Madame Jane predicts: Our grandchildren’s fate rests in the hands of the duped

“Americans have been duped,” Madam Jane stated yesterday. She is our neighborhood fortune teller and her predictions are always accurate — if a bit scary. And while gazing into her new and improved high-tech crystal ball, Madame Jane also predicted that all this unwarranted and inappropriately naive gullibility on the part of Americans today is gonna end up costing our grandchildren a LOT.

“And exactly how do you see that our grandchildren will be affected by us having been bamboozled?” I asked her. “Will they have to suffer the indignity of having only 300 channels to chose from on their cable TV? Or not having as many versions of made-in-China Barbie as we used to have when we were kids? Or having to cut back on their trips to the mall to only three times a week?”

But judging from the tears that began welling up in Madame Jane’s eyes as she watched her crystal ball in dismay, I suddenly realized how very painful it must be — to be gifted with the Second Sight in these troubled times. “To put it mildly,” stated MJ, “our grandchildren are now doomed.” Oh crap. But in what way? What exactly does Madame Jane see?

“I see children trapped inside the agonizing grip of hunger, thirst and starvation. I see children being raised like savages in filthy slave labor camps. I see children crying in the night and trying to eat grass and dirt just to stay alive.”

“And you’re talking about some nameless and faceless children living in some far-way third-world country like Biafra or Darfur or Gaza, right?”

“No, I’m talking about American kids here. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned American kids. And brown-skinned and yellow-skinned American kids too. Scrambling through gutters and ditches, roving in packs, trying desperately to just stay alive.” Good grief.

“But is there nothing that we can do right now to avoid this terrible fate for our grandchildren?” I asked.

“Sure there is. Lots of stuff. But you alone can’t do it all. And no one else in America seems to even want to do it. Most Americans have been willingly duped into complacency — while our future is being robbed blind by the worthless and useless bunch of lying greedy heartless bastards who have taken over our economy, our government and our hearts and our minds. But unless all Americans start to act right NOW, the future that I see is assured.”

I’m going to have to agree with Madame Jane on this one. We have sold our grandchildren’s patrimony for pittance — to the religious fakers who tell us to hate our neighbors. To the generals and war profiteers who tell us that killing and war is the only answer to every problem. To that great casino on Wall Street that uses our congressional representatives, president and Supreme Court justices as its personal errand boys and security guards. And to the hypocritical self-styled “Patriotic Americans” who, when no one else is looking, use our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our Flag and our Pledge of Allegiance for toilet paper.

“So. Madame Jane. What are you are saying here? That horrible things will happen to our grandchildren if we don’t wise up, right?” Pretty much.

“But after all these duped Americans have been so righteously forewarned by yourself, do we actually then start to wise up?” Er, no. “I thought as much.”

So I thanked Madame Jane for giving me her extremely grim take on the future and then got up to leave. “You sit right back down in that chair right now, Missie. I still got something else to say.” And then she whipped out an ancient raggedy deck of tarot cards, shuffled them twice and pulled out the Hanged Man. Oops. Not good.

“Your grandchildren aren’t the only ones who are gonna suffer here, deary,” she told me. “Tea Party members are also gonna be doomed — to a life of living in cardboard boxes under the freeway and subsisting on cat food. Those people have just shot themselves in the foot. ‘Rugged Individualism’ is NOT gonna work out for them. Not after they lose their MediCare and their Social Security and their homes and their cars and their jobs and their roads and their trains and their police force and their doctors and their schools….”

I myself don’t give a rat’s arse about what happens to Teabaggers in the future. As far as I’m concerned, they deserve what they get. But Madame Jane actually seems to care about these poor unfortunate souls. “Of course they have been duped by the corporatists and the oligarchs and the talk-show hosts and the rich people. Duped. Duped. Duped. But even still, they are going to have to pay a very stiff price for their stupidity, gullibility and naivete. We are currently living in a world that is far too fast-paced for these naive huckster’s marks to survive for long. There is far too much at stake now for gullibility to serve as either a protection or excuse. They too are gonna pay. But still. You do sorta have to feel sorry for them.”

I got her drift. Pity the poor Teabaggers, they know not what they do. Yeah, right.

“But,” I protested, hoping to get in the last word, “Tea Partiers are currently all jumping up and down and screaming and demanding stuff like, ‘Rugged individualism, smaller government, less regulation, no unions, no infrastructure investment, no help with healthcare and no Socialism for anyone except for the Tea Party’s idols, the rich.’ So then how about we just give them what they want?” And they deserve what they get. Humph.

But trying to get in the last word with Madame Jane is always kinda hard. “We are all still human beings,” she reminded me. “And we all still have ideals to live up to. That’s what separates us from animals. And if something tragic happens to the least of us, then it happens to us all.” Or to Teabaggers. Or our grandchildren. They’re all doomed.

And then MJ started ranting along about the new 21st-century Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and autism. I just covered my ears.

“So now we have the Teabaggers dying a horrible death and our grandchildren dying a horrible death and America’s new Four Horsemen mowing whole groups of people down. Fine. But can you please get a little bit more specific here? Like, what is gonna be happening to ME?” So Madame Jane then read my palm.

“I see a horrible death for you too….” Now wait a minute. That’s going too far! “See that line there? It means that you have become addicted to sugar — and that you will die from an overdose of the stuff.” Yeah but what a way to go.

“Could be worse,” I replied. “Sugar’s not so bad. I mean, I could be addicted to heroin….”

“Nope. Sugar addiction is much much more worse than smack.” Oh really? How is that? “With heroin addiction, first you gotta wait until the good stuff is imported from Afghanistan and then you gotta go slink around in the nasty part of town until you score off of some shady illegal dealer. But not so with sugar — you can walk fifty feet in almost any direction in America and legally score all the sugar, fructose and those lame sugar-substitutes you could ever possibly crave.”

But, hey, at least I’m not addicted to cigarettes. “That wouldn’t be as bad either,” said Madame Jane — always so negative! “Right now there’s a huge tax on cigarettes that will hopefully pay for all those costly lung cancer treatments that heavy smokers gotta have. But who is going to pay for all that diabetes treatment once you go blind and all your toes start to fall off? There’s no tax on high-fructose corn syrup that’s gonna help you out here!”

Yikes! It looks like I’m gonna be doomed too.

PS: Recent newspaper headlines have all been shrieking that Social Security is gonna be cut in order to balance the federal deficit. If this happens, Americans are going to be even more duped than was even dreamed of in Madame Jane’s philosophy. But here’s a very obvious prediction from me:

If you sincerely want to cut the federal deficit and are not just here to blow smoke, then let’s all just stop financing and fighting all these resource wars that greedy Texas oilmen have been happily inflicting on us for decades. That would do it. Let’s pull out of Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, Mexico, Nigeria, Columbia, whatever. Let’s just let these freaking oilmen finance and fight their own freaking resource wars by themselves — or, at the very least, let us share in some of their profits.

Barack Obama Is Wrong: 18 Facts Which Prove That Illegal Immigration Is An Absolute Nightmare For The U.S. Economy

Barack Obama has declared that “immigration reform is an economic imperative“, and is promising to do his best to get an immigration bill pushed through Congress this year.  But will “legalizing” all of the illegal immigration that has taken place over the last several decades improve the struggling U.S. economy or will it actually make our economic problems worse?  One of the favorite tricks of top politicians is to promise that the economy is going to improve if we just support what it is that they are currently pushing.  Hopefully the Americans people will not buy the nonsense that Obama is spewing.  The truth is that Barack Obama is wrong about the economic impact of illegal immigration.  Illegal immigrants don’t do jobs that Americans “don’t want” to do.  A million Americans recently showed up to apply for a job at McDonald’s.  That is how desperate Americans are for work these days.  Please don’t try to tell me that there aren’t millions of Americans out there that would not pick fruit for minimum wage.  The millions upon millions of illegal immigrants in this country are stealing jobs, they are depressing wages in a whole host of industries and they are a huge factor in the erosion of the middle class.  Millions of middle class American families can’t afford to provide for their families anymore and are losing their homes, drowning in debt or going bankrupt.  Rather than what Barack Obama is proposing (which is to essentially “legalize” illegal immigration), we need an immigration policy that makes sense and that protects American jobs.

Before we go any further, it is important for me to make a few points.  It is not a bad thing that people want to come to this nation from another country.  A lot of people that want to come to the United States are really hard working and have really solid character.  This nation has a long tradition of immigrants arriving to build a better life here. At different times this country will need different levels of immigration, but we will always need new immigrants.  People on one side of a border are not more “valuable” than people on another side of a border.  There is a reason why our founding fathers believed that “all men are created equal”.  In every nation on earth there are really wonderful people.  We should love all men, women and children no matter where they were born and no matter what they look like.  God created us all and He loves us all dearly.

The reason I went into all that is because of the way politics is played in America in 2011.  The moment that anyone suggests that there might be a problem with illegal immigration they are immediately branded with all kinds of horrible labels.  To put a horrible label on someone that is completely and totally untrue just to score political points is absolutely despicable.

The funny thing is that some of the organizations that denounce others the loudest should actually be examining themselves.  For example, one of the largest pro-illegal immigration organizations is called “La Raza”, which literally means “The Race” (as if we all couldn’t figure it out).  Perhaps it is time for them to come up with a new name.

Look, we all have to start learning to love each other.  If not, our society is going to continue to break down.

A majority of the American people (yes, that is what the polls show) are not against illegal immigration because they “hate” another group of people.  Rather, they just want all immigrants to go through the “front door” and they want the government to be sensitive to changing economic conditions.

The sad truth is that the U.S. government has absolutely refused to secure the U.S. border with Mexico for decades, and this has allowed millions upon millions of criminals, drug dealers and gang members to cross freely into the United States.  In addition, by refusing to secure the border we have allowed new diseases to spread unchecked into this country.

Meanwhile, the law abiding people that would like to get into this country legally are put through absolute hell.  I used to practice law and I have filled out immigration forms.  The process is a complete and total nightmare.

So we have been making it really easy for law breakers to sneak in the back door of our country and we have been making it really hard for law abiding people to get in the front door.

What in the world could be wrong about wanting to fix that?

Once many illegal immigrants arrive in the United States they either try to make a living legally (by directly competing with blue collar American workers  for jobs and driving their wages down) or illegally by selling drugs or being involved in other kinds of criminal activity.

Apparently Barack Obama believes that this kind of behavior should be rewarded with a “path to citizenship”.

The vast majority of illegal immigrants pay absolutely no federal or state income taxes and they never intend to.  At the same time, they seem more than happy to take advantage of the free social services and benefits offered to them.  In fact, stories of how “good” life in America is just encourages more and more immigrants to come to the United States illegally.

We need an immigration policy that insists that everyone come in through the front door.

Is there anyone out there that cannot agree with that?

We also need to set immigration levels that our economy can handle.

Right now our economy is struggling.  Millions upon millions of Americans are out of work.  44 million Americans are on food stamps.  47 million Americans are living in poverty.  We just can’t take in a whole lot of extra workers right now.

You would think that would just be common sense.

But instead, Barack Obama wants to grant amnesty to all of the illegal immigrants that are already here and put them on a path to citizenship.

Wow – do you think that might embolden millions more illegal immigrants to come flooding in?

Barack Obama is against a border fence.  He says we don’t need it.

Meanwhile, thousands more illegal immigrants pour into this country every single day.

Barack Obama supports all of the “sanctuary cities” that have openly declared that they are not going to enforce our immigration laws.

So where do you think illegal immigrants are going to flock to?  The truth is that word about these “sanctuary cities” gets around really fast.  If you live in one of these cities, then you probably know all about it.

If Barack Obama gets his way, nobody will be breaking our immigration laws because essentially there will not be any more immigration laws.

Not that George W. Bush was any better.  He was an absolute disaster on immigration as well.

The truth is that our immigration policy has been slowly eroding the U.S. middle class for many decades.

But according to Barack Obama, we desperately need to implement his “immigration reform” plan for the good of the middle class….

“One way to strengthen the middle class in America is to reform the immigration system, so that there is no longer a massive underground economy that exploits a cheap source of labor while depressing wages for everybody else.”

What a joke.  The reality is that illegal immigration hurts that U.S. middle class and it is severely damaging to the U.S. economy.  Because of illegal immigration, every single day wages are lost, taxes don’t get collected, hospitals provide “free health care” for which they are never paid, huge criminal gangs of foreigners are roaming our streets and the cost of providing social services to illegal aliens is slowly bankrupting state and local governments.

The following are 18 facts which prove that illegal immigration is an absolute nightmare for the U.S. economy….

#1 Illegal immigrants take jobs away from American citizens. According to a review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data, legal and illegal immigrants gained over a million additional jobs between 2008 and 2010 even as millions of American citizens were losing their jobs during that same time period.

#2 The majority of our immigrants now sneak in through the “back door” that the federal government purposely leaves open.  Thanks to the negligence of the federal government, far more people  than come in through the legal immigration process.  This has got to change.

#3 Illegal immigrants generally don’t pay taxes.  The vast majority of illegal aliens would never even dream of paying income taxes, but Mexicans living in America send billions upon billions of dollars out of the United States and back to Mexico every single year.

#4 Although illegal aliens pay next to nothing in taxes, they have no problem receiving tens of billions of dollars worth of free education benefits, free health care benefits, free housing assistance and free food stamp benefits.  Many communities in the United States now openly advertise that they will help illegal aliens with these things.

#5 The cost of educating the children of illegal immigrants is staggering. It is estimated that U.S. taxpayers spend  on primary and secondary school education for the children of illegal immigrants.

#6 Thanks to illegal immigration, California’s overstretched health care systemis on the verge of collapse.  Dozens of California hospitals and emergency rooms have shut down over the last decade because they could not afford to stay open after being endlessly swamped by illegal immigrants who were simply not able to pay for the services that they were receiving.  As a result, the remainder of the health care system in the state of California is now beyond overloaded.  This had led to brutally long waits, diverted ambulances and even unnecessary patient deaths.  Sadly, the state of California now ranks dead lastout of all 50 states in the number of emergency rooms per million people.

#7 It was estimated that there were employed by U.S. employers during 2008.  How much better would our economy look if all of those jobs were being filled by American workers?

#8 The region along the U.S./Mexico border is now an open war zone. Just across the U.S. border, the city of Juarez, Mexico is considered to be one of the most dangerous cities on the entire planet because of the brutal drug war being waged there. In fact, Juarez has now become the murder capital of the western hemisphere.  Much of that violence has begun to spill over into areas of the southwestern United States.

For example, a while back NPR described one incident in the Juarez Valley that involved American citizens….

A couple of weeks ago, gunmen in the Juarez Valley killed the Mexican relative of a Fort Hancock high school student. When the student’s family in Fort Hancock heard about it, they crossed the border at 10 a.m. to see the body, and took the student with them.

“By 10:30, they had stabbed the relatives that went with him, which included his grandparents, with an ice pick,” says school superintendent Jose Franco. “My understanding is that the gentleman is like 90 years old, and they poked his eyes out with an ice pick. I believe those people are still in intensive care here in a hospital in the U.S.”

#9 A substantial percentage of young illegal immigrants end up in gangs.  U.S. authorities say that there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs operating inside the United States. According to federal statistics, these 1 million gang members are responsible for up to 80% of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year.  Latino gangs made up primarily of illegal aliens are responsible for much of this violence.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, some of the most notorious gangs in the country are made up almost entirely of illegal immigrants….

“Gang investigators in Virginia estimate that 90% of the members of MS-13, the most notorious immigrant gang, are illegal immigrants.”

#10 The “18th Street Gang” is certainly giving MS-13 a run for their money.  It is believed that the 18th Street Gang has thousands of members in the city of Los Angeles alone. In fact, the gang has become so notorious that there are even rumors that some police officers in Los Angeles simply will not venture into the areas most heavily controlled by the 18th Street gang.

The following is what Wikipedia says about the 18th Street Gang….

A US Justice Department report from 2009 estimates that the 18th Street gang has a membership of some 30,000 to 50,000 with 80% of them being illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America and is active in 44 cities in 20 states. Its main source of income is street-level distribution of cocaine and marijuana and, to a lesser extent, heroin and methamphetamine. Gang members also commit assault, auto theft, carjacking, drive-by shootings, extortion, homicide, identification fraud, and robbery.

#11 The “drug war” in northern Mexico is one gigantic bloodbath. The Mexican government says that as many as 28,000 people have been slaughtered by the drug cartels since 2007.  A very significant percentage of those deaths have happened in areas right along the U.S. border, and yet our federal government still sees no reason to get serious about border security.

#12 It is an open secret that Mexican drug cartels are openly conducting military operations inside the United States.  The handful of border patrol agents that we have guarding the border are massively outgunned and outmanned.

One agent who patrols the border and who asked to remain anonymous told Fox News the following….

“To say that this area is out of control is an understatement.”

A different federal agent put it this way in an email to Fox News….

“Every night we’re getting beaten like a pinata at a birthday party by drug, alien smugglers.”

#13 Federal border officials say that Mexican drug cartels have not only set up shop on U.S. soil, but they are actually maintaining lookout bases in strategic locations in the hills of southern Arizona.  If you go to Arizona today, there are actually signs that have been put up by the federal government warning American citizens not to venture into certain wilderness routes that are used by Mexican drug cartels to bring in drugs.

#14 The drug war being waged on both sides of the border is so violent that it is almost unimaginable.  For example, one very prominent Mexican assassin known as “the soupmaker” has confessed that he made approximately 300 bodies disappear by dissolving them in acid baths.  But right now there is essentially nothing that is preventing the next “soupmaker” from crossing the U.S. border and moving into your neighborhood.

#15 Arizona police are being openly warned by the Mexican drug cartels that if they try to interfere with the drug traffic in their area that they will be “taken out” by drug cartel snipers.

#16 While the U.S. military endlessly hunts for “members of al-Qaeda” in the caves of Afghanistan and on the streets of Iraqi cities, a very real threat has been building just south of the border.  Over the past 15 to 20 years, Hezbollah has set up operations all over Mexico, Central America and South America.  Hezbollah is reportedly making a lot of money in the drug trade and in trafficking illegal aliens.  Sadly, our government is largely ignoring this.

#17 Each year, it costs the states billions of dollars to incarcerate illegal immigrant criminals that should have never been allowed into the country in the first place. It is estimated that illegal aliens make up  of the population in federal, state and local prisons and that the total cost of incarcerating them is more than $1.6 billion annually.

#18 The drug cartels and the gangs always seem to be a couple steps ahead of our agents along the border. Approximately 75 tunnels along the U.S. border with Mexico have been discovered by law enforcement authorities in the last four years alone.

How much do you think all of this crime, gang violence and drug cartel activity is costing our economy?

Why won’t the federal government do what the Constitution requires and secure the border?

Oh, but Barack Obama says that he has a plan.

He says that he is going to save the day.

The following is how Barack Obama describes his plan…

“We are not going to ship back 12 million people, we’re not going to do it as a practical matter. We would have to take all our law enforcement that we have available and we would have to use it and put people on buses, and rip families apart, and that’s not who we are, that’s not what America is about. So what I’ve proposed… is you say we’re going to bring these folks out of the shadows. We’re going to make them pay a fine, they are going to have to learn English, they are going to have to go to the back of the line…but they will have a pathway to citizenship over the course of 10 years.”

So how many illegal immigrants do you think are going to step forward to pay a fine?

One percent?

How many of them do you think are going to show up for English classes?

Who is going to make them do it?

Obama?

Are we going to have law enforcement officials running around trying to collect fines from illegal immigrants and trying to get them to attend their English lessons?

According to Obama, the millions upon millions of illegal immigrants that are in this country are going to be glad to willingly do the following….

1) Admit they broke the law

2) Pay back taxes and a fine

3) Learn English

4) Be willing to undergo background checks before starting the legalization process.

Those four points are taken directly from Obama’s plan.

So what are illegal immigrants going to do when this plan is passed?

99 percent of them are going to laugh and they are just going to keep on doing what they have been doing.

Large numbers of illegal immigrants are already enjoying the “high life” in the dozens of “sanctuary cities” across the United States.

The following is how the Ohio Jobs & Justice PAC defines sanctuary cities….

Generally, sanctuary policies instruct city employees not to notify the federal government of the presence of illegal aliens living in their communities. The policies also end the distinction between legal resident aliens and illegal aliens–so illegal aliens often benefit from taxpayer funded government services and programs too.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Can I sign up for that plan?

After all, who wouldn’t want to earn all income tax-free and yet enjoy unlimited government services?

Today we are being told that we need to make life as comfortable as possible for the waves of illegal immigrants that are coming in.  In fact, Barack Obama says that all of us need to make sure that our kids are learning how to speak Spanish….

“I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about, we need to have English only. They want to pass a law, we just, we want English only…Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English, I agree with this. But understand this, instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, they’ll learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.”

All of this is utter insanity.

The cold, hard reality of the matter is that we have tightly secured the border between South Korea and North Korea for over 50 years and we could secure our own borders if we really wanted to.

But instead, we continue to leave our border with Mexico completely wide open. Thousands of criminals, gang members and drug pushers continue to come in completely unchecked every single day.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have to subject ourselves to some of the most humiliating “security measures” imaginable before we are even allowed to get on to an airplane.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?

Source: The Economic Collapse

Forget about Libya: Let’s invade the Caymans!

If you were to look in the dictionary for a definition of the word “loot,” you would find the following: “Goods usually of considerable value taken in war”. But no matter how you get your hands on it, loot is still loot. According to Merriam-Webster, when nations seize loot, it is called war. However, when individuals seize loot, we call them pirates. But sometimes nations can act like pirates too.

Merriam-Webster also defines the word “loot” as “something appropriated illegally often by force or violence.” Even nations can do that! And if your nation is bound and determined to act like a pirate, then might I suggest that it follow Captain Jack Sparrow’s excellent example and go off to the Caribbean to do its plundering, right?

According to journalist Nicholas Shaxson, author of “Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens,” there are anywhere between ten and 20 trillion U.S. dollars sitting offshore at the moment. “Half of world trade is processed in one way or another through tax havens. It’s all around us, and it’s absolutely huge.” (an absolute Must-Read if you want to understand American politics and economics today). And many of these huge “offshore” holdings are located in the Caribbean. Good to know!

Of course plundering Libya does have its good points, I’ll be the first to admit. By sacking and pillaging its oil-producing cities for their loot, there is much swag to be had — especially if you are working for BP. However, dollar for dollar, the Cayman Islands have much more loot to offer than almost anywhere else in the world — and I’m not just talking about some eye-popping booty here either. Unlike Libya, the Cayman Islands are also offering a really first-class place to invade.

Just imagine all those billions and trillions of dollars stored in the bank vaults at Georgetown, just lying there waiting to be had. And them thar hearty treasures are easy pickings too — because the Caymans, unlike Libya, doesn’t even have an army to defend itself. No major guided missile systems, no nuclear weapons, not even very many tanks. Plus the hotels in the Caymans are much nicer than the ones in Libya, giving Anderson Cooper much more comfortable digs to report from than in the Middle East.

According to WhereToStay.com, you can get a suite at the Villa Bellagio in Georgetown for just $1,377 a night — including five bedrooms, four baths, easy golf course access, maid service and an in-suite jacuzzi. “Directly on the beach!” reads the brochure. Let’s see Gaddafi try to match that.

And, as the Caymans government itself brags on its website, “The Cayman Islands is one of the world’s leading providers of institutionally focused, specialized financial services and a preferred destination for the structuring and domiciling of sophisticated financial services products.” Yours for the picking! Why go to Libya for oil money when eventually all that oil money will end up coming to you anyway, here in the Caribbean.

Plus the Caymans have all kinds of cool beaches where you can bury your treasure once the plundering is over. X marks the spot.

If the United States is into the pirating game — and it surely appears to be, after having successfully looted Iraq’s oil, Afghanistan’s heroin trade, Vietnam’s central location and all that prime real estate in Palestine — then I would like to suggest that it’s time for America to GO BIG and loot the Cayman Islands too. Ah, the Caymans — where all America’s oligarchs’ vast pirate swag always ends up eventually anyway. So let’s eliminate the middleman here and go straight to the end of the booty rainbow itself.

“But America can’t invade the Caymans, Jane!” you might say. Why not? “Because that’s America’s money down there in those vaults.” Yep. My point exactly. Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. aren’t the only countries that have been looted by pirates. America has been looted too. And now it’s time to go and get it all back.

“Avast there, Mateys!” Hoist up the Jolly Roger. Set sail on the Black Pearl.

American taxpayers’ money is no longer stored in our treasury, at our mints, or in Fort Knox. Now it’s all down there in the Caymans in private senators’ and lobbyists’ and corporatists’ secret bank accounts. So let’s storm down there like Keira Knightly and get it all back. Or maybe we could spare ourselves all the bother of invading yet another sovereign country again — and just pass a few laws that will make it illegal for corporatist pirates to pillage America and send their loot off to the Caymans. Nah. Where would be all the “Talk like a Pirate Day” fun in that?

PS: I just checked with Expedia regarding the price of a trip to the Caymans and if you are willing to live on the cheap and forgo the whole oligarch experience, you can actually score a round-trip air fare from San Francisco and a minimalist hotel room for a week for less than $1,500. I should save up, go down there and pay a visit to what used to be America’s money sometime — since it is definitely not located up here any more, and it looks like us wimpy American taxpayers ain’t gonna invade the Caymans to get it back any time soon.

‘Global Economic Crisis’ exposes plans for a global military dictatorship

Review of: The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century
Editors, Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall
Publisher: Global Research, 2010 (391 pp)

There’s a certain irony to my reading this book while waiting at the Food Stamp office. I’m part of an increasing number suffering under the New World Order’s systematic destruction of the planet’s middle classes so as to concentrate wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer families. While global uprisings now threaten global governance under a single currency, scheming rulers have long anticipated this reaction. In The Global Economic Crisis, we learn exactly how a planet-wide military dictatorship plans to enforce its feudal vision.

Neatly organized into five sections comprising 20 essays by fifteen different authors, Global Economic Crisis carefully ties militarization with the planned economic meltdown. Client states and the U.S. itself have openly and sometimes secretly developed the legal framework for martial law. Testifying before a US Senate committee on Intelligence in early 2009, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, warned that civil unrest owing to the economic collapse posed a greater threat than Arab terrorism. One of the book’s essayists, Bill Van Auken, points out that this is the first time in several years that Al Qaeda did not top the list of threats to national security.

The book’s major theme, supported by well-documented sources (and we expect nothing less from Global Research), hammers out the connection between military dominance and planned economic crises. Cuts in social spending augment the buildup of arms. Intellectual property laws bolster control of the world’s food supply by a handful of multinational corporations. Captured by transnational corporations that escape national anti-trust laws, the “free market” has given way to corporate control of prices, while driving down wages. Social protest of such polices is met by military and police violence.

In GEC, we learn that today’s global economy is driven by trade in oil, arms, drugs, and slavery (including prostitution). Where neoliberalism flourishes, so do these sectors. On the drug trade, Michel Chossudovsky writes, “The underlying military and intelligence objective is to protect the cocaine and heroin markets, which feed billions of narco-dollars into the Western banking system.” Indeed, a recent report by Bloomberg News exposed how Bank of America and Wachovia (now owned by Wells Fargo) finances Mexico’s drug cartels:

“They are multinational businesses, after all,” says [Mexican Senator Felipe] Gonzalez, as he slowly loads his revolver at his desk in his Mexico City office. “And they cannot work without a bank.”

One can travel to any major city in the world and buy supposedly illegal drugs, arms, prostitutes or slaves. The level of infrastructure required for such a ubiquitous global market implies government and banking support.

Those writing about the social and economic ramifications of globalist actions will greatly appreciate Peter Phillips’ essay, “Poverty and Social Inequality.” It’s chock full of charts laying out facts and statistics.

One of the more intricate essays, “The Political Economy of World Government,” details how economic classes are being restructured, with the potential for the middle classes to unite “using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes.” In this piece, Andrew Gavin Marshall shows how various private interest groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission are deliberately restructuring society to make national borders irrelevant.

On par, Ellen Brown’s piece, “The Towers of Basel: Secretive Plan to create a Global Central Bank” shows how a shadowy global banking committee can break national economies, or boost them if the country does what the moneylenders dictate.

Not entirely an easy read, Global Economic Crisis nonetheless exposes the deep underworkings of a criminal class of bankers and industrialists who serve their own economic interests at the expense of everyone else, backed up by an expanding global military presence.

The last book to get me this angry was John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Like Confessions, strategies to circumvent and overturn the globalists’ plans are offered inGEC. The “Cook Plan,” for example, emphasizes the need to dissolve the debt-based monetary system – a theme often discussed by Ellen Brown. Claudia von Werlhoff also offers alternatives, describing the various labor and peasant movements that restore local economies while protecting the environment from the ravages of corporate ecocide.

By fully digesting the information presented, the world’s people can best strategize effective resistance. Nonviolence has been a key feature of street protests and strikes that started in Greece and France last year, though often met with violence by police and military. But the stark “austerity” measures neoliberals are foisting on the globe, while they rake in trillions of dollars in bankster bailouts and no-bid contracts, have emboldened populists across Northern Africa. Austerity has even inspired the otherwise anemic US labor movement, with protests spreading from Wisconsin to Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and beyond.

Such street action must also be coupled with direct measures taken at the local level, however. It is here that the ideas presented in Global Economic Crisis can be of most use. By understanding how banks engineered this “bloodless coup,” we find impetus for restoring national sovereignty and a more sane and equitable economy.

Joseph Lieberman’s Long Overdue Departure

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate in 2000 who subsequently broke away from the Democratic Party and won reelection as an independent in 2006, has announced that he will not seek reelection when his fourth term expires next year.

Lieberman’s departure will not make much difference to the political scene in Washington as his influence has been on the wane for years. It is nevertheless moderately good news because his hypocrisy, bad judgment and malevolence are impressive even by the standards of the best Congress money can buy.

Lieberman took pride of his well publicized pontifications on issues of “values” and “morality,” notably in 1998 when he described President Clinton’s conduct in the Lewinsky scandal as “disgraceful,” drawing praise from members of both parties for his supposedly principled stand. At the same time he has supported a host of bad causes and continues to support them.

In 1999 Lieberman co-sponsored the “Hate Crimes Bill” (S.622) that had sought to criminalize any statement critical of militant homosexuals’ objectives, practices and “lifestyle.” He was outspoken in his advocacy in giving homosexuals and lesbians the same rights as heterosexuals to adopt children. He has been a vocal supporter of the repeal of don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy: “The late Senator Barry Goldwater once said, ‘It’s not important if you are straight, just that you can shoot straight.’ I agree, and believe our current policy should be changed.” When it was changed last month he hailed the decision as a personal triumph.

An advocate of open borders, in January 2004 Lieberman supported “one-time earned legalization” for illegal immigrants. Four months earlier he accused President George W. Bush of using 9/11 as an excuse to avoid immigration reform. In June 2007 he voted against declaring English as the official language of the U.S. government and supported blanket amnesty for the illegals (“Comprehensive Immigration Reform”). In March 2008 he voted to support continuing federal funds for declared “sanctuary cities” which violated federal immigration laws. He was rated 0% by USBC.

Lieberman’s pro-abortion stand and his voting record on abortion are incompatible with Orthodox Judaism which he claims to profess: “Al Gore and I respect and will protect a woman’s right to choose and our opponents will not. We know that this is a difficult, personal, moral, medical issue. But that is exactly why it ought to be left, under our law, to a woman, her doctor and her god.” He has regularly scored 100% in voting record surveys by NARAL and other pro-abortion groups.

A life-long global interventionist, Lieberman has been a consistent supporter of NATO expansion and an enthusiast for the Iraq war, “a heroic struggle against enemies of civilization” (September 2003). He took pride in not having “an inch of difference” from George W. Bush on the issue, declaring that “overthrowing Saddam was right,” and—somewhat oddly—that the victory in Iraq would open door to Israeli-Palestinian peace (January 2004)

The darkest side of Senator Joseph Lieberman’s record has to do with his stand of Kosovo.  Well before the KLA escalated its terrorist campaign in early 1998, instigating the crisis that culminated in the bombing campaign a year later, Albanian separatists were active purchasing political influence in Washington. Their key backer was Bob Dole, but Lieberman soon became a major asset and was given money by Albanian lobbyists. This champion of campaign finance reform performed on cue: as early as in October 1998, way ahead of the rest of the pack, he went on television to advocate war against Serbia.  It was not only a matter of U.S./NATO “credibility,” said he, but also of morality, “a question of acting early to stop a broader war in the Balkans… a question of acting out of our humanitarian values.” In April 1999 he declared that “the United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles … Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.”

Once he did get that longed-for bombing, Lieberman urged an unlimited escalation of the war with ground troops, and actively advocated war crimes against Serb civilians. He expressed hope that the air campaign, “even if it does not convince Milosevic to order his troops out of Kosovo, will so devastate his economy, which it’s doing now, so ruin the lives of his people, that they will rise up and throw him out.”

On May 23, 1999, Lieberman repeated this call for indiscriminate terrorist bombing of civilian targets in Serbia on Fox News.  When the presenter said, “But wait, I thought we weren’t trying to make life miserable for regular, every day Serbs,” Lieberman’s answer was unambiguous:

Oh, we are. I mean that’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of months. We’re not only hitting military targets, otherwise why would we be cutting off the water supply and knocking out the power stations—turning the lights out. We’re trying through the air campaign to break the will of the Serbian people so they will force their leader to break his will to then order the troops out of Kosovo.

A paragon of moral virtue was actively advocating war crimes against innocent (“regular”) civilians. Lieberman additionally repaid his Albanian benefactors by sponsoring the infamous “Kosovo Self-Defense Act” that would have provided $25 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money to equip 10,000 KLA “fighters” with arms and anti-tank weapons. In the event Lieberman’s KLA friends did not need additional arms: they were given a free hand to kill and expel non-Albanians from Kosovo under the benevolent gaze of NATO occupiers. He remaind mute following last month’s revelations that his KLA protégés were involved in organ harvesting and heroin trafficking on a grand scale.

Joseph Lieberman has been described as “the conscience of the U.S. Senate.” Indeed, just as Luca Brasi was the conscience of the Corleone family.

Iran vs. KFC: Chickening out in Tehran and Yazd

In a pissing contest between the United States and Iran, it’s hard to tell who would win.  Of course America is bigger and has more nuclear weapons, but Iran is more self-sufficient due to its broader manufacturing base.  

Americans used to be much more free than Iranians — but times may have changed.  When you consider the recent FBI raids in Minneapolis, Congressional renewal of that slimy PATRIOT Act, waterboarding’s sudden wide popularity, our suspended habeas corpus protections, wholesale election giveaways to Citizens United and Diebold, AT&T wiretapping, executive privileges to detain and assassinate U.S. citizens, Arizona’s recent driving-while-Mexican laws and all those happy crotch-gropers at TSA, our country seems to be trying just as hard as it can to catch up with the hardliners in Tehran.

Yet despite the fact that hard-line mullahs are basically running the show in Iran right now, it is still one of the most democratic countries in the Middle East when you compare Iran with a majority of other countries in that region that are currently run by or have been run in the past by the many tyrannical losers that America has happily hand-picked and financed over the last 60 years.  Then suddenly Iran doesn’t look so bad.

America has poured billions of our good taxpayer dollars into supporting all kinds of tyrants and dictatorships in the Middle East, including (but not limited to) Saddam Hussein, the decadent House of Saud, Hamid Karzai’s brother who is the top heroin supplier in the world, that famous CIA tool Osama bin Ladin, the notorious former Shah of Iran, those Kuwaiti losers who sucked us into the Gulf War, Washington’s current BFF in Egypt, good old Ariel Sharon aka the Butcher of Shatila, that American-owned punk who was just thrown out of Tunisia — and I forget who all else. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/the-brutal-truth-about-tunisia-2186287.html)

If you compare the natural resources of Iran with those of America, the U.S. certainly does have lots of oil — but then Iran has lots of oil too.  We also have lots of farmland, but then so does northern Iran.  Our national parks are awesome, but Iran’s historical architectural sites are also superb.

Gasoline in Iran now costs $2.80 per gallon, due to a recent 400% increase.  But gas at my local gas station costs $3.50 per gallon, so Iran has the slight edge there.  Profits from oil revenue in Iran appear to be going toward upgrading of the Iranian economy, infrastructure, military and social services.  American gas companies’ profits, on the other hand, appear to be going toward buying new Beemers and Porsches for their CEOs.

Financially speaking, the U.S. banks on its dollars — while Iran uses euros.  But which currency is stronger?  It’s hard to tell.  However, with gold now selling at an unbelievable $1,367 an ounce and both the U.S. and the E.U. having economic problems these days, I think that almost everyone is losing that particular race — even China.

Iran is a flat-out theocracy now — but according to Bush, Beck and Boehner, America is a theocracy-wannabe in the making, a “theocracy” ruled by corporations.  Not Jesus. 

Currently, Iran is ruled by Islamic ayatollahs and America is ruled by corporations.  Let’s compare.  In Islam, people fast for one month a year in order to learn compassion for those who have less than they do.  In addition, good Muslims are required to give a portion of their income to charity.  Under these house rules, there is a fair chance that the ayatollahs of Iran will be motivated by their religion to help those they rule — thus there is always a chance for redemption.

However, the corporations that now rule America have proven again and again that they are motivated solely by greed.  And while everyone in America seems to be complaining about Big Government these days, the truth is that “government” — big or small — no longer rules America.  Corporations do.  There’s been a bloodless revolution in our country.  America is now ruled by K Street.

Corporations now own America on every level — and we Americans stood passively by and allowed this disaster to happen.  America’s government no longer serves us.  America’s government now serves them.  There’s been a bloodless coup here in America and now it appears that we are ruled solely by greed — and greed has no chance for redemption.

Here’s another comparison between Iran and America:  If asked the question, “Does the Iranian government systematically lie to its citizens?” I would probably have to say yes.  But compared to the vast amount of lying to its citizens that goes on in America today — as revealed recently by Wikileaks — who knows which country would come out the winner here?  The American government, however, appears to have gained the winning edge in this contest.

One in four Iranians don’t have healthcare coverage.  One in six Americans don’t have healthcare coverage.  America is only slightly ahead here.

But there is one area where America has clearly beaten Iran hands down.  No contest here at all!  America is far better at cooking chicken.  Even KFC chicken is better than most of the chicken I ate in Iran — and I have evidence to prove it.

When I toured Iran two years ago, almost everywhere I went, I got served dry, over-cooked chicken.  America wins the chicken-cooking Olympics hands down!

Iran may occasionally use an iron fist on dissenters who disagree with its presidential election results — whereas America still uses its velvet glove.  Iran may have much of the European oil market sewed up, a much broader manufacturing base and apparently-strong alliances with Russia and China, but America has won out over Iran hands down when it comes to cooking chicken!

Are You Ready for the Revolution?

For a while in 2001-2, I worked the night shift at a midtown Manhattan corporate gym (cue the shame and self-loathing) at which I met several interesting characters.

One evening, for example, I was wearing a Yankees t-shirt with the name “Justice” emblazoned on the back (for former Yank David Justice ), when a woman named Mary—perhaps in her late 60s—asked me if I were a Yankee fan. I told her I was…but my real reason for wearing the shirt was all about the word “justice.” She smiled and declared that justice was a “noble idea.”

This was shortly after 9/11, so I braced myself for the inevitable “we need to show those towel heads some justice.” Instead, Mary told me—albeit in a very low voice—she was going to Washington soon to march against the impending invasion of Iraq.

After this confession, Mary looked genuinely nervous. Had she gone too far in the alleged land of the free? I just smiled and said in my best underground resistance voice: “Don’t worry, I’m with you.”

Mary and I proceeded to talk in depth each time she’d come to workout. The company eventually phased out the gym and let me go but just before so, I saw Mary and complimented her on how hard she was training.

She leaned close to me and whispered: “When the revolution comes, I’ll be ready.”

Which brings me to a good question for 2011: Are you ready for the revolution?

Being a revolutionary needn’t require one to sleep till noon, dress entirely in black, and sport a rail-thin, heroin addict physique. Then again, neither should Michael Moore ever serve as anyone’s role model for healthy rebellion.

If you agree that fitness—both mental and physical—is a crucial component for any serious subversive, read on…

4 Steps to Radical Fitness



1. Condition Your Body

For example: Having your arms yanked and bound behind you before being tossed onto a street corner or jammed onto a detention bus can potentially cause damage to the muscles of the shoulder and upper back. To better prepare for this seemingly inevitable scenario, you might wanna seek help from the camel .

2. Free Your Mind

As Ralph Nader sez:

“Once we stop growing up corporate and grow up civic, we will be much more focused on nutritious food, rather than junk food; we will be much more inquiring about different kinds of products; we will look at pollution as a form of violence, not just something that is nasty and dirty; we will demand the mechanism so we can control what we own and use these great resources for an enlightened, just, prosperous, happy society where the pursuit of justice is filled with such joy it itself becomes the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of justice.”

3. Green Your Eating Habits

An activist’s eating habits offer the best opportunity to put theory into practice. If you consume a plant-based, whole foods, locally grown diet (organic, if and when possible), you’ve virtually taken yourself out of the equation, re: animal cruelty, environmental devastation, corporate welfare, and a growing health holocaust .

4. Learn How to Defend Yourself and Your Planet

The inherent message being: If we were to appreciate our unbreakable bonds to other humans and the entire natural world, we’d be more likely to act in “self defense ” when engaging in green activism. I see it as sort of a literal and metaphorical left hook .

Kosovo’s Thaçi: Human Organs Trafficker

The details of an elaborate KLA-run human organ harvesting ring, broadly known for years, have been confirmed by a Council of Europe report published on December 15. The report, “Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking of human organs in Kosovo” identifies the province’s recently re-elected “prime minister” Hashim Thaçi as the boss of a “mafia-like” Albanian group specialized in smuggling weapons, drugs, people, and human organs all over Europe. The report reveals that Thaçi’s closest aides were taking Serbs across the border into Albania after the war, murdering them, and selling their organs on the black market. In addition, the report accuses Thaçi of having exerted “violent control” over the heroin trade for a decade.

Deliberate Destrution of Evidence – Long dismissed in the mainstream media as “Serbian propaganda,” the allegations of organ trafficking – familiarto our readers – were ignored in the West until early 2008, when Carla Del Ponte, former Prosecutor at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, revealed in her memoirs that she had been prevented from initiating any serious investigation into its merits. She also revealed – shockingly – that some elements of proof taken by ICTY field investigators from the notorious “Yellow House” in the Albanian town of Rripe were destroyed at The Hague, thus enabling the KLA and their Western enablers to claim that “there was no evidence” for the organ trafficking allegations.

In April 2008, prompted by Del Ponte’s revelations, seventeen European parliamentarians signed a motion for a resolution calling on the Assembly to examine the allegations. The matter was referred to the Assembly’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, which in June 2008 appointed Swiss senator Dick Marty as its rapporteur. He had gained international prominence by his previous investigation of accusations that the CIA abducted and imprisoned terrorism suspects in Europe.

“Genuine Terror” – In his Introductory Remarks Marty revealed some of the “extraordinary challenges of this assignment”: the acts alleged purportedly took place a decade ago, they were not properly investigated by any of the national and international authorities with jurisdiction over the territories concerned. In addition, Marty went on,

… efforts to establish the facts of the Kosovo conflict and punish the attendant war crimes had primarily been concentrated in one direction, based on an implicit presumption that one side were the victims and the other side the perpetrators. As we shall see, the reality seems to have been more complex.  The structure of Kosovar Albanian society, still very much clan-orientated, and the absence of a true civil society have made it extremely difficult to set up contacts with local sources. This is compounded by fear, often to the point of genuine terror, which we have observed in some of our informants immediately upon broaching the subject of our inquiry.  Even certain representatives of international institutions did not conceal their reluctance to grapple with these facts: “The past is the past”, we were told; “we must now look to the future.”

The report says Thaçi’s links with organized crime go back to the late 1990’s, when his Drenica Group became the dominant faction within the KLA. By 1998 he was able to grab control of “most of the illicit criminal enterprises” in Albania itself. Thaçi and four other members of the Drenica Group are named as personally guilty of assassinations, detentions and beatings:

In confidential reports spanning more than a decade, agencies dedicated to combating drug smuggling in at least five countries have named Hashim Thaçi and other members of his Drenica Group as having exerted violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics… Thaçi and these other Drenica Group members are consistently named as “key players” in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime. I have examined these diverse, voluminous reports with consternation and a sense of moral outrage.

Marty notes that the international community chose to ignore war crimes by the KLA, enabling Thaçi’s forces to conduct a campaign of murdereous terror against Serbs, Roma, and Albanians accused of collaborating with the Serbs. Some 500 of them “disappeared after the arrival of KFOR troops on 12 June 1999,” about a hundred Albanians and 400 others, most of them Serbs. Some of these civilians had been secretly imprisoned by the KLA at different locations in northern Albania, the report adds, “and were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, before ultimately disappearing.” Captives were “filtered” in ad-hoc prisons for their suitability for organ harvesting based on sex, age, health and ethnic origin. They were then sent to the last stop – a makeshift clinic near Fushë-Krujë, close to the Tirana airport:

As and when the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.

Thaçi the Untouchable – The report states that Thaçi’s Drenica Group “bear the greatest responsibility” for the prisons and the fate of those held in them. It criticizes the governments supportive of Kosovo’s independence for not holding to account senior Albanians in Kosovo, including Thaçi, and of lacking the will to effectively prosecute the former leaders of the KLA. The diplomatic and political support by such powers “bestowed upon Thaçi, not least in his own mind, a sense of being untouchable.”

Marty concludes that “[t]he signs of collusion between the criminal class and the highest political and institutional office holders are too numerous and too serious to be ignored,” but “the international authorities in charge of the region did not consider it necessary to conduct a detailed examination of these circumstances, or did so incompletely and superficially.”

Following Marty’s presentation of the report to the Council of Europe in Paris on December 16 it will be debated by the Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg on January 25.

Media Reaction – Within days of the publication of Marty’s report, numerous of excellent articles were published in the mainstream media Europe linking his revelations with the broader problem of NATO’s war against the Serbs in 1999, the precedent it had created for Afghanistan and Iraq, and the nature of the “Kosovar” society today.

Neil Clark in The Guardian assailed “the myth of liberal intervention.” Far from being Tony Blair’s “good” war, he wrote, the assault on Yugoslavia was as wrong as the invasion of Iraq:

It was a fiction many on the liberal left bought into. In 1999 Blair was seen not as a duplicitous warmonger in hock to the US but as an ethical leader taking a stand against ethnic cleansing. But if the west had wanted to act morally in the Balkans and to protect the people in Kosovo there were solutions other than war with the Serbs, and options other than backing the KLA – the most violent group in Kosovan politics… Instead, a virulently anti-Serb stance led the west into taking ever more extreme positions, and siding with an organisation which even Robert Gelbard, President Clinton’s special envoy to Kosovo, described as “without any question, a terrorist group.”

Clark reminds us that it was the KLA’s campaign of violence in 1998 which led to an escalation of the conflict with the government in Belgrade. “We were told the outbreak of war in March 1999 with NASTO was the Serbian government’s fault,” he adds, yet Lord Gilbert, the UK defence minister, admitted “the terms put to Miloševic at Rambouillet [the international conference preceding the war] were absolutely intolerable … it was quite deliberate.” Then came the NATO occupation, under which an estimated 200,000 ethnic Serbs and other minorities from south Kosovo, and almost the whole Serb population of Pristina, have been forced from their homes. But as the Iraq war has become discredited, Clark concludes,

so it is even more important for the supporters of “liberal interventionism” to promote the line that Kosovo was in some way a success. The Council of Europe’s report on the KLA’s crimes makes that position much harder to maintain. And if it plays its part in making people more sceptical about any future western “liberal interventions”, it is to be warmly welcomed.

Tony Blair has some very bizarre friends, wrote Stephen Glover in The Daily Mail, but a monster who traded in human body parts beats the lot. The prime minister of ­Kosovo is painted by the report as a major war criminal presiding over a corrupt and dysfunctional state, Glover says, and yet this same Mr Thaci and his associates in the so-called Kosovo ­Liberation Army were put in place after the U.S. and Britain launched an onslaught in March 1999 against Serbia, dropping more than 250,000 and killing an estimated 1,500 blameless ­civilians:

This was Mr Blair’s first big war, and it paved the way for the subsequent Western invasion of Iraq. The crucial difference is that while the Left in ­general and the Lib Dems in particular opposed the war against Saddam ­Hussein, both were among Mr Blair’s main cheerleaders as he persuaded President Bill Clinton to join forces with him in crushing Serbia.

Both London and Washington tended to ignore atrocities committed by Hashim Thaci’s KLA, Glover concludes, and offered unacceptably draconian terms to the Serbs “because by that stage Blair and Clinton preferred war”:

Those were the days, of course, when most of the media thought Tony Blair could do no wrong. His military success in 1999 convinced him that Britain could and should play the role of the world’s number two policeman to the U.S. A ­messianic note entered his rhetoric, as at the 2001 Labour party conference, when he raved that ‘the kaleidoscope has been shaken… Let us ­­re-order this world about us.” … What happened in Kosovo helped shape subsequent events in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is richly ironic that ‘liberated’ Kosovo should now be a failed, gangster state… With his messianic certainties, the morally bipolar Tony Blair liked to divide the world into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, having presumptuously placed himself in the first category. How fitting that this begetter of war after war should end up by receiving the Golden Medal of Freedom from a monster who traded in body parts.

U.S. Damage Limitation and Self-Censorship – Such commentary is light years away from the feeble and half-hearted reporting in the American mainstream media. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, did not deem it fit to publish a story about the Council of Europe report itself. It published two related items critical of the report instead, on the European Union expressing doubt about its factual basis and on the “government” of Kosovo planning to sue Dick Marty for libel. No major daily has published a word of doubt about Bill Clinton’s wisdom of waging a war on behalf of Thaçi and his cohorts a decade ago, or perpetuating the myth of it having been a good war today.

That Thaçi aka “The Snake” is a criminal as well as a war criminal is no news, of course. The intriguing question is who, on the European side, wanted to end his “untouchable” status, why now, and what is the U.S. Government – his principal enabler and abettor – going to do about it.

Unsurprisingly, Thaçi’s “government” dismissed the report on December 14 as “baseless and defamatory.” On that same day Hashim Thaçi wrote in a telegram to President Obama that “the death of Richard Holbrooke is a loss of a friend.” “The Snake” has many other friends in Washington, however, people like US senator (and current foe of WikiLeaks) Joseph Lieberman, who declared back in 1999 at the height of the US-led war against the Serbs that “the United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles … Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.” Thaçi’s photos with top U.S. officials are a virtual Who’s Who of successive Administrations over the past 12 years: Bill and Hillary Clinton, Albright, Bush, Rice, Biden, Wesley Clark…

Thaçi’s American enablers and their media minions are already embarking on a bipartisan damage-limitation exercise. Its twin pillars will be the assertion that the report rests on flimsy factual evidence, an attempt to discredit Dick Marty personally, and the claim the Council of Europe as an irrelevant talking shop.

Kabul vs. St. Louis: Boom town vs. Ghost town

When a friend of mine recently returned from six months in Afghanistan where he had been teaching school in Kabul, I jumped at the chance to grill him.  At first he told me a lot of generalized stuff — such as how the young Afghans he talked with felt about the future of their country and how President Karzai’s brother Wali is the biggest heroin dealer in the world (that is if you don’t count Oxycontin manufacturers, the CIA and George Bush). And then my friend started getting more specific about what he had seen and learned in Afghanistan, and the big differences between there and here.  “In the past ten years, I’ve watched American cities turn into ghost towns — and the city of Kabul turn into a gold rush town, a boom town.”

Apparently jobs for Americans in the United States have become scarcer and scarcer but jobs for Americans in Afghanistan have really blossomed.  “In Kabul, it’s almost impossible to get fired.”

While in Afghanistan, my friend had worked for an international NGO, teaching school to the children of Kabul’s educated class in a posh district over near the Makroyan, a former Soviet-style housing block, and a few blocks away from the U.S. embassy.  He had also worked with Kabul’s beggar children and street rats as well.

“The Makroyan, which sports a fairly good water supply and electrical wiring, used to be a highly sought-after place to live before the giant housing boom that began in 2008 changed all that — as Kabul began to get all prettied up and the housing market became flooded with fancy new high-end high-rise apartment complexes.  Now even the airport no longer looks all bombed out.”  And don’t forget the giant new multi-billion-dollar prison complex just constructed by Americans out at Baghram as well.

“America has now been occupying Afghanistan even longer than the Russians were there,” continued my friend, “although you can still find plenty of evidence left from the Russian occupation, including several Soviet-style housing blocks and many Russian helicopters that are still in the air.”

Then my friend talked about the last 50 years of Afghan history.  “Americans here at home really don’t know much about Afghanistan or about its ten-year Russian occupation, its current American occupation, the huge American airbase in Kandahar built in 1963 or that the British also occupied Afghanistan back in the 1950s, when the Brits designed several extensive irrigation systems which later failed — making many sections of arable land in Afghanistan too salty to grow anything except opium poppies.

“What Americans are doing in these areas now is rehabbing those old British projects from the 1950s — and also rehabbing projects that Americans built in Afghanistan back in the 1950s and 1960s while trying to recreate images of suburban America in the Afghan outback.”  And, from what I have heard, they’re also protecting Afghanistan’s poppy crops.

“A lot of kids beg in the streets around where I taught because the embassy and the ISAF are near here and offer a possible steady stream of people to beg from.  The ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, is composed mainly of Italians, Bulgarians and Turks and has been nicknamed ‘In Sandals And Flipflops’ by U.S. forces. But the street kids know U.S. and ISAF troops only in battle gear and with their guns pointed everywhere, and the attitude of the Americans is by far the most hostile on a routine basis.  American military convoys are a huge annoyance on the streets of Kabul.

“While in Kabul, I worked with both the street kids and the educated kids, teaching English and sports to them both.  And almost all of them, from every economic class that I taught, expressed a clear desire for Afghanistan to form a national identity, one that would break down barriers of race, culture, education and economics — and barriers between opportunities for boys and girls as well.  The girls in Kabul also badly wanted to come out and learn.”

I find it ironic that Afghans seem to want to unify themselves so badly — at a time when all too many Americans seem to be trying to head in the opposite direction, to break down into special interest groups based on “Screw the Other Guy vs. Me First” ideologies and “Us vs. Them” mentalities instead of trying to strengthen our current national identity when the going gets tough.

“But is it safe in Kabul now?” I asked.  “I’ve heard stories about kidnappings and bomb threats.  Is this true?”

“Kabul is now basically safe because there are now checkpoints everywhere — checking for whatever, looking for Pashtuns from out of town, bombs, guns.  And they have been really effective too. For instance, they found five suicide bombers complete with vests during the peace meetings that Karzai held last spring.  The Afghan National Police are manning the checkpoints and they have been trained by German police.”

“And what about President Karzai?  Is he popular in Afghanistan — or not?”

“There are both good and bad things to say about Karzai.  He does have a power base and is not completely unpopular, but word over in Kabul is that he’s a junkie.  Plus his brother Wali is the biggest heroin driver in the world.  But Wali is also a power broker who secures the roads and gets paid millions in protection money from everyone, including Americans.”

Then my friend told me a joke about Karzai that is currently making the rounds. “The Taliban kidnapped President Karzai and issued a ransom note saying, ‘If you don’t come up with five million dollars, we are going to burn him up with petrol.  Give all you can.’  So I gave two gallons.”  Afghans apparently really like this joke.

According to my friend, there are two major factors involved in the American occupation — the September 11 war and the drug war. “Drug dealing is the thing that keeps it all going over in Afghanistan, where there are actually two wars going on.  And the drug war is costing us more.

“In addition, we’re also creating more enemies because we burn poppy fields in order to take drug money away from the insurgency and smoke out the Taliban’s funding.  And that’s not just in Helmand and Kandahar.  It’s in the north too.  Poppies are growing everywhere in Afghanistan and farmers rely on poppy crops for income.  But it’s hard to find out what’s going on in these drug wars — for instance, why burn one field and not the other?  I have no idea.  They’re having a big offensive in Marja right now, to burn poppy crops there.”

Interesting.  I’ve heard that it is the policy of American troops NOT to burn poppies as well.  So.  Whose poppies get burned and whose poppies don’t burn — and who decides that?

“How do the street kids that you worked with feel about Americans and the Taliban?” I asked next.

“Before we talk about the Taliban, let’s first talk about education. There is a ton of money going into schools in Afghanistan and there are more Afghan girls in school right now than ever before.  But the main issue regarding education is the lack of schools for the ‘working children’ or street kids because the public schools cost money to attend.  And like so many development schemes over there, the school buildings have been built but their operation has not been funded.  All that the funders are required to do is to spend their money on hard-asset infrastructure/ school buildings — because it’s easier to track the progress and the skim.

“Likewise, it’s difficult to chart the progress of kids who can’t spend full days in school because their families require the money they can make on the street.  And at one point someone decided that all the kids in Kabul were going to have been shipped out to the provinces.

“New schools are being built everywhere but there are almost no education programs in Afghanistan right now — and no one has been able to successfully address this problem at all.”  Sounds like what is happening here in America too — with regard to our subtle economic war on teachers.

“A lot of Afghan families have a lot of kids, and these families are poor.  And the parents need their kids to help support the families so the kids beg, wash cars, sell gum, carry water or whatever.  Most kids there are unable to afford to attend school — either the boys or the girls.”

Plus girls don’t have access to sports in Afghanistan either.  “Girls can’t play soccer in public. The Taliban has a hard line on that.  And it is against the law for a woman to ride a bike on the street.  And now there are more women wearing burkas than ever.  One NGO, Skatistan, is building a skate park in Kabul now and actually went to the mullahs and asked them to issue a fatwa allowing girls to use skateboards.  And the mullahs actually did — which opened up the Skatistan program to girls.”

Here’s more information regarding the Taliban.  “Nobody likes them because almost all of the students I worked with live in a way that the Taliban wouldn’t approve of.  And my students are all far-removed from the old Taliban times so don’t know much about that.  But I’ve noticed among the adults I’ve talked with that, regarding which time-period in their recent history a particular Afghan prefers will depend on when he or she was doing well and on their skill sets.  For instance if you did well during the Soviet times, you liked that time.  However, no one looks back to the mujaheddin civil war time with nostalgia.  That period was pretty much a nightmare for everyone.”

“So did some people like living under the old Taliban regime?”

“The generally-held view in Afghanistan is that the Taliban rose to power to bring justice and peace to a war-torn and lawless country.  And for better or for worse, their justice system was more consistent than what had gone before it.  Few people were above the law under the Taliban.  Even if one of their own stepped out of line, they were usually punished.  But now they have many who are above the law.  The Taliban policed their own even.  Karzai’s government fails in this way — it’s inconsistent.  Some poppy fields are spared while others not.  All kinds of stories circulate as to who is illegally doing what.”

And apparently Afghanistan has its own web of stories regarding what people believe is happening there now.  “Some of these stories are crazy but people still believe them.  79% of all Afghans didn’t know about the 9-11 attacks and think America just came there to control Afghanistan’s mineral and strategic wealth.”

Ha.  No wonder Afghans don’t know about 9-11!  According to the latest WikiLeaks documents, it was Saudis who sponsored and paid for 9-11.  So why didn’t Bush invade Saudi Arabia instead?

My friend then returned to the subject of national unity.  “Afghan kids in Kabul are really into nationalism — into being one country instead of being divided into tribal groups.  They want peace, along with stable systems of education, justice and economics.  And they want Islam.  Almost all Afghans are very devout Muslims and do the prayers.  Adults, of course, pray regularly as required.  But the teens pray also, and while kids are not expected to pray, fast, etc., many of them do.  Alarmingly, even many really young kids participate in Ramadan.  Afghans take Islam seriously.”

As for knowledge of the outside world’s view of Afghanistan, “Afghans are aware of the recent Christian fundamentalist Quran-burning episodes in America.  They saw that on TV.  Many get satellite TV reception in Kabul.  And locally there are about five stations there, including Ariana TV and Tolo News.  Tolo News can be accessed here in the U.S. at http://www.tolonews.com/en/afghanistan/1181-isaf-to-continue-night-raids-in-afghanistan-.  Tolo News is in English and covers all things Afghan.  It’s a good source if you want to know what is going on over there.”

Here’s a sample headline of the kind of story you can find on www.tolonews.com:  “Two End States in Afghanistan:  Somalia of Asia or the Turkey of the East?”

As for international news coming out of Afghanistan, according to my friend all media there is completely blocked down.  “If a journalist reports news stories adverse to U.S. interests, he or she will never work for the networks again.  Even Tolo News doesn’t cover these kinds of stories because if they do, they are left out from access to U.S. bases.  Journalists are under complete threat about never having a job in news again.  Here’s an example:  The number of people killed in an incident will be stretched out so that instead of reporting that 18 troops were killed by a suicide bomber, they will report that a few troops died one day and then perhaps three more died on the next day.   And it’s also the same as what happened in Vietnam — where the number of enemies killed were multiplied and exaggerated.  The news media here now is as highly filtered and filtered in the same way as the USSR news media was filtered back when the Soviets were here.”

And as to the Af-Pak area?  My friend highly recommended that I watch a video on the subject called, “Down at the Gun Bazaar”.  http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1gizg_vice-travel-darra-pakistan_shortfilms “Definitely the largest firearms market in the world.  They make a thousands guns a day here,” says the narrator.

“Kabul is currently a gold rush town, a boom town,” my friend continued.  “A lot of building is going on there — mostly homes that they call ‘poppy palaces’.  The best place to invest poppy money right now is in Kabul real estate.  The poppy-palace mirrored-dome style of architecture has spread like wildfire.  But the biggest difference between 2006 Kabul and 2010 Kabul is the lack of bomb craters and bullet holes in the walls.  The new levels of growth and development from when I was there before and my recent trip to Kabul really freaked me out.  And this new boom-town financing is coming mostly from U.S. military money, poppy money and development money from the US.”

Another big change in Afghanistan has been the improvement of its infrastructure.  The road out to Bamiyan was being rebuilt and was the biggest public works project my friend had ever seen — and why not?  American contractors make far more money installing roads than they do creating functioning hospitals and schools.

“This new Bamiyan road tears indiscriminately through villages and farmlands.  But in a way it is a good thing because it has helped to modernize the country and has escalated the ability to move things around.  And all of this has happened within in the last year, under Obama.  But the fact that it has taken so long to complete just this one road should serve as Exhibit A in a trial of George W. Bush.  They didn’t build hardly any formal infrastructure in Afghanistan under Bush.  Money was going to road builders under Bush but the roads weren’t being built for the infrastructure.  They were being built in order to further the war — or else Bush siphoned off money earmarked for Afghanistan and sent it off to Iraq.”

“Why did Bush do that?”

“Apparently Bush and his advisers thought that the Taliban would put up a bigger fight than they did — and so when they rolled over, Bush wanted a bigger war and he picked Iraq to perpetuate a lasting war, leaving our troops in Afghanistan hung out to dry, and thus creating the war we have now in a big way.  Perhaps Obama is taking care of the business now that Bush should have taken care of years ago.”

But Obama is no saint in my friend’s eyes either.  “The way that Obama is now dealing with Pakistan is bad.  And by continuing the drug war as well, Obama is also doing the same thing that Bush did — so that ten years after the American invasion, American money and drug money is still poring into Afghanistan.”  And out of America’s cities.

“The original pre-2001 Taliban sold poppies to western pharmaceutical companies legitimately but the current Afghan government sells NO poppies to drug companies.  And there is a reason for that.  Oxycontin, which is one of the U.S. pharmaceutical companies’ best-sellers, is basically synthetic heroin — but if western drug companies were forced to buy Afghan poppies instead of selling Oxycontin, the drug wars would be over in a minute.  The entire problem in Afghanistan would be eliminated because it would set a standardized price for opium poppies there.  Right now the price of heroin fluctuates according to how many fields are being burned, how many dealers are being arrested, how many facilities are being raided, etc.”

And if you want to know about how the heroin system works in Afghanistan, rent a copy of that DVD movie called “Winter’s Bone,” which describes how the methamphetamine production system works in Missouri.  “Raising and manufacturing illegal drugs is currently a major way to survive in both Afghanistan and America.”

When my friend left St. Louis last spring, there were no jobs available at all.  “No jobs and no prospects of finding one no matter what your educational level.  People with masters degrees were working in fast food places, work trades, etc.  And then I arrived in Kabul — and the difference between St. Louis and Kabul was astounding.

“In Kabul, there is nothing both Americans and Afghans can do to lose their jobs — but in St. Louis, they can’t even find jobs.  I hadn’t even seen one help-wanted sign in St. Louis during the whole year and a half before I left.  But in Kabul, westerners with any kind of skills had unbelievable pay packages, vacation days and benefits.”

“What kind of vacation days?”

“A conservative estimate is that a lot of people have vacation rates of four months on, six weeks off.  They are then flown home or to Dubai.  For instance, the UN staff is in catastrophic mode now and so receives many benefits.  Workers in Afghanistan are defensive about the perks that they get but they get a lot compared to what they would get working in the US.”

But things have apparently picked up around St. Louis since my friend’s been back.  “People used to be so scared and hunkered down that they wouldn’t spend any money.  There was a collective petrification due to the economic downturn, which in turn was due to so much capital leaving our country without being accounted for — not only job-outsourcing money and offshore corporate money being laundered to avoid paying taxes but also the huge amounts of profits from what Americans spend on drugs that has been going off to Mexico, Afghanistan, South America.  This has been a VERY big drain on our economy.”

Another big money drain here, according to my friend, has resulted from Americans buying illicit pharmaceuticals — which are not taxed and not counted.  “In America, drug companies sell their products to distributors who then sell the product on to the doctors.  And a lot of people who use illegal drugs also have real medical problems, for which they also get prescription drugs — but then they trade their legal prescription drugs off for meth, which they like more than Oxycontin.”  Yikes!  I didn’t know that.  I just assumed that everyone else in America was like Rush Limbaugh.

“Selling Oxycontin is a huge business for the drug companies and they want this practice of trading Oxycontin for meth to continue.  For instance, drug companies just spent billions lobbying Congress about keeping pseudoephedrines for sale over the counter.”

“Why is that?”

“So that you can make meth out of it.  Meth dealers cook pseudoephedrines down with ammonia — like the ammonia in fertilizer.  That’s how it’s done.  Crank is also made with aluminum from beer cans — the aluminum bonds with the drug.  Then it is snorted, smoked or shot up.”

But what’s so hot about meth?  “It’s a long, long high.  You can be high for four days on just a small amount.  You don’t dream while you are high and you go into sleep derivation, wherein the body releases chemicals that are hallucinogenic almost.  It’s the sleep deprivation factor.  No amount of coffee can give you that.  The brain needs its sleep.  And meth won’t let you sleep.”  Yuck.

“Jefferson County, right outside of St. Louis, is the meth-plague capital of the world.  Meth is a cheap high.”

It seemed to me that my friend had gotten sidetracked into stories about meth production and I told him that.  “No.  I was just making another analogy between St. Louis and Kabul.  A lot of drug companies here in America are unregulated cesspools and the same holds true with the unregulated use of drugs in Afghanistan.”

What goes on in Afghanistan doesn’t stay in Afghanistan however. “For another thing, the war in Afghanistan is basically fueled on Red Bull and up pills — so when troops come home, they are susceptible to becoming meth-heads.

“The first time people use meth, they get really really high and are unable to function, but then after they use for a while, they start to blend in — and can hold down a job.  And then, after continued use, they can’t function as a normal person any more.  They lose a lot of weight, and the life goes out of their eyes.  They start to look older than they are.  Less alive.  Like zombies.  And you can always tell a meth-head because of the sores.  They start having big sores — because meth is basically a poison and the sores are caused by the poison being released into the bloodstream.”  Double-yuck.  And so perhaps America’s Afghan vets have become vulnerable to the illicit lure of crank after a couple years of living on uppers and Red Bulls.

“If you want to know more about meth use in America and how it supports the local economy while destroying the fabric of local society at the same time, watch the movie, ‘Winter’s Bone’.  I recommend it.”

Here’s another example of how Kabul has become a boom town while St. Louis has become a ghost town.  “In the 1960s, Northwest Plaza here was the biggest shopping mall in the world.  Now it only has only one store still open — a shoe repair shop.  And in the meantime, luxury malls in Kabul are going full blast.  The Kabul City Center mall, owned by Wali Karzai, sells diamonds, electronics, iPods, and iPhones that you can’t even get in St. Louis.  No development money being spent here but it is being spent in Afghanistan like water.  All that money, along with the drug profits, is obviously going out of our economy.”

And apparently Kabul is actually physically safer for its average citizen than is St. Louis.  “Kabul is safe in the context of using St. Louis as a standard — but it’s still pretty dangerous.”  Hey, even Berkeley is relatively dangerous these days.

“85% of the cars driven in Kabul are Toyota Corrollas,” my friend added — but I forgot to ask him about what type of cars are being driven in St. Louis.

Economic Implosion Sets The Blame Game In Motion

By Giordano Bruno | Neithercorp Press…

When a child bounds about the house and breaks his mother’s favorite flower vase or creepy ‘Precious Moments’ figurine, he usually blames the dog before he blames himself. We tend to learn the value of scapegoats at a very early age. Many people eventually outgrow this terrible habit and begin to take responsibility for their actions, while others never do. The ability to divert justice is frowned upon by those of us who value conscience, but in some circles, such “talent” is prized above all else. There are some in this world who derive great joy from creating destruction and allowing innocent men or guiltless groups to take the fall.

The Italian philosopher/elitist extraordinaire, Niccolo Machiavelli, often discussed the “virtue” of the scapegoat. In his treatise ‘The Prince’ (essentially a guidebook for the tyrants of the 16th century} he outlined how to manipulate the rage of the masses towards the ends of the state (or royalty, or dictatorship, or autocracy, etc.). Though a soulless cretin of the highest order, Machiavelli was ahead of his time in one sense; he recognized before many others that a storm was brewing against the traditional rule of iron fisted monarchy. The world was changing, and the threat of violence and death was not going to be enough to keep the elites in power. The common people were beginning to awaken, to educate themselves, to demand their inherent right to freedom, not just in small controllable pockets, but all over the globe. The ruling class had to adapt its methods to this awakening by turning away from brute force and towards more psychologically rooted tactics. The use of a proxy became a valuable method for the elites in creating the illusion of judgment on government criminality, while at the same time allowing the same men behind the criminality to maintain their “savior” status in the public eye.

Machiavelli suggested throwing middle-management thugs to the angry hoards, while the true heads of state, the men who gave those thugs their orders, remained untouched. There are, however, many variations to this scheme. When you are a group that heads the central banking apparatus of a nation or many nations, when you control the core mechanisms (its currency and interest rates) by which a country financially rises and falls, and you cause that country to fall, you had better have a host of backup patsies to take the pitchforks and bullets coming your way.

Let’s look at some of the probable redirections and excuses that we will be hearing from government and the mainstream media in the next couple of years as the world’s fiscal stability takes a long swan dive into the shallow end of the pool.

It’s All The American People’s Fault: This has been a widespread diversionary argument since the credit and mortgage crisis became widely known in 2008, but you need to trust me when I say, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Yes, many Americans have amassed incredible debts, and took on mortgages they knew they could not afford, and then borrowed money against these mortgages which they never planned to pay back. People, not just in America, but all over the planet, have a fantastic aptitude for greed and stupidity. It’s certainly a driver for financial mayhem, but is it the source? In the case of today’s recession/depression, the answer is no.

Americans over-consumed and over-leveraged, but who enabled that trend to take place? Only the lenders could have facilitated such a spending spree. So then it was the predatory lending of banks? In part, but we must go further to the root of the problem. Who directs the lending capacity and practices of the big banks? Why the central bank, of course! Ever since the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act passed in 1980, all banks fall under the purview of the Federal Reserve. It was the Federal Reserve that artificially lowered interest rates and borrowing costs to historically low levels in order to excite the debt bubble which then burst in 2008. Credit was easy. In fact, it was so easy that big banks practically threw money at people unqualified to handle mortgage payments.

Cheap money was everywhere, and this cheap money was the perfect primer for the expansion of household debts. The people are to blame for their frivolous and unchecked spending, but the Fed is to blame for creating and supporting the habit. A heroin addict has to get his fix from somewhere, and the dealer is certainly held accountable.

The central banks of the world are responsible for much more than dropping bags of cash into the laps of unreliable people, but this issue is the one that is most likely to come up again and again as the crisis progresses; are the banks to blame for handing out all that money without regard for the consequences, or are Americans to blame for using it?

As I stated earlier, the anti-American consumerist talking point is only in its infancy. Expect to hear much more vitriol from foreign nations about how our “unregulated” free market capitalist fervor is dragging the rest of the Earth down with us. Expect to hear about the “greedy” American and how he alone brought down global financial stability because he refused to live within his means. Expect to hear about how the rest of the world needs to keep America “in check” before it wreaks havoc beyond fathoming.

The truth is that overt American consumerism is only the symptom of a greater sickness, not the cause, which is central banking itself. Yet, the stage is already being set for the American people to take the full brunt of the blame in the history books as the main catalyst for collapse.

Lack Of Regulation Was The Culprit: People who claim there are not enough laws and regulations governing banks and lending practices have obviously never read or tried to read the Security and Exchange Commission’s legal guidelines. I suggest they do that now before going any further:

http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/securitieslaws.htm

There are more than adequate laws and regulations in place to keep banks in line. The problem is that the SEC has refused to enforce those laws when it matters. For 20 years, the SEC operated a whistleblower reward fund for people who took the risk of presenting evidence of banking fraud. Obviously, there has been a whole lot of fraud taking place the past two decades, yet only FIVE people were ever paid from the fund for coming forward:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/05/sec-rarely-rewards-whistl_n_525729.html

Only five people in twenty years?! How is this possible? Perhaps the fact that the SEC has been ignoring or sabotaging whistleblowers for decades might explain the discrepancy.

There are certainly more recorded accounts of the SEC ignoring whistleblowers than I can list in this article, but here are some of the more recent instances:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5663759.ece

http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/16/news/economy/COSO_SEC_flaws_Sarbox.fortune/index.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/20/AR2010012005125_pf.html

There are also accounts of the SEC actually giving employee whistleblower information to the companies committing the fraud, exposing those employees to retaliation:

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2010/09/sec-official-cited-for-whistleblower-retaliation-to-testify-at-senate-hearing-tomorrow.html

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is supposed to protect whistleblowers from such retaliation, and the SEC’s budget was doubled in order to make sure that was possible, but past events have shown that it is rarely implemented. The bottom line is that corporate banks have gotten away with murder right in full view of the government and the SEC, despite ample evidence and regulations, because the evidence was swept under the rug and the regulations were never enforced.

In light of the Madoff scandal, among others, the SEC has had to run damage control by enlarging whistleblower funds and writing new rules to protect those who wish to come forward with information. Of course, the catch is that the SEC is also now pressuring employees to go to their company with the information first, and then to the SEC later, allowing the offending corporation to “police themselves” before the SEC gets involved. Talk about awkward:

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/04/sec-issues-proposed-whistleblower-rules-the-lobbying-continues/

Now the Federal Reserve, on the other hand, deals with no oversight from government, no threat of a full audit, and is not required to open its books to public scrutiny under FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) request. As Alan Greenspan recently admitted, the Fed is an independent (private) entity that answers to no one. Not Congress, not even the American people:

If the mainstream media was to debate that the collapse is taking place because of a complete lack of regulation regarding the Federal Reserve, they would be correct, but no one in the MSM is arguing that! Instead, they often argue the opposite, claiming that the Fed needs more power and zero oversight in order to save us all from the catastrophe the central bank itself created.

It’s All China’s Fault: We’ve talked about the brewing trade wars and currency wars in past articles, and I think many people are familiar with this subject, even those who have no interest in it. That said, there is still a lack of understanding in the general populace as to the issue of blame. China as a country is not to blame for our economic problems, no more than America as a country is to blame for the world’s economic problems. In contrast, the central bankers and corporate heads of China, and the central bankers and corporate heads of the U.S., are very much involved in fueling global financial distress.

The oligarchy of the U.S. supported and encouraged the outsourcing of American industry throughout the 80’s and 90’s to take advantage of China’s cheap labor (and to push Americans into a weak 70% service based economy). China never forced us to send all our manufacturing jobs overseas, our own corporate elites did.

China also never forced the Fed to begin accelerated devaluation of the dollar. The central bankers of the U.S. are well aware that a weak currency and quantitative easing is not going to have any meaningful effect on our export growth for years or even decades if at all, primarily because we have little export capability on our own soil to back such a transition. You have to have goods to trade before you can…..well…..trade…..

Interestingly, the fiat injections of the Fed which are supposedly designed to combat Chinese currency manipulation are actually causing some adverse reactions. Is anyone really surprised?

So far, the bailout money dumped into banks has gone nowhere. Financial institutions have hoarded the cash while tightening lending standards even beyond what is required by such agencies as the Federal Housing Administration:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-17/home-ownership-gets-harder-for-americans-as-lenders-restrict-fha-mortgages.html

Thus, dollar devaluation in that regard has produced no results. None. Nada. Zero money going into the general economy or to the public.

What about QE2? All that fiat which Wall Street has been expecting to pour into the Dow and prop up stocks?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tepper-tells-cnbc-fed-will-prop-up-market-2010-09-24

It’s a funny thing, but it seems as though international investors and even bankers right here at home no longer trust American stocks or bond markets. Capital is being yanked out of U.S. equities and is now flooding into Asian markets, like China’s, whose assets are considered safer and more profitable:

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90778/98506/7200236.html

This is sometimes called “hot money”, and it has the ability to cause severe inflation. The irony is that the Federal Reserve pumps this money into the banking system or into Treasuries, and then that money leaves the country to go directly to China, meaning, yet again, the banksters have devalued the dollar with fiat printing and not a cent is going to help actual Americans, or even to alleviate debts. This is why QE2 has failed to boost sales of or interest in U.S. T-bonds, even though the Fed is now buying them like mad:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AB2SU20101112

It also explains why the dollar and the Dow are exhibiting signs of falling simultaneously; a trend which we have been warning about since 2008 as a prophet of extreme danger:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69K04L20101117

Meanwhile, the banking elites of China are also completely aware that the U.S., like their ancient nemesis Japan, is on the verge of financial seppuku. China’s food and housing markets are in the midst of an inflationary run due to capital inflows from both countries. Their consumers cannot afford it and the Yuan is not yet equipped to contain it. They could dump their forex reserves of Dollars and Yen, allowing the Yuan to appreciate, and counter the inevitable explosion in prices they face. So what’s stopping them? They need someone to BLAME before they take action.

Yes, the blame game is played in many languages, and China knows it well. They are waiting tentatively for the U.S. to label them officially as “currency manipulators”, to implement full-spectrum import taxes, and to devalue the Greenback just a little bit more. Then, a Treasury dump by the Chinese becomes practical, and rational, instead of a blatant economic nuke attack.

The key is that in order for this process to unfold the way it has so far, and the way it is likely to continue, both central banks on both sides of the Pacific need to act in concert. They have to shake hands and agree that the dollar has to go. Unless you believe in extraordinarily complex coincidences, which I don’t…

The Republicans/Democrats Are To Blame: This one is tried and true, but not quite as effective as it used to be. So let’s keep it short and to the point…

Republican leadership (under the neo-cons) supported bailouts and protected corporate banks and the Federal Reserve without question. Democratic leadership has supported bailouts and protected corporate banks and the Federal Reserve without question. This is fact. Icy cold, but still fact. What is the difference between the leaderships of both major parties? There is none. Period.

The only new political dynamic is that of Tea Party candidates such as Ron Paul and Rand Paul, who will most definitely be targeted by the establishment as ghastly conservative gremlins who actually believe in the Constitution and sound money. Besides giving globalists the shivers, liberty based candidates also bring hard choices to the table, choices which some Americans won’t like.

Do we continue burning money with entitlement programs we can’t afford? Socialists hate that question. Are we traditional conservatives empty of compassion? Not at all, but compassion is not the issue. The issue is one of means, and it’s an issue that people with their heads in Utopian clouds tend to ignore. If you can’t afford a beer, you can’t have a beer. If you can’t afford universal health care, then you can’t have universal health care. What is so difficult about this?

Tea Party objectives including holding the debt ceiling at current levels, or stopping the extension of unemployment benefits for yet another quarter, will be held up as the triggers of collapse, when they are really just unavoidable consequences of the bad economy. Unemployment benefits are going to stop eventually as the dollar tumbles in value. Maybe they should be cut now before they contribute to this event. Maybe the debt ceiling should be held steady, before the government no longer has the capacity to keep itself running, let alone raise the ceiling yet again.

The false left/right paradigm is for babies and naïve journalists. If you are looking at one party or another party to place the entire blame, then you are looking in the wrong place. If you are looking to accuse Constitutionalists for causing this economic debacle, then you apparently overestimate the influence we have over the corporate run government and the private Federal Reserve, which is flattering, but also silly…

Surely, Its All Ireland’s Fault: I’ve never quite understood the phrase “the luck of the Irish”. The Irish as a culture seem immensely unlucky to me, and this goes back centuries. The elites of Europe, and most especially Britain, have been out for Irish blood since the kings of old, and this time it appears as though they might get what they’ve always wanted; Ireland under their thumb, permanently.

Remember the whole “Euro crisis” last year that magically went away when the media stopped talking about it? Well, they’ve started talking about it again, and magically its back.

Ireland is not necessarily the next Greece. Their debt habits are not so indescribably corrupt, but they do have many liabilities, not to mention borrowing costs they cannot afford:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A94P320101111

The EU at first attempted to hide the destabilization of Irish debt concerns, just as they did with Greece, and as they are doing with Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Now, though, they have decided to use Ireland’s pain to gain control of the country, apparently by shaming them into taking IMF and EU money.

Ireland has always been adverse to participation in the EU, and the Irish are a fiercely independent people. The country has not conceded that it necessarily needs EU or IMF funds to continue functioning. Whether they are in immediate danger is hard to say. However, it is clear that the leaks by the EU on the Irish situation have caused considerable turmoil in overseas markets. This has then been used by the EU as an attack point. “If only the Irish would accept an IMF bailout, everything would be alright, and the European markets would go back to normal”, they say.

By this method, the banking goblins of Europe have snared Ireland by accusing it of endangering the rest of the world:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-19/irish-mourn-loss-of-sovereignty-as-cowen-scorned-before-german-bailout-.html

But this doesn’t end with Ireland. Expect the same tactic to be used on any other European nation that tries to maintain a sense of sovereignty. Already, threats of similar circumstances are arising in Portugal and Spain:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-18/irish-bailout-may-unleash-bond-vigilantes-on-portugal-market-euro-credit.html

Countries that fight centralization and hold fast to free market ideals will be attacked as obstacles to the solution. The solution, of course, will be global governance of finance by the IMF.

The Federal Reserve Is The Source Of All Our Ills: After several pages describing the nightmare that is the Federal Reserve, am I actually going to defend them? Not a chance. What I will do though is point out that the Fed is not the source of the problem, but merely a part of it. This probably sounds contrary to what is often heard in the Liberty Movement, but let’s pause and consider for a moment…

The Federal Reserve is an institution, a shell built around the unlawful concept of central banking as well as the unseemly men who utilize it. Shutting down the Fed only solves the immediate dilemma, but it does not remove the threat entirely. Central Banking Ponzi schemes must also be removed from the picture, and the elites who operate these central banks must be prosecuted. The Fed is a cardboard box that holds the month old eggs that are filling the air with the vapid stench that curls our nostrils. You don’t get rid of the box and leave the eggs under your mattress.

This all seems evident, I’m sure, but let’s examine how the Fed is being portrayed lately in the MSM.

Mainstream news sources and investment analysts which in the past have protected the Fed are now showcasing articles and editorials which criticize it heavily:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-28/schwarzman-says-more-fed-easing-won-t-make-much-difference.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/nov/08/fed-quantitative-easing-may-lead-to-disaster

http://www.politico.com/static/PPM182_101115_bernanke_letter.html

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/05/news/economy/Fed_quantitative_easing/index.htm

Even former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is getting in on the action, stating that QE2 is a danger to world markets:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AA00320101111

However, he followed these comments with this statement:

“If the G20 is serious in pledging to sustain open multilateral trade and the international financial system that fosters it, it should be willing to forgo an element of sovereignty to achieve net gains for all,”

Ah, therein lay the catch! The MSM is starting to sound like the Liberty Movement when it comes to the Federal Reserve, but this is not necessarily a good thing. What is instead happening is a concerted effort to portray the Fed as the root of the collapse, but it is only an attack on the Fed as an institution. The globalists that operate central banks around the world are not being held accountable, only one aspect of their fiscal house. Greenspan reveals the true intention of the new Fed criticism in the comment above. The central bank is being offered as a sacrifice, like Machiavelli’s middle-management scapegoats, to appease the angry masses while the real villains get off scot-free.

It is a certainty that the solution offered to the “Fed problem” will be the insinuation of the IMF into American economy and American government. An “element of sovereignty” will have to go, according them. What this really entails is the replacement of one elitist banking construct with another even more invasive elitist banking construct. This strategy could be frighteningly effective against those in anti-Fed organizations who may be convinced that an end to the Federal Reserve is a “victory”, when it is only opening the door to a greater horror.

Does the Fed need to go? Absolutely! But we cannot allow the Fed to be used as a part of the blame game, a tool to lure us into accepting more pronounced tyranny. We must not compromise on the issue of central banking itself. For America to survive, the Federal Reserve must exit stage left, and no other central banking organization, under any circumstances, should be allowed to replace it.

Staying Focused On The Real Enemy: To every illness there is a root cause. An insidious microbe or parasite that introduces our pain. If we focus on the pain, or attempt to treat the symptoms alone, we will never rid ourselves of what ails us. Scapegoating and diverting by globalists is meant to keep us running in circles after the extremities of the disasters they design, and away from the heart of the quandary.

The blame game will become intense in the next year, and some of it, no matter how educated we are on the farce, will start to sound logical, especially if fear becomes a dominant factor. This has to be overcome at all costs. The question of legitimate responsibility must be presented again and again; who REALLY had the initiative, the know-how, and the allocated wealth needed to produce such a collapse? Who ultimately benefits? Is it China? Is it bond vigilantes? Is it us? Or, is it the power mongers and fiat bandits of the top 1%? Stop, look at where the control is being directed, and you’ll find the true monster staring right back at you.

You can contact Giordano Bruno at:

Tips from famous crime writers: Solving the mysteries of writing & righting

I love reading murder mysteries because they are like puzzles to be solved — and because, in these books, there are always wrongs to be righted and Justice to be served. And the constant efforts of murder-mystery heroes to identify and capture the bad guys fit right in with my own life-long passion for Justice, especially in politics. Who dun it? “Karl Rove!”

When I attended BoucherCon, a convention of mystery writers and mystery readers held in San Francisco recently, one facet of the conference that I really liked was when several famous murder-mystery authors spoke to us groundlings about how they went about writing their books. Here’s what I learned from the following authors:

EDDIE MULLER, San Francisco’s current Czar of Noir: “I wrote about 1940s San Francisco because I wanted to recapture a place that no longer exists. It was my father’s town and I wanted to live his life vicariously — World War II, Dashell Hammett, the Barbary Coast. My father was actually born in Golden Gate Park after the 1906 earthquake. This was a whole part of San Francisco that I never got to experience myself but only heard stories about.” And so he wanted to write some of those stories down before they got lost forever — that was his motivation to write. (My powerful original motivation for starting to write was that I was completely pissed off at George W. Bush for stealing the 2000 election. Now there is one who-dun-it that no one seems to want to solve.)

“My job is to make sure that the things of the past don’t disappear. I write in order to preserve this past for future generations. I write for five-year-olds. And, in addition, if you can possibly do as an adult the things that you loved to do as a six-year-old, you’ll be fine. And my best subject in elementary school was Show and Tell. You have to find something that you really want to write about. You become curious about a character and a time.” And also about how the events of the day shapes a character’s world.

“My publishers were very upset with me after a while because they wanted me to keep writing books like my first ones. But my passion had moved on.” You have to have passion about something in order to write well about it. “It’s very hard for me to just sit down and write about something. It’s got to have a visceral spark for me to do it — one where I can’t eat or sleep until I do it.”

Short stories are easier to write than novels, according to Muller. “That’s because novels have their finish lines way off in the distance. And talking your stories out is also part of the writing process. You need to try as hard as you can to make your characters distinctive. Dialog is always at the service of developing character — in every dialogue you should be able to distinguish who is talking by the tone of what they say, even without attributions such as ‘he said’ or ‘she said’.”

Muller also said that it was easier to write a novel if you do it a chapter at a time. “I always write little mini-novels, about 20 pages ahead of where I am, because I think you need to leave space for zig-zags. A writer, unlike a pilot who always flies from Point A to Point B, constantly needs to leave his comfort zone. Tell the story you want to tell, not just follow the formula. Don’t be afraid to get out of your comfort zone.

“In my novels, I’ve tried to reclaim the hard-bitten dialogues of the 1940s without turning them into parody. Newspaper reporters from that time knew how to relate the facts in the shortest time possible and it is this timing that I’m trying to reclaim. That’s how newsmen wrote back then.”

Muller loved the old newspaper days. “There is nothing more impressive than an old-time newspaper office. The cacophony and urgency of those old newsrooms is gone. My dad worked for William Randolph Hearst and I myself took a job at the Chronicle because I wanted to be there when that behemoth went down. Now no one even goes to the office any more. Work is done at home. The Chronicle is still being published today but it’s just not the same. The romance is gone.

“Face it. Romance happens when people interact. And that just doesn’t happen any more. Everything now is done at home. Bars and theaters and public places are where people interact.” Now people just use the internet and rent videos.

“Always remember that It’s not how you spend your money that is important — it’s how you spend your time.”

Then Muller defined the “Noir” concept for us newbees. “In true Noir, it’s when fate is indifferent and the protagonist knows that he is doing wrong — and does it anyway. He has a tendency to self-destruct. Noir makes you feel the anxiety and despair of these people who knowingly do wrong. Thus Noir can happen anywhere. It doesn’t just happen in the Tenderloin. It also happens in the nicest part of town.”

DAVID BALDACCI: As a lawyer, I did the same thing that I did later as a writer — tell a story. It’s all about words. You do the research and then you tell the story. Transitioning between being a lawyer and being a writer was smooth. And your reader is like your jury.” I agree. I used to write personal injury settlement briefs — which is just like writing soap opera.

“I do a lot of research but don’t use 99% of it. Then after you have all the points down, you shorten it. Your final product should be all muscle, no fat. If it doesn’t describe a character or advance the plot, take it out. Distill it down to the best stuff — from 100 pages down to one paragraph if need be. But you still need to do the research.” I myself hate research — but Baldacci apparently thrives on it.

“One time I went out on a police patrol doing research and the policeman busted five criminals. And I swear this happened. As one of the criminals was lying there on the ground in handcuffs, he looked up at me and said, ‘I love your books!’ It really happened.”

When Baldacci was a lawyer, he saw a lot of justice not being done. “All of my books are about seeking justice. Sometimes my characters find it and sometimes they don’t.”

And none of Baldacci’s heroes are perfect — just as none of his villains are totally bad. “My villains can rationalize any behavior they commit. They are not a part of society so why should they care about society? And while 99% of us have a societal inhibitor that prevents us from acting on our feelings, some of us don’t. Look at Ted Bundy. His brain was just freaky. But most other villains are motivated because they have been left out of society.” Yeah, like most of Americans have been left out of the global corporatists’ grand schemes for MY country. But does that make us villains too? Hopefully not.

“My brain is always going on stories. You can’t turn it off — always thinking about writing. Even now. It’s absolutely never turned off. Wherever you go, whoever you meet, it’s all fodder for stories.”

Regarding inspiration, “The spectacular ideas, the Eureka moments, the epiphanies don’t happen often. I get ideas and extrapolate on them and distill and increase them so they will amount to a 400-page novel that someone other than your mother will read.”

Regarding many writers’ lack of self-confidence, Baldacci was hopeful. “I’m still fearful about my abilities, but that is a great combatant to complacency. Every book I write is like my first one. If you do this, you write a better book. But all people in the creative business have to have a high level of confidence. To put yourself out there to strangers is hard. Who do you write for? Your readers? No. I write for myself — not what sells, not what’s hot. I ask myself, ‘Do I want to spend a year of my life with this? Is this stuff cool?'”

Baldacci’s latest book is called “Hell’s Corner” and it’s about his regular group of characters, the Camel Club. “And it’s all smoke and mirrors, which is what Washington DC is all about. It’s my tip of the hat to DC.” Baldacci also talked about his favorite charitable project — trying to get more books into the homes of poor children.

LAURIE R. KING: “Sherlock Holmes is a terribly useful guy [for juicing up a plot]. I got about two lines into my first Mary Russell book and thought, ‘Oh crap. I really should learn more about Holmes.'” And apparently she did. I love king’s series about Mary keeping bees with Sherlock and later becoming his wife.

“I first sat down to write when my son had just gone off to pre-school for three glorious days a week. I wrote my first book on paper, typed it up and sent it off. Publishers’ reaction? Silence. I was such an ignoramus when I first started submitting manuscripts. I didn’t have an agent. Many publishers don’t take unsolicited manuscripts. I sent the thing out to publishers for three years with no luck, and then the Linda Allen agency took me on and I started selling manuscripts — but it only took me six years from writing my first book to its publication.” And it’s even rougher now to find a publisher than it was back then.

Sometimes readers stop and ask, “Would a character really do that?” Apparently books that have too many weird things happening in them usually don’t work. But the Mary Russell series certainly does.

JOSEPH FINDER: “My standards for what I write have grown higher over the years. Unfortunately, however, my skills have remained the same — except that now I have a better sense of structure and a better idea of what I’m trying to do. And being a published author now and doing all that it entails takes away from my writing time.”

Regarding having a book turned into a movie, Finder said, “I’ve sold a number of books to Hollywood that never got made into films. In Hollywood, writers are so low on the totem pole that they are below the ground. One time I tried to get an acting part in my movie [like Hitchcock did] and that was really strange. In Hollywood, they have a false respect for novelists but they mistrust us. Once, someone actually told me that I didn’t understand what my own novel was even about. They leave out all the good novelistic stuff in my books there, so now I just write what I think they will cut out. First they buy the script. Then they laugh at it. I don’t need that.”

And Finder actually likes to do research for his novels too. “When writers go to a place to do research, we go with heightened senses. But research is a dangerous drug for me. I love research. It’s like heroin. I start out with insecurity, knowing not much. And what you learn, you can’t show it off — it’s only the tip of the iceberg of what finally ends up going into the book.” I hate research.

“I read Robert Ludlum and John Forsythe when I was just starting out. I read a whole bunch of different thrillers. As writers, we start out imitating someone else and then we find our own voice.”

But Finder doesn’t waste his time writing on subjects that are familiar to him. “I hate the advice, ‘Write what you know.’ That’s crap. I always write what I want to find out. And someone said, ‘Suspense is undermined by humor.’ Screw that. I want to write what I want to write. Write what you like to write. If it clicks in the marketplace, that’s a plus. If publishers don’t like it, too bad.” Totally!

“The biggest struggle is actually just sitting down to write. But you have to keep writing because once you get into it, it’s really wonderful. I wish someone had told me that the first book is not the end-all and be-all. Just keep writing! But I still fear the empty document screen. Just shut everything else off and write. But if you get blocked, just take a look at your outline the night before, sleep on it and work on it in the morning.”

I’ve heard that before — that our brains sort stuff out for us in our sleep and we do our best creative work when we first wake up in the morning because our brains have already done most of the dirty work for us while we slept.

ANDREW KLAVAN: At first I wasn’t going to review Klavan’s suggestions on writing because I didn’t agree with his politics. However I have changed my mind about that. Why? Because of something that some guy I correspond with on the internet said recently. Internet Guy and I have such completely polar opposite views about how America should be run that, frankly, I almost hate him. I mean really! Teabaggers like him have just sold out our country to foreign interests and global corporations solely because the Supreme Court decision regarding Citizens United now allows our former democracy to go to the highest bidder — whoever can pay for the most libelous and mendacious campaign ads. But I digress.

Anyway, I thought I would NEVER have anything in common with Internet Guy, who I considered to be a completely ignorant schmuck, a willing victim of corporate brainwashing — but then I suddenly discovered that he and I were both murder-mystery fans! So maybe Internet Guy isn’t such a dumby after all (except for in politics of course, where he is clueless). And so perhaps I should give Klavan a chance too.

“I like screenwriting because it gets me out of the house,” said Klavan. “Writing novels is a lonely business — but I still love writing them. But the results of writing for Hollywood are so random. Sometimes they are good, sometimes bad.”

Klavan’s influences? “Raymond Chandler. He is the portrait of what a man should be like. And when I was 19, I read ‘Crime and Punishment’ and it changed my life. Someone just said of my latest book, ‘It’s like Chandler meets Dostoevsky.’ And I started out with no mentors, just walking around New York City with a manuscript box under my arm, literally getting thrown out of publishing offices.” Apparently this is the story of every writer’s life.

“One of the dangers of writing is that other stuff that you need to do keeps creeping in and grabbing up you time. I’ve been setting aside four hours a day to write since I was 14. And I still have to do that.”

MARTIN CRUZ SMITH: This man is one of my favorite writers — him and Janet Evanovich. “Writing is harder for me these days. It seems like everything interrupts me now. There’s either too much noise — or else too much quiet.”

Regarding Hollywood? “Hollywood has a technique that is debasing. It’s like you have a raincoat, they take it, jump up and down on it and throw it in the gutter. After that, do you really want it back? One main actor even apologized to me for what they did to my book.”

Regarding research? We have to evoke Donald Rumsfeld when we write — we have to know what we don’t know. The key to a good research interview is to just listen. Let it flow. I went to Russia to write and Moscow was such a fantastic city that I had to throw away my planned American character for a Russian one.”

Smith was most influenced by “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” and James Caan is his favorite American writer. “You have to find those tiny little bits of detail that come together and make the character come to life. My advice is to don’t listen to anyone else, just write. Write until your butt is sore. Stay home from those writers’ conferences and just write.”

And as a writer, you have to be hyper-aware. “A pitcher sees only home plate — but a writer see everything. And you put everything into your book.” And then you go out and look for a publisher — and press your luck.

LEE CHILD: He was at the convention too, mingling. Unlike some other writers, Child seems to like mingling with his fans. I saw him in the hotel lobby. He’s really tall. But I missed his presentation because I was off babysitting Mena the Kid. However, I am now reading his books and trying to catch up on his hero Jack Reacher, the impossibly perfect man, almost an American version of James Bond.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of international-spy-ring, CIA assassination, testosterone-laced who-dun-it types of murder mysteries, as a result of learning about them (and getting free copies of them) at BoucherCon — and also because I’m still trying to figure out what is REALLY going on in that clandestine American nether-world of black ops, assassinations, skulduggery and unaccountability that most of us Americans know nothing about — but still have to pay for. And this type of mystery writer lets us in on the ground floor of what is really going on behind all those closed doors. And it ain’t pretty. Or democratic. Or American. But Karl Rove would definitely approve.

America’s Moral Implosion

The 60s generation embraced moral relativism—the belief that there is no right and wrong—and it swept across our nation like a firestorm.  Five decades later a large number of Americans have completely lost their moral compass.   We have become the hook up culture, marked by casual sexual encounters.  We are a nation of Girls Gone Wild, where young women expose themselves before cameras.   How much deeper into the immoral abyss can we slide?

When a nation has no clear understanding of what exactly is moral and immoral the younger generation’s thinking becomes muddled.  Without proper guidance from their parents, young people are unable to discern good from evil.

Speaking of which, teen idol Miley Cyrus is working on changing her image to sultry seductress.  In her raunchy new music video single “Who Owns My Heart” fans won’t recognize the cute teenage girl who plays the title role of Hanna Montana on the Disney channel.  Miley is17-years-old and apparently thinks she’s all grown up.  If appearances are any indication, she seems quite comfortable in her new role.  Watching the video makes one think that writhing on a bed wearing only underwear and grinding with males and females on the dance floor wearing short shorts and a reveling top is old hat for Lady Miley.   One thing’s for sure: Miley Cyrus is no longer the Disney darling she once was.  Watch her video.  See the new Barbarella do her thing.

In a 2007 interview with USA Today, Miley said that her Christian faith is “the main thing” in her life.  She said that God wants her to be a “light, a testimony” in Hollywood.

Then in 2008 Miley caused quite a stir when she posed for Vanity Fair. While there was no nudity, the 15-year-old was wrapped in what appeared to be a bed sheet with her entire back exposed.

At the ripe old age of 16, Miley dawned short shorts, black boots and did a pole-dancing performance at the Teen Choice Awards.

Going back to Miley’s video, my question is: Who put this girl in provocative poses?  Who shot the video?  Do we not have laws to protect children from being sexually exploited by idiot adults?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Miley’s dad is crooner Billy Ray Cyrus who is best known for his mega hit “Achy Breaky Heart.”  Billy Ray is a devout Christian who professes his deep faith in God.  For several seasons he starred in the faith-based TV series Doc.  Billy Ray’s achy breaky heart must have shattered as he watched his precious little girl stand on a table and “get her body movin’.”  Then again, he could have stepped in and put a stop to it.  Why didn’t he?

Tish Cyrus, Miley’s mom, must have been in Borneo at the time of the filming and was unable to get to her daughter in time to rescue her from the perverts who produced and directed the video.

Am I being too hard on Miley’s parents?  I think not.  They are, after all, her guardians.  They are also professing Christians.  If the Cyrus’ were your typical Hollywood couple I wouldn’t be writing this column.  I’ve chosen this particular subject because I find Miley Cyrus’ slide into sleaze disturbing.  I’ve mulled it over for several days and come to the decision that what I have to say to her parents needs to be said in print.  Just three little words….You blew it!

When my daughter was 17, I would have died a thousand deaths if she had appeared in a video dressed up like a tramp. I cannot imagine any Christian parent thinking it’s no big deal for millions of males to ogle their daughter’s half naked body and fantasize about what they’d like to do to her.  But that’s just me.

Back when I was a teenager Americans still embraced Christian values. We were a moral people.  When I was 17 the main topic of conversation with my friends was boys, movie stars, and fashion.  Most of my friends were modest… innocent…impressionable…and easily manipulated!  In great part thanks to Hellywood, and that isn’t a misspelling, a great many teenage girls lose their innocence because they’re impressionable and easily manipulated.

Kids have always looked to celebrities as role models. Many people, young and old alike, make their relationship, fashion, and even life decisions based on what their favorite celebrities wear and do. Females emulate the likes of Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Amy Weinhouse, Heidi Montag and the Kardashian sisters, while males tend to look up to rap artists and athletes.  Almost without exception, rappers are poor role models.  Some athletes such as Tiger Woods, Mark McGuire, Jason Giambi, Michael Vic and Michael Phelps have made mistakes and publicly apologized.  But they still failed the role model test.  And when celebrities blow it how do their fans respond?  They say things like: We all make mistakes.  We all sin.  No one’s perfect.  He/she deserves another chance…or 2 or 3 or 4…

Give me a break!  Being a role model is an honor celebs should not take lightly.  Although there are a lot of superstars (and politicians) who are honorable people and wonderful role models, many are not.  Famous people who have a multitude of fans trying to emulate them should be humbled by the adoration they receive.  Moreover, they should try hard to be upstanding citizens.  Loose ladies and “bad boys” make bad role models.

Since the sixties secularists have been denigrating and coarsening our culture to the point where most adults have learned to accept seeing teenage girls parade around in public, scantily dressed, wearing getups that 20 years ago only prostitutes turning tricks on street corners would dare dress in.  Guess who they’re trying to emulate?

Like much of Western Europe, America is a bastion of immorality, in large part due to our adopting a liberal worldview.  While liberals pushed their filth on us, many people stuck their heads in the sand.  But, thankfully, some fought back.  The much maligned religious right has been in the trenches fighting to restore America to its Christian roots.  The idea is to free our nation from the grip of secularists /liberals/progressives.  These warriors have gotten no help from the mainstream media whatsoever.  Instead the liberal press viciously attacks them at every turn.

Americans are discovering that unbridled immorality is part and parcel of the secular worldview.  Take for example what is happening in middle schools across our nation.  We can thank liberals/progressives who have control over the government schools for the growing number of preteens who have become sexually promiscuous.  I’m talking 11 and 12-year-olds!  What these kids don’t realize is that having sex with multiple partners is risky!  Sooner or later “hooking up” will result in a sexually-transmitted disease (STD), some of which are deadly!

Here’s a real shocker.  A recent study conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that nearly1 in 4 teen girls–that’s more than 3 million–have 1 or more sexually transmitted diseases.

Constant exposure to sex is harmful to kids.  They’re not equipped to process information about sex — especially homosexual sex!  Parents who encourage their sons and daughters to embrace their homosexuality need to know that a September 2010 CDC study conducted on 8,000 “gay” men showed that 1 in 5 is infected with the AIDS virus — and nearly half are unaware of it!  “This study’s message is clear,” said CDC National Center for HIV/AIDS director Kevin Fenton.  “HIV exacts a devastating toll on men who have sex with men in America’s major cities.”

Young people abuse drugs and alcohol.  They lie, cheat and steal without remorse.  They do not flinch at brutality.  Instead of portraying vampires and witches as villains, they are the new heroes and heroines.  Coarse language spews forth from the mouths of preteens…there is little or no respect for authority or for adults…selfishness and narcissism has become the rule, not the exception.  What more proof do we need that liberalism brings destruction to a nation?

Here’s one last example of America’s moral implosion.  Actresses on the TV show “Glee” posed for a GQ photo shoot as the characters they play. Here’s the problem.  GQ magazine is explicitly written for adult men. The photos hyper-sexualize the actresses who, although adults in real life, play high school-aged girls.  Tim Winters of the Parents TV Council believes that because the photos will be published in an adult male magazine it borders on pedophilia:

“Many children who flocked to ‘High School Musical’ have grown into ‘Glee’ fans,” says Winters.  “They are now being treated to seductive, in-your-face poses of the underwear-clad female characters posing in front of school lockers, one of them opting for a full-frontal crotch shot. By authorizing this kind of near-pornographic display, the creators of the program have established their intentions on the show’s direction. And it isn’t good for families. …‘Glee’ creator Ryan Murphy has declared that it is his goal in life to remove every barrier to the depiction of explicit sex on TV. On Bravo’s ‘Sex in the Box’ Murphy said, ‘It’s tough to get that sexual point of view across on television. Hopefully I have made it possible for somebody on broadcast television to do a rear-entry scene in three years. Maybe that will be my legacy.’”

This is a legacy to boast about?

Because of people like Ryan Murphy, a large number of our younger generation is missing out on childhood altogether.  Sadly, very few people seem genuinely concerned about how our highly sexualized culture affects children.  And this includes most religious leaders!  Many of them sit on the sidelines while those on the frontlines of the battle try to put a stop to the pornification of our culture.  Instead of fighting pressing problems on their home turf, religious leaders go to Third World Countries to help those in need–a magnanimous gesture to say the least—when their own country needs help battling the culture war!  Our nation is going to hell in a hand basket!  Hello!

No one knows what went on behind the scenes during the making of Miley Cyrus’ video.  It appears, though, that her parents failed to provide her with some guidance — and many parents and grandparents extend this same attitude toward their own families.  Parents seem numb to what’s going on in the world so they sit on the sidelines hoping the problem will just disappear.  It seems some parents are either not living in the real world, or they are, and cannot figure out how to solve the problems, so they let things slide.

As for Christians…

Too many professing Christians are not engaged in the culture war.  They’ve tuned out what’s going on around them.  They turn their faces away while others are doing the dirty work.  It’s time to show some moxie, Christian! Join the fight!  God-fearing people must pitch in and help put a stop to the child exploiting/corrupting garbage dump our nation has become. With God’s help—and His blessing–Gideon’s army of 300 took on and took out 135,000 Midianite soldiers.  (Judges 8:10-12)  Christian conservatives may be small in number, like Gideon’s army, but God will work through us if we trust in Him.

First and foremost, Christian, you must share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the lost. (Mark 1:14)  Go and make disciples of all nations.  (Mat. 28:19)  This is what your Lord and Master instructed you to do.  Are you obeying His command?  People will not change unless hearts and minds are changed.

Moreover, Christians must come to terms with the fact that we’ve allowed moral anarchists to drag America through the mud — and they’re not finished soiling her good name.  Fight for her!

Also, we’ve huffed and puffed while greedy adults exploited impressionable children but we did little or nothing to stop them.  Yo

“One-tenth of sexually active New York City high school students say they have had at least one same-sex partner, and teens who say they’ve had sexual contact with both sexes report higher-than-average rates of dating violence, forced sex and risky sexual behavior.” —Karen Matthews

Newly Disclosed Documents Shed More Light on Early Taliban Offers, Pakistan Role

U.S. government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and recently posted on the website of the George Washington University National Security Archive shed some additional light on talks with the Taliban prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, including with regard to the repeated Taliban offers to hand over Osama bin Laden, and the role of Pakistan before and after the attacks.[1]

One of the recently released State Department documents, from March 2000, notes that a proposed “gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Multan, Pakistan figured prominently in discussions” about the mutual goal between the U.S. and regional players of stabilizing Afghanistan. Discussions on another proposed pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan had also been proposed that were “more advanced”, and the Pakistanis had gone to Tehran to meet with Iranian officials “to pursue these negotiations”. But neither “pipeline is likely to go forward in the mid-term”, the documented concluded.

A Pakistani official told the U.S. that “Pakistan ‘will always support the Taliban’”. This “policy cannot change, he continued; it would prompt rebellion across the Northwest Frontier Provinces, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and indeed on both sides of the Pashtun-dominated Pak-Afghan border.” But the Taliban were “‘looking for a way out’ of the problem with bin Laden”. The U.S. was urged to “find a way to compromise with the Taliban”, and possible “ways that the U.S. and the Taliban might use to break the impasse” were suggested, including “the possibility of a trial in a third (Muslim) country”, “U.S. assurances that bin Laden would not face the death penalty”, and “a U.S. outline of what the Taliban would gain from extradition of bin Laden”.[2]

It is already known that the U.S. had demanded in secret discussions with the Taliban that bin Laden be handed over for more than three years prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The talks continued “until just days before” the attacks, according to a Washington Post report the month following the attacks. But a compromise solution such as the above that would offer the Taliban a face-saving way out of the impasse was never seriously considered. Instead, “State Department officials refused to soften their demand that bin Laden face trial in the U.S. justice system.”

Officials described the U.S. decision to reject Taliban offers as a missed opportunity. Former CIA station chief Milt Bearden told the Post, “We never heard what they were trying to say…. We had no common language. Ours was, ‘Give up bin Laden.’ They were saying, ‘Do something to help us give him up.’” Bearden added, “I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the neck,” but this “never clicked” with U.S. officials.

Michael Malinowski, a State Department official involved in the talks, acknowledged, “I would say, ‘Hey, give up bin Laden,’ and they would say, ‘No…. Show us the evidence’”, a request U.S. officials deemed unreasonable.[3]

According to the BBC, the Taliban later even warned the U.S. that bin Laden was going to launch an attack on American soil. Former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil said his warnings, issued because of concerns that the U.S. would react by waging war against Afghanistan, had been ignored. A U.S. official did not deny that such warnings were issued, but told BBC rather that it was dismissed because “We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff”.[4]

Indeed, underscoring Muttawakil’s stated reasons for having delivered the threat warning to the U.S., a State Department document from June 2001 obtained by INTELWIRE.com[5] showed that the U.S. had warned the Taliban “that they will be held directly responsible for any loss of life that occurs from terrorist actions related to terrorists who have trained in Afghanistan or use Afghanistan as a base of planning operations.”[6] The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef responded that “the Taliban do not see Americans as their enemies and that there are no threats to Americans coming from the Taliban. Nontheless, said Zaeef, ‘We will do our best to follow up and stop’ any threat.” With regard to bin Laden, “Zaeef emphasized that the Taliban’s relationship with UBL [Usama/Osama bin Laden] and others is based not on enmity against the United States, but on ‘culture.’”[7]

Rejecting the Taliban offers to have bin Laden handed over, the U.S. instead pursued a policy of regime change well prior to the 9/11 attacks. Jane’s Information Group reported in March 2001 that “India is believed to have joined Russia, the USA and Iran in a concerted front against Afghanistan’s Taliban regime”, which included support for Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, including “information and logistic support” from Washington.[8] Former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik told the BBC that he had been told by senior U.S. officials in July 2001 at a U.N.-sponsored summit in Berlin that military action would be taken against the Taliban by the middle of October. Preparations had already been coordinated with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Russia. Naik also “said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban.”[9]

A newly released document dated August 30, 2001 shows that Pakistan was continuing to urge the U.S. “to maintain open channels to the Taliban.” Pakistani officials denied that their support for the Taliban included military assistance. When asked “why Pakistan supports the Taliban”, an official replied, “We don’t support but inter-act with the Taliban”. Pressed further on why Pakistan continued “to give the Taliban international diplomatic support and to press the USG [United States Government] to engage with the Taliban?” the Pakistanis “reiterated that the Taliban are the effective rulers of at least 90 percent of Afghanistan, that they enjoy significant popular support because they ended the banditry and anarchy that once bedeviled the country, and that the instant success of the opium poppy production ban underscored … the reality and effectiveness of Taliban authority.” If it wasn’t for “external support” for the Northern Alliance, it “would collapse in a matter of days.”[10]

Another newly disclosed document shows that two days after the 9/11 attacks Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was told “bluntly” that “There was no inclination in Washington to engage in a dialog with the Taliban.” The U.S. was already prepared for military action and “believed strongly that the Taliban are harboring the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks.” The U.S. was “fairly sure” that bin Laden “and his Al Qida network of terrorists” were guilty.[11]

The following day, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage issued an ultimatum to Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed that Pakistan’s cooperation was expected “should the evidence strongly implicate Usama bin-Laden and the Al Qaida network in Afghanistan and should Afghanistan and the Taliban continue to harbor him and this network”.[12]

Mahmud conveyed the message to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and reported back to Armitage that “the ‘response was not negative on all these points’.” The Taliban was to convene a grand council to discuss the U.S.’s terms. Mahmud said he had “framed the decision to Mullah Omar and the other Afghans as essentially choosing between one man and his safe haven versus the well-being of 25 million citizens of Afghanistan” and that they were “now engaged in ‘deep introspection’ about their decisions.”[13]

The BBC reported on the Pakistani talks with the Taliban, noting that the Taliban were “demanding proof of his involvement in the terror attacks on the US” before they would consider handing over Osama bin Laden, who issued a statement saying, “The US is pointing the finger at me but I categorically state that I have not done this”.[14] CNN similarly reported that the Taliban was “refusing to hand over bin Laden without proof or evidence that he was involved” in the 9/11 attacks. Ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef said “that deporting him without proof would amount to an ‘insult to Islam.’” But, he added, “We are ready to cooperate if we are shown evidence.” U.S. officials said evidence gathered linking bin Laden to other terrorist attacks were all the proof that was needed, but declined to provide evidence of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks.[15]

A document from September 23 notes that Mahmud planned to meet with the Taliban a second time, and that he emphasized to the U.S. that “A negotiated solution would be preferable to military action”, but was told that “his trip could not delay military planning” and that “The time for negotiation was past.” In his further meeting, Mahmud would ask Omar to “surrender Usama Bin Laden and his Al Qaida lieutenants”, and reiterated Pakistan’s pledge of support for the U.S. effort, but replied by saying, “I implore you not to act in anger. Real victory will come in negotiations…. Reasoning with them to get rid of terrorism will be better than the use of brute force. If the strategic objective is Al Quaida [sic] and UBL, it is better for the Afghans to do it. We could avoid the fallout.” Overthrowing the Taliban regime would “leave a dangerous political vacuum” and Afghanistan would “revert to warlordism”, Mahmud warned. He further cautioned that “a strike will produce thousands of frustrated young Muslim men. It will be an incubator of anger that will explode two or three years from now.”[16] The U.S. dismissed these concerns, which were subsequently proven to have been prescient.

Secretary of State Colin Powell at the same time told Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press, “I am absolutely convinced that the al Qaeda network, which he heads, was responsible for this attack.” When asked whether the government would “release publicly a white paper which links him and his organization to this attack”, Powell replied, “We are hard at work bringing all the information together, intelligence information, law enforcement information. And I think in the near future we will be able to put out a paper, a document that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking him to this attack.”[17] The promised white paper was never delivered.

The U.S. war against Afghanistan commenced on October 7, and the Taliban again repeated offers to negotiate handing over bin Laden. Taliban deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir announced that “If the Taliban is given evidence that Osama bin Laden is involved” and the U.S. stopped its bombing, “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country”. President George W. Bush rejected the offer as “non-negotiable”, adding, “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”[18] Refusing to provide evidence of bin Laden’s guilt, Bush reiterated the U.S. ultimatum: “If they want us to stop our military operations, they’ve just got to meet my conditions. When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations.”[19]

The Taliban then dropped their demand for evidence and repeated their offer to turn bin Laden over to a third country. The London Guardian reported that Taliban minister Muttawakil met with officials from the CIA and ISI to propose the offer, which was once again dismissed by U.S. officials.[20] Taliban spokesman Amir Khan Muttaqi said at the end of October, “We do not want to fight…. We will negotiate. But talk to us like a sovereign country. We are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama’s involvement, but they have refused. Why?” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher responded by falsely claiming, “All one has to do is watch television to find Osama bin Laden claiming responsibility for the September 11 bombings.”[21]

In fact, as already noted, bin Laden had in denied any involvement in the attacks. On September 16, bin Laden issued a statement saying: “Following the latest explosions in the United States, some Americans are pointing the finger at me, but I deny that because I have not done it…. Reiterating once again, I say that I have not done it….” He added that the Taliban had forbidden terrorist attacks from being “carried out from Afghanistan’s territory”, and that this message had been delivered to him personally from Taliban leader Mullah Omar.[22]

Again on September 28, in an interview with the Karachi daily Ummat, bin Laden denied involvement: “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people…. Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.”

He went on to suggest that the attacks were an inside job: “Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usama and Taliban and then this incident happened…. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United States? That secret government must be asked as to who made the attacks.”[23]

Bin Laden was correct in his observation that U.S. policymakers perceived the need for an external enemy in order to pursue their policy goals. Without such a threat, the goal of many after the end of the Cold War not only to maintain U.S. military expenditures, but to effect a “transformation” of the military into a force for U.S. global hegemony, could not be realized. The neoconservative think tank The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), acknowledged this in its September 2000 manifesto “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century”, which argued the case for maintaining U.S. preeminence and global hegemony, and to “extend the current Pax Americana” through a buildup of the military. But this “process of transformation” was “likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”[24]

This assessment echoed that of Andrew Krepinevich, Executive Director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on March 5, 1999. After stating that “There appears to be a general agreement concerning the need to transform the U.S. military into a significantly different kind of force from that which emerged victorious from the Cold and Gulf Wars,” he noted that “this verbal support has not been translated into a defense program supporting transformation.” He stated further that “While there is growing support in Congress for transformation the ‘critical mass’ needed to affect it has not yet been achieved.” In conclusion, he said, “in the absence of a strong external shock to the United States—a latter-day ‘Pearl Harbor’ of sorts—surmounting the barriers to transformation will likely prove a long, arduous process.”[25]

While the U.S. never produced the white paper it promised that was to present the evidence against bin Laden in making its case for war, the British government did present a paper Tony Blair insisted demonstrated his guilt. Yet “Downing Street acknowledged that the 21-page dossier did not amount to a prosecutable case against bin Laden in a court of law.” Harder evidence, the document claimed, was “too sensitive to release.”[26]

To this day, the attacks of 9/11 are not listed as being among the crimes for which Osama bin Laden is wanted by the FBI, because there is not enough evidence against him to bring an indictment against him in a court of law.[27]

The threshold of evidence required for waging a war is apparently much lower than that to issue an indictment in a court of law. As a direct consequence of the war, Afghanistan once again became far and away the world’s leading producer of opium and heroin; it indeed returned to a state of warlordism, chaos, and violence, just as the U.S. had been warned; many more Afghan civilians have been killed than Americans who died on 9/11, and Osama bin Laden was never captured.

Notes

[1] “‘No-Go’ Tribal Areas Became Basis for Afghan Insurgency Documents Show”, George Washington University National Security Archive, September 13, 2010 <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/index.htm>.

[2] “Turkmenistan and Pakistan Predict War, Even While ‘Working for Peace,’ in Afghanistan, and Continue to Support Taliban”, U.S. State Department, March 13, 2000 <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/doc01.pdf>.

[3] David B. Ottaway and Joe Stephens, “Diplomats Met With Taliban on Bin Laden”, Washington Post, October 29, 2001; Page A01 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A3483-2001Oct28¬Found=true>.

[4] Kate Clark, “Taleban ‘warned US of huge attack’”, BBC News, September 7, 2002 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2242594.stm>.

[5] J.M. Berger, “U.S. Had ‘High Confidence’ Of UBL Attack in June 2001″, INTELWIRE.com, November 7, 2008 <http://intelwire.egoplex.com/2008_11_07_exclusives.html>.

[6] “Terrorism: Demarche on Threat by Afghan-Based Terrorists”, U.S. State Department, June 27, 2001 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2001-06-27-DOS-taliban-obl-meeting.pdf>.

[7] “Terrorism: Demarche on Threat by Afghan-Based Terrorists”, U.S. State Department, June 29, 2001 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2001-06-29-DOS-taliban-obl-meeting.pdf>.

[8] Rahul Bedi, “India joins anti-Taliban coalition”, Jane’s Information Group, March 15, 2001.

[9] George Arney, “US ‘planned attack on Taleban’”, BBC News, September 18, 2001 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm>.

[10] “STAFFDEL focuses on Afghanistan at MFA”, U.S. State Department, August 30, 2001 <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/doc03.pdf>.

[11] “Musharraf [EXCISED]“, U.S. State Department, September 13, 2001 <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/doc03.pdf>

[12] “Deputy Secretary Armitage’s Meeting with General Mahmud: Actions and Support Expected of Pakistan in Fight Against Terrorism”, U.S. State Department, September 13, 2001 <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/doc05.pdf>

[13] “Deputy Secretary Armitage-Mahmoud Phone Call”, U.S. State Department, September 18, 2001 <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/doc07.pdf>.

[14] “Taleban to decide Bin Laden fate”, BBC News, September 17, 2001 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1547076.stm>. See also Rupert Cornwell and Andrew Grice, “Taliban are given an ultimatum: hand over bin Laden or face attack”, The Independent, September 17, 2001 <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/taliban-are-given-an-ultimatum-hand-over-bin-laden-or-face-attack-751974.html>.

[15] “White House warns Taliban: ‘We will defeat you’”, CNN, September 21, 2001 <http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/09/21/ret.afghan.taliban/>. See also Luke Harding and Rory McCarthy, “Bush rejects Bin Laden deal”, The Guardian, September 21, 2001 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/21/afghanistan.september1111>.

[16] “Mahmud Plans 2nd Mission to Afghanistan”, U.S. State Department, September 24, 2001 <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/doc08.pdf>.

[17] Transcript of NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ With Tim Russert, September 23, 2001 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/nbctext092301.html>.

[18] “Bush rejects Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden over”, The Guardian, October 14, 2001 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5>. See also Andrew Buncombe, “Bush rejects Taliban offer to surrender bin Laden”, The Independent, October 15, 2001 <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bush-rejects-taliban-offer-to-surrender-bin-laden-631436.html>.

[19] Larry D. Hatfield, “Intense daylight bombing raids / Bush rejects new Taliban offer to send bin Laden to 3rd country”, San Francisco Chronicle, October 15, 2001 <http://articles.sfgate.com/2001-10-15/news/17621096_1_taliban-laden-bin>.

[20] Rory McCarthy, “New offer on Bin Laden”, The Guardian, October 17, 2001 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/17/afghanistan.terrorism11>.

[21] Kathy Gannon, “Official: Taliban Willing to Talk”, Associated Press, November 1, 2001.

[22] “Afghanistan: Bin Laden Denies Involvement in Terrorist Attacks in US”, Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press News Agency, September 16, 2001; from “Compilation of Usama Bin Laden Statements, 1994 – January 2004″, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, January 2004 <http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/ubl-fbis.pdf>. See also “Bin Laden says he wasn’t behind attacks”, CNN, September 17, 2001 <http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/inv.binladen.denial/>.

[23] “‘Exclusive’ Interview With Usama Bin Ladin on 11 Sep Attacks in US”, Ummat, September 28, 2001; from the FBIS compliation.

[24] “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century”, Project for a New American Century, September 2000 <http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf>.

[25] Testimony of Andrew Krepinevich, Executive Director, before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, Marcy 5, 1999 <http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/Archive/T.19990305.Emerging_Threats,_/T.19990305.Emerging_Threats,_.htm>.

[26] George Jones, “Blair presents the ‘proof’ that bin Laden is guilty”, The Telegraph, October 5, 2001 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1358499/Blair-presents-the-proof-that-bin-Laden-is-guilty.html>

[27] “FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitive: Usama Bin Laden”, Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed September 20, 2001 <http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/fugitives/laden.htm>. “No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11″, ProjectCensored.org, accessed September 20, 2001 <http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/16-no-hard-evidence-connecting-bin-laden-to-9-11/>.

The Role of Heroin In Sustaining The Afghan “war”

I just got an e-mail from Scottish journalist David Pratt, asking me to please let people know about the insidious effects of heroin on Afghanistan — and on Scotland. Of course I will. The two articles that Pratt wrote on this subject offer huge new insights into why the Bush-Obama “war” in Afghanistan is still going on after nine long bloody years of both physical pain and financial disaster for both Afghanistan and the United States (not to mention Scotland).

I first met Pratt when we were both embedded in the Green Zone in Iraq in 2007, and it was love at first sight — I immediately fell in love with his writing style, his knowledge and his willingness to go WAY out on a limb in order to get an accurate story. He has spent the last 30 years as a war correspondent for Glasgow’s Sunday Herald, and his book “Intifada: The Long Day of Rage” is the ultimate eye-witness report on .

Pratt is a fabulous reporter and if he says that poppy cultivation and heroin sales are not only financing the Taliban’s weapon supply in Afghanistan right now but also has become its current favorite way of screwing up the U.S. occupation by destabilizing the government in Kabul, then I know that information is spot-on.

According to Pratt, one American drug-control adviser in Kabul stated categorically that, “Once the Taliban realized that narcotic control was a major goal of the international coalition and Afghan government, they OK’d it to the farmers to grow poppy because they know it destabilizes the government. That’s also the reason why we’re seeing even more opium and heroin production.”

These are the kind of insightful articles that make other journalists (including myself) drool with envy. I wish that I could have written that!

According to another Pratt source, Dr. Zemoray Amin of Doctors of the World, “cheapness and easy availability of drugs, joblessness, displacement and, above all, the effects of the war are the main reasons for heroin’s escalating impact in Afghanistan. But …there is another, even more worrying root cause. It stems from the widespread corruption among those within the top tier of the Afghan establishment, and complicity by the international community in ignoring that crookedness in exchange for political allegiance and strategical leverage in the fight against the Taliban.”

General Petraeus might be better off spending his time fighting poppy growing rather than fighting small-time villagers who are caught between a rock and a hard place regarding the Taliban.

Here’s the rest of Pratt’s article, entitled “Trail of Destruction”.

Next, Pratt takes on the other end of the poppy chain — heroin in Scotland. Entitled “Made in Kabul — shot up in Glasgow,” This report is also grim. Drug addicts are now dying in Scotland in large numbers, thanks to Scottish soldiers who die in Afghanistan so that the drug trade there can continue to grow and prosper.

Here’s a quote: “Jawad was left for dead in a ditch. Stephen was found overdosed in a doorway. Though more than 3000 miles separate Kabul’s Karte Seh district and Glasgow’s Gorbals, the lives of these two men are inextricably linked by one thing: heroin. In the space of little over a month on opposite sides of the world, I listened to both tell of a hellish journey each had taken while trapped in the grip of a powerful and terrifying addiction.

“Jawad is no stranger to pain – in Kabul’s drug institutions, the methods used to detox heroin addicts come from the Middle Ages. Head shaved and stripped naked, on numerous occasions he has been locked in a cell and hosed down with freezing water. But it was the night when some policemen started beating Jawad that the agony became so great he found himself begging them to stop.”

Read the rest of this article at http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/made-in-kabul-shot-up-in-glasgow-1.1049730

If I don’t have the talent, insights, opportunity and/or knowledge to write important articles like these two, at least I’m glad to know that someone like Pratt is out there writing them for us — and it my pleasure to pass them on even though it makes me sad to know that the information they contain is verifiablely true.

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