War: The Ultimate Example of Bullying

At a local neighborhood meeting the other day, I made a comment that someone else didn’t like — and the next thing I knew this person was yelling at me Big Time.  Perhaps she thought that the sheer volume of her voice would bully me into keeping the real 411 to myself.  Not gonna happen.

I’ve been bullied all my life by all kinds of expert bullies.  I’ve been threatened by terrorists in Iraq, chased by North Korean border guards, issued death threats by the IDF — and, even worse, raised in a Republican town!  You can’t get much more bullied than that.  So now I never back down for anyone — let alone someone who merely raises his or her voice.

And so, at the meeting, I used my “outside voice” on that bully — a voice that makes even dogs and bats hide under the bed.  But did that make me feel any better?  No, not even close.  All I’d done was just to stoop to herlevel.  Not good.

Bullies are people who, when they can’t win their arguments by truth, reason or logic, then result to violence, intimidation, lies and extortion.  School-yard bullies use that technique.  And, on the national and international level, it is also used by the Mafia, Al Qaeda, Fox News, the IDF, the GOP, America’s new militarized police forces and our new massive highly-weaponized armies happily dreaming of world-wide “pre-emptive war” at the taxpayers’ expense.

So how do we protect ourselves against bullies?  Not sure.  Non-violent resistance is good — but losing one’s life in order to non-violently preserve one’s own self-respect is bad.

Strength in numbers is good (just look at what WalMart workers are achieving through their demonstrations) — but getting pepper-sprayed and shot with rubber bullets by our new militarized police forces in the process is bad.

Raising our children to believe in Truth and Justice is good.  Bullying our children with spankings and other types of brutal actions of the strong against the weak is bad.  ANYONE can beat up a two-year-old.

Social media freedom and WikiLeaks are good.  Media distortion and censorship is bad.

And, according to Dave Lindorff, climate change is bad for most of us but might be hunky-dory for bullies.

When we decent folk stand up against bullies, no matter what it costs us, this makes us feel good about ourselves — but it also makes us feel bad because we have stooped to their level.  But as Jesus, Buddha, etc. once said, “There is more good in human beings than there is bad.”  And now, more than ever, it is time for the good part of our human nature to come out — and to stop kowtowing to bullies.  And to stop BEING bullies as well.

But I digress.

What I really want to talk about here is the very nature of “war” — where the strong intimidate the weak and the biggest bully takes all.   Unfortunately, it’s not the smartest or most creative or the kindest or the best or most hard-working person who takes it all — it’s the ones with the most weapons and the least shame.

In the last 65 years, America has become the biggest bully in the world.  I’m ashamed to say that — but it is true.  And all our super-macho armies and all our vainglorious wars, even the ones involving squabbling with other bullies over the same turf, don’t make us any better than what we really have become:  Bullies.

We try to teach our kids not to be bullies — and then we ourselves turn around and wave flags and cheer and support all kinds of brutal bullying done by America’s vast war machine, even though we have armed and equipped these bullies ourselves; at the expense of our own jobs, homes,infrastructure, schools, lifestyles, elders and kids.

A few million years ago, dinosaurs were the ultimate bullies and mammals were the ultimate victims — in a race between the strong and the meek.  But just look how things have turned out.  Seen any dinosaurs around lately?  I think not.

And who knows what new life-form will start evolving once our current human bullying “Masters of War” are extinct.

At the rate we are going — between the massive weapons races, the invasions and Occupations, the terrorism (state-sponsored and otherwise), the nuclear arsenals, whatever — it looks like the meek truly are going to inherit the earth.  Again.

Global Banks are the Financial Services Wing of the Drug Cartels

“Steal a little,” wrote Bob Dylan, “they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you a king.” These days, he might recraft the line to read: deal a little dope, they throw you in jail; launder the narco billions, they’ll make you apologise to the US Senate.

Two months ago in Washington DC, a poor black man called Edward Dorsey Sr was convicted of peddling 5.5 grams of crack cocaine. Because he was charged before a recent relative amelioration in sentencing, he was given a mandatory 10 years in jail.

Last week, managers from Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, lined up before the Senate’s permanent sub-committee on investigations – just across the Potomac river from the scene of Dorsey’s crime – to be asked questions such as: “It took three or four years to close a suspicious account. Is there any way that should be allowed to happen?”

The “suspicious account” was that of a “casa de cambio”, a currency exchange house operated in Mexico on behalf of the largest criminal syndicate in the world and one of the most savage, the Sinaloa drug-trafficking cartel. The dealings had been flagged up to HSBC bosses by an anti-money laundering officer, but to no avail – the dirty business continued. “No, senator,” came the reply from a bespectacled Brit called Paul Thurston, chief executive, retail banking and wealth management, HSBC Holdings plc.

The same casa de cambio, called Puebla, was known to be under investigation in another case involving the  bank during the time HSBC was entertaining its money. US authorities had seized $11m from Wachovia’s Miami office, on the way to securing the biggest settlement in banking history with Wachovia in March 2010, detailed in this newspaper last year.

Wachovia was fined $50m and made to surrender $110m in proven drug profits, but was shown to have inadequately monitored a staggering $376bn through the casa de cambio over four years, of which $10bn was in cash. The whistleblower in the case, an Englishman working as an anti-money laundering officer in the bank’s London office, Martin Woods, was disciplined for trying to alert his superiors, and won a settlement after bringing a claim for unfair dismissal.

No one from Wachovia went to jail – and, said Woods at the time of the settlement: “These are the proceeds of murder and misery in Mexico, and of drugs sold around the world. But no one goes to jail. What does the settlement do to fight the cartels? Nothing. It encourages the cartels and anyone who wants to make money by laundering their blood dollars.”

HSBC has been found to have handled $7bn in narco cash, “and this is the starter for 10″, Woods now says. “We’ll get the full picture over time. But what’s the sanction on these banks? What’s their risk? The cartels should renegotiate their charges with the banks. They’re being priced for a risk element that isn’t there.”

Wachovia was not the first, neither will HSBC be the last. Six years ago, a subsidiary of Barclays – Barclays Private Bank – was exposed as having been used to launder drug money from Colombia through five accounts linked to the infamous Medellín cartel. By an ironic twist, Barclays continued to entertain the funds after British police had become involved after a tip-off, from HSBC.

And the issue is wider than drug-money. It is about where banks, law enforcement officers and the regulators – and politics and society generally – want to draw the line between the criminal and supposed “legal” economies, if there is one.

Take the top-drawer bank to the elite and Her Majesty the Queen, Coutts, part of the bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland. On 23 March, the UK Financial Services Authority issued a final notice to Coutts, fixing a penalty of £8.75m for breach of its money-laundering code.

The FSA reviewed 103 “high-risk customer files” and “identified deficiencies in 73 files”, showing “failure to conduct appropriate ongoing monitoring” over three years. In two cases, private bankers involved had “failed to identify serious criminal allegations against those customers”. Rory Tapner, chief executive of the wealth division of RBS said that “since concerns were first identified by the FSA, Coutts & Co has enhanced its client relationship management process”. The refrain was the same from HSBC last week, and every other bank after every other shameful revelation: we went awry, but we’ve fixed it.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, though, to know Coutts’s private view of Wachovia’s case – or, at least of people such as Woods who do root out criminal laundering?

As it happens, through a rare glimpse, we do. Last year, the Wachovia whistleblower was offered a job at Coutts. But the bank suddenly withdrew its job offer. An internal email sent by the interviewer to a director of Coutts’s wealth management programme explained the bank had “a very generic reason for our decision, citing the fact that we had become aware of an incident at Wachovia, one of Martin Woods’s previous employers, and that Coutts was keen to avoid any risk of reputational damage that might relate to the incident”.

The thought occurs to Woods, who is taking legal action against Coutts for mistreatment of a whistleblower, that he was too tenacious at Wachovia. Coutts declined to comment.

No one at Coutts was called to account for the FSA’s alarming findings. No one was sanctioned under criminal law last month when the  for illegally moving billions of dollars into the US banking system, in breach of sanctions – as HSBC has done with money from North Korea and Iran. Neither were they in 2009, when Lloyds TSB – 43% owned by the British taxpayer – was fined $350m for whitewashing Iranian money into the US. The fines seem huge to us, but banks pay them from petty cash.

If there is a prosecution, it is always “deferred”, as with Wachovia, and a Californian bank called Sigue used by HSBC to receive the Mexican drug money. Be good for a year, and we’ll forget about it. Since when did the likes of Edward Dorsey of Washington enjoy that kind of leniency?

A foremost trainer of anti-money laundering officers in the US is Robert Mazur, who infiltrated the Medellín cartel during the prosecution and collapse of the BCCI bank in 1991, and who tells the Observer that “the only thing that will make the banks properly vigilant to what is happening is when they hear the rattle of handcuffs in the boardroom”.

It remains to be seen whether HSBC’s barons will, like Wachovia’s, avoid Dorsey’s fate.

“People don’t like to ask how close the banker’s finger is to the trigger of the killer’s gun,” says Woods.

But in this newspaper – when we revealed the original “cease and desist” order against HSBC – the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, posited that four pillars of the international banking system are: drug-money laundering, sanctions busting, tax evasion and arms trafficking.

The response of politicians is to cower from any serious legal assault on this reality, for the simple reasons that the money is too big (plus consultancies to be had after leaving office). The British government recruits a former chairman of HSBC as trade secretary just as the drug-laundering scandal breaks.

Herein, along with Dylan’s dictum, lies the problem. We don’t think of those banking barons as the financial services wing of the Sinaloa cartel.

The stark truth is that the cartels’ best friends are those people in pin-stripes who, after a rap on the knuckles, return to their golf in Connecticut and drinks parties in Holland Park.

The notion of any dichotomy between the global criminal economy and the “legal” one is fantasy. Worse, it is a lie. They are seamless, mutually interdependent – one and the same.

Source: The Guardian

TSA Does Not Keep You Safe. It Never Has. It Never Will

In a little less than a week, I will be flying for the third time this year. When I get to the airport, I will be faced with three abhorrent choices:

1. Have myself photographed in my birthday suit by one of those very possibly cancer-causing nudie-nukers.
2. Have my crotch groped by some tax-mainlining pervert in an act that anywhere else would constitute sexual assault. This is also full of health risks.
3. Not flying.

And if you are going to say, “Then just don’t fly”, then you just don’t get it.

As Vin Suprynowicz has put it, “It’s all a vicious game of ‘let’s pretend.’”

TSA does not keep you safe. It never has. It never will.

I have said before – Suprynowicz says something similar – that if a terrorist really wanted to kill a lot of people and disrupt aviation, he would not go to all the trouble of smuggling a bomb onto a plane. Rather, he would set off a bomb in a terminal.

Terrorists could even orchestrate a coordinated attack at multiple locations. Imagine bombs going off at eight on a Monday morning at, say, ATL, ORD, LAX and DFW. Imagine thousands dead and America’s four largest aviation hubs crippled indefinitely.

TSA waits until well after you enter a terminal before commencing with gate rape. Not only have they never caught a terrorist in over a decade, but they leave most parts of airports … ahem … “unprotected.”

(Last year, a congressthing announced that there had been 25,000 breaches of TSA since its inception in 2001.)

Besides, who says a terrorist attack has to involve planes and airports?

Elsewhere, looking at a nude photograph of a minor would be considered child pornography and would land you in the joint. Not so with TSA.

I mean, like, terrorists could attack train stations, bus stations, schools, shopping malls, stadiums and grocery stores. Are you willing to be sexually assaulted every time you enter such venues? Are you willing to have career perverts grope and ogle your six-year-old kids as they walk into school? How far down this road are you willing to go?

I write this in the aftermath of Jerry Sandusky’s conviction on 45 counts of child molestation. Yes, we should be outraged about these crimes and the cover up by the Penn State establishment. Why are we not just as outraged about the fact that TSA flunkies molest children at airports every day and get away with it?

And if TSA is oh so necessary to keep us “secure” from terrorists at airports, why don’t they also station their blue shirts at train stations and bus stations? Why don’t they interrupt traffic on highways? I mean, like, you never know when or where a terrorist could hypothetically, theoretically strike next. You can’t be too careful.

Oh, wait.   .

One of the grievances spelled out in the Declaration of Independence – and the basis for the Third Amendment – was “Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.” I am sure that King George III never dreamt of authorizing the redcoats to grope the crotches of the colonists, much less justified such institutionalized depravity in the name of a higher good. (And if he had, the “shot heard round the world” would have been fired much sooner than April 19, 1775. People had self-respect back then.)

Allan Macurdy is perhaps the most amazing person I have ever known. Diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy at age 7, he let nothing stand in his way. In spite of absolutely daunting physical challenges, he would become a professor of law at Boston University.

I don’t know about Allan’s politics, nor will I ever care. And I have no idea what he would think about TSA. However, I want to steal a phrase from him: “higher parade of horribles.” He used this phrase when discussing how much physical adversity a person would accept before they simply lost the will to live.

Likewise, there is a “higher parade of horribles” that applies to TSA. As horrible as terrorism is, there would be something immeasurably more horrible: life under a totalitarian government.

And this is exactly what millions of Americans seem willing to accept in the name of “security”. How else would you describe a government that will presume its citizens guilty until proven innocent and molest and assault them as a condition of movement? When we forsake the presumption of innocence, we lose America.

And if you will quietly accept TSA’s sexual – and scatalogical – humiliation, what will you not accept? Where will you draw the line? If you think TSA is of secondary importance, then don’t complain to me about the IRS or Obamacare. You have already told me that you will allow your government to do absolutely anything.

I would rather live in a free society with the very remote chance of being a victim of terrorism than in a place such as Cuba or North Korea, with a ubiquitous “national security” apparatus and no liberty whatsoever.

And if this higher horrible of a truly totalitarian state does come to pass on these shores, it will not be the fault of Dubya or Obomber or Al-Qaeda or Al-whatever. It will be because of millions of Americans allowed their government to do absolutely anything to keep them “secure.”

Oh how I wish I had said this first: Our liberty was not stolen from us. It died from lack of exercise.

Elite Killers Kill At Large For Kidon, Mossad

A new book reveals that a department known as Kidon within the Mossad has dispatched assassins into Iran in order to murder the nuclear scientists, thereby stunting the country’s nuclear energy program.

Authors Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman in their book Spies against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars state that the notorious spy agency has killed at least four Iranian nuclear scientists, including targeting them with operatives on motorcycles, an assassination technique used by the elite killers at Kidon.

The Kidon killers “excel at accurate shooting at any speed and staying steady to shoot and to place exquisitely shaped sticky bombs” and consider it their hallmark.

Kidon, known to be one of the world’s most efficient killing machines, is technically described as a little Mossad within Mossad.

Tasked with carrying out covert ops across the world, Kidon has embarked on a number of black ops and assassinations in different countries.

Those who kill for Kidon are selected either from within the Mossad spy agency or from among the natives of the countries where they plan to carry out assassinations.

For instance, in case of the nuclear assassinations conducted in Iran by Kidon, they basically hired people with Iranian or dual nationalities. One of the Mossad assassins was Majid Jamali Fashi who confessed he had cooperated with Mossad for financial reasons only.

Majid Jamali Fashi assassinated Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, a professor at Tehran University in January 2011 by blowing an explosive-laden motorbike via a remote-controlled device. He reportedly received training from Mossad inside Israel as well as $120,000 to assassinate the Iranian scientist. According to his confession, Jamali Fashi received forged documents in Azerbaijan’s Heydar Aliyev Airport to travel to Tel Aviv.

He confessed, “I woke up early in the morning and as we were trained I went to the warehouse. I had to prepare the box which contained the bomb. I took the motorbike out of the house and reached a location that I had to contact them. I went to the alley [where the professor resided]. It was vacant. No one was there. I brought the bike to the sidewalk and parked it in front of the house. They told me that the mission had been accomplished and that I had to discard my stuff.”

Jamali Fashi was executed under the Iranian judicial system on 15 May, 2012. Parenthetically, Azerbaijan has in recent years become an apparent haven for Mossad spies and assassins.

Another Mossad operative of Iranian nationality has been identified as Ja’far Khoshzaban, alias Javidan, who has been working under the auspices of Azeri security forces and who has been involved in nuclear assassinations. Iranian intelligence ministry has demanded the extradition of Mossad’s Iranian spy from Azerbaijan. Iran has reportedly obtained documents, suggesting that Azeri officials have aided and abetted Mossad and CIA agents in their targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists, namely Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan. As a matter of fact, CIA is constantly mentioned along with Mossad as the main elements in the nuclear assassinations.

Ahmadi Roshan was assassinated on January 11, 2012 when an unknown motorcyclist attached a magnetic bomb to his car near a college building of Allameh Tabatabaei University in northern Tehran.

Using the same ‘sticking bomb technique’, the Kidon assassins attached bombs to the vehicles of Iranian university professors Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi and detonated the explosives on November 29, 2010. Professor Shahriari was killed immediately, but Dr. Abbasi and his wife only sustained minor injuries.

As a rule, the Kidon kill team is comprised of four highly seasoned men: 1. Tracer 2. Transporter 3. Helper 4. Killer.  The tracer spots the target. The transporter guides the assassination team to the target. The helper basically serves as the motorcycle driver who helps the killer and the killer is tasked with shooting the target or attaching magnetic bomb to the car of the victim.

According to the book Spies against Armageddon, the Kidon agents are well-trained in shooting and placing “exquisitely shaped sticky bombs” and consider it their hallmark.

These facts aside, it rather seems sort of naïve to disregard the role of the CIA-backed MKO terrorists in the nuclear assassinations and give all the credit to the Kidon agents. There is solid evidence which evinces the MKO role in the assassination of the Iranian scientists.

American commentator Richard Silverstein believes that the primary source of income for the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) comes from the assassinations the group conducts within the Iranian soil at the behest of the Mossad. He argues that “If you’re a terrorist on behalf of Israel, as MKO is, then you’re kosher as far as (US-based Israeli publicist) Dershowitz is concerned. And your money is golden. Where does the money come from? Possibly from the Iran assassinations the MKO performs on Mossad’s behalf, which undoubtedly pay well. Then there’s the possibility that the USD 400-million Bush allocated for destabilizing Iran in 2007 has found its way either to the MKO or Mossad (or both)”

More to the point, the CIA works in the same satanic league with the Mossad and MKO. Time and again, the officials in Washington have encouraged and even confessed to the killings of the Iranian nuclear scientists.

Former US senator Rick Santorum callously described the assassination of Iranian scientists as “wonderful,” threatening that those who work for Iran’s nuclear program “are not safe.”

“On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly.”

He also said, “I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe.”

Also, former Bush administration ambassador to the UN John Bolton said on Fox News that the killing of an Iranian scientist and sanctions against Iran constitute only “half-measures in the quest to stunt Iran’s nuclear ambitions”.

Former White House Speaker Newt Gingrich has called for covert action, including “taking out their scientists” and cyberwarfare.

Quotations of this nature are legion and all these facts reinforce the idea that Washington has been making clandestine efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear energy program in cahoots with Tel Aviv and their lackey i.e. the MKO.

No Apocalypse Yet

“Moscow” — The anticipated apocalypse did not come to pass. The presidential election in Russia ran its course, Putin was duly elected, and to the great astonishment of the opposition, multimillion crowds demanding the blood of the tyrant did not materialize. Only some 15,000 protesters gathered in central Moscow and dispersed peacefully within two hours. Only a remaining hundred hardcore activists were resolved “to stay until Putin goes” in the frozen city fountain. They were removed by police, charged and released. What a flop!

An inspired spokesperson of the Whites, a returnee from New York Masha Gessen, self-described “Jewish Lesbian, a sworn enemy of the Putin regime”, a blogger for the NY Times, “extremely influential”, according to Newsweek, who has just published with Riverhead a book prophesying the swift fall of Putin, predicted (or called for) 200,000 angry Russians tearing down the walls of Kremlin and washing with blood the streets on March 5. Rarely has a forecast failed so profoundly.

The last rally had its funny moments. The radicals came with quite obscene slogans against Putin and against his electorate. They booed down almost everybody including the billionaire oligarch Mr Prokhorov who tried his luck with them. It was rather cold, almost 20 degrees F (-6°C), and the call of Udaltsov and Navalny to stay put was met with visible disbelief. Navalny looked extremely unhappy; he spoke of the need to build a movement from scratch. The police behaved very well; even the participants lauded its polite and respectful attitude. US cops could take a lesson from Moscow riot police how to be cool.

Until it happened, nobody was sure of the outcome. Opposition leaders I asked privately told me that they didn’t know; the government wasn’t sure and brought in thousands of troops and riot police, menacingly located in the backyards, happily remaining uncalled for. City hall permitted all the rallies applied for, at the time and place they asked; there were no logistic problems, the location of the main opposition demo was in Pushkin square, the Moscow equivalent of Times Square in New York. All in vain: people did not come.

They were sobered by the vote. Some 40,000 observers drafted from all walks of life were stationed at the booths; there were web-cameras checking every corner near the booths for possible fraud. Relatively open-minded observers had had a chance to see that in transparent elections people did vote for Putin. Not overwhelmingly (64 per cent is not a North Korean kind of result), but convincingly. A few liberal bloggers had a change of heart and sobbingly admitted that they had witnessed fair elections and heard vox populi. For this reason, calls by Navalny, Yashin, Udaltsov and other White leaders to declare the vote “illegitimate” fell on deaf ears.

Only a few hardcore activists kept claiming that the vote was fraudulent; other Whites lamented that they had to share this planet with such a rabble. The deputy chief editor of the main White broadcaster Echo Moskvy, Vladimir Varfolomeev, wrote in his blog that “the social base of Putin regime, 40 to 50 million Russians, has to be eliminated” for democracy to win. This remark was widely interpreted as a call for genocide. Other Whites disparagingly called the Putin electorate “sprats” and other endearing terms; one or two declared their intention to emigrate to Israel. They plan for more rallies, but the feeling is that the orange bubble has burst.

The activists are heart-broken, dashed in their expectations. Their cause, that of fair elections, is dead. Demonization of Putin did not work; to the contrary, it pushed many stubborn Russians back into the fold. Now they look for a new cause, and it seems they have chosen confrontation with the church. After the failure, their first action was in support of four punk-rockers who made a nuisance of themselves in a Moscow cathedral. This is not likely to endear them to the broad masses, as the Russians are quite devout to their national church.

The communists did rather well, but their tactics in the aftermath of the elections were confusing and lacklustre. Mr Zuganov chose neither to recognize nor congratulate Mr Putin; the Party called for a rally but did not mobilize its cadres and it flopped, for the ordinary Communists did not understand the message. Probably a new person at the helm of the party instead of tired Mr Zuganov will be able to change things in time for the next elections.

Moscow is different

Analysis of the election results shows that Moscow voted differently from the rest of the country. Russia’s social disparity was translated into electoral numbers very neatly. Elsewhere, second place was taken by the Communist contender Mr Gennady Zuganov (18 per cent); in Moscow it was ceded by the Communists in favour of the bon-vivant oligarch Mr Mikhail Prokhorov who received a very robust 20 per cent as opposed to 7 per cent in Russia generally.

Even more revealing were the results in separate electoral districts: the more well-to-do neighborhoods of Moscow voted handsomely for Prokhorov, in the best and most expensive areas he got up to 40 per cent of the vote. Prokhorov and his people called for a neoliberal agenda, less taxation for business, longer working hours, dismantling of the remnants of social protection including central heating that makes Russian homes so warm in the winter. Naturally he could not hope to win the average Russian heart, but the well-heeled voted for him, though they made their fortunes under Putin.

Putin brought this result upon himself: he allowed Moscow to become the vortex of money flows. More money comes and stays in Moscow than in the rest of Russia. Once, Moscow had a big working class population, many factories, good conditions for workers, for the workers were the mainstay of the Soviet regime. But for last 20 years Moscow has been deindustrialised, factories closed, the working class shrunk, while the locals made a killing renting out their state-provided apartments.

The results of elections in Moscow could have been even worse for Putin but for the bussing of voters from industrial townships. The bussed voters were also citizens of Russia and the bussing did not change the overall results; it changed the results for separate districts, and so it obscured the dangerous disparity between Moscow and the rest of the country. In some expensive areas of Moscow where little if any bussing took place, Prokhorov gathered almost as many votes as Putin. In London and Tel Aviv, where many Russian citizens voted, Prokhorov won hands down, and Putin was nowhere.

If Putin wants to remain in power, he must do something about Moscow. The disparity between Moscow and the country has to be equalized. The capital city and its inhabitants are hated by the country folk, and this feeling could allow Putin to shift resources away from this too-rich city.

His bigger problem is with the oligarchs. Will he try to fit their agenda? This is a distinct possibility. Though at the time of upsurge and hate-Putin rallies, he appealed to the patriotism of activists and intellectuals, and they saved him by the miracle at the Poklonnaya Mount, they are far from certain that he will not forget them in the time of his victory. Ditto Mr Rogozin, the fiery nationalist, who was brought home from honorary exile in Brussels. People wonder whether Putin will keep him now.

However, there is a possibility that he will do what the oligarchs fear, namely deal with offshoring and the dishonest dealing of the super-rich. John Helmer, an oldtimer journalist in Moscow with Asia Times, wrote enthusiastically of Putin’s directive VP-P13-9308 of December 28, 2011 available here; he described it “the oligarch killer”. Putin has demanded from CEOs and managers of the state-owned giants that they disclose, in Helmer’s words:

“networks of affiliation between officials and beneficiaries; wives, children and other family members or nominees who have been placed in concealed trusts and bag-holding positions; and chains of offshore cashflows. The state companies include Rosatom, the uranium mining and uranium fuel holding company; Inter RAO UES, the electricity holding company; RusdHydro, the hydroelectric power producer; Irkutskenergo, a southeast regional supplier of electricity; Gazprom; Transneft, the oil pipeline company; Sovcomflot, the state shipping company; Russian Railways; Aeroflot; Rostelecom; and the three state banks – Sberbank, VTB and Vnesheconombank.”

Surprisingly little was written about this in the media before the elections, though any sign of an attack on oligarchs would have brought in extra millions of voters to Putin. There were a couple of reports on TV, and then the matter disappeared from public view. Will Putin continue this struggle against the CEOs who deal with state property in the interests of their families? It is hard to predict whether in the end Putin will dare to fight the oligarchs or will prefer to accommodate them.

If he wants to survive politically, he will have to implement the national agenda, confront the oligarchs, curb the creative class, provide support to those who supported him. But Putin is a master of compromise; he takes decisive action only if necessary. He will be encumbered with Mr Dmitri Medvedev as his prime minister, an extremely inauspicious appointment he could not escape. Though loyal to Putin personally, he is not a good executive. Still it would be difficult to drop him unless he really makes a mess of things.

Russia faces fateful years. There is the danger of an Israeli-American war against Iran; and Iran is Russia’s neighbour and a friend. Syria, though in much better shape after the taking of Homs, is still in trouble, and Syria is the Russian foothold in the Middle East. The future of the Euro and the EC is doubtful, while Europe is Russia’s biggest trading partner. The US is in a presidential election year , a time when its politicians vie with each other to be tougher to the world – and to Russia. In a way, it’s a relief that this important country is in Mr Putin’s hands.

The Saga of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks

“Defense lawyers say Manning was clearly a troubled young soldier whom the Army should never have deployed to Iraq or given access to classified material while he was stationed there … They say he was in emotional turmoil, partly because he was a gay soldier at a time when homosexuals were barred from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces.” (Associated Press, February 3)

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Bradley Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base his legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young man to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to Wikileaks. They should not be presenting him that way any more than Bradley should be tried as a criminal or traitor. He should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Bradley also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat: “If you had free reign over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Bradley Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of Wikileaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as “solitary confinement”. Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making him testify against and implicating Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnaped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video “Collateral Murder” and documented in the “Iraq War Logs,” made public by Manning and Wikileaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two little children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law — something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed — forced the Obama administration to pull the remaining American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today, as are the many hundreds/thousands of American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities like Haditha, Fallujah, and other places whose names will live in infamy in the land of ancient Mesopotamia.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq war, the Wikileaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US Embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there — one long and detailed cable being titled: “CORRUPTION IN TUNISIA: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE” — how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on “current and emerging leaders and advisers” as well as information about “corruption” and information about leaders’ health and “vulnerability”. The UN directive also specifically asked for “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats”. A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.
• President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or “Afghanistan is over for Europe.”
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily “manage” the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a “weak and fractured” Iraq, and were even “fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government”. The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the “Cuban Five”. “Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.”
• UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the runup to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for “human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess”. [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a “boy-play” party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it’s what you think.)
• Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”.
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re “widespread severe torture” by India, the widely-renowned “world’s largest democracy”: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: “The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.” Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of “the world’s largest democracy”; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

AIPAC Works For The 1 Percent

The battle for justice in the Middle East is our battle. It is part of the vast, global battle against the 1 percent. It is about living rather than dying. It is about communicating rather than killing. It is about love rather than hate. It is part of the great battle against the corporate forces of death that reign over us—the fossil fuel industry, the weapons manufacturers, the security and surveillance state, the speculators on Wall Street, the oligarchic elites who assault our poor, our working men and women, our children, one in four of whom depend on food stamps to eat, the elites who are destroying our ecosystem with its trees, its air and its water and throwing into doubt our survival as a species.

What is being done in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, is a pale reflection of what is slowly happening to the rest of us. It is a window into the rise of the global security state, our new governing system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” It is a reflection of a world where the powerful are not bound by law, either on Wall Street or in the shattered remains of the countries we invade and occupy, including Iraq with its hundreds of thousands of dead. And one of the greatest purveyors of this demented ideology of violence for the sake of violence, this flagrant disregard for the rule of domestic and international law, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

I spent seven years in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I lived for two of those seven years in Jerusalem. AIPAC does not speak for Jews or for Israel. It is a mouthpiece for right-wing ideologues, some of whom hold power in Israel and some of whom hold power in Washington, who believe that because they have the capacity to war wage they have a right to wage war, whose loyalty, in the end, is not to the citizens of Israel or Palestine or the United States but the corporate elites, the defense contractors, those who make war a business, those who have turned ordinary Palestinians, Israelis and Americans, along with hundreds of millions of the world’s poor, into commodities to exploit, repress and control.

We have not brought freedom, democracy and the virtues of Western civilization to the Muslim world. We have brought state terrorism, massive destruction, war and death. There is no moral distinction between a drone strike and the explosion of the improvised explosive device, between a suicide bombing and a targeted assassination. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the Muslim world remains submissive and compliant. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing larger and larger portions of Palestinian land. We have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.

And let us not forget that deep inside our secret world of offshore penal colonies, black sites, and torture and interrogation centers, we practice the cruelty and barbarity that always accompanies unchecked imperial power. There were scores of graphic pictures and videos from the prison in Abu Ghraib that were swiftly classified and hidden from public view. And in these videos, as Seymour Hersh reported, mothers who were arrested with their young sons, often children, watched in horror as their boys were repeatedly sodomized. This was filmed. And on the soundtrack you hear the boys shrieking. And the mothers were smuggling notes out to their families saying, “Come and kill us because of what is happening.”

We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. It is we who legitimize the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads, suicide bombers and radical jihadists. The longer we drop iron fragmentation bombs and seize Muslim land, the longer we kill with impunity, the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate.

“If you gaze into the abyss,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “the abyss gazes into you.”

I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah, is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays, women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance, and uses its power to deny popular will. And yes, it is a regime that appears determined to build a nuclear weapon, although I would stress that no one has offered any proof this is occurring. I have spent time in Iranian jails. I was once deported from Tehran in handcuffs. But I do not remember Iran orchestrating a coup in the United States to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists. I do not remember Iran arming and funding a neighboring state to wage war against our country. Iran never shot down one of our passenger jets, as did the USS Vincennes—nicknamed Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels—when in June 1988 it fired missiles at an Airbus filled with Iranian civilians, killing everyone on board. Iran is not sponsoring terrorist strikes within the United States, as our intelligence services and the Israeli intelligence services currently do in Iran. We have not seen five of our top nuclear scientists since 2007 murdered on American soil. The attacks in Iran include suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and “targeted assassinations” of government officials and other Iranian leaders. What would we do if the situation were reversed? How would we react if Iran carried out similar acts of terrorism against us?

We are, and have long been, the primary engine for radicalism in the Middle East. The greatest favor we can do for democracy activists in Iran, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the states that dot North Africa, is to withdraw our troops from the region and begin to speak to Iranians and the rest of the Muslim world in the civilized language of diplomacy, respect and mutual interests. The longer we cling to the doomed doctrine of permanent war the more we give credibility to the extremists who need, indeed yearn for, an enemy that speaks in the same crude slogans of nationalist cant and violence that they do. The louder the Israelis and their idiot allies in Washington call for the bombing of Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions, the happier are the morally bankrupt clerics who are ordering the beating and murder of demonstrators. We may laugh when crowds supporting [President] Ahmadinejad call us “the Great Satan,” but there is a very palpable reality that informs the terrible algebra of their hatred. And since even the most optimistic scenarios say that any strike on Iranian nuclear installations will at best set back Iran’s alleged weapons program by [only] three or four years, we can be sure that violence will beget violence, just as fanaticism begets fanaticism.

The hypocrisy of this vaunted moral crusade is not lost on those in the Middle East. Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Pakistan, India and Israel did not and developed nuclear weapons programs in secret. Israel now has an estimated 400 to 600 nuclear weapons. The word “Dimona,” the name of the city where the nuclear facilities are located in Israel, is shorthand in the Muslim world for the deadly Israeli threat to Muslims’ existence.

What lessons did the Iranians learn from our Israeli, Pakistani and Indian allies?

Given that we are actively engaged in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime, given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what must be done to the Iranian regime, and given that Israel could obliterate Iran many times over, what do we expect from the Iranians? On top of this, the Iranian regime grasps that the doctrine of permanent war entails making “pre-emptive” and unprovoked strikes. And they know that if Iraq, like North Korea, had had a bomb they would have never suffered American invasion and occupation.

Those in Washington who advocate attacking Iran, knowing as little about the limitations and chaos of war as they do about the Middle East, believe they can cripple nuclear production and neutralize the 850,000-man Iranian army. They should look closely at the 2006 Israeli air campaign in southern Lebanon, which saw Hezbollah victorious and united most Lebanese behind the militant Islamic group. If the massive Israeli bombing of Lebanon failed to pacify 4 million Lebanese, how can we expect to pacify a country of 70 million people? But reality never seems to impinge on the neoconservative universe or the efficacy of its doctrine of permanent war.

I have watched over the years as these neoconservatives have meddled disastrously in the Middle East. The support by neoconservatives of the Israeli right wing—and I covered Yitzhak Rabin’s 1992 campaign for prime minister when prominent AIPAC donors poured money and resources into Likud to defeat Rabin—is not about Israel. It is about advancing this perverted ideology. Rabin detested these neoconservatives. When he made his first visit to Washington after being elected prime minister he dismissed requests from the lobby for a meeting by telling aides: “I don’t speak to scumbags.”

These neoconservatives, who like our own neoconservatives hide behind the rhetoric of patriotism, national security and religious piety, are not wedded to any discernable doctrine other than force. They, like all rabid nationalists, are stunted and deformed individuals, only able to communicate in the language of self-exaltation and violence.

“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš wrote. “Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell—it’s other people (other nations, another tribe). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images—as nationalists.”

AIPAC does not drive Middle Eastern policy in the United States. I am afraid it is worse than that. AIPAC is one of an array of powerful and well-funded neoconservative institutions that worship force and drive our relations with the rest of the world. These neoconservatives choose an enemy and then our compliant class of journalists, specialists, military analysts, columnists and television commentators line up to serve as giddy cheerleaders for war. Moments like these always make me embarrassed to be a reporter. Our political elite, Republican and Democrat, finds in this ideology a simple, childish allure. This ideology does not require cultural, historical or linguistic literacy. It reduces the world to black and white, good and evil. The drumbeat for war with Iran sounded by AIPAC is part of this broad, sick, binary vision of a world that can be subjugated by force, a world where all will be made to kneel before these corporate and neoconservative elites, where none, including finally us, will be permitted to whisper dissent.

Pre-emptive war, under post-Nuremberg law, is defined as a criminal act of aggression. George W. Bush, whose disregard for the rule of law was legend, went to the U.N. for a resolution to attack Iraq, although his interpretation of the U.N. resolution as justifying the invasion of Iraq had dubious legal merit. But in this current debate over war with Iran, that pretense of legality is ignored. Where is Israel’s U.N. resolution authorizing it to strike Iran? Why isn’t anyone demanding that Israel seek one? Why does the only discussion in the media and among political elites center around the questions of “Will Israel attack Iran?” “Can it successfully carry out an attack?” “What will happen if there is an attack?” The essential question is left unasked. Does Israel have the right to attack Iran? And here the answer is very, very clear. It does not.

These neoconservatives were too blind and too enamored of their own power to see what invading Afghanistan and Iraq would trigger; so too are they unable to comprehend the regional conflagration that would be unleashed by attacking Iran, what it would mean for us, for Israel, for our allies and for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of innocents.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” the Bible warns.

And since our elites have no vision it is up to us. The uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Occupy Wall Street to our gathering outside AIPAC’s doors in Washington are the same primal struggle for sanity, peace and justice, for a world wrenched free from the grip of those who would destroy it. And the abject fawning of our political elite, including Barack Obama, before AIPAC and its bank account is yet another window into the moral bankruptcy of our political class, another sign that the formal mechanisms of power are useless and broken. Civil disobedience is all we have left. It is our patriotic duty. We are called to make the cries of mothers, fathers and children in the squalid refugee camps in Gaza, in the suburbs of Tehran and in the bleak industrial wastelands in Ohio heard. We are called to stand up before these forces of death, the purveyors of violence, those whose hearts have grown cold with hatred. We are called to embrace and defend life with intensity and passion if we are to survive as a species, if we are to save our planet from the ravages of corporate greed and the specter of endless and futile war.

The Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, in his poem “Rypin,” translated by Peter Cole, examined what power, force and self-worship do to compassion, justice and human decency. Rypin was the Polish town his father escaped from during the pogroms.

These creatures in helmets and khakis,
I say to myself, aren’t Jews,
In the truest sense of the word. A Jew
Doesn’t dress himself up with weapons like jewelry,
Doesn’t believe in the barrel of a gun aimed at a target,
But in the thumb of the child who was shot at—
In the house through which he comes and goes,
Not in the charge that blows it apart.
The coarse soul and iron first
He scorns by nature.
He lifts his eyes not to the officer, or the soldier
With his finger on the trigger—but to justice,
And he cries out for compassion.
Therefore, he won’t steal land from its people
And will not starve them in camps.
The voice calling for expulsion
Is heard from the hoarse throat of the oppressor—
A sure sign that the Jew has entered a foreign country
And, like Umberto Saba, gone into hiding within his own city.
Because of voices like these, father
At age sixteen, with your family, you fled Rypin;
Now here Rypin is your son.

Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday night in Washington, D.C., at the Occupy AIPAC protest, organized by CODEPINK Women for Peace and other peace, faith and solidarity groups.

Source: Chris Hedges | Truthdig.com

Consequences To Expect If The U.S. Invades Iran

Let’s be honest, quite a few Americans love a good war, especially those Americans who have never had to bear witness to one first hand.  War is the ultimate tribally vicarious experience.  Anyone, even pudgy armchair generals with deep-seated feelings of personal inadequacy, can revel in the victories and actions of armies a half a world away as if they themselves stood on the front lines risking possible annihilation at the hands of dastardly cartoon-land “evil doers”.  They may have never done a single worthwhile thing in their lives, but at least they can bask in the perceived glory of their country’s military might.

This attitude of swollen ego through proxy is not limited to the “Right” side of the political spectrum as some might expect.  In fact, if the terrifyingly demented presidency of Barack Obama has proven anything so far, it is that elements of the “Left” are just as bloodthirsty as any NeoCon, and just as ready to blindly support the political supremacy of their “side” regardless of any broken promises, abandoned principles, or openly flaunted hypocrisies.  No matter how reasonable or irrefutable the arguments against a particular conflict are, there will ALWAYS be a certain percentage of the populace which ignores all logic and barrels forward to cheerlead violent actions which ultimately only benefit a select and elite few.

They do this, though they rarely openly admit it, because of unbalanced and irrational biases which drive their decision making processes.  In the case of the wars in the Middle East, the common public argument boils down to one of “self defense”.  “They are coming to get us!”  At least, that is what we are constantly told.  And I’m sure that some Americans out there truly believe this.  However, in their heart of hearts, others instead relish the idea of imposing their world views and philosophical systems upon others, even if it means using cluster bombs and predator drones.

Some people simply hate Muslims, for one reason or another.  Some people believe that war will bring with it economic gain.  Some are so afraid of what they do not comprehend that they only feel secure by attacking it.  Some believe that the U.S. citizenry is morally obligated to become entangled with governments like Israel’s, and support them without question as if they are infallible, though they are often just as corrupt as the governments we are directed to despise.  And yet others (for religious purposes), actually clamor for Middle Eastern destruction in the desperate hopes that their version of biblical prophecy will be vindicated.  Ultimately, most Americans who support continued destruction in the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter, do so out a selfish need for private absolution and elevation, not out of a sincere sense of patriotism, and not because nations like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Iran present a legitimate danger to their safety.

These men and women have invested their very identities into the mechanizations of collective war.  They will not be swayed by evidence or honorable arguments.  Any criticism of the actions of the collective will immediately be treated as a personal attack on their individual character, causing their minds to shut down completely.

As far as Iran is concerned, I am not here to convince the war-drum pounding zombie hoards infesting the mentally impotent sewage soaked wastelands of my country that their rationalizations for raining laser guided death on the third world is a “reprehensible thing”.  Given their impenetrable biases, which I listed above, that would be a complete waste of time.

I could, indeed, point out how in 1953 the U.S. and Britain overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossaddegh, because he refused to allow global corporate interests to exploit his country’s oil resources.  I could outline how the forced CIA installation of the Shah in Iran and the creation of his secret police led to the torture and murder of thousands of innocent people.  I could list similar covert activities over the past 100 years or so, in countries all over the world, which have created the now universal disdain the third world has for the U.S. government.  I could even show them a PBS special from 1987 which effectively details this history and warns of what is now going on today.  The kind of mainstream news coverage that networks currently blacklist honest and daring journalists for:

But what about all the nuclear talk being shoved down our throats lately?  Doesn’t this supersede any historical concerns between Iran and the U.S.?  What if the terrorists get their hands on “the bomb”?!

On this issue, I could easily interject the fact that countries supposedly hostile to the U.S., like North Korea, have long had nuclear capability, and certainly the means to use infiltrators to deliver that technology, yet, we haven’t sent the Western war machine after them.  I would also set the record straight by mentioning that the ONLY country in the world that has used a nuclear weapon against another is the U.S.  I could educate these people on the exposure of secret Israeli nuclear weapons programs since the 1970’s, and the fact that Israel even attempted to illegally sell this technology to Apartheid South Africa:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-05-24/israel-tried-to-sell-nuclear-weapons/839404 

I could try to clear the air by reminding the uninformed that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently admitted that Iran has no nuclear weapons capability.  And, that this fact was repeated by an Iranian nuclear scientist, Sharhram Amiri, who defected to the U.S. in 2010 with the help of the CIA in the hopes that he could be used to disseminate propaganda on “secret” nuclear weapons programs in his former homeland.  Instead, he only reinforced the assertion that there are no such programs:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG21Ak01.html

With the CIA made to look foolish, they have now decided that Amiri is “peripheral” to the Iranian nuke programs, and is no longer a solid source of information.  I could follow by pointing out how decidedly convenient this is…

What about all the similarities between the lies on WMD’s in Iraq and the rhetoric against Iran today?  What about the disinformation put forward by the IAEA and its cadre of foreign policy yes-men?

What about the fact that back when Iran was run by our own puppet leader, the Shah, an iron-fisted sociopathic dictator, we were more than happy that the country was developing nuclear power plants:

Sorry, but sharing this information with the warmongering percentage of our American culture is futile.  None of this data means a thing to them.  For these people, it’s not about facts; it’s about foggy perception, uncontrolled emotion, and false identity.  Understanding the situation only complicates their pursuit of the next collectivist high; that frenetic freak frenzy that takes hold of a population and makes them swarm like mad bees, or hungry piranha, poisoning and devouring everything in their path.

With this in mind, the only recourse I could possibly think of to wake them up to their philosophical and moral folly is to expose them to very real and debilitating consequences they will face in their everyday lives in the wake of expanded conflict on the part of the U.S.  That is to say, you may hate Iran, you may hate Iranians, you may despise Muslims, you may be driven by a childish need to live vicariously through the exploits of your government, or, you might actually believe the hype that Iran is in league with Al-Qaeda, that they really are after nuclear weapons in a diabolical plot to harm Americans, and you might truly believe that Israel is that “beacon of freedom” in the Middle East and that all its neighbors must be pacified for the sake of democracy.  At bottom, whatever your deepest intentions, and whatever you might think, this is irrelevant in the face of the inevitable costs of war.  If you support such a war, here is how it will affect you when it breaks loose:

Exploding Oil Prices

The U.S. has had a ban on Iranian oil imports since 1979, however, Iran still supplies about 5% of the global oil market.  This might not seem like much, but Iran also has the means and ability to shut down the Straight of Hormuz, which is one of two major petroleum choke points in the world.  Around 17 million barrels of oil per day are shipped through the Straight of Hormuz, or about 20% of all oil traded worldwide.

In 2006, during the last major Iran war scare, experts predicted gasoline price increases in excess of $10 a gallon if Iran was invaded.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/07/news/international/iran_oil/

This would devastate the U.S. economy, which is already hanging by a thin thread.  Iran has announced this past weekend it will cease all oil shipments to Britain and France in protest of their support of economic sanctions.  This alone is causing oil to spike today.  A global energy crisis will financially decimate average citizens who will have their savings sapped by extreme price inflation, not just in gasoline, but in all goods that require the use of gasoline in their production and shipping.  If you like this idea, then by all means, support an invasion of Iran.

War Domino Effect

In January of 2010, I wrote an article for Neithercorp Press entitled “Will Globalists Trigger Yet Another World War”.  In that article, I warned about the dangers of an invasion of Iran or Syria being used to foment a global conflict, in order to create a crisis large enough to distract the masses away from the international banker created economic collapse:

http://www.alt-market.com/neithercorp/press/2010/01/will-globalists-trigger-yet-another-world-war/

In 2006, Iran signed a mutual defense pact with its neighbor, Syria, which is also in the middle of its own turmoil and possible NATO intervention.  Syria has strong ties to Russia, and even has a revamped Russian naval base off its coast, a fact rarely mentioned by the mainstream media.  Both Russia and China have made their opposition clear in the case of any Western intervention in Iran or Syria.  An invasion by the U.S. or Israel in these regions could quickly intensify into wider war between major world powers.  If you like the idea of a world war which could eventually put you and your family in direct danger, then by all means, support an invasion of Iran.

Dollar Collapse

Make no mistake, the U.S. dollar is already on the verge of collapse, along with the U.S. economy.  Bilateral trade agreements between BRIC and ASEAN nations are sprouting up everywhere the past couple months, and these agreements are specifically designed to end the dollar’s status as the world reserve currency.  An invasion of Iran will only expedite this process.  If global anger over the resulting chaos in oil prices doesn’t set off a dump of the dollar, the eventual debt obligation incurred through the overt costs of war will.  Ron Paul has always been right; it doesn’t matter whether you think invasion is a good idea or not.  We simply CANNOT afford it.  America is bankrupt.  Our only source of income is our ability to print money from thin air.  Each dollar created to fund new wars brings our currency ever closer to its demise.

This combination of disastrous economic policy and disastrous foreign policy has actually been used before.  Great Britain once sat in the position of economic authority that the U.S. sits in today, and the pound sterling was once considered the world reserve because it was required in the global trade of oil, just as the dollar is now.  However, British intrigues in the Middle East, and more specifically in Egypt, led them into extreme debt.  In the 1940’s and 1950’s, international banks led by America and France threatened to dump British Treasury Bonds in response to their efforts to dominate Middle Eastern oil.  Does any of this sound familiar?

This ultimately led to considerable devaluation of the pound.  In 1967, the death blow was finally delivered when Prime Minister Harold Wilson artificially reduced the British exchange rate by 14% overnight!  Meaning, in the span of a single evening, British citizens lost 14% of their buying power, and every product they went out to buy the next day would cost them 14% more.

It would be practical to mention that the move to destroy the British pound came right in time for the implementation of new programs for the construction of the European Union, and the Euro, the new supranational currency which would later become the standard.  The EU and the Euro never could have come about while the Pound Sterling remained a world reserve.  Just another amazing coincidence I’m sure, and one that couldn’t possibly have any relation to what is happening to the dollar in 2012, right…?

So, if you like the idea of losing 14% or more of your buying power overnight, and having that financial loss blamed on the tides of war, rather than on the corporate bankers who actually created the mess, then by all means, support an invasion of Iran.

Civil Liberties Destroyed

Do you like being able to walk down the street without having to suffer through constant pat-downs by low wage brain-dead cretins in blue gloves?  Does it make you feel good to know that if you are ever arrested, whether you are guilty or not, you are guaranteed by law to receive a fair trial by your peers in a civilian court with a lawyer by your side?  Do you enjoy taking a long drive with the family without facing check points, and predator drones constantly overhead every time you put the top down to feel the wind in your hair?  Don’t get too comfortable, folks!  These “luxuries” will soon be a thing of the past, especially as the U.S. financial situation deteriorates and war escalates.  Think of all the new threats the elites in our government can use to rationalize the usurpation of Constitutional protections when war with Iran, or Syria, or Russia, or China, or all of them at once, breaks out.

The term “terrorist” will take on a whole different dynamic.  Great national dangers often facilitate broader definitions of who is and who is not an “enemy of the state”.  Crisis gives wings to legislation like the NDAA.  In this kind of despotic environment, no one, even those citizens who support the state in nearly all of its enterprises, is safe.  Maybe you love the idea of war with Iran, but at the same time, hate the idea of having a TSA goon manhandling your wife or daughter in a train station or on a street corner.  Good luck with that.  Speaking out could be treated as disruption of national security measures.  Off to the gulag with you!

The “greater good” somehow always entails the dissolution of civil liberties for the common man.  Invariably, the establishment in power favors no one, save a highly connected few.  Being pro-establishment does not necessarily protect you from a government given free reign to do whatever it pleases in wartime.  In the end, everyone is fair game.

If this is the kind of America you want to live in, by all means, support an invasion of Iran.

If You Can’t See The Big Picture, You Can’t See A Thing…

The relentless drive for war in the Middle East is not about “spreading democracy”.  It is not about terrorism.  It is not about oil (at least for the most part).  It is not about Israel (at least, not the Israeli people).  It is not even about corporate profiteering by the Military Industrial Complex.  War in the Middle East is about changing the way our country and our world operates, culturally, socially, financially, and politically.  War opens doors to social re-engineering that could never be accomplished otherwise.  War creates fear, panic, rage, and allows dystopian fallacies to reign supreme.  War, unjust and dishonorable war, makes countries weak, and ripe for violent change.

Iran is not a threat to our way of life, and never has been.  But, war in Iran could easily upset the core of our entire country, and leave us wayward strangers in the land we were born.

While much of the rhetoric of preemptive invasion that America has been awash in these past few months is carefully crafted and disseminated by government entities whose intentions are far from honest, its effectiveness is mute without the helping hand of a thoughtless subsection of the public.  Every decade or so, a new generation of idiot spawn comes of age to be willingly sacrificed on the chopping block of globalist conquest.  This new decade brings with it the promise of not just more of the same, but perhaps the most costly tithe to the gods of war ever made in our country’s history.  This is not our fight.  This is a fight we are being conned into undertaking for the profit of others, and thus, it is a fight we cannot win.  Perhaps when the blind mobs of this nation feel the abrupt sting of their foolishness in their narrow day-to-day existence, they will finally understand…

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

The Heath And The Hill

The Tug-of-War In Moscow…

Moscow – For a month, Moscow was bracing itself for the February 4 Rally. It was pre-planned and prepared by the anti-Putin pro-Western liberal opposition, donning white colours. Despite sub-zero Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Centigrade) arctic frost, the organisers hoped to break their pre-Christmas record and gather a huge crowd and a procession to shatter the will of the government supporters. They had bought all thermal underwear in the city stores, joined forces with anti-Muslim nationalists of Pym Fortuyn kind, and marched in strength probably exceeding the previous rallies. Police counted them at 38 thousand-strong; by their own calculation they were up to 60 thousand.

But the surprise of the day loomed elsewhere. While the pro-Western opposition gathered on the Bolotnaya Heath (Le Marais) just across the river from the Kremlin red crenelated walls, a small demo was also planned as a token of government support on the Poklonnaya Hill (La Montagne), overlooking Moscow from the west. The White Fronde of the Heath applied for 60 thousand-strong rally permit and almost made it; pro-government forces planned for 15 thousand, and even this assessment was considered too optimistic: previous pro-government rally made between three to five thousand. Indeed, demos are good “against”, not “for” the government. However, the Poklonnaya Hill demo turned something completely different – the rally of the opposition to the White Fronde. And this rally had 138,000 participants, by the police count, almost ten times more than predicted.

The numbers are discussed and debated. Vechernyya Moskva, a city paper, published huge headline “138 000 : 36 000 Putin Leads”. Echo Moskvy, the voice of the Orange opposition gives 62 000 Heath vs. 80 000 Hill. The disparity in assessments is partly due to methods of counting. Some count how many people are located in the square at any given time (this will be a low estimate) but it is just a guess how many people came and went away; this is the flow factor. I would guess that the Heath had a considerable flow: it is a downtown place, easy to come, easy to go. Probably the Hill have had less flow, as it is an out-of-town place, hard to get there, hard to leave. So my guess would be 50 thousand for the Heath, and 110 thousand for the Hill. Though precise numbers are being argued about, but the numerical victory of the Hill was accepted by the Heath people, who said that they are fewer but of better quality Some Heath organisers claimed that the Hill mobilised hire-a-mob technique and paid cash to participants. This is an empty claim: nobody in Russia can hire so many participants. It is a common knowledge that three to five thousand people is the absolute maximum that can be mobilised by such measures, especially at such frost.

The Hill won because this largest rally was not “for Putin” – there were many speakers known for their dislike of Putin and his regime, but they hated the “white” (or “orange”) opposition of the Heath even more. If the West hates Putin, it should try the forces woken up by the rally. It became a rally against neo-liberals, against pro-Western policies, a rally of Red-Brown (or “patriotic”) alliance of statist nationalist opposition of Russia-First. They out-Putined Putin in no time.

This was a great surprise for the people of Moscow. It was thought that Putin will rely upon his own pet youth movements like Nashi and Steel, organised and paid for by the Kremlin some years ago as a fighting reserve in the case of an Orange revolution, but they folded and faded away at the first sign of trouble. The government officials, both high and low, did not support Putin, either. Nobody predicted Putin will wake up the sleeping beast of popular feelings.
The western mass media missed the point altogether claiming that the participants were hired or forced to demonstrate, or alternatively that there were few of them. Fox News did their best by broadcasting pictures of the Hill demo and saying it was the Heath. Other western agencies published pictures of 1991 rallies saying they were taken yesterday on the Heath. In Moscow, nobody was fooled: people knew when they were licked.

There is a huge untapped potential of Russia-First feeling, connected with resentment against Western imperialist policies. It is not homogeneous: some of these people have strong attachment to the memory of the USSR, others prefer memory of Tsarist Russia, and some are looking for an alternative future. These people and these tendencies were repressed and delegitimised in the Nineties, during the unhindered rule of the pro-Western liberals.

Putin is a compromise figure between the westernised liberals and Russia-Firsters; he used some of the Russian nativist rhetoric while carrying out liberal economic policy. Russia-Firsters survived his years, but they were never allowed into the corridors of power, where such figures as Alexei Kudrin and Anatoli Chubais, the favourites of IMF, prowled. This opposition burst forth on the Hill rally.

Among the speakers, there was flamboyant Prokhanov, a prolific writer and the chief editor of the Zavtra newspaper, the main organ of the Brown-Red coalition. He placed Russia as the next on the line of the imperialist attack, after Libya, Syria and Iran. He fully supported the Russian veto in the Security Council, but he would like to see more of direct Russian support for Syria and Iran, more friendship with China. He is a frequent traveller to Syria and Iran, is a great friend of Palestine, published a book glorifying Hamas and supporting Hezbollah. An Orthodox Christian, a mystic and a unrepentant Soviet-style Communist, Stalin admirer, he was very critical of Putin and his compromises. Fear and loathing of the Orange revolution mobilised him and his numerous followers to the demo.

Actually, it was the first time since Yeltsin shelled the Parliament in 1993 with the US blessing, that this hard core of Russian political life emerged and was allowed by the Putin’s government to show its strength. There were other speakers, notably Maxim Shevchenko, a popular presenter of the state TV, known for his sympathy to the Muslims and his staunch anti-Zionist stand; Alexander Dugin, “the Russian Heidegger”, a controversial philosopher from the Moscow State University, the founder of the Eurasian movement and a friend of the European anti-American non-racist New Right. They were fiery and outspoken, not-so-much for Putin but surely against his liberal “orange” opponents.

The pools say this feeling is widely spread in Russia, as the Heath protesters allowed themselves to be presented as spoiled brats, rich kids, people in expensive fur coats who like each other and despise the rabble. In vain they protested that they do not strive for an Orange revolution; this was the general feeling, and their connection with the leaders of the Nineties did not add to their prestige. The Heath organisers were aware of that, and none of these old politicians, no controversial figure was allowed to speak during the demo. As the result, they had very little to say beyond chanting Down with Putin.

In the end, the Heath protesters emerged with despondent mood, contrasting their feelings after December demos. They discovered that they hold no patent on rallies, and that their opponents can field many more people to the street. Probably their enthusiasm for rallies will now vane somewhat. The Russians are afraid of “orange” revolutions, as arranged by your friendly NED and other tools of the State Department. Many, perhaps majority of the Hill demonstrators were afraid of a replay of Nineties, or of Tahrir, and they were happy to support Putin as a symbol of stability. The government stocked up the fears, by flooding with limelight a visit of the opposition leaders to the US Embassy. Michael McFaul, the new US Ambassador found himself in the centre of controversy, with many parliamentarians demanding him being sent home for this meeting took place almost immediately upon his arrival and even before he presented his accreditation papers.

The Western governments did not understand this change of mood in Moscow when they demanded to vote on their draft of Syrian resolution. They expected that the Heath rally will frighten the Russian government and make it more pliable. They had a good reason: this was the general feeling among embassies’ interlocutors. When President Medvedev visited Moscow State U a few days earlier, a student (a Heath protester, apparently) asked him whether he is ready to meet the fate of Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein, or will he escape to his friendly North Korea. After the Hill demo this Saturday, he would not ask this question: it seems now too far-fetched. Nor the Russian government felt it should give in to the Western pressure on Syria: if the Hill speakers are to be judged by, now Russia is more likely to send its anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.

So it was a momentous day; a day of cruel frost, probably the coldest day of the year – next day, as if by order, it rose to perfectly palatable minus 12 degrees Centigrade (10 degrees Fahrenheit). Putin can be pleased with this development: the demos brought the Russians out of their hibernation, they are likely to participate in the Presidential elections on March 4, and the danger of massive stay-away disappeared. Putin supporters were woken up and discovered they are majority, while liberal protesters were reminded that Putin is a compromise figure, and their lot could be much, much worse if the Hill crowd were allowed to set its rules.

The Communists stayed away from both demos, they are busy building up the party chairman Gennady Zuganov as a credible alternative to Putin in the forthcoming elections, so they did not want to be seen as supporting Putin. It is possible that the elections will run in two tours, and then it will be Zuganov vs. Putin. For pro-Western forces in Moscow, that will be a difficult choice: they will have to decide whom do they hate more: Putin or Communists?

However, the liberals are not defeated. Their numbers are small, but they are well positioned. Though ex-Finance Minister Kudrin is now out of power and with the protesters, all his former minions are still installed in the upper echelons. The opposition has a lot of media at its disposal barring the powerful federal TV channels, and the latter are mainly putting out entertainment. The opposition has its supporters among the ultra-rich, and within the inner sanctum of the Secret Service as well. Liberal anti-Putin papers receive quite a lot of advertising from friendly oligarchs. The struggle will go on well beyond March 4, the elections day.

Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny is a rising star of the opposition movement. He made his name on disclosures of the barely legal tricks of Russian officialdom integrated with the moneyed crowd. These disclosures would hardly amaze Americans who remember Enron and the Brits who follow Tony Blair’s tax saga. Apparently, that is in part where the Russians learned the features of real capitalism, mainly warts. Such ugly arrangements – profiteering, usury and asset-stripping – are the mainstay of the current world political economical system. They should be disclosed, outlawed and punished, no doubt, but they are not uniquely or predominantly Russian, rather “modern-capitalist.” The U.S. ambassador in Moscow reported on Navalny some years ago to his bosses, calling him “a Russian Don Quixote” (08MOSCOW2632), for he fought a widely spread and common injustice.

Navalny’s other line was the uncovering of shady oil deals. The U.S. Embassy was not impressed by his results: they checked his findings, according to the wikileaked cable 08MOSCOW3380, with Western managers who told them in confidence that Russian seaborne oil trade had became “open and transparent,” in the words of Dave Chapman, general director of oil trading for Shell Russia.

The idea of Navalny as a new savior ran into obstacles, as his liberal supporters were visibly upset by his ties with Russian nationalists. An old Moscow liberal lady, a respected widow, reported that he called an Azeri party member by a racist term and was expelled from the liberal Yabloko party. Navalny reportedly made snide remarks about Georgian poets qua Georgians. However, the Russians are quite tolerant of racist abuse and probably this story did not hurt him much.

In a long interview with another liberal luminary, the best-seller writer B. Akunin (a Russian Harold Robbins), Navalny tried to dispel such fears, but he did not denounce nationalism. Perhaps Navalny’s nationalism is a clever card well played: at the top of the new Fronde there are not many ethnic Russians, and a “real Russian” with nationalist background would be a good thing to have in the front of a revolutionary movement which is blessed by many Jews.

“Ethnic origin” is not a major consideration in Russia – the country has been led by Tatars (Ivan the Terrible was a son of a Tatar princess), Germans (Catherine the Great was a German princess by birth), Jews (Trotsky and Sverdlov), by Georgians (Stalin) and Ukrainians (Brezhnev, also Khrushchev). Ethnic Russian nationalism was actively discouraged in Soviet times. Still, it is an advantage to have an ethnic-Russian personality at the helm of a movement.

Many liberals and non-ethnic Russians are deeply suspicious of Navalny. But their presentation of Navalny as a “new Hitler” is far-fetched. Blue-eyed, good-looking, a dash of the racist, yes, but not an especially silver-tongued one. Navalny tried to talk to the demonstrators in December but was catcalled more than once. His manner was too rude, as if he were talking to a street gang. He did not speak on the Saturday demo at all. His views are far from clear. When asked for a model state Russia should follow, Navalny said, “Singapore.” This is an odd choice for a person fighting Putin’s strong-arm style, as Lee Kuan Yew was probably more authoritarian than Putin. As fond as I am of Singapore street cooking, I can’t imagine a less suitable model for a vast multinational ex-empire than the tiny Chinese polis.

Iranian Crisis Escalates

Speaking to reporters during a visit to Turkey on January 19, Iran’s foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi warned his country’s Arab neighbors against aligning themselves too closely with the United States in the ongoing crisis over Tehran’s nuclear program. Saudi Arabia was particularly vocal in its condemnation of Iran’s warning last month that it might close the Strait of Hormuz—through which one-third of the world’s seaborne oil passes daily—if the United States and her allies apply sanctions against Iranian oil exports.

A day earlier Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said American troops in the Persian Gulf region do not require any build-up for a possible military conflict with Iran. “We are not making any special steps at this point in order to deal with the situation,” he said. “Why? Because, frankly, we are fully prepared to deal with that situation now,” Panetta explained.

In the meantime the European Union is on track to agree to an oil embargo against Iran at the EU foreign ministers’ meeting next week.

The latest rhetorical escalation follows President Obama’s decision on December 31 to apply sanctions against any institution dealing with Iran’s central bank, effectively making it impossible for most countries to buy Iranian crude oil.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao criticized the U.S. position in comments published on January 19, and on the same day foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said that “sanctions and military threats will not help solve the problem but only aggravate the situation.”

On Wednesday Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the military option mooted by U.S. would ignite a disastrous, widespread Middle East war. “Unilateral sanctions against Iran has nothing in common with the desire to keep the nuclear weapons nonproliferation regime unshaken,” Lavrov said.

Unsurprisingly, the neoconservative advocates of a preventive war against Iran are delighted. They see Tehran’s threat to block the Strait of Hormuz as a “golden opportunity” to force the issue by military means:

A military plan would have to include the elimination of the offending Iranian ships or submarines laying mines, and the destruction of missiles that might menace shipping. Most of Iran’s navy would find itself gracing the bottom of the sea as a result. Meanwhile, major U.S. Marine amphibious landings on Iran’s coast and Army airborne drops deep inside the sparsely populated Hormozgan region would have to create a physical cordon and an occupied buffer zone between Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. It would be a very long time before the West gave this territory back to Iran.

Furthermore, the argument goes, by seizing Hormozgan, the West would have a forward base within Iran from which to conduct attacks on known nuclear sites: “Strike aircraft (and, more worrisome to Iran’s regime, Special Forces troops) would be just 60 to 90 minutes away from Iranian nuclear sites. Iran’s threat to block the Strait of Hormuz has given the West new options.”

The issue that remains moot is not whether Iran is developing a nuclear weapon—let us assume that this is a documented fact, though it is not—but whether an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a threat to the United States. What are the motives of the Iranian decisionmakers? To threaten Europe, thus necessitating an American antimissile shield along Russia’s western borders in Central Europe? To threaten the United States even, regardless of a guaranteed hundred-fold retaliation to any attack? Or to protect Iran from what her leaders perceive to be a threatening environment?

Iran has one neighbor to the west and another to the northeast who were both invaded by the United States over the past 11 years. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq would have been invaded had they actually possessed weapons of mass destruction. Iran’s eastern neighbor is Pakistan, an unstable and unpredictable nuclear power. In the wider neighborhood there are two other key players with an atomic arsenal, India and Israel, with Turkey not far behind. Under the circumstances, having an independent nuclear deterrent is a perfectly rational option for the government in Tehran to pursue—any Iranian government, Islamist or secular, monarchist or republican, pro- or anti-Western. That option is based on the realities of the security equation and not on the millenarian zeal of Shi’ite fanaticism or on genocidal Jewhatred, as the proponents of war would have us believe. Even if Iran were to garner an arsenal of a dozen devices, which would take a decade at least, the overall strategic balance would remain fundamentally unaltered. Indeed, the political climate in the region may actually improve: Iran would feel safe from an American attack and therefore at least potentially less likely to indulge in destabilizing proxy interventions in the region, notably in Lebanon.

Israel may have reason to feel threatened by Iran’s long-term plans, but it is up to Israel to consider her options and to act accordingly. She may well decide on a robust response, like her bombing of the Osirak nuclear plant in Iraq in 1981, with all the attendant risks and uncertainties. She should not expect the United States to do the job on her behalf, however.

The Saudis would also feel uncomfortable with a nuclear-armed Iran across the Gulf, and that would be a good thing. The more the royal kleptocrats in Riyadh focus on potential threats in the neighborhood, the less likely they are to escalate their global proliferation of Islamic extremism, which they have lavishly financed for decades. In any event, as the example of North Korea shows, the possession of the bomb by a single actor does not necessarily lead to a sudden nuclear rush in the region.

The second objection is technical. Regardless of its formal or substantial justification, can a U.S. war against Iran be kept limited and winnable? The initial intent may be to execute bombing raids against a dozen or perhaps two-dozen specific targets, but would that merely set Iran’s efforts back by two or three years? And what if Iran retaliates by detonating dirty bombs in downtown Tel Aviv and midtown Manhattan? What if the Iranians treat a U.S. attack not as a limited action that, in the War Party’s calculus, would produce a limited response, but as an existential struggle comparable to Khomeini’s all-out reply to Saddam’s attack 30 years ago?

If the Iranians respond forcefully, the advocates of limited air strikes against nuclear installations are certain to demand troops on the ground, regardless of risks and consequences, because our “credibility” would be at stake. In reality, America’s credibility would be terminally undermined by the resulting Iranian quagmire. An all-out “Operation Iranian Freedom” is not a rational option, because even with our unsurpassed military capabilities, the United States would not be able to mount a full-fledged invasion.

The third predictable consequence of a U.S. attack on Iran would be a global economic meltdown of unprecedented severity and magnitude. Not only would Iran’s output of some four million barrels per day be halted, but the maritime traffic through the Straits of Hormuz would come to a standstill for months on end—regardless of outcome. The resulting global energy crisis would make the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War pale in comparison, pushing a barrel to $300 within weeks and making the economic and financial crises of the past three years in Europe and the United States seem like the good old days.

Last but not least, we’d witness internal consolidation of the Iranian regime, a calcified theocracy devoid of ideas and solutions as it faces economic stagnation and political tensions. Domestic squabbles and the infighting of recent months would be forgotten, and any sign of opposition to the regime would be equated with treason. There would be no Iranian Spring for decades to come. On the other hand, without the unifying effect of an external threat the mullahs’ regime may yet prove more vulnerable to implosion than we would otherwise suspect.

Instead of considering a military action against Iran with no clear exit strategy at a prohibitive cost to our core interests, Washington would be well advised to prepare a strategy for dealing with Iran—even as a putative nuclear power. Deterring and containing Iran would be easier than deterring and containing the Soviets 50 years ago. The country’s regime, admittedly unpleasant, is neither suicidal nor tainted by the blood of untold millions, as the two communist nuclear powers had been.

Real concerns about Iran’s nuclear program exist; they are also present in Moscow and Beijing. It is still possible and politically profitable for Washington to pursue bilateral diplomacy based on an offer of U.S. security guarantees to Iran in return for a rigorous supervision regime and a formal pledge that Iran refrain from developing nuclear weapons. A reasonable agreement would also allow Iran to enrich uranium to the extent needed for power generation and accept Iran’s right to the enrichment technology, so long as she agrees to subject her entire nuclear program to international oversight.

By pursuing sanctions similar in intent and likely consequences to FDR’s sanctions against Japan in 1941, the Obama administration may produce similar outcomes. That would be a disaster for all concerned.

Iraq. Began With Big Lies. Ending With Big Lies. Never forget

“Most people don’t understand what they have been part of here,” said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December. “We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them.”

“It is pretty exciting,” said another young American soldier in Iraq. “We are going down in the history books, you might say.” (Washington Post, December 18, 2011)

Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume leather-bound set of “The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another.” The newest volume can relate, with numerous graphic photos, how the modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi failed state; how the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly, … how the people of that unhappy land lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood, and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lying anywhere in wait for children to pick them up … a river of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

No matter … drum roll, please … Stand tall American GI hero! And don’t even think of ever apologizing or paying any reparations. Iraq is forced by Washington to continue paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion in 1990 (an invasion instigated in no small measure by the United States). And — deep breath here! — Vietnam has been compensating the United States. Since 1997 Hanoi has been paying off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it. (William Blum, Rogue State, p.304) How much will the United States pay the people of Iraq?

On December 14, at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina military base, Barack Obama stood before an audience of soldiers to speak about the Iraq war. It was a moment in which the president of the United States found it within his heart and soul — as well as within his oft-praised (supposed) intellect — to proclaim:

This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible. … Years from now, your legacy will endure. In the names of your fallen comrades etched on headstones at Arlington, and the quiet memorials across our country. In the whispered words of admiration as you march in parades, and in the freedom of our children and grandchildren. … So God bless you all, God bless your families, and God bless the United States of America. … You have earned your place in history because you sacrificed so much for people you have never met.

Does Mr. Obama, the Peace Laureate, believe the words that come out of his mouth?

Barack H. Obama believes only in being the President of the United States. It is the only strong belief the man holds.

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

• If the US really believed in 2002-3 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction why did they send in more than 100,000 troops, who were certain to be annihilated?
• In a letter released August 17, 2006, 21 former generals and high ranking national security officials called on President George W. Bush to reverse course and embrace a new area of negotiation with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The group told reporters Bush’s “hard line” policies had undermined national security and made America less safe.
• Throughout most of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in Latin America taught its flocks of the poor that there was no need to do battle with the ruling elite because the poor would get their just rewards in the afterlife.
• The US overthrew the Sandinistas in Nicaragua because the Sandinistas “intended to create a country where there was only a colony before.” — Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer
• “[George W.] Bush said last week that part of the purpose of the Indonesia trip ‘is to make sure that the people who are suspicious of our country understand our motives are pure’.” (Washington Post, October 22, 2003)
• “Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors. American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal Others.” — The Black Commentator, June 8, 2006
• President Obama should accompany the military people when they inform parents that their child has died in the latest of America’s never-ending wars. And maybe ask George W. to come along as well.
• During the Vietnam War some University of Michigan students created a brouhaha when they threatened to napalm a puppy dog on the steps of a campus building. The uproar of indignation at their cruelty was heard nationwide. Of course, when the time came they didn’t do it, having successfully made the point that people cared more about napalming a dog than they did about napalming people.
• “It’s a lie and an illusion that we have an inefficient government. This government is only inefficient if you think its job is, as stated in the Constitution, ‘to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.’ These objectives are beyond our government’s talents only because they are beyond its intentions.” — Michael Ventura
• “Get some new lawyers” – US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook when he told her he was informed that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (which Albright championed) was illegal under international law.
• The two countries of the world, along with the United States, which have the greatest national obsession with baseball are two of the main targets of US foreign policy: Venezuela and Cuba.
• The Cuban Five case: This is the first case in American history of alleged spying and espionage without a single page from a secret document. The government never presented any evidence of a stolen official document or any attempt to steal an official document. This is the first spy case without secrets from the government. (Read more)
• “If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a ‘suspected terrorist’ is inside, the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is ‘inevitable’. So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians.” — Howard Zinn
• “The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to impose limited sanctions on North Korea for its recent missile tests, and demanded that the reclusive communist nation suspend its ballistic missile program.” (Associated Press, July 15, 2006) … Internet commentator: “Test some missiles that land harmlessly in the ocean? Unanimous condemnation. Fire some missiles at targets on land, kill hundreds of people, and destroy hundreds of civilian targets including power plants, airports, roads, bridges, TV stations, etc., all in violation of the Geneva Convention? Hey, no problem.”
• For some nine years, American B-52 bombers relentlessly dropped tons of ordnance on a southeast Asian country (Vietnam) that still cultivated rice fields using draft animals.
• “The messianism of American foreign policy is a remarkable thing. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks it seems like Khrushchev reporting to the party congress: ‘The whole world is marching triumphantly toward democracy but some rogue states prefer to stay aside from that road, etc. etc’.” — Natalia Narochnitskaya, vice chairman of the international affairs committee in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament. (Washington Post, April 3, 2006)
• Washington … Propagandistan
• The bulldozer, driven by an Israeli army soldier on assignment to demolish a home, rolled over Rachel Corrie, who was 23 years old. She had taken a nonviolent position for human rights; she lost her life as a result. But she was rarely praised in the same US media outlets that had gone into raptures over the image of a solitary unarmed man standing in front of Chinese tanks at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. — Norman Solomon
• American sovereignty hasn’t faced a legitimate foreign threat to its existence since the British in 1812.
• There are two major patterns in foreign policy: the rule of force or the rule of law. On February 8, 1819 the US decided, after a very long debate in the House, to reject the rule of law in foreign policy. The vote was 100 to 70 against requiring the Congress to approve illegal invasions of other countries or peoples. This pertained to the “Seminole War”, actually the invasion of Florida. Since then every president has had the right to “defend America”, code words for the use of force against whomever he chooses. — Kelly Gelgering

Happy New Year. Here’s what to look forward to.

JANUARY 22: Congress passes a law requiring that all persons arrested in anti-war demonstrations be sterilized. House Speaker John Boehner declares it is “God’s will”. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says she supports the law but that she has some reservation because there’s no provision for a right of appeal.

FEBRUARY 15: Ron Paul assassinated by man named Oswald Harvey.

FEBRUARY 18: Oswald Harvey, while in solitary confinement and guarded round the clock by 1200 policemen and the entire 3rd Army Brigade, is killed by man named Ruby Jackson.

FEBRUARY 26: Ruby Jackson suddenly dies in prison of a rare Asian disease heretofore unknown in the Western Hemisphere.

MARCH 6: US President Hopey Changey announces new draconian sanctions against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, declaring that they all possess weapons of mass destruction, are an imminent threat to the United States, have close ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban, are aiding Islamic terrorists in Somalia, were involved in 9-11, played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the attack on Pearl Harbor, do not believe in God or American Exceptionalism, and are all “really bad guys”.

APRIL 1: Military forces overthrow Evo Morales in Bolivia. US State Department decries the loss of democracy.

APRIL 2: US recognizes the new Bolivian military junta, sells it 100 jet fighters and 200 tanks.

APRIL 3: Revolution breaks out in Bolivia endangering the military junta; 40,000 American marines are sent to La Paz to quell the uprising.

APRIL 8: Dick Cheney announces from his hospital bed that the United States has finally discovered caches of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — “So all those doubters can now just go ‘F’ themselves.” The former vice-president, however, refuses to provide any details of the find because, he says, to do so might reveal intelligence sources or methods.

APRIL 10: ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, General Electric, General Motors, AT&T, Ford, and IBM merge to form “Free Enterprise, Inc.”

APRIL 16: Free Enterprise, Inc. seeks to purchase Guatemala and Haiti. Citigroup refuses to sell.

APRIL 18: Free Enterprise, Inc. purchases Citigroup.

MAY 5: The Democratic Party changes its name to the Republican Lite Party, and announces the opening of a joint bank account with the Republicans so that corporate lobbyists need make out only one check. In celebration of the change the new party calls for eliminating the sales tax on yachts.

MAY 11: China claims to have shot down an American spy plane over the center of China. State Department categorically denies the story.

MAY 12: State Department admits that an American plane may have “inadvertently” strayed 2,000 miles into China, but denies that it was a spy plane.

MAY 13: State Department admits that the plane may have been a spy plane but denies that it was piloted by a US government employee.

MAY 14: State Department admits that the pilot was a civilian employee of a Defense Department contractor but denies that China exists.

JUNE 11: Homeland Security announces plan to collect the DNA at birth of every child born in the United States.

JULY 1: The air in Los Angeles reaches so bad a pollution level that the rich begin to hire undocumented workers to breathe for them.

AUGUST 6: The Justice Department announces that six people have been arrested in New York in connection with a plan to bomb the United Nations, the Empire State Building, the Times Square subway station, Madison Square Garden, and Lincoln Center.

AUGUST 7: Charges are dropped against four of “The New York Six” when it is determined that they are FBI agents.

AUGUST 16: At a major demonstration in Washington, the Tea Party demands an end to all government expenditures. They also warn Congress not to touch Social Security or Medicare.

AUGUST 26: Texas executes a 16-year-old girl for having an abortion and a 12-year-old boy for possession of marijuana.

SEPTEMBER 3: The Labor Department announces that Labor Day will become a celebration of America’s gratitude to its corporations, a day dedicated to the memory of J.P. Morgan and Pinkerton strike breakers killed in the line of duty.

SEPTEMBER 12: The draft is reinstated for males and females, ages 16 to 45. Those who are missing a limb or are blind can apply for non-combat roles.

SEPTEMBER 14: Riots breaks out in 24 American cities in protest of the new draft. 200,000 American troops are brought home from Afghanistan, Iraq, and 25 other countries to put down the riots.

SEPTEMBER 28: The Tea Party calls for giving embryos the vote.

OCTOBER 19: Cops the world over form a new association, Policemen’s International Governing Society. PIGS announces that its first goal will be to mount a campaign against the notion that a person is innocent until proven guilty, in those countries where the quaint notion still dwells.

NOVEMBER 8: The turnout for the US presidential election is 9.6%. The voting ballots are all imprinted: “From one person, one vote, to one dollar, one vote.” The winner is “None of the above”.

NOVEMBER 11: US prison population reaches 2.5 million. It is determined that at least 70 percent of the prisoners would not have been incarcerated a century ago, for the acts they committed were then not criminal violations.

DECEMBER 3: Supreme Court rules that police may search anyone if they have reasonable grounds for believing that the person has pockets.

DECEMBER 16: The Occupy Movement sets up a tent on the White House lawn. An hour later a missile fired from a drone leaves but a thin wisp of smoke.

‘2012: What’s In Store…’

The Private Global Power Elite embedded in major governments is dead set on imposing World Government on us sooner rather than later. Let’s look at 12 mega-processes – veritable “Triggers” – that we infer they are using to achieve their goals.

All roads lead to World Government.  This should come as no surprise.  London’s Financial Times openly articulated this view in an article by their chief foreign affairs commentator, Gideon Rachman, published on 8 December 2009, whose title said it all: “And Now for a World Government.” These goals are echoed by the Trilateral Commission, CFR and Bilderberg insiders – even by the Vatican.

Macro-managing planet Earth is no easy matter. It requires strategic and tactical planning by a vast think-tank network allied to major elite universities whereby armies of academics, operators, lobbyists, media players and government officers interface, all abundantly financed by the global corporate and banking superstructure.

They do this holistically, knowing that they operate on different stages moving at very different speeds:

• Financial Triggers move at lightning speed thanks to electronic information technology that can make or break markets, currencies and entire countries in just hours or days;
• Economic Triggers move slower: manufacturing cars, aircraft, food, clothes, building plants and houses takes months;
• Political Triggers tied to the “democratic system” put politicians in power for several years;
• Cultural Triggers require entire generations to implement; this is where PsyWar has reached unprecedented “heights”.

Risk-managing this whole process takes into account the many pitfalls and surprises in store.  So each plan in every field counts, with “Plan B’s” – even Plans “C” and “D” – which can be implemented if needed.

Twelve Triggers for World Government

Today, the Global Power Elite are wrapping up globalization and ushering in World Government.  Paraphrasing the tightrope walker in German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” this implies “….a dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting…”

These 12 Triggers are interlinked and interlocked in a highly complex, holistic matrix, very flexible in its tactics but rigidly unbending in its strategic objectives. When read as a whole, the picture that unfolds shows that whole being far more than the sum of its parts.

1) Financial Meltdown. Since 2008, the Global Financial System continues on life-support. Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and the US economic hit team – Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup, JPMorganChase mega-bankers working with the Bank of England and the European Central Bank – have not and will not take any measures to help the populace and ailing economies.  They just funnel trillions to the banking elite, imposing the media myth that certain banks are “too big to fail” (Orwellian Newspeak for “too damn powerful to fail”). Why? Because it’s not governments overseeing, supervising and controlling Goldman Sachs, CitiCorp, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, JPMorganChase, but exactly the other way around…

2) Economic Crises.  Today, “Destructive Extreme Capitalism” is collapsing national and regional economies, reformatting them into international slave-labour Gulag-like entities that Joseph Stalin would envy.   Our woes lie not with the world’s real economy (mostly intact), but with the fake world of finance, banks, and speculation;

3) Social Upheavals.  Meltdowns in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Iceland and – soon to come – Italy, Spain and others, trigger violent social uprisings, even in the US and UK;

4) Pandemics.  Get ready for more “flu surprises” leading to mandatory vaccinations: a discreet opportunity to slip RFID chips into our bodies and test “intelligent viruses” targeting specific DNA strains.  Racially and ethnically selective viruses as part of mass depopulation campaigns?

5) Global Warming. As the global economy sinks into zero growth mode, economic drivers shift from growth expansion to consumption contraction. Will coming “carbon credits” open the path to full societal control?

6) Terrorist “False Flag” Mega-Attacks. The Elite have this wildcard up their sleeve to jump-start new “crises” as short-cuts towards world government.  Will new “attacks” dwarfing 9/11 justify further global wars, invasions and genocide?  A nuclear weapon over a major city to be blamed on the Elite’s “enemies”?

7) Generalized War in the Middle East. As we speak, naval forces, bombers, entire armies are poised to attack and invade Syria, Iran…

8 ) Ecological/Environmental “Accidents”. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident sparked the beginning of the end of the former USSR by showing the world and the Soviets themselves that their State could no longer manage their own nuclear facilities.  April 2010 saw the BP “Deepwater Horizon” oil rig eco-catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico; since March 2011, Japan and the world have been grappling with a much larger nuclear accident in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.  Was foul play involved?

9) Assassination of a major political or religious figure to be blamed on an Elite enemy.  Mossad, CIA, MI6 are really good at playing this type of dirty trick;

10) Attacks on “Rogue States” – Iraq, Libya… Who’s next? Iran? Syria?  Venezuela?  North Korea?

11) Staged “Religious” Event. The growing need of the masses for meaning in their lives makes them easy victims of a Hollywood-staged, 3D virtual reality hologram show, orchestrating a “second coming”.  An electronically engineered “messianic figure” acting in sync with Elite global objectives?   Who would dare go against God himself?

12) Staged “Alien Contact.” This too may be in the works.  For decades, large sectors of world population have been programmed to believe in aliens.  Here too, hologram technology could stage a “space vehicle landing” – on the White House lawn, of course – highlighting the “need” for Mankind to have “unified representation” in the face of extraterrestrials.  Further justification for world government?
What do such interlocking “crises” have in common? Global warming, pandemics, “international terrorism”, financial collapse, economic depression, even alien contacts?  They all serve to show that they cannot be addressed by any single nation state, thus “justifying” the need for World Government.
2012: We must stay especially alert, understanding things the way they really are and not the way the global TV Masters want us to believe they are.

Source: Adrian Salbuchi for RT

Iraq: Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Screwed?

This month, our combat troops of United States military withdrew from Iraq after nearly a decade of killing 100,000 Iraqi citizens of all persuasions, being murdered themselves by insurgents who infiltrated past check points, thousands were killed or maimed by countless IEDs, and, as time plays out over 100,000 American combat troops are predicted to commit suicide from their brains being scrambled by the horrors of war.  Thousands of marriages will fail and countless children will suffer the horrors of war as their fathers live in Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome purgatory.

As to the first question of who won: no one.  As to the second question of who lost: everyone.  As to the third question of who got screwed: America’s military and America’s sons and daughters that served.

Of all the stupid, needless, meaningless and painful wars the United States has created, George W. Bush and the Military Industrial Complex, along with other war profiteers should be sent to prison for their lies, fraud and deception against the American people.  “Weapons of Mass Destruction” will become the poster-phrase for our leaders lying, cheating and swindling the American people.  George W. Bush cajoled, coaxed and coerced us into war with Iraq.

The German Nazi beast Hermann Goring said it 60 years ago:

“Naturally the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany.  That is understood.  But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.  Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Vietnam killed 58,300 kids, wounded 350,000 young men and created havoc across our country. It started our national debt into the trillions of dollars. It split families and it too was based on a lie:  the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President Lyndon Baines Johnson the “reason” to massacre over 2.1 million Vietnamese in 10 years of war.  No negotiation, no conversation, no attempt at understanding—just go in to Nam and blast them back into the stone age.  Trouble was—they pretty much lived in the Stone Age in the first place.  Because of his sickening choice, Johnson died of depression and a very sick and sad man the last years of his life.  He actually “got it” as to what he did.  It will be interesting to see if former President George W. Bush ever “gets it” as to the astounding amount of death and horror he created.  He may end his life inside a bottle of booze where he started it.

From the war in Vietnam, I wrote a piece showing a doctor’s research whereby somewhere over 175,000 to as high as 225,000 American combat troops that left Vietnam in one piece, killed themselves from their emotional wounds from their service in Vietnam.  The alcoholism and drug addiction from that war grew beyond imagination. It continues today in veteran homelessness, poverty, broken families, drug and alcohol use and nameless children that never enjoyed a healthy father.

The human misery that George W. Bush created in Iraq and Afghanistan may go much higher than 225,000 suicides of U.S. troops.  If you start counting the human misery of 2.5 million Iraqi refugees and incredible displacement of their society, the human misery factor extends off the charts.

As you noticed this past week, the Sunni and Shiites are already bombing each other into more violence.  One bomb in Baghdad killed 69 people and wounded over 100 others.  Sectarian violence will continue.

Our “moment” (10 years) over there might be likened to a person sticking his or her hand into a bucket of water. While our hand remained in the water, the level of the water changed and we created cause and effect.  When we withdrew our hand, it all returned to the same as before we left.  As Richard Engel said to NBC’s Brian Williams on Friday, “Their sectarian violence is just beginning and will implode Iraq.  Iraq’s President Maliki cannot control what’s coming.”

In other words, their endless tribal wars will re-convene.  Which means, all our nearly $1 trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money will have gone for all the death and destruction—for nothing.  In the meantime, our own country’s educational systems, infrastructure and cities crumble before our eyes.

Saddam Hussein was no more a threat to the United States than a baby in a sandbox 10,000 miles away.  To remain in Afghanistan for 10 years defies logic, reason and common sense.  If we are to be the police-nation of the world to bring all the dictators to justice, we would have to attack, occupy and dominate North Korea, China, Pakistan, Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan and two dozen other countries around the world.  It’s absolutely absurd what we allowed the Military Industrial Complex to perpetrate on our citizens and our country.

But because we now support an all volunteer army, no one blinks at the deaths and costs.  More disturbing, we spend more money on war than most of the rest of the world combined.  In the meantime, we suffer 42 million functionally illiterate Americans, 46 million Americans living on food stamps, another 15 million unemployed and 13 million children living in poverty.  We’re losing the middle class while our prisons house 2.3 million suffering souls.  We have millions of foreclosures of homes for Americans and we can’t pay our teachers a decent wage while our schools fail.

When will this president address America’s rebuilding?  When will this Congress “attack” America’s problems?  When will Americans speak up for America’s future?

When will 535 members of Congress grow a brain, spine and conscience to represent peace, common sense and reason?  When will we elect presidents that studied history, learned critical thinking and understood logic?  When will America become an instrument of peace in the world?

If I were a betting man, some president in the future will “create” another war guided by the Military Industrial Complex that creates another generation of suicides, fatherless families, plastic legs, arms and PTSD military veterans.  And the American people?  Too apathetic to get off the couch to speak up against war!

Kim Jong-il, The Leader From Hell

Kim Jong-il, the North Korean “Dear Leader” (as well as  Secretary-General of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, etc, etc.) is dead at 69. The news that the diminutive leader of the most unpleasant despotism in the world is no longer going to regale us with his elevator shoes, oversize glasses and bouffant hairdo would be unworthy of attention, were it not for the existence of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and the anachronistic presence of U.S. troops in South Korea.

Kim was the son and heir of North Korea’s long-term Communist dictator Kim Il-sung. He was born in late 1941 in the Soviet Far East, where his father commanded a Red Army brigade composed of Korean and Chinese exiles. His official biography was doctored, however, to claim that he was born on Korean soil in 1942, in an area controlled by the Communist resistance forces led by his father. Everything else that is officially known about him is also a lie, including the miraculous signs that supposedly attended his birth (according to the official North Korean News Agency it was accompanied by the appearance of a bright star in the sky and a double-rainbow that touched the earth), the details of his education, and the intricacies of his complex family life. What we do know is that he was a film buff with a collection of 20,000 foreign movies and a connoisseur of fine French cognacs, neither of which appears to have softened his propensity to cruelty and capricious eccentricity.

By 1982 Kim Sr. had bestowed on him several senior Party, legislative, and military posts. As heir-apparent he took the designation of “Dear Leader” and was hailed as “the worthy successor to the cause of the revolution.” A grotesque personality cult was swiftly built around him, similar to the one enjoyed by his father, whom he succeeded on Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994. Hymns were composed in his honor, his images were hewn into rocky mountainsides, and his pictures added to those of his father in every office, classroom, and home.

In the late 1990s Kim Jong-il invested heavily into the already bloated military (songun, “army first”), with an emphasis on the nuclear program which was crowned with an A-bomb test in 2006, and a second shortly after President Obama’s inauguration. He pursued his father’s ruinous economic policy of strict autarky (“self-reliance,” juche) with fanatical zeal, effectively ending foreign trade even with North Korea’s only foreign friend, China. Economic mismanagement eventually resulted in a catastrophic famine which is conservatively estimated to have claimed over two million lives, or ten percent of the population, by 1997.

In late spring 2009 Kim Jong-il started grooming his youngest son, Kim Jong-un (b., 1983), as his successor. The youngster was duly designated “The Brilliant Comrade,” but since the rules of succession had not been formally announced prior to Kim Jong-il’s death it is uncertain whether it will proceed uncontested. His ability to establish himself in power will depend primarily on the loyalty of the army top brass and the willingness of the narrow ruling elite—which includes several relatives from his grandfather’s extended family—to respect Kim Jong-il’s wishes. The first signs are encouraging for the youngster: the ruling party has called on the nation to unite “under the leadership of our comrade Kim Jong-un,” and he was also named head of the committee that will oversee his father’s funeral on December 28.

On the foreign front the successors will inherit a position fairly stable in the short term. Kim Jong-il proved a capable negotiator, extracting a series of American concessions in return for a halt to his nuclear weapons buildup. The U.S. put North Korea on its list of state sponsors of terrorism after North Korean agents planted a bomb that blew up a South Korean passenger jet in 1987, on Kim Jong-il’s direct orders, according to one of the agents who was caught alive. In October 2008 the Bush Administration agreed to remove Pyongyang from its terrorism blacklist in return for the North’s commitment to dismantle its nuclear program. The deal was reached within the framework of the six-party talks (China, Japan, Russia, the United States, North and South Korea), whereby Pyongyang agreed to allow teams of international inspectors to visit its Yongbyon plutonium-processing facility in return for much needed foreign aid.

Playing the nuclear card—the only one he had amidst economic ruin and political isolation—had paid handsome diplomatic and economic dividends to Kim Jong-il over the years. “When the history of this era is written,” Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and expert on proliferation, was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “the scorecard will be Kim 8, Bush 0.” But if “he was the greatest master of survival, against all odds,” added Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul, “it was his own people who paid the price, and the price was pretty high.”

Whoever succeeds Kim, the United States should plan on withdrawing the remaining American troops from the Korean peninsula. It should be left to the countries immediately concerned—South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia—to deal with his successors to the best of their abilities. The U.S. response to Communist aggression in Korea in the summer of 1950 was fully justified. In the ensuing decades it was necessary to maintain U.S. forces in South Korea, as neither China nor the USSR could be relied upon to keep Kim Il-sung in check. Over the past three decades, however, the picture has been altered beyond recognition. China and Russia owe no favors to Pyongyang and are loath to underwrite its ruinous economic policies at home, let alone to condone any adventurism abroad. More importantly, South Korea is now one of the most powerful economies in the world. It has the financial and scientific wherewithal to become a first-class military power. It is more than capable of checking threats from North Korea, which remains mired in an Oriental brand of Stalinism—the most oppressive police state in the world, and one of the poorest in terms of per capita consumption.

As I noted in this column over three years ago, removing the American umbrella from South Korea would be beneficial to both sides because the U.S. would be disengaged from a spot where the dangers of continued military presence exceed benefits, while South Korea would be forced to end its dependence on Washington for its defense:

American withdrawal would prompt South Korea finally to become a mature, self-reliant regional power fully responsible for its self-protection, as befits one of the most highly developed industrial economies in the world. It would also force it to diversify its portfolio of foreign contacts, possibly leading to a Russian-South Korean or a Chinese-South Korean alliance, either of which is preferable to an open-ended American guarantee… America has no national interest in retaining troops in Korea or in continuing to protect Seoul. Old habits may die hard, but the 55-year habit of garrisoning South Korea has to be kicked because it is dangerous, expensive, and unnecessary. To the argument that South Korea’s military is not strong enough to withstand the threat from the North, the answer is clear: only by removing our tripwire can America finally force South Korea to upgrade its military and to make its people assume the full economic and political burden of defending their own country. For exactly the same reason American troops should be removed from Japan and Germany. A strategic anachronism five decades old would thus be finally ended.

The above conclusions from October 2008 still stand, word for word. It is to be feared that the Obama Administration will not contemplate an American withdrawal from Korea because of its newly-fangled policy of encircling China, which is manifest in the decision to station U.S. Marines in Darwin, in northern Australia. In view of President Obama’s sudden outburst of bellicose oratory at the sixth East Asian Summit in Bali last month (China must “play by the rules” and stop her “military advances,” he declared, and the United States “will send a clear message to [the Chinese] that we think that they need to be on track in terms of accepting the rules and responsibilities that come with being a world power”) the GIs will stay put along the 38^th parallel for many years to come.

Using Fake Intelligence to Wage War on Iran

In November 2005, the New York Times published a report by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger entitled “Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran’s Nuclear Aims”. Washington’s allegations, reported in the NYT  hinged upon documents “obtained from a stolen Iranian computer by an unknown source and given to US intelligence in 2004″. (See Gareth Porter, Exclusive Report: Evidence of Iran Nuclear Weapons Program May Be Fraudulent, Global Research, November 18, 2010, emphasis added).

These documents included “a series of drawings of a missile re-entry vehicle” which allegedly could accommodate an Iranian produced nuclear weapon.

“In mid-July, senior American intelligence officials called the leaders of the international atomic inspection agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer.

The Americans flashed on a screen and spread over a conference table selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead, according to a half-dozen European and American participants in the meeting.

The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.”(William J. Broad and David E. Sanger Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran’s Nuclear Aims – New York Times, November 13, 2005)

These “secret documents” were subsequently submitted by the US State Department to the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA, with a view to demonstrating that Iran was developing a nuclear weapons program.

While their authenticity has been questioned on several occasions,  a recent article by investigative reporter Gareth Porter confirms unequivocally that the mysterious laptop documents are fake. The drawings contained in the documents do not pertain to the Shahab missile but to an obsolete North Korean missile system which was decommissioned by Iran in the mid-1990s.

How stupid! The drawings presented by US State Department officials pertained to the “Wrong Missile Warhead”:

In July 2005, … Robert Joseph, US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, made a formal presentation on the purported Iranian nuclear weapons program documents to the agency’s leading officials in Vienna. Joseph flashed excerpts from the documents on the screen, giving special attention to the series of technical drawings or “schematics” showing 18 different ways of fitting an unidentified payload into the re-entry vehicle or “warhead” of Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile, the Shahab-3.

When IAEA analysts were allowed to study the documents, however, they discovered that those schematics were based on a re-entry vehicle that the analysts knew had already been abandoned by the Iranian military in favor of a new, improved design. The warhead shown in the schematics had the familiar “dunce cap” shape of the original North Korean No Dong missile, which Iran had acquired in the mid-1990s. …

The laptop documents had depicted the wrong re-entry vehicle being redesigned. … (Gareth Porter, op cit )

Who was behind the production of fake intelligence? Gareth Porter’s suggests that Israel’s Mossad has been a source of  fake intelligence regarding Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program:

The origin of the laptop documents may never be proven conclusively, but the accumulated evidence points to Israel as the source. As early as 1995, the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence research and assessment division, Yaakov Amidror, tried unsuccessfully to persuade his American counterparts that Iran was planning to “go nuclear.” By 2003-2004, Mossad’s reporting on the Iranian nuclear program was viewed by high-ranking CIA officials as an effort to pressure the Bush administration into considering military action against Iran’s nuclear sites, according to Israeli sources cited by a pro-Israeli news service.” (Ibid)

Lies and Fabrications to Justify a Military Agenda

The laptop documents were essential to sustaining America’s position in the UN Security Council.

We are dealing with a clear case of fake intelligence comparable to that presented by Colin Powell in February 2003 on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The fake intelligence presented to the UN Security Council was used as a justification for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“The evidence, or lack thereof, speaks for itself. In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, the Bush administration produced hundreds of pages of intelligence for members of Congress and for the United Nations that showed how Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein possessed tons of chemical and biological weapons and was actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

The intelligence information, gathered by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, a Department of Defense agency that gathers foreign military intelligence for the Pentagon, was used by the Bush administration to convince the public that Iraq posed a threat to the world.” (See Jason Leopold, Powell Denies Intelligence Failure In Buildup To War, But Evidence Doesn’t Hold Up, Global Research, 10 June 2003)

Iran’s Shahab Missile system

Source: Global Research

Corporatism Is Not Capitalism

7 Things About The Monolithic Predator Corporations That Dominate Our Economy That Every American Should Know…

Right now, there is a lot of talk about the evils of “capitalism”.  But it is not really accurate to say that we live in a capitalist system.  Rather, what we have in the United States today, and what most of the world is living under, is much more accurately described as “corporatism”.  Under corporatism, most wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of giant corporations and big government is used as a tool by these corporations to consolidate wealth and power even further.  In a corporatist system, the wealth and power of individuals and small businesses is dwarfed by the overwhelming dominance of the corporations.  Eventually, the corporations end up owning almost everything and they end up dominating nearly every aspect of society.  As you will see below, this very accurately describes the United States of America today.  Corporatism is killing this country, and it is not what our founding fathers intended.

The following is the definition of “corporatism” from the Merriam-Webster dictionary….

the organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction

Corporatism is actually not too different from socialism or communism.  They are all “collectivist” economic systems.  Under corporatism, wealth and power are even more highly concentrated than they are under socialism or communism, and the truth is that none of them are “egalitarian” economic systems.  Under all collectivist systems, a small elite almost always enjoys most of the benefits while most of the rest of the population suffers.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters realize that our economic system is fundamentally unjust in many ways, but the problem is that most of them want to trade one form of collectivism for another.

But our founding fathers never intended for us to have a collectivist system.

Instead, they intended for us to enjoy a capitalist system where true competition and the free enterprise system would allow individuals and small businesses to thrive.

In an article that was posted earlier this year on Addicting Info, Stephen D. Foster Jr. detailed how our founding fathers actually felt about corporations….

The East India Company was the largest corporation of its day and its dominance of trade angered the colonists so much, that they dumped the tea products it had on a ship into Boston Harbor which today is universally known as the Boston Tea Party. At the time, in Britain, large corporations funded elections generously and its stock was owned by nearly everyone in parliament. The founding fathers did not think much of these corporations that had great wealth and great influence in government. And that is precisely why they put restrictions upon them after the government was organized under the Constitution.

After the nation’s founding, corporations were granted charters by the state as they are today. Unlike today, however, corporations were only permitted to exist 20 or 30 years and could only deal in one commodity, could not hold stock in other companies, and their property holdings were limited to what they needed to accomplish their business goals. And perhaps the most important facet of all this is that most states in the early days of the nation had laws on the books that made any political contribution by corporations a criminal offense.

Our founding fathers would have never approved of any form of collectivism.  They understood that all great concentrations of wealth and power represent a significant threat to the freedoms and liberties of average citizens.

Are you not convinced that we live in a corporatist system?

Well, keep reading.

The following are 7 things about the monolithic predator corporations that dominate our economy that every American should know….

#1 Corporations not only completely dominate the U.S. economy, they also completely dominate the global economy as well.  A newly released University of Zurich study examined more than 43,000 major multinational corporations.  The study discovered a vast web of interlocking ownerships that is controlled by a “core” of 1,318 giant corporations.

But that “core” itself is controlled by a “super-entity” of 147 monolithic corporations that are very, very tightly knit.  As a recent article in NewScientist noted, these 147 corporations control approximately 40 percent of all the wealth in the entire network….

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 percent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 percent of the companies were able to control 40 percent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

Unsurprisingly, the “super-entity” of 147 corporations is dominated by international banks and large financial institutions.  For example, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America are all in the top 25.

#2 This dominance of the global economy by corporations has allowed global wealth to become concentrated to a very frightening degree.

According to Credit Suisse, those with a household net worth of a million dollars or more control 38.5% of all the wealth in the world.  Last year, that figure was at35.6%.  As you can see, it is rapidly moving in the wrong direction.

For a group of people that represents less than 0.5% of the global population to control almost 40 percent of all the wealth is insane.

The dominance of corporations is also one of the primary reasons why we are witnessing income inequality grow so rapidly in the United States.  The following comes from a recent article in the Los Angeles Times….

An economic snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows that inflation-adjusted incomes of the top 1% of households increased 224% from 1979 to 2007, while incomes for the bottom 90% grew just 5% in the same time period. Those in the top 0.1% of income fared even better, with incomes growing 390% over that time period.

You can see a chart that displays these shocking numbers right here.

#3 Since wealth has become concentrated in very few hands, that means that there are a whole lot of poor people out there.

At a time when technology should be making it possible to lift standards of living all over the globe, poverty just continues to spread.  According to the same Credit Suisse study referenced above, the bottom two-thirds of the global population controls just 3.3% of all the wealth.

Not only that, more than 3 billion people currently live on less than 2 dollar a day.

While the ultra-wealthy live the high life, unimaginable tragedies play out all over the globe every single day.  Every 3.6 seconds someone starves to death andthree-quarters of them are children under the age of 5.

#4 Giant corporations have become so dominant that it has become very hard for small businesses to compete and survive in the United States.

Today, even though our population is increasing, the number of small businesses continues to decrease.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006.  Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.

This is the exact opposite of what should be happening under a capitalist system.

#5 Big corporations completely dominate the media.  Almost all of the news that you get and almost all of the entertainment that you enjoy is fed to you by giant corporations.

Back in 1983, somewhere around 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States.

Today, control of the news media is concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations.

#6 Big corporations completely dominate our financial system.  Yes, there are hundreds of choices in the financial world, but just a handful control the vast majority of the assets.

Back in 2002, the top 10 banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets.  Today, the top 10 banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.

The “too big to fail” banks just keep getting more and more powerful.  For example, the “big six” U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) now possess assetsequivalent to approximately 60 percent of America’s gross national product.

#7 Big corporations completely dominate our political system.  Because they have so much wealth and power, corporations can exert an overwhelming amount of influence over our elections.  Studies have shown that in federal elections the candidate that raises the most money wins about 90 percent of the time.

Politics in America is not about winning over hearts and minds.

It is about who can raise the most cash.

Sometimes this truth leaks out a bit in the mainstream media.  For example, during a recent show on MSNBC, Dylan Ratigan ….

“The biggest contributor to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is Goldman Sachs. The primary activities of this president relative to banking have been to protect the most lucrative aspect of that business, which is the dark market for credit default swaps and the like. That has been the explicit agenda of his Treasury Secretary. This president is advocating trade agreements that allow enhanced bank secrecy in Panama, enhanced murdering of union members in Colombia, and the refunding of North Korean slaves.”

Later on, Ratigan followed up by accusing both political parties ….

“But I guess where I take issue is, this president is working for the bad guys. The Democrats are working for the bad guys. So are the Republicans. The Democrats get away with it by saying, ‘Look at how crazy the Republicans are; at the Democrats pretend to care about people.’ BUT THE FACT IS THE 2-PARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM IS UTTERLY BOGUS.”

Wow – nobody is actually supposed to say that on television.

Today, most of our politicians are bought, and most of them actively help the monolithic predator corporations accumulate even more wealth and even more power.

In fact, as I wrote about recently, the big Wall Street banks are already trying tobuy the election in 2012.

Fortunately, it looks like the American people are starting to wake up.  According to one recent survey, only 23 percent of all Americans now trust the financial system, and 60 percent of all Americans are either “angry” or “very angry” about the economy.

Unfortunately, many of them are joining protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street which are calling for one form of collectivism to replace another.

The American people are being given a false choice.

We don’t have to choose between corporatism and socialism.

We don’t have to choose between big corporations and big government.

Our founding fathers actually intended for corporations and government to both be greatly limited.

The following is a famous quote from Thomas Jefferson….

“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Unfortunately, things did not turn out how Jefferson wanted.  Instead of us controlling the corporations, they now control us.

This next quote is from John Adams….

“Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.”

But who dominates our economy today?

The big banks.

Perhaps we should have listened to founding fathers such as John Adams.

Lastly, here is another quote from Thomas Jefferson….

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

How prescient was that quote?

Last year, over a million American families were booted out of their homes by the big banks.  The financial institutions actually now have more total equity in our homes than we do.

Unemployment is rampant, but corporate profits are soaring.  The number of Americans on food stamps has increased by more than 70 percent since 2007, and yet the incomes of those at the top of the food chain continue to increase.

We need a system that allows all Americans to start small businesses, compete fairly and have a chance at success.

Instead, what we have is a corporatist system where the big corporations have most of the wealth, most of the power and most of the advantages.

We need to get the American people to understand that corporatism is not capitalism.

Corporatism is a collectivist system that allows the elite to accumulate gigantic amounts of wealth and power.

The answer to such a system is not to go to a different collectivist system.

Rather, we need to return as much power as possible to individuals and small businesses.

Our founding fathers intended for us to live in a country where power was highly decentralized.

Why didn’t we listen to them?

Source: The American Dream

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