support birth control rather than do everything in our power to stop it—yet stand gasping in anger at the abortion rates?

You’re invited to get off your ‘righteous indignation’ and get down to reality. Get down to reasoned thinking! Get down to the nitty-gritty of how fast our civilization fails to deal with reality.

As these children grow into illiteracy, poverty, misery, drugs, ghettoes and welfare—you pay the bills. We’re losing the ‘quality’ of our citizens. Every human being wants and deserves to be successful. We need their positive impact on our country, not the other way around. Wouldn’t it be better for the House of Representatives to vote in $140 million for birth control for the whole year rather that $12 billion for killing people every 30 days in Iraq and Afghanistan? Discrepancy: $144 billion for war versus $140 million for birth control. What’s your choice? When will you speak up?

Part 2: humanity’s future, morals, ethics, choice, environment

The Anti-Empire Report

A cautionary tale

In July of 1975 I went to Portugal because in April of the previous year a bloodless military coup had brought down the US-supported 48-year fascist regime of Portugal, the world’s only remaining colonial power. This was followed by a program centered on nationalization of major industries, workers control, a minimum wage, land reform, and other progressive measures. Military officers in a Western nation who spoke like socialists was science fiction to my American mind, but it had become a reality in Portugal. The center of Lisbon was crowded from morning till evening with people discussing the changes and putting up flyers on bulletin boards. The visual symbol of the Portuguese “revolution” had become the picture of a child sticking a rose into the muzzle of a rifle held by a friendly soldier, and I got caught up in demonstrations and parades featuring people, including myself, standing on tanks and throwing roses, with the crowds cheering the soldiers. It was pretty heady stuff, and I dearly wanted to believe, but I and most people I spoke to there had little doubt that the United States could not let such a breath of fresh air last very long. The overthrow of the Chilean government less than two years earlier had raised the world’s collective political consciousness, as well as the level of skepticism and paranoia on the left.

Washington and multinational corporate officials who were on the board of directors of the planet were indeed concerned. Besides anything else, Portugal was a member of NATO. Destabilization became the order of the day: covert actions; attacks in the US press; subverting trade unions; subsidizing opposition media; economic sabotage through international credit and commerce; heavy financing of selected candidates in elections; a US cut-off of Portugal from certain military and nuclear information commonly available to NATO members; NATO naval and air exercises off the Portuguese coast, with 19 NATO warships moored in Lisbon’s harbor, regarded by most Portuguese as an attempt to intimidate the provisional government. In 1976 the “Socialist” Party (scarcely further left and no less anti-communist than the US Democratic Party) came to power, heavily financed by the CIA, the Agency also arranging for Western European social-democratic parties to help foot the bill. The Portuguese revolution was dead, stillborn. ¹

The events in Egypt cannot help but remind me of Portugal. Here, there, and everywhere, now and before, the United States of America, as always, is petrified of anything genuinely progressive or socialist, or even too democratic, for that carries the danger of allowing god-knows what kind of non-America-believer taking office. Honduras 2009, Haiti 2004, Venezuela 2002, Ecuador 2000, Bulgaria 1990, Nicaragua 1990 … dozens more … anything, anyone, if there’s a choice, even a dictator, a torturer, is better.

We are so good even our enemies believe our lies

I’ve devoted a lot of time and effort to the question of how to reach the American mind concerning US foreign policy. To a large extent what this comes down to is trying to counterbalance the lifetime of indoctrination someone raised in the United States receives. It comes in news stories every day.

On January 27, the Washington Post ran a story about the State Department personnel who were held hostage at the American embassy in Tehran, Iran for some 14 months, 1979-81. The former hostages were preparing to hold a 30th anniversary remembrance the next day.

“It was wrong on every conceivable count,” said L. Bruce Laingen, who was the charge d’affaires. “It was absolutely wrong. … That is my most vivid memory today.” Former political officer John W. Limbert agrees, saying that he “would take any opportunity” to tell his captors “what a terrible thing they had done by their own criteria.”

What criteria, I wonder, did the man think his Iranian captors were guided by? In 1953, the United States had overthrown the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh, resulting, as planned, in the return to power from exile of the Shah. This led to 26 years of rule by oppression including routine torture as the Shah was safeguarded continuously by US military support. Is this not reason enough for Iranians to be bitterly angry at the United States? What was Mr. Limbert thinking? What do Americans who read or hear such comments think? They read or hear distorted news reports pertaining to America’s present or historical role in the world every day, and like in the Washington Post article cited here — there’s no correction by the reporter, no questions asked, no challenge put forth to the idea of America the Noble, America the perpetual victim of the Bad Guys.

Atheist: “Blasphemy is a victimless crime.”

Salman Taseer was murdered in Pakistan a few weeks ago. He was the governor of Punjab province and a member of the secular Pakistan People’s Party. The man who killed him, Mumtaz Qadri, was lauded by some as a hero, showering rose petals on him. Photos taken at the scene show him smiling.

Taseer had dared to speak out against Pakistan’s stringent anti-blasphemy law, calling for leniency for a Christian mother sentenced to death under the blasphemy ban. A national group of 500 religious scholars praised the assassin and issued a warning to those who mourned Taseer. “One who supports a blasphemer is also a blasphemer,” the group said in a statement, which warned journalists, politicians and intellectuals to “learn” from the killing. “What Qadri did has made every Muslim proud.”²

Nice, really nice, very civilized. It’s no wonder that decent, god-fearing Americans believe that this kind of thinking and behavior justify Washington’s multiple wars; that this is what the United States is fighting against — Islamic fanatics, homicidal maniacs, who kill their own countrymen over some esoteric piece of religious dogma, who want to kill Americans over some other imagined holy sin, because we’re “infidels” or “blasphemers”. How can we reason with such people? Where is the common humanity the naive pacifists and anti-war activists would like us to honor?

But war can be seen as America’s religion — most recently Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and many more in the past — all non-believers in Washington’s Church of Our Lady of Eternal Invasion, Sacred Bombing, and Immaculate Torture, all condemned to death for blasphemy, as each day the United States unleashes blessed robotic death machines called Predators flying over their lands to send “Hellfire” (sic) missiles screaming into wedding parties, funerals, homes, not knowing who the victims are, not caring who the victims are, thousands of them by now, as long as Washington can claim each time –- whether correctly or not — that amongst their number was a prominent blasphemer, call him Taliban, or al Qaeda, or insurgent, or militant. How can we reason with such people, the ones in the CIA who operate these drone bombers? What is the difference between them and Mumtaz Qadri? Qadri was smiling in satisfaction after carrying out his holy mission. The CIA man sits comfortably in a room in Nevada and plays his holy video game, then goes out to a satisfying dinner while his victims lay dying. Mumtaz Qadri believes passionately in something called Paradise. The CIA man believes passionately in something called American Exceptionalism.

As do the great majority of Americans. Our drone operator is not necessarily an “extremist”. Sam Smith, the publisher of the marvelously readable newsletter, the Progressive Review, recently wrote: “One of the greatest myths draped over this land is that the so-called wing nuts mainly come from the far right and left. And that there is, however, a wise and moderate establishment that will save us from their madness. In fact, the real wing nuts are to be found in the middle. … having captured both public office and major media, [they] spread disaster, death and decay with impunity. Take, for example, the 60,000 some American troops killed in pointless wars beginning with Vietnam. Now count the number of political assassinations, hate murders, terrorist acts and so forth. There is simply no comparison. Yet every war that we have fought in modern times has been the direct choice of the American establishment, those who pompously describe themselves as moderates, centrists, or bipartisan.” ³

Extending the comparison: In 2008 a young American named Sharif Mobley moved to Yemen to study Arabic and religion. American officials maintain that his purpose was actually to join a terror group. They “see Mobley as one of a growing cadre of native-born Americans who are drawn to violent jihad.” ⁴ Can one not say as well that the many young native-born Americans who voluntarily join the military to fight in one of America’s many foreign wars “are drawn to violent jihad”?

Items of interest from a journal I’ve kept for 40 years

(Some written by me, most by others; for those lacking a source you can send me an email.)

• “The biggest crimes of our generation — torture, warrantless wiretapping, and extraordinary rendition — would not have come to light but for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. For the hand-wringing “but we can’t willy-nilly reveal classified information” crowd, do you think Abu Ghraib wasn’t classified?” – Jesselyn Radack
• “The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.” – US Agency for International Development, “Direct Economic Benefits of U.S. Assistance Programs” (1999); i.e., most of the money is paid directly to US corporations.
• In 1963, the Kennedy administration was faced with a steadily disintegrating situation in Vietnam. At a turbulent cabinet meeting, Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked: If the situation is so dire, why not withdraw? Historian Arthur Schlesinger, present at the meeting, noted how “the question hovered for a moment, then died away.” It was “a hopelessly alien thought in a field of unexplored assumptions and entrenched convictions.”
• I watched 21 Marines in full dress uniform with rifles, fire a 21-gun salute to the President. It was then that I realized how far America’s military had deteriorated. Every one of them missed the bastard.
• Soviet expansion was self-defense, not imperialism like with the United States. The Soviets, in World War I and II, lost about 40 million people because the West had used Eastern Europe as a highway to invade Russia. It should not be surprising that after WW2 the Russians were determined to close down that highway.
• In March 2010 Secretary of “Defense” Robert Gates complained that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace.
• The major problem in establishing both the United States and Israel as nations was what to do with the indigenous people. Same solution. Kill ‘em. Without legality. Without mercy.
• From the film “The Battle of Algiers”:Journalist: M. Ben M’Hidi, don’t you think it’s a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?

  Ben M’Hidi: And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.

• … the seamless transition from the Cold War to a perpetual Global War on Terrorism
• One of the reasons some countries allow US bases is because the leaders are worried about being overthrown in a coup and they think that the presence of the US military might discourage such action, or that if a coup breaks out the US can help to put it down. There’s also the large payments made to the government by the US and the prestige factor. Small countries can have inferiority complexes and, as absurd as it may seem to the likes of you and I, having an American base in the country can seem to be a feather in their cap; one of the same reasons they join NATO. Another reason for a base: the US can have intelligence information embarrassing to the country’s leader. This is known as blackmail.
• George Washington referred to the new American republic as the “infant empire”
• Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
• “He [Obama] is trying to say: ‘Do not hate us … but we will continue to kill you’.” – Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s second-in-command
• “Since both the US and France lost in Vietnam, then the ‘fight for our freedom’ must have been unsuccessful, and we must be under the occupation of the North Vietnamese Army. Next time you’re out on the street and you see a passing NVA patrol, please wave and tell them Tim says hello.” – Tim Moriarty
• The American Museum of History, on the Mall in Washington, DC: One of the popular exhibitions in recent years was “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War”. This included a tribute to the “exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives” in Vietnam, where they were “determined to stop communist expansion”. In Iraq, other true hearts “employed air strikes of unprecedented precision”.
• “The United States became the target of terrorists on 9/11 not because of the country’s freedom and democracy, but because U.S. Middle East policy has had nothing to do with freedom and democracy.” – Stephen Zunes
• The Wikileaks documents raise issues of national embarrassment, not national security.
• Orange, Rose and Green Revolutions in other countries require coordinated US government intervention aimed at creating what has been called “genetically modified” grassroots movements.
• Mikhail Gorbachev: “I feel betrayed by the West. The opportunity we seized on behalf of peace has been lost. The whole idea of a new world order has been completely abandoned.” (Interview in 2000.)
• George Bernard Shaw used three concepts to describe the positions of individuals in Nazi Germany: intelligence, decency, and Naziism. He argued that if a person was intelligent, and a Nazi, he was not decent. If he was decent and a Nazi, he was not intelligent. And if he was decent and intelligent, he was not a Nazi. — (I suggest that the reader make any substitution for the word “Nazi” s/he deems appropriate.)
• “The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power.” – Aneurin Bevan, Labour Party (UK) minister, 1897-1960
• “Which adversary has a navy justifying our expenditure of $90 billion for 30 Virginia-class submarines, and which enemy air force justifies our plans for about 340 F-22 fighter planes at a cost of $63 billion? This is pork and waste writ large, making the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ look like child’s play.” – Letter in the Washington Post, 2009
• So many foreign leaders keep silent in the face of US crimes, even when they’re the victim, that we’ve gotten used to that. So Hugo Chávez’s outbursts can seem weird and dangerous.

Notes

1. William Blum, “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower”, pages 187, 228 for sources
2. Washington Post, January 5, 2011
3. Progressive Review, January 27, 2011
4. Washington Post, September 5, 2010

Secrecy, Propaganda, and Ignorance

Recipe for Oppression…

The Evil One is secretive.  Pictures of aborted babies are never published by our press or media.  We do not see the wounded and maimed soldiers returning from the Middle East nor are we shown the terror that accompanies constant exposure to lethal violence.   The bodies of women and children that fall victim to our bombs and drones are neither seen nor reported.  We are not told that the ratio of civilian to military casualties is about nine to one.

Following the strange events of September 11, 2001 the Administration of President George W. Bush created the largest incursion into our personal freedom and privacy in the history of our nation. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) abolished freedom in our airports, Homeland Security gutted the Constitution, the CIA expanded, the FBI grew, and numerous other secret agencies sprang into existence.

Security and intelligence gathering have become malignancies in our government.  If you haven’t kept track, reliable sources count 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in 10,000 United States locations; 84,000 thousand people have top secret security clearance; they are housed in buildings that total 17 million square feet; and every year they publish 50,000 intelligence reports.

Following are some (but not all) of the Top Secret organizations.

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation

DOD Departrment of Defense

NCTC National Counterterrorism Center

XOIWS Air Force, (what it stands for is secret)

DIA Defense Intelligence Agency

NSA National Security Agency

OHS Office of Homeland Security

ODNI Office of Director of National Intelligence

SAP Special Access Programs

NGA National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Intelligence gathering is so vast that finding the detail that requires action is almost impossible. A high ranking official concerned with the highly classified Special Access Programs said, “There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs – that’s God.” This tangled mass of overlapping agencies failed to restrain U. S. Army Major Nedal Malik Hasan, the Egyptian shrink who killed 13 and wounded 30 at Fort Hood in Texas.  Neither did they respond to a father’s report that his son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had succumbed to radical teachings in Yemen.  Airplane passengers did what billions of dollars worth of government intelligence could not do, they subdued young Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber.

Like a cancer the complex continues to grow with new buildings just finished or under construction.  ODNI, with cloudy responsibilities, moved into a new complex at Liberty Crossing;     XOIWS recently constructed its own unmarked building; NGA is working on a new $1.8 billion structure; NSA a new $1.7 billion home; construction is scheduled for a massive headquarters building and a separate operations center at the U. S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, a 270,000 square foot intelligence office is already underway; a new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility is under construction; DHS is building a massive new complex and there is another $3.4 billion security structure in the works.  All of this space gets filled with paid workers.

The Federal Government now employs over 2 million people not including the CIA, NSA, DIA, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.  It is the nation’s largest employer.

We are also building abroad, gigantic multi-million dollar projects are going up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

American citizens are not privy to the functions of the thousands of people working inside these buildings.  Their work is secret and they work for a government that fosters secrecy.  Our government claims secrecy is needed for national security reasons.  The security of the United States of America is complicated.  If we minded our own business as our founders recommended life would be much simpler!  Always belligerent we became interested in dominating other nations in the early Twentieth Century.  Secret manipulations of foreign governments were the rule throughout the 1900s.

Much of the intervention was a result of the business interests of American corporations in foreign nations.  We control many of the nations in our hemisphere: Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba (Until Castro), Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela.  We have troops in 140 nations and those defeated in WWII remain faithful allies.  Following manipulation by Europe’s empires we began dallying in Middle Eastern affairsmaking enemies in Iran before our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Support for the incursion of neo-Israel into Arab territory aroused Muslim wrath and now, the presence of our troops in the Middle East guarantees eternal Muslim enmity.

Foreign intrigues that consume our government seem remote to most of our citizens.  Our knowledge is limited by a controlled press and a propaganda campaign that coaxes citizens into supporting blunt aggression.  Our opinions are irrelevant.  We will become entangled in world government whether we like it or not.  Few Americans seem to care.  They dislike what is happening but they would rather believe the propaganda and vent emotional patriotism than confront the awful evil happening before their eyes.

My last essay emphasized the duty of Christians to confront evil (evil is disobedience to God’s Law).  That essay drew some approval but far more silence.  Silence seems to indicate disagreement without solid rebuttal – it could mean a copout, a person who believes support for God’s Law is too radical; a pragmatist; a compromiser who believes obedience to God’s Commandments is too much to expect.

Twenty years ago I became disillusioned with the Charismatic Movement because two decades of generous conversions had failed to impact the culture.  Literature from Chalcedon helped me to understand that antinomianism had de-fanged Christianity by removing its only defense against evil humanistic laws.  That understanding placed me in the Reformed camp and I began to learn about United States Reformed Christianity.  I was disappointed to find that the same lack of unity that plagues Evangelicals also plagues the numerically challenged Reformers.  There are various kinds of Reformed churches.  In some the women wear head covering and the music is restricted to singing Psalms; some hold to a Dispensational framework; Baptism procedures differ; many shun Christmas and Easter; some are stridently rigid and overtly rude; most preach to small congregations and like their Evangelical competitors seek to avoid controversy.  Though many believe in the efficacy of God’s Law few have the temerity to urge its application in our society.

Reformed Christianity has the theological tools needed to bring lasting liberty to the culture but without unity they, too, are useless.

While our cancerous government responds to the human lust for power by attempting to control the world, Christianity provides a flaccid source of entertainment. Islam is a cultish competitor but its followers not only have a world view but law to back it up.  While our government continues to add evil laws to our already inscrutable humanistic system American Christians are terrified that Muslims might succeed in bringing Sharia law into the United States.  We have been brain washed into hating God’s Law and cleaving to human law.  When reminded that the Bible (and the Koran) advocates stoning as a method capital punishment, Christians cringe.  There is more resistance to God’s law than there is to human torture; which is now supported by our government.  Islam is a dangerous, ancient enemy but, unfortunately, it is a much stronger antagonist to world government than Christianity!

If Satan can succeed in keeping things hidden his purposes can be realized.  He has succeeded in creating a secretive government and a lazy church that reclines into easy Pietism instead of developing its legal muscle.  These two Satanic triumphs have set the stage for tyranny.

Much of the information in this essay came from an article in the Washington Post. Read it here.

NGOs in Haiti: “The Handmaidens of Imperial Domination”

An Interview With Ashley Smith…

MW–In your article in CounterPunch titled “Haiti and the Aid Racket“, you said that “The catastrophe in Haiti has revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government and the NGO aid industry”. Can you explain what you mean?

Ashley Smith—After the earthquake, the imperial powers and international NGOs collected billions of dollars with the promise that they would provide relief for Haiti’s quake victims and then rebuild the country. Today, even mainstream figures are profoundly critical of what the U.S. and the NGOs have done. For example, Ricardo Seitenfus, the special representative from the Organization of American States (OAS) to Haiti, told the Swiss daily Le Temps, “If there is failure of international aid, it is Haiti.”

For that moment of honesty, the OAS fired Seitenfus. But he was right. Today, there are still over 810,000 people, essentially quake refugees, trapped in 1,150 tent camps in and around Port-au-Prince. Only 15 percent of the promised transitional housing has been built. Astonishingly only 5 percent of the rubble has been removed. And there has been next to no reconstruction.

The U.S. is principally to blame for this failure. Initially the Obama Administration used the cover of humanitarianism to deploy 20,000 troops and 17 naval ships to bolster the UN occupation in policing desperate people and preventing an exodus of refugees. This military response, as Doctors without Borders complained at the time, actually interfered with the distribution of humanitarian aid. Once it did turn to relief and reconstruction, it set up the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) under its control, which garnered promises of $10 billion in donations from the imperial powers. The IHRC, however, has only collected 10 percent of the promised sums. When and if they do collect the donations, the U.S. aims to implement a neoliberal plan of to exploit Haiti’s cheap labor in sweatshops, export-oriented plantations, and tourist resorts. So what they claim to be an effort, in IHRC co-chair Bill Clinton’s words, an “effort to build back better” is actually a ruse for the exploitation of Haiti.

The international NGOs’ record is almost as abysmal. To be clear, some have done invaluable work, especially Partners in Health. But on the whole, the NGOs have failed the Haitian people. The NGOs have not spent the enormous sums of money they collected. The Red Cross, for instance, garnered $479 million in donations for Haiti, but has only spent or committed $245 million to projects. The NGOs do not coordinate their relief efforts. They are engaged in capitalist competition with one another for funds and are pre-occupied with branding their separate efforts so that they can advertise their “successes” to their donors. As a result, the NGOs provide at best provide a chaotic jumble of services to quake victims. At worst, they are sitting on piles of cash.

In truth, the U.S., its allies, and NGO surrogates have overseen and in many cases caused worsening conditions in Haiti worse over the last year. The failure of reconstruction left hundreds of thousands trapped in camps, vulnerable to storms, disease, and violence brought on by desperate conditions. On top of that, the UN occupation forces, specifically a contingent of Nepalese soldiers, most likely introduced cholera that has now become a countrywide epidemic, killing thousands and infecting hundreds of thousands more. The U.S. then precipitated a political crisis by pushing for parliamentary election to give a democratic veneer to American neocolonial rule. The election was a sham; it excluded the country’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, and was marred by massive fraud and a contested outcome. Finally, like a nightmare, the former dictator, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, has returned to the country from exile, throwing the country into political chaos.

MW—Professor David Harvey says that NGOs act as “Trojan horses for neoliberal globalization.” Do you agree with Harvey and, if so, would you elaborate?

Ashley Smith—Let’s be clear first that NGOs form a big range of groups, from reformist organizations to large international humanitarians ones and others that are essentially appendages of various state powers, both major and minor. Some reformist NGOs have played a significant role in the World Social Forum and others are clearly on the side of neoliberal globalization. Harvey is absolutely correct about the role of the international NGOs. There is an insidious relationship between them, U.S. imperialism and neoliberal globalization.

After the economic crisis of the 1970s, the U.S. abandoned Keynesianism, whose emphasis on state-led development had failed, and adopted market fundamentalism, aka neoliberalism, at home and abroad to restore profits and growth in the system. In the U.S. the ruling class busted unions, cut the welfare state, and deregulated the economy. Internationally, as Walden Bello documents in Dark Victory, the U.S. used the debt crisis to compel third world countries to open up their markets, abolish regulations on foreign and domestic capital, privatize state industry, and shred state-run social programs.

Neoliberalism worked for the capitalist class, restoring profit and growth—however uneven—in the world system. But neoliberalism exacted an enormous social price everywhere. In the third world, it dislocated peasants, impoverished workers, and created enormous slums in many parts of the world. On top of that, the hollowing out of the states left many countries unable to provide services, regulate capital, or respond to natural and social crises.

The imperial powers, International Financial Institutions, and corporate foundations diverted their money from third world states to NGOs to fill the vacuum. In this way, the NGOs have actually accelerated the opening up of third world economies. In an apt phrase, David Harvey calls the process “privatization by NGO.”

MW—Do the big NGOs see natural disasters as a “growth industry” or is their interest strictly humanitarian?

Ashley Smith—In reality the answer is both. They are part and parcel of what Naomi Klein has called disaster capitalism. International NGOs are really businesses and big ones at that. There are about 50,000 international NGOs that compete for about $10 billion in funding from the International Financial Institutions, the imperial powers, and local governments. Just like corporations, they have chief executive officers, boards made up of mainly capitalists, a middle class professional staff, and then down at the bottom poorly paid laborers in their countries of operation.

These NGOs raise their funds by highlighting problems in the third world especially catastrophes like the earthquake in Haiti, branding their relief projects, and then advertising their efforts to imperial, corporate, and individual donors to raise more money. They are in the business of poverty and disaster management. A couple of people in the international NGOs actually told me that when the earthquake struck in Haiti some NGO bureaucrats, excited with the new prospects of fundraising, celebrated the disaster as if they had struck oil.

As capitalist entities they affirm and exacerbate the class division in the societies in which they operate. Anthropologist Mark Schuller describes their impact in Haiti. He writes: “In addition to higher salaries, NGO employees have access to many privileges: clean drinking water, electricity to charge cell phones, e-mail and the ever-prized U.S. visa. These privileges in turn plug individuals into the global economy. People’s first visits to the U.S. solidified neoliberal ideologies. This artificial, dependent middle class–the “NGO class”–thus directly support a form of economic globalization, accomplishes ideological work and further stratifies the Haitian population, selecting a chosen few for privileges denied Haiti’s poor majority.”

For all their professed humanitarianism, these NGOs in no way solve the ongoing crisis and at best mitigate the disaster in societies where they operate. Since they are inter-twined with neoliberal capitalism, they cannot and will not challenge the systemic roots of third world poverty that turn natural disasters into social catastrophes. They are in fact complicit with the problem. Thus, they do a booming business putting band-aids on the mortal wounds their neoliberal donors inflict. Haiti is the paradigmatic example. As Haiti spirals into greater poverty NGOs have exploded to over 10,000 across the country. The worse the conditions have gotten, the more NGOs have sprouted up, in a cycle of growing needs ever more inadequately met.

MW—Why has it been so hard to make progress in addressing the basic needs of the Haitian people? Is it a question of funding, logistics, access to heavy equipment, politics or something else?

Ashley Smith—-It is really not a technical or logistics problem at all. Nor is it a problem with the Haitian people, as racists often argue. As Alex Dupuy documents in his brilliant book, Haiti and the World Economy, the fault of the Haitian underdevelopment lies with the Haitian ruling class and imperialism. After the Haitian Revolution in 1804—the first successful slave revolution in history—the new Haitian ruling class tried to maintain plantation farming for export to the world market. But the freed slaves fled the plantations to become peasants farming for subsistence and small-scale export. Unable to sustain their capitalist plantations let alone industrialize the society, the ruling class split into two parts—urban merchants and rural land barons, both parasitic on the domestic peasant majority and dependent on international capitalism.

Imperialism, however, was and is the central cause of Haiti’s underdevelopment. The imperial powers—all slaveholders at the time—were terrified by the threat of the Haitian Revolution. They initially imposed an economic embargo on the fledgling society and then trapped Haiti in debt. In return for recognition of the country in 1825, France forced Haiti to pay 150 million francs, the equivalent today of $21 billion, in compensation for the loss of its slaves. Thus France structurally adjusted Haiti at its birth. As the rising imperial power in the region, the U.S. developed a predatory relationship to Haiti, invading and occupying several times at the end of the 19th century to ensure debt repayments. It occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, repressing the population and setting up the dreaded Haitian Armed Forces. Later it backed the Duvalier family dictatorship as an anticommunist ally against Castro in Cuba.

At the end of the 1970s, the U.S. convinced Baby Doc to implement a neoliberal plan to open up Haiti to American agribusiness, build sweatshops for the multinational textile industry, and set up swank tourist resorts for yuppies. Impoverished and fed up, the Haitian peasants, workers and urban poor rose up in the mass movement, Lavalas, that drove Baby Doc from power and then elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide President in 1990 on a program of social reform. The U.S. responded by backing the Haitian ruling class in two coups, one in 1991 and another in 2004. Their aim was to repress the mass movement and block the attempt to use the Haitian state to improve conditions for the country’s masses. Since 2004, it has maintained a UN occupation in the country to police resistance, while it has tried to impose the same old economic plan.

MW—Author Mike Davis says that NGOs are a form of “soft imperialism.” If he’s right, then the work of the thousands of NGOs in Haiti could be seen as a form of occupation? Your thoughts?

Ashley Smith—He’s absolutely right about the international NGOs. In the past, imperialism used religious institutions as a means to justify conquest, colonization and plunder as a civilizing mission—they were bringing the light of Christianity to the heathen masses. Today while the imperial powers plunder the third world, they funnel money into NGOs to make it seem like they are interested in aiding the very people they are robbing and exploiting. Haiti is perhaps the worst example of this process. While the U.S. imposed neoliberal plans that impoverished the people, it poured money into NGOs, cultivating the self-congratulatory illusion that it is helping Haiti.

Just like the religious institutions of the past, the NGOs are part and parcel of imperial domination of third world countries. In Haiti, for example, 70 percent of the NGO funding comes from the U.S. state. As a result, they become vehicles for control through provision of the societies in which they operate. As Peter Hallward argues, “the bulk of USAID money that goes to Haiti and to other countries in the region is explicitly designed to pursue interests–the promotion of a secure investment climate, the nurturing of links with local business elites, the preservation of a docile and low-wage labor force, and so on.”

Perhaps one of the worst impacts of the NGOs is how they have become a vehicle for the cooptation of the indigenous resistance. As Mike Davis puts it in Planet of Slums, “Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at co-opting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left. Even if there are some celebrated exceptions—such as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social Forums—the broad impact of the NGO/’civil society revolution”…has been to bureaucratize and de-radicalize urban social movements.”

MW—To what extent are NGOs being used to usurp the power of the state? Do they pose a direct threat to Haiti’s sovereignty?

Ashley Smith—This is the most insidious face of the imperial use of NGOs in Haiti. As I noted earlier, even before the earthquake, imperial and corporate donors were bypassing the Haitian state to give money directly to international NGOs. They thus exacerbated the gutting of the Haitian state so much so that Haitians now refer to their own country as ruled not by their own government but by a “Republic of NGOs.”

That phrase captures how Haiti has lost its sovereignty. But the reality is even worse than the phrase implies. The NGOs are not part of any republic; they are not democratically accountable to the Haitian people or even its government, but to international donors. And they are not truly non-governmental. They are in fact so dependent on imperial powers for their donations that they are better thought of as subsidiaries of those governments.

In reality, the NGOs are part of how U.S. imperialism rules Haiti today as a neocolony. It uses the UN occupation force as its repressive arm. And it uses NGOs to oversee social services. The combination of the UN and the NGOs undercut any notion that the Haitian state let alone its people control their own country.

MW—What is the relationship between the Pentagon and the NGOs?

Ashley Smith—-Historically, NGOs had an established doctrine of neutrality in conflicts and refused to endorse imperial intervention. However, as Conor Foley documents in The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, many of the big NGOs like Doctors Without Borders have abandoned that stance and call for imperial intervention. They are thus handmaidens of imperial domination.

In Haiti, the U.S. deliberately used willing NGOs as allies in their destabilization and eventual overthrow of the Aristide government. The U.S. imposed an aid embargo to prevent Aristide from implementing any social reforms. They then channeled money through USAID into NGOs. Many of these NGOs would line up with the ruling class opposition, the Group of 184, some even backed the U.S.-backed death squads, and others supported the U.S. coup.

Today, Haiti is a neocolony of the United States. The U.S. has effective state power through the UN occupation. It controls its economy through IHRC. It dominates almost every aspect of civil society through its NGO raj. For all these reasons former OAS representative Ricardo Seitenfus said the UN was “transforming the Haitians into prisoners on their own island.”

America unplugged: Our leaders’ Christmas wishes are coming true this year

America’s leaders seem to be really happy right now — because all of their Christmas wishes appear to be coming true. “But, Jane,” you might ask “which leaders are you talking about? Who exactly does lead America?”

“The rich lead America — of course.” Who the freak did you think led America? God? The government? Brad Pitt?

“But America is a democracy, Jane. The majority rules here and American citizens run the show. How can you even say something like that?” Easy.

If the majority indeed rules here in America and democracy is firmly in control and the wealthy have little or no say in politics, just answer me one question. How many members of our salt-of-the-earth, working-class American majority are currently serving in Congress right now? Or on the Supreme Court? Or in the White House? Or leading the Federal Reserve Securities Exchange Commission or the Federal Drug Administration or the Federal Communications Commission or the armed forces or… You can count the members of our working class in the upper echelons of power in America on the fingers of your two hands — and not even get down to counting your toes. Heck, you can’t hardly even find anyone in any of those places that even belongs to our middle class.

I rest my case!

And boy are America’s leaders happy right now — as they eagerly anticipate getting their fill of Christmas presents this year. “And what do you want in your Christmas stocking this year, rich people? What’s on your Christmas list?”

“First of all, we’d love more government deregulations in our favor.” Check. “And tax breaks for the wealthy.” Check. “And a continuing steady flow of American jobs sent offshore so that we can continue to break the backs of America’s unions by using cheap-labor scabs in Haiti, Honduras and China. And we also want more cheap labor scabs here at home too!” Check, check and check.

“And please Santa — remember to stuff our stockings with all those wonderful ear-marks for agribusiness. And keep up the good work with stuffing the Pentagon budget too. Americans don’t need infrastructure, medical care and education — not if it means making us unhappy on Christmas.” Triple check.

“And for the next Christmas present on our list, we want compliant Americans who are afraid of their own shadows and are at each others’ throats over petty stuff so that they won’t notice us as we happily pick their pockets.” Double-check. “And ownership of all major media — no one needs to hear the truth, especially not at Christmas!” No problem. Check. “And please get rid of all those pesky bloggers, whistleblowers and net-neutrality freaks while you’re at it. Capitalism hates competition.” Check, check, check, check.

“Then please send lots of drug money our way — both legal and illegal. Let’s keep Americans drugged. They’re happy. We’re happy! And don’t forget about climate change either — please hold it off until we’ve made our profits and moved on. Let the kids deal with it. No Green Christmas for us!” Just name it, it’s yours.”

“And we want profits from endless wars too. Those Middle East disasters and fiascos? Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine? Keep ‘em coming! Thank you, Santa. America may be losing its lifeblood on those wars but WE are making a mint!” No worries, rich people. You can check that one off of your wish-list too. “And we also want a government that hemorrhages money in our direction, endless deficits, access to the Social Security vault…” It’s definitely coming your way.

It’s almost Christmas morning. All this good stuff is about to slide down your trillion-dollar chimneys. Get out the milk and cookies! Yuletide cheer!

“But basically, Santa, what we rich people really want for Christmas is an oligarchy — preferably like the one that sprang up in Russia after the Soviet Union fell. We want the United States of America to fall too, just like the good old USSR. And please, Santa, let us be the ones who pick up the (gold) pieces as America’s ‘socialist’ government falls apart — the one that the American people took for granted so much and spent so much time griping about. And please please please replace yesteryear’s worn out old American democracy with a shiny spanking new surveillance state.”

Check off everything on your list, rich guys. This year you’ll be getting it all.

“But I thought that Santa only brought presents to those who were nice,” you might comment.

Sorry, Virginia. It doesn’t work that way in America any more. In America today, Santa only brings you presents if you are naughty — or greedy, mendacious, evil, violent, hypocritical, underhanded, slimy, thieving, back-stabbing and/or cruel.

Leaked Cable: Hike food prices to boost GM crop approval in Europe

In a January 2008 meeting, US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General Alfredo Bonet “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.”

It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that “The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number,” reports Fred Kaufman in The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.

The unprecedented high in food prices in 2008 caused an additional 250 million people to go hungry, pushing the global number to over a billion.  2008 is also the first year “since such statistics have been kept, that the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward,” said Kaufman.

All to boost acceptance of GM foods, and done via a trading scheme on which Wall Street speculators profited enormously.

Mass food riots in several nations ensued, as did an investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, resulting in a finding that, yes, unrestricted speculation in food commodities caused soaring prices.

In a comment at the end of the cable, the diplomat also revealed a level of pessimism about Spain’s willingness to help force GM foods on Europe:

“This was a very good substantive discussion. However, it is clear that while Spain will continue sometimes to vote in favor of biotechnology liberalization proposals, the Spaniards will tread warily on this issue given their own domestic sensitivities and other equities Spain has in the EU.”

That pessimism was largely unfounded, as “Spain planted 80 percent of all the Bt maize in the EU in 2009 and maintained its record adoption rate of 22 percent from the previous year,” noted a report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

The leaked cables, amounting to over 1,300 right now, reveal US obsession with expanding the biotech market:

• One leaked cable confirms US concern with promoting GM foods in Africa, which Richard Brenneman described as “a significant item on the State Department’s agenda.”

• In another leaked cable describing the potential to expand US interests in “isolationist” Austria, that nation’s ban on GM foods is highlighted.

• According to a leaked cable from 2007, of concern was French President Sarkozy’s desire to implement a ban on GM foods in line with populist sentiment. According to GM Free Regions, France maintains its opposition to GM foods today.

• In this leaked cable, the Pope openly blamed global hunger on commodity speculation and corrupt public officials, so far refusing to support the use of GM foods. (Also see my Dec. 12 piece, “Leaked cables confirm Pope’s distance from GMO debate and limited stance on bioethics.”

More may be revealed in the remaining cables.

Profiteering Leaves World open to Future Price Manipulation

Food commodity speculation was enabled in 2000 by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.  Deregulation handyman Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) introduced the bill, coauthored by financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the chairman of the Agriculture Committee.

describes the legislative climate when the bill passed:

“As part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown….

“Gramm’s most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.”

Not only did that Act enable the subprime meltdown that crashed the economy and put tens of millions into foreclosure, it also enabled Wall Street investors to artificially spike the price of food.

“Bankers had taken control of the world’s food, money chased money, and a billion people went hungry,” Kaufman clarified.

After a year long investigation, he confirmed that price hikes in food from 2005 thru the peak in June 2008 had nothing to do with the supply chain, but instead occurred as a result of a Wall Street investment scheme known as Commodity Investment Funds. The first to develop the idea was Goldman Sachs, which took 18 different food sources, including cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs and wheat, and created an investment package. Kaufman explains:

“They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known thenceforward as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. Then they began to offer shares.”

(Kaufman summarizes his report in this June 2010 interview by , and in this July Democracy Now interview.)

Kaufman points out that also in 2008, ConAgra Foods was able to sell its trading arm to a hedge fund for $2.8 billion.  The world’s largest grain trader and GMO giant, Cargill, recorded an 86% jump in annual profits in the first quarter of 2008, attributed to commodity trading and an expanding biofuels market. The Star Tribune calculated that Cargill earned $471,611 an hour that quarter.

The investment bubble burst in June 2008 and “aggregate commodity prices fell about 60% by mid-November 2008,” notes Steve Suppan of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy. Though the US House of Representatives introduced a regulatory bill, “legislative loopholes will exempt at least 40-45%” of such trades.  Supporting the loopholes is Cargill, among other multinational corporations. Suppan concludes:

“The outlook for a sustainable and transparent financial system to underwrite trade dependent food security is not good… [T]he budget for the just launched congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, scheduled to report December 15, [2010] is just $8 million.  The Wall Street lobbying budget for defeating financial reform legislation is thus far $344 million…”

The final bill was signed into law in July 2010 (summarized by the New York Times), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission continues to issue new rules purportedly aimed at regulating financial markets. “But big banks influence the rules governing derivatives through a variety of industry groups,” notes another New York Times piece.

Did the artificial price hike open EU doors to GM foods?

No, in fact ISAAA noted that: “Six European countries planted 94,750 hectares of biotech crops in 2009, down from seven countries and 107,719 hectares in 2008, as Germany discontinued its planting.”

A closer look at EU member state actions on GM foods after June 2008 details some of the GM-free battle in Europe:

• In December 2008, after a ten-year hiatus, Italy agreed to open field tests of GM crops.

• The Czech Republic became the second largest grower of Bt corn in the EU in 2008, nearly doubling the acreage planted in 2007. The USDA characterized it as being an investment target not only in agriculture but also in vaccine development.

• At the EU level, “In an apparent U-turn in his attitude as one of EU executive’s most GM-wary commissioners, environment chief Stavros Dimas” wrote draft approvals for two more varieties of GM corn, reported Reuters in December 2008.

• However, by September 2008, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland had all become GM-free, and urged the UK to do likewise.

• Though pressured by the European Commission, in January 2009 Hungary refused to lift its ban on GM foods. Its sovereign right to reject GMOs, along with Austria’s, was later upheld by an EU vote with 20 member states supporting such bans.

• In March 2009, Luxembourg became the fifth EU nation to ban GM foods, following France, Hungary, Greece and Austria.

• In October 2009, Turkey banned the import of biotech products.

For updates and a more thorough history of EU actions on GM foods, see GMO-Free Europe. European states handle the issue differently than in the US, allowing regions within a nation to maintain GM-free zones. Each step a nation takes toward GM approval invariably draws regional resistance.

Biotech Crops Expand Globally in 2009

Though the strategy to hike food prices to spur European acceptance of GM foods failed, it worked elsewhere.  Globally, biotech crops expanded by 7% in 2009 over 2008 figures, according to this chart by ISAAA:

In fact, ISAAA asserted GM expansion was due to the 2008 price hikes, as noted by chairman and founder Clive James: “With last year’s food crisis, price spikes, and hunger and malnutrition afflicting more than 1 billion people for the first time ever, there has been a global shift from efforts for just food security to food self-sufficiency.”

Poorer nations hardest hit by hunger — in Africa and South America — are more vulnerable to price hikes.  But even after the geologically unusual earthquake in January, Haitian farmers rejected Monsanto’s “gift” of GM seeds.  However, the big push remains in Africa and China.

A Wary Future

Although it is now widely accepted that Wall Street speculation caused the food bubble, starving hundreds of millions, regulators have so far failed to curb the practices that allow international banksters to manipulate food prices.

Meanwhile, the biotech industry continues to repeat its mantra that GM food can cure world hunger.  This claim is not backed by the science and it seems to hold less sway in the GM food debate, especially with the Pope recognizing what many others assert: There is no shortage of food; hunger expanded because of price hikes.

Americans Hiding From Reality

Personal Responsibility…

NBC’s Brian Williams last week reported, “The latest figures show  72 percent of African-American newborns in the United States arrive from single mothers, most of them teenagers.”  (Date: November 7, 2010, NBC Nightly News) They immediately land on welfare rolls as “Aid to Dependent Children.”  Similar figures include Hispanic teen single mothers.  These unmarried teen mothers fail to graduate from high school—while they birth two, three, four and more children while living full-time off welfare.

The rate of U.S. taxpayer welfare dollars for this new generation of illiterate, irresponsible, unemployed and un-trainable armada of citizens and non-citizens—grows annually with massive immigrant loading of 3.1 million. (Source: www.cis.org , Dr. Steven Camarata)  Legal immigrant mothers birth 900,000 newborns annually within the United States.

Additionally, figures show that an average of 350,000 to 400,000 illegal alien un-wed women and pregnant visa over-stayers also land on welfare rolls—paid for by U.S. taxpayers.  U.S. citizens must pay for assisted housing, medical care, breakfasts and lunches, food stamps, K-12 education and more.

Seventeen percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008. (Source: David Salano, KIAH TV Houston, November 7, 2010)

“It’s unbelievable. I didn’t realize the number was so astounding,” said Kathleen Zein, a native of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti living in Houston. “I think the report is very sad. Hopefully things will change around, but it’s an ongoing process.  It’s just bad choices, and they don’t have the right mentors to guide them and [provide them with the appropriate way of] protecting themselves.”

Today, the American Reading Foundation offers these educational facts:  The United States houses 42 million Americans and non-citizens that cannot read, write or perform simple math.  Another 50 million American citizens cannot read past the 4^th grade level.

ILLITERACY  DEFINES THE THIRD WORLD

In my world travels, I witnessed unimaginable poverty, misery and human suffering in third world countries.  Where you enjoy grocery stores filled with food and schools with teachers, over 1 billion humans cannot find a clean glass of drinking water daily.  Because of that, 18 million humans starve to death annually.

Yet, third world mothers not only birth enough kids to replace the 57 million humans that die annually, those mothers add 80 million net gain newborns every year.

What am I getting at?   Just this: illiteracy defines the third world.  They add 80 million more mouths to feed annually, but cannot maintain or sustain any educational thrust.  Therefore, what do illiterate human beings do?  Answer: while we attend the opera or a football game—they propagate.

Brian Williams also reported  that Detroit, Michigan suffers a 76 percent dropout rate from its high schools and all around the USA, a whopping 1.2 million 18 year olds hit the streets annually unable to read, write or perform simple math.

Yet, we spend $12 billion a month ‘nation building’ in Iraq and Afghanistan—while our own civilization degrades into third world illiteracy.

Bob Herbert of the New York Times followed up with my column last week, “Has the American Dream Come to an End?”, with his own, “America is hiding from reality.”  He said, “However you want to define the American Dream, there is not much of it that’s left anymore.  Wherever you choose to look—at the economy and jobs, the public schools, the budget deficits, the non-stop warfare—you’ll see a country in sad shape. Standards of living are declining.” (November 28, 2010, NY Times)

No kidding Jack!

This country rots deeper in its belly than ever before.  A whopping 41.8 million Americans utilize food stamps.   Yet, our Congress outsources, offshores and insources millions of jobs.  Congress takes jobs away from Americans by the millions—and gives them to immigrants.

The PEW Hispanic Center showed: in the year after the official end of the recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers in the USA gained 656,000 jobs while native-born American workers lost 1.2 million jobs—now totaling 15 million unemployed.

As the U.S. economy adds 95,000 jobs monthly, our Congress adds another 200,000 immigrants every 30 days.  No chance for ever closing the employment gap for Americans! None! Zilch!

“The human suffering in the years required to recover from the recession will continue to be immense,” said Herbert.

While we stagger into 2011, our president and this Congress continue importing 3.1 million legal immigrants and their children annually with no end in sight. (Source: www.cis.org)

Does it make sense?  Who chose this path?  Why do we continue to follow it?  Who benefits?  Why does our Congress continue to do this to American citizens?

We do not see personal responsibility or accountability in our president or U.S. Congress.  Beats the balderdash out of me!

The Tremendous Dangers of The Dream Act

If not enough that 15 million Americans suffer unemployment and another seven million cannot find full time jobs—your U.S. Congress led by Senator Harry Reid, re-elected by the most unemployed per capita population of all 50 states, introduced the Dream Act once again after it suffered defeat every year since 2000. If 41.8 million Americans subsisting on food stamps doesn’t send a message to Harry Reid, I cannot for the life of me, understand how an intellectual imbecile like Reid enjoyed re-election from a brain-dead Nevada electorate. Same goes for the California ‘vacant brains’ that voted Nancy Pelosi back into office!

Both states’ congressional members fail miserably at serving their own citizens: California protects over 4.5 million illegal aliens while drowning in $25 billion in debts. Nevada suffers incredible destruction of their schools, hospitals and work force via hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.

After offering you director Roy Beck’s two educational five and 10 minute videos last week, I will offer them again at the end of this column. I hope you send those two videos out to every American across the Internet to educate them as to what we face as we allow our country to be invaded by legal and illegal immigration. Out of the projected 100 million people added to this country within 25 years, a full 70 million will be third world immigrants with third world cultures, educational levels equal to Haiti’s and cultural practices totally incompatible with our first world countries. We create an intractable ‘poverty class’ that will undermine our citizens, our children, our language and our culture. It’s already in full swing in all our immigrant-laden cities where welfare gives them everything off our backs: annual costs run $346 billion. (Source: www.thesocialcontract.com with Edwin Rubenstein Report)

In the second video, you will see where Beck shows our immigration-driven population more than triple by the end of the century as we head toward a billion persons from a line that grows by 1 billion every 13 years around the world. I cannot for the life of me understand how or why Congress or Americans think adding another 300 to 600 million more people to this country will make everything better, i.e., gridlock, air pollution, crowding, gas prices, food prices, species extinction, quality of life, climate destabilization and much more on multiple levels.

Do we enjoy national suicide of our culture, language and way of life? Answer: we must because that’s what we’re doing!

I talked to Roy Beck as to what we face:

“The DREAM ACT amnesty would be another nightmare for beleaguered and unemployed American workers,” said Beck. “Yet, so many national religious, media and political leaders are embarrassing themselves today, crying out for the Lame Duck Congress to pass the DREAM Act amnesty.

“While 22 million Americans who want a full-time job cannot find one, pro-amnesty cheerleaders are making a last-ditch effort to increase competition for jobs by giving millions of work permits to illegal aliens through the DREAM Act.

“Supporters of DREAM continue to mislead the public by talking about a small group of teenaged students who shouldn’t be punished for the sins of their parents who supposedly brought them to the U.S. as young children. In actuality, the bill covers at least 2 million illegal aliens up to age 35 even if they came after childhood, and it allows them to petition for their parents to get permanent work permits.

“The DREAM Act allows the parents who illegally put their children into this status to be rewarded for their behavior.

“And while it adds millions more competitors into the legal U.S. labor force, it does nothing to discourage future millions from entering the U.S. illegally, from putting their children into difficult circumstances, and from harming American workers.

“The DREAM Act is drawn for much too wide of an illegal population, is full of loopholes, is open to massive fraud and would encourage more illegal immigration, all of which would keep millions of Americans and their families unemployed and disadvantaged.

“What kind of a politician would be that callous and destructive to his/her own constituents?

“And what kind of politician would think voters should reward him/her with re-election next time around?”

You can stop the Dream Act by joining www.NumbersUSA.org and become a faxer and phone caller. Join 1 million Americans of every persuasion to stop this national nightmare. It’s easy, free, quick and effective. Bi-partisan!

In a five minute astoundingly simple yet brilliant video, “Immigration, Poverty, and Gum Balls”, Roy Beck, director ofwww.numbersusa.ORG, graphically illustrates the impact of overpopulation.  Take five minutes to see for yourself:

“Immigration by the numbers—off the chart” by Roy Beck

This 10 minute demonstration shows Americans the results of unending mass immigration on the quality of life and sustainability for future generations: in a word “Mind boggling!”  www.NumbersUSA.org

In a five minute astoundingly simple yet brilliant video, “Immigration, Poverty, and Gum Balls”, Roy Beck, director ofwww.numbersusa.ORG, graphically illustrates the impact of overpopulation.  Take five minutes to see for yourself:

“Immigration by the numbers—off the chart” by Roy Beck

This 10 minute demonstration shows Americans the results of unending mass immigration on the quality of life and sustainability for future generations: in a word “Mind boggling!”  www.NumbersUSA.org

If any of us, no matter what our race, creed or color might be, refuse to engage our U.S. Congress as we have not for 30 years as to the population/immigration equation-our children will find themselves living in a terribly degraded America where the American Dream will be described by the history books as a ‘fleeting fantasy’ from the era of 1950 to 2010.

They come to America for a better life

Like the slavery issue of 1776 when the founders framed the U.S. Constitution, 21^st century immigration parallels the complexities of the past—facing today’s leaders and citizens.

Back then, they talked about a wonderful new concept of self-government that yielded, “…life, liberty and pursuit of happiness…,” as long as you did not carry shackles around your neck and feet.

Americans kicked the can down the road for nearly 100 years before the can kicked back.  The American humorist Mark Twain said, “Silent assertion is the shabbiest of all lies. It happens when leaders, the media and church obfuscate, cloud, suppress or deny a social wrong or something not working in our civilization.”

Our ‘silent assertion’ ended up with America ripping itself apart in the Civil War.

Slavery could not continue as an institution.  People died by the hundreds of thousands.  Yet, today, slavery continues in Africa and people continue killing one another.

America repeats this slavery atrocity in America today: illegal immigration!  Rich people and corporations employ poor people at slave wages to the tune of over 10 million of them in 2010 along with another 10 million of their kids and spouses.  Those slave wages beat the misery of Mexican wages and many other countries.  The rich dodge the laws and the poor crawl across American borders to break the law: “I came for a better life for me and my children.”

In violation of the rule of law, we kicked this noisier can down the road for the past 30 years, and someday soon, we will pay for our stupidity, greed and this modern day slavery. The financial costs will exceed $5 trillion according to the Heritage Foundation for any kind of an amnesty for them and their kids.  Once they gain citizenship, they will be able to ‘chain migrate’ millions more of their families.

Why can’t other countries duplicate the simple market dynamics of America to bring their citizens a prosperous way of life?  Why don’t the people of Mexico raise up and vote leaders into office that would serve them instead of force them into another kind of slavery north of the border?

Today, 3.1 billion human beings, according to the World Bank, live on less than $2.00 per day.  Another 2.0 billion live on less than $3.00 per day.  Their numbers grow by over 80 million net gain around the planet annually.  Their poverty grows beyond solving.

You may look close to home at the island of Haiti. It houses 9.5 million, mostly illiterate, culturally poor and completely destitute people even BEFORE the earthquake.   Demographic projections show Haiti adding another 3.1 million within a few decades.

Haiti’s problem?  The Catholic Church advocates against birth control which results in overzealous human fecundity!

Haiti’s land mass?  Less than Rhode Island, our smallest state.  Rhode Island houses 1.05 million people to give you an idea of Haiti’s demographic overshoot.

If given a chance and a boat ticket, the entire 9.5 million humans on the island of Haiti would immigrate to America tomorrow.  If given a plane or boat ticket, a minimum of 3.1 billion humans would immigrate to the land of milk and honey, America, tomorrow.

What’s the problem?  Those folks around the planet in greatest poverty add 80 million of themselves annually on their way to adding two to three billion by mid century.

THE IMMIGRATION LINE GROWS AND NEVER ENDS

What cost to American taxpayers each year?  Try a whopping $346 billion spread out across 15 federal agencies!  (Source: Edwin Rubenstein Report, www.thesocialcontract.com )

What does that reality mean to every American citizen?  I offer you one of the simplest and most brilliant five minute video ever created in this world by Roy Beck.  It explains their dilemma and our predicament.  Watch it and weep!  Watch it and share it with everyone you know to help every citizen in this country understand the mind-boggling futility of further immigration into the USA.

In a five minute astoundingly simple yet brilliant video, “Immigration, Poverty, and Gum Balls”, Roy Beck, director ofwww.numbersusa.ORG, graphically illustrates the impact of overpopulation.  Take five minutes to see for yourself:

After you watched Beck’s first video, view this 10 minute video that arrived last week. It’s already enjoyed nearly 1.0 million viewers.   It shows what we face if we continue our current immigration policy.  Out of the next added 100 million people to the USA via mass immigration, a full 70 million will be third world immigrants and their children. Watch it and gasp!  Watch it and learn!  Watch it and share it with everyone you know.

“Immigration by the numbers—off the chart” by Roy Beck

This 10 minute demonstration shows Americans the results of unending mass immigration on the quality of life and sustainability for future generations: in a word “Mind boggling!”  www.NumbersUSA.org

If we fail to change our immigration policy, much like the ‘slavery issue’ of 1776, we most certainly will not survive the outcome as to sheer numbers, as to a livable environment and as to a sustainable civilization.  Today, we can make a difference to change the future for our children.  Within 25 years, if we allow immigration to add 100 million people, our children and all living things in America will be nostril-deep in irreversible consequences and unsolvable problems.

In struggle with the American mind

Since The Great Flood hit Pakistan in July …

• many millions have been displaced, evacuated, stranded or lost their homes; numerous roads, schools and health clinics destroyed
• hundreds of villages washed away
• millions of livestock have perished; for the rural poor something akin to a Western stock market crash that wipes out years of savings
• countless farms decimated, including critical crops like corn; officials say the damage is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and it does not appear that Pakistan will recover within the next few years
• infectious diseases are rising sharply
• airplanes of the United States of America have flown over Pakistan and dropped bombs on dozens of occasions ¹

I direct these remarks to readers who have to deal with Americans who turn into a stone wall upon hearing the United States accused of acting immorally; America, they are convinced, means well; our motives are noble. And if we do do something that looks bad, and the badness can’t easily be covered up or explained away … well, great powers have always done things like that, we’re no worse than the other great powers of history, and a lot better than most. God bless America.

A certain percentage of such people do change eventually and stop rationalizing; this happens usually after being confronted X-number of times with evidence of the less-than-beautiful behavior of their government around the world. The value of X of course varies with the individual; so don’t give up trying to educate the hardened Americans you come in contact with. You never know when your enlightening them about a particular wickedness of their favorite country will be the straw that breaks their imperialist-loving back. (But remember the warning from Friedrich Schiller of Germany: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. — “With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain.”)

Here’s a recent revelation of wickedness that might serve to move certain of the unenlightened: New evidence has recently come to light that reinforces the view of a CIA role in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of The Congo following its independence from Belgium in 1960. The United States didn’t pull the trigger, but it did just about everything else, including giving the green light to the Congolese officials who had kidnaped Lumumba. CIA Station Chief Larry Devlin, we now know, was consulted by these officials about the transfer of Lumumba to his sworn enemies. Devlin signaled them that he had no objection to it. Lumumba’s fate was sealed. ²

It was a classic Cold War example of anti-communism carried to absurd and cruel lengths. Years later, Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon told a Senate investigating committee that the National Security Council and President Eisenhower had believed in 1960 that Lumumba was a “very difficult if not impossible person to deal with, and was dangerous to the peace and safety of the world.” ³ This statement moved author Jonathan Kwitny to observe:

How far beyond the dreams of a barefoot jungle postal clerk in 1956, that in a few short years he would be dangerous to the peace and safety of the world! The perception seems insane, particularly coming from the National Security Council, which really does have the power to end all human life within hours. ⁴

President Eisenhower personally gave the order to kill the progressive African leader. ⁵

We can’t know for sure what life for the Congolese people would have been like had Lumumba been allowed to remain in office. But we do know what followed his assassination — one vicious dictator after another presiding over 50 years of mass murder, rape, and destruction as competing national forces and neighboring states fought endlessly over the vast mineral wealth in the country. The Congo would not hold another democratic election for 46 years.

Overthrowing a country’s last great hope, with disastrous consequences, is an historical pattern found throughout the long chronicle of American imperialist interventions, from Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s to Haiti and Afghanistan in the 1990s, with many examples in between. Washington has been working on Hugo Chávez in Venezuela for a decade.

Just like the commercials that warn you “Don’t try this at home”, I urge you not to waste your time trying to educate the likes of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who not long ago referred to “the men and women of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps” as “the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century.” ⁶ What can you say to such a man? And this is the leading foreign policy columnist for America’s “newspaper of record”. God help us. The man could use some adult supervision.

A man named Barack Obama

For many years I have not paid a great deal of attention to party politics in the United States. I usually have only a passing knowledge of who’s who in Congress. It’s policies that interest me much more than politicians. But during the 2008 presidential campaign I kept hearing the name Barack Obama when I turned on the radio, and repeatedly saw his name in headlines in various newspapers. I knew no more than that he was a senator from Illinois and … Was he black?

Then one day I turned on my kitchen radio and was informed that Obama was about to begin a talk. I decided to listen, and did so for about 15 or 20 minutes while I washed the dishes. I listened, and listened, and then it hit me … This man is not saying anything! It’s all platitude and cliché, very little of what I would call substance. His talk could have been written by a computer, touching all the appropriate bases and saying just what could be expected to give some hope to the pessimistic and to artfully challenge the skepticism of the cynical; feel-good language for every occasion; conventional wisdom for every issue. His supporters, I would later learn, insisted that he had to talk this way to be elected, but once elected — Aha! The real genuine-progressive, anti-war Barack Obama would appear. “Change you can believe in!” Hallelujah! … They’re still saying things like that.

Last week Obama gave the traditional annual speech at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. ⁷ To give you an idea of whether the man now sincerely expresses himself “outside the box” at all, here’s what he had to say about Pakistan: “Since the rains came and the floodwaters rose in Pakistan, we have pledged our assistance, and we should all support the Pakistani people as they recover and rebuild.” Does he think no one in the world knows about the American bombs? Did he think he was speaking before sophisticated international diplomats or making a campaign speech before Iowa farmers?

Plus endless verbiage about the endless Israeli-Palestine issue, which could have been lifted out of almost any speech by any American president of the past 30 years. But no mention at all of Gaza. Oh, excuse me — there was one line: “the young girl in Gaza who wants to have no ceiling on her dreams”. Gosh, choke. One would never know that the United States possesses huge leverage over the state of Israel — billions/trillions of dollars of military and economic aid and gifts. An American president with a minimum of courage could force Israel to make concessions, and in a struggle between a thousand-pound gorilla (Israel) and an infant (Hamas) it’s the gorilla that has to give some ground.

And this: “We also know from experience that those who defend these [universal] values for their people have been our closest friends and allies, while those who have denied those rights — whether terrorist groups or tyrannical governments — have chosen to be our adversaries.”

Such a lie. It would be difficult to name a single brutal dictatorship of the Western world in the second half of the 20th Century that was not supported by the United States; not only supported, but often put into power and kept in power against the wishes of the population. And in recent years as well, Washington has supported very repressive governments, such as Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Indonesia, Egypt, Kosovo, Colombia, and Israel. As to terrorist groups being adversaries of the United States — another item for the future Barack Obama Presidential Liebrary; as I’ve discussed in this report on several occasions, including last month, the United States has supported terrorist groups for decades. As they’ve supported US foreign policy.

“Yes, of course it’s nice to have a president who speaks in complete sentences. But that they’re coherent doesn’t make them honest.” — John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine. ⁸

The secret to understanding US foreign policy

In one of his regular “Reflections” essays, Fidel Castro recently discussed United States hostility towards Venezuela. “What they really want is Venezuela’s oil,” wrote the Cuban leader. ⁹ This is a commonly-held viewpoint within the international left. The point is put forth, for example, in Oliver Stone’s recent film “South of the Border”. I must, however, take exception.

In the post-World War Two period, in Latin America alone, the US has had a similar hostile policy toward progressive governments and movements in Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, and Bolivia. What these governments and movements all had in common was that they were/are leftist; nothing to do with oil. For more than half a century Washington has been trying to block the rise of any government in Latin America that threatens to offer a viable alternative to the capitalist model. Venezuela of course fits perfectly into that scenario; oil or no oil.

This ideology was the essence of the Cold War all over the world.

The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. To express this striving for dominance numerically, one can consider that since the end of World War Two the United States has:

• Endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
• Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
• Waged war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries.
• Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
• Dropped bombs on the people of some 30 countries.
• Suppressed dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world. ¹⁰

The United States institutional war machine has long been, and remains, on automatic pilot.

The 9/11 Truth Movement

The Truthers have long been pressing me to express my support for their cause. Here’s how I stand on the issue. I’m very aware of the serious contradictions and apparent lies in the Official Government Version (OGV) of what happened on that fateful day. (Before the Truthers can be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”, it should be noted that the OGV is literally a “conspiracy theory” about the fantastic things that a certain 19 men conspired to do.) It does appear that the buildings in New York collapsed essentially because of a controlled demolition, which employed explosives as well as certain incendiary substances found in the rubble. So, for this and many other questions raised by the 9/11 Truth Movement, the OGV can clearly not be taken entirely at face value but has to be seriously examined point by point. But no matter what the discrepancies in the OGV, does it necessarily follow that the events of 9/11 were an “inside job”? Is it an either/or matter? Either a group of terrorists were fully responsible or the government planned it all down to the last detail?

What if the government, with its omnipresent eyes and ears, discovered the plotting of Mideast terrorists some time before and decided to let it happen — and even enhance the destruction — to make use of it as a justification for its “War on Terror”? The Truthers admit that they can’t fully explain what actually took place, but they argue that they are not obliged to do so; that they have exposed the government lies and that the fact of these lies proves that it was an inside job. The Truthers have done great work, but I say that for me, and I’m sure for many others, to accept the idea of an inside job I have to indeed know what actually took place, or at least a lot more than I know now. It is, after all, an incredible story, and I need to know how the government pulled it off. I need to have certain questions answered, amongst which are the following:

1. Were the planes that hit the towers hijacked?
2. Did they contain the passengers named amongst the dead?
3. Were they piloted or were they flying via remote control?
4. If piloted, who were the pilots?
5. Did a plane crash in Pennsylvania? If so, why? What happened to the remains of the plane and the passengers?
6. Did a plane crash into the Pentagon? What happened to the remains of the plane and the passengers?
7. Why do Truthers say that some, or many, of the named Arabic hijackers have been found alive living abroad? Why couldn’t their identity have been stolen by the hijackers?

If the Truthers can’t answer any or most of the above questions, are they prepared to consider the possibility of 9/11 being a “let-it-happen” government operation?

Do words have to mean something?

“Holocaust denier barred from leading tour at Auschwitz”. That was the headline over a short news item in the Washington Post on September 22. The story, in full, read: “British historian and Holocaust-denier David Irving will not be permitted to give tours at Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, museum officials said Tuesday after the controversial historian arrived in Poland to lead a tour of Nazi sites. Irving told the British Daily Mail on Friday that Treblinka was a genuine death camp but that Auschwitz was a ‘Disney-style tourist attraction’.”

So how can Irving be called a “Holocaust-denier” if he says that the Nazi concentration camp at Treblinka “was a genuine death camp”? I don’t know. Do you? Why don’t you ask the Post? They never reply to my letters. And while you’re at it, ask them why they and their columnists routinely refer to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a “Holocaust-denier”. You might even point out to them that Ahmadinejad said in a speech at Columbia University (September 24, 2007), in reply to a question about the Holocaust, “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”

Indeed, I don’t know if any of the so-called “Holocaust-deniers” actually, ever, umm, y’know, umm … deny the Holocaust. They question certain aspects of the Holocaust history that’s been handed down to us, but they don’t explicitly say that what we know as the Holocaust never took place. Yes, I’m sure you can find at least one nut-case somewhere.

Speaking of nut-cases, two days after Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia, Congressman Duncan Hunter (R.-CA) introduced legislation “To prohibit Federal grants to or contracts with Columbia University” (HR 3675, 110th Congress). I’m surprised he didn’t call for a Predator to fly over the campus and drop a few bombs. Don’t ya just love our Congressmembers? Soon to be joined it seems by a few Teaparty types who think that Barack Obama is a socialist. (If Obama is a socialist, what, I wonder, do they call Hugo Chávez? Or Karl Marx?) The new Madame Speaker of the House may be Alice in Wonderland.

Notes

1. Wikipedia, Drone attacks in Pakistan
2. AllAfrica.com, New Evidence Shows U.S. Role in Congo’s Decision to Send Patrice Lumumba to His Death, August 1st 2010
3. The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate: The Church Committee), Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, November 20, 1975, p.58
4. Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (1984), p.57
5. New York Times, February 22, 1976, p.55
6. New York Times, October 11, 2009
7. White House Press Office, , September 23, 2010
8. The Providence Journal, “Obama a very smooth liar“, June 17, 2009
9. Reflections by Comrade Fidel, “What they want is Venezuela’s oil“, September 27, 2010
10. A link to any of the first five lists can be obtained by writing to William Blum at . The sixth list has not yet been uploaded to the Internet.

Immigration Cannot Continue – The Current State of Immigration

Part 2: The current state of immigration…

In this three part series, you may enjoy Maria Fotopoulos, Senior Writing Fellow at www.capsweb.org as she examines amnesty for 20 million illegal aliens now residing within the United States.  She addresses the key word ‘sustainability’ in “No home for amnesty in a sustainable America.”

THE CURRENT STATE OF IMMIGRATION

“Since first rewarding illegal aliens with amnesty and a path to citizenship in the 1980s, the U.S. population has continued to grow inexorably with no end in sight,” said Fotopoulos. “The U.S. Bureau of the Census makes low, middle and high projections for future population growth. On the high end, by 2100, U.S. population may be more than 1 billion. The decade starting in 1990 saw the biggest population increase of any prior 10-year period in U.S. history.

“In California, which absorbs about 21 percent of the country’s immigrants, the state’s continuing population explosion is attributable to immigration and the higher-than-average fertility rates of new immigrants. The state has an estimated 3-5 million illegal aliens among its population of 39 million.

“Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens settle in across the U.S. from every imaginable country from A to Z—Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, with Albania, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Somalia, Sudan and others in between.

“Our neighbor to the immediate south, however, accounts for the largest percentage at 56 percent. Estimates suggest that as many as half of all Mexicans living in the U.S. are here illegally. Of all deportations, Mexico represents 70 percent, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Deportations doubled from 1999 to 2008 to nearly 360,000, of which 97,000 were criminal deportations.

“With a population of 13.6 million in 1900, Mexico’s population has now ballooned to 111 million. A well-known litany of poverty, drug trafficking and government corruption in Mexico, coupled with inadequate border and immigration enforcement on the U.S. side, has led to the ongoing exodus of Mexicans from their home, with the tacit support of the Mexican government.

“While people illegally crossing the Mexico- U.S. border by foot or vehicle is a familiar image and the source of 60 percent of illegal aliens, the other 40 percent arrived legally and overstayed their visas.”

AMNESTY UNDER PRESIDENT OBAMA

“Scantly mentioned by either presidential candidate in the 2008 race, the issue of illegal immigration was overshadowed by the severe recession when President Obama took office,” said Fotopoulos. “But it was clear that the President favored both an amnesty and an increase in the number of immigrants allowed into the U.S.

“Among the five cornerstones promoted on the White House’s immigration webpage were plans to “increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill” and “support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.” With Obama in office, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid moved quickly with a placeholder bill for amnesty legislation, S.9, the Stronger Economy, Stronger Borders Act of 2009, calling for “reforming and rationalizing avenues for legal immigration.”

“In a major speech on immigration in summer 2010, Obama called for amnesty in the guise of immigration reform, blaming the “pressure of partisanship and election year politics” for derailing his plans for a “pathway for legal status” for millions living in the U.S. illegally. Despite the rhetoric and intense pressure from open-border advocates, it is unlikely that Congress will take up immigration legislation before the November 2010 elections; there simply is not enough support to get a bill passed.

“Hence, open-border groups began pushing Obama to implement a de facto amnesty through executive action, a temporary halt to nearly all deportations as well as the issuance of work permits to illegal aliens. Breaking news of this development led Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and seven other senators to write Obama and ask for a “commitment that the Administration has no plans to … change the current position of a large group of illegal aliens already in the United States.”

WHAT CITIZENS SAY

“Poll after poll indicates that the majority of Americans view illegal immigration differently than the Obama administration does,” said Fotopoulos.  “A USA Today/Gallup Poll found that 80 percent of Americans are concerned that illegal immigrants burden schools, hospitals and other government services, and 77 percent believe that they drive down wages. A New York Times/CBS poll found that 82 percent think border enforcement is insufficient to keep illegal aliens from coming to the U.S., and a Rasmussen Reports poll showed 79 percent did not think the government was doing enough to secure the border.

“Several surveys have shown broad, national support for the Arizona law. The Associated Press reported that its recent poll found “almost twice as many people support the Arizona law as those who oppose it.” Like other states—and border states in particular— Arizona has been under attack in recent years by both an unchecked increasing illegal population and crime. From 2000 to 2008, the number of illegal aliens in Arizona skyrocketed by 70 percent, and 14 percent of the prison population was illegal aliens.

“In addition to widespread public disapproval of illegal immigration, there are problematic implications to implementation of any amnesty legislation. A known weak and nonperforming agency, the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) would be responsible for processing millions of people which will take time and millions of dollars. Past amnesties have been plagued by fraud and abuse. One of the biggest problems would be accurately identifying applicants— their actual names, history and background. Many applicants will have a long history of scamming the immigration benefits system by using alternative names, fraudulent or stolen Social Security numbers and ITINs (Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers), or counterfeit birth certificates. The Mexican government-issued matricula consular card is notoriously unreliable.”

For more information please contact: www.capsweb.org

Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS)
1129 State Street, 3-D
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

Immigration Cannot Continue — No Home for Amnesty in a Sustainable America

Part 1: A viable civilization a must in order to survive…

In this three part series, you may enjoy Maria Fotopoulos, Senior Writing Fellow at www.capsweb.org as she examines amnesty for 20 million illegal aliens now residing within the United States.  She addresses the key word ‘sustainability’ in “No home for amnesty in a sustainable America.”

“At the root of any modern nation-state lies the belief that because a given population shares, or can be made to share, certain identifiable characteristics—religion, language, shared history, and so on—it merits an independent existence,” wrote historian James L. Gelvin.

“Some 500 years of history, tracing back to the Protestant Reformation, anchor the development of the concept of nation-state, which became the preeminent political organizing structure worldwide by the 19th century,” said Fotopoulos. “Sovereignty and recognizable borders are among the most prominent characteristics of the nation-state. For the United States, its borders have evolved through the last 200 years and the push of Manifest Destiny, ultimately taking our current 50-state form.”

“Borders are more than just lines on maps. With recognizable borders comes a system to maintain their integrity. In the nation’s collective memory, Ellis Island, site of passage for 12 million legal immigrants to the U.S. from the late 1890s through the early 1950s, is the symbol of a system that once ensured we knew who was coming into the country.

“In recent times, the focal point of a legal gateway for U.S. entry has eroded both in reality and in public consciousness. Although people have entered the country illegally since immigration laws were first passed, the numbers in recent years have soared. Millions are in this country illegally because they sneaked across borders or overstayed their visas.

“The influx of humanity coming to the country both legally and illegally has been addressed in various ways through the years. Under presidents Hoover, Truman and Eisenhower there were mass deportations of illegal aliens, including large numbers from Mexico who worked throughout the southwestern states in agriculture. By the end of the Eisenhower years, reports indicated that illegal immigration dropped by 95 percent.

“Then in 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act (the Hart-Celler Immigration Bill). Essentially, it replaced immigration law from the 1920s and recast the future of immigration for the country. With staunch support from a young Senator Ted Kennedy, the new law placed no limit on the number of family members that could come to the country by way of a “family reunification” clause for legal immigrants. The law also shifted the focus from Western European immigrants and opened up immigration to non-European nations, notably Asian and Latin American countries. Immigration doubled between 1965 and 1970, with another doubling between 1970 and 1990.

“Twenty years later, immigration—this time illegal—was again a topic. Again, with a big push from Senator Kennedy, the role of immigration in shaping the country was to change, this time with the passage of the Immigration and Reform Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, an amnesty for illegal aliens.

“Since IRCA, Congress has enacted an additional six amnesties, providing some 5.7 million people with the gift of U.S. citizenship:

1. Immigration and Reform Control Act (IRCA), 1986
   Blanket amnesty for some 2.7 million illegal aliens.
2. Section 245(i) Amnesty, 1994
   Temporary rolling amnesty for 578,000 illegal aliens.
3. Section 245(i) Extension Amnesty, 1997
   Extension of the rolling amnesty created in 1994.
   Note: The numbers for section 245(i) are not broken out for 1994 and 1997.
4. Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) Amnesty, 1997
   Amnesty for close to 1 million illegal aliens from Central America.
5. Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act Amnesty (HRIFA), 1998
   Amnesty for 125,000 illegal aliens from Haiti.
6. Late Amnesty, 2000
   Amnesty for some illegal aliens who claim they should have received amnesty under the 1986 IRCA amnesty, an estimated 400,000 illegal aliens.
7. LIFE Act Amnesty, 2000
   Reinstatement of the rolling Section 245(i) amnesty, an estimated 900,000 illegal aliens.

“Ultimately, these legislative acts awarded amnesty to a much larger populace than the original estimates. Rather than cover some one million illegal aliens, IRCA, together with the Late Amnesty of 2000, gave the opportunity for naturalization to more than 3 million people who were illegally in the U.S.”

MILLIONS OF ILLEGAL ALIENS NOW IN THE U.S.

“The number of people living in the country illegally now is at an epic level, between 10 and 30 million according to most government and academic estimates, although some studies place the figure much higher. It is difficult to overstate the enormity of the problem, even at the conservative, consensus figure,” said Fotopoulos.  “For some perspective on size, more than 100 nations of the world have a population less than 12 million. Many politicians, thinking of short-term fixes, rather than the best interests of American citizens, have focused on amnesty, failing to note the historical record demonstrating that amnesties simply lead to more amnesties and to higher rates of illegal immigration.

“Traditionally, America has been one of the few countries that was a magnet for large-scale immigration. With increased global population pressure and greater mobility, the United States—the third most populous country in the world—is no longer alone in wrestling with immigration issues.

“Britain’s new austerity plan includes recognition that immigration is out of control, and the country will cap the number of immigrants from outside the EU. In Northern Ireland, after a recent crackdown on illegal immigrants, a representative of the border agency said, “We will not tolerate illegal working which threatens to damage our communities, and will act on intelligence to target those businesses which ignore the rules and remove those with no right to be in the UK.”

“In Australia, environmentalists, concerned with the deleterious impacts of population growth on the environment, are leading an effort to reduce immigration levels. The population of Australia, approximately the same size as our contiguous states, is 22 million compared to the U.S. population of 310 million.

“A CNN report noted severe penalties, including corporal punishment, for illegal immigration in Malaysia and Singapore. Italy criminalized illegal immigration last year in a law that “allows unarmed civilians to form patrol groups and help police fight crime on the street,” CNN observed.

“In comparison, the law passed this year in Arizona to try to combat the state’s epidemic of illegal immigration—an estimated 460,000 illegal aliens are calling Arizona home—seems mild. It allows law officers, in the course of enforcing other laws, to check a person’s immigration status if there is reasonable suspicion that the person is in the U.S. illegally. The law mirrors federal law that has been in force for decades.”

For more information please contact: www.capsweb.org

Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS)
1129 State Street, 3-D
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

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