Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama declares war on Libya

While the United States staggers under $14 trillion in debt, 15 million unemployed Americans, 43 million subsisting on food stamps and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama dove into a third war with Libya over the weekend.

Obama never served in the military.  He wouldn’t know the difference of a platoon from KP duty. He doesn’t know the difference of a captain and a major.  He doesn’t have the slightest idea of what he’s getting us into: much like George W. Bush and Iraq.

The only result will be thousands more dead American soldiers!  For what? Answer: nothing!

Of all the $100 billion worth of drugs crossing our unguarded borders with Mexico, which new exotic blend made its way into the White House?  When did common sense and reasoned thought devolve into “Muslim insanity” in Africa and the Middle East?

Thomas Jefferson said that America should never enter into foreign entanglements for the simple reason that such involvements could come to no good end.

“With his $1.6 million peace prize in his pocket, President Barack Hussein Obama launched an aggressive onslaught of U.S. cruise warfare missiles into a sovereign nation, Libya, who has an internationally recognized leader in Moammar Qaddafi- a tyrannical leader to be sure, but a leader none-the-less,” said freelance journalist Kimberly Dvorak. “Now America’s young and globalist president has taken the helm for America’s third Muslim country war. As such, Obama has further solidified his place, “in a war of his choosing” by involving America in another blurry-eyed Middle-East quagmire.”

The Arab League complained, “U.S. tomahawk missile airstrikes are responsible for killing innocent Libyan citizens.”

Amr Moussa, spokesperson for the Arab League, claims military operations have gone beyond what the Arab League backed; “What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone. What we want is civilians’ protected not the shelling of more civilians.”

What are we doing to ourselves and the rest of the world with three U.S. led wars?  What do we hope to accomplish?  How many more people will we kill?  When will it stop?  How can we justify wars that continue killing more people?

“Perhaps it has something to do with the ‘King of Tripoli,’ Qaddafi, who poked the eye of American families who lost loved ones in Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland,” said Dvorak. “ On December 21, 1988, flight 103 was destroyed in-flight by a bomb that was planted on the aircraft by a Qaddafi intelligence operative. The terrorist-engineered airplane crash killed 270 passengers, including 189 American citizens.”

The U.S. suffered enormous loss of life in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.  All of those wars proved deadly, useless and without merit of any kind. The only result: millions of deaths with no resolution.  Realistically, 17 of the 19—9/11 perpetrators came from Saudi Arabia.  Why didn’t we bomb them with “shock and awe”?

“This is an absurd situation; there is absolutely nothing of interest to the United States in Libya,” said former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit Michael Scheuer. “If all the Libyans killed each other for the next week, what difference does it makes to life in the United States.”

A CIA spokesman said; “Air power never wins anything … air power will not resolve the question and we will ultimately be faced with another incursion of U.S. forces on the ground. It is an extraordinarily irresponsible thing for the president to do.”

Louis Farrakhan for the first time in his life asked a reasonable question, “Why don’t you organize a group of respected Americans and ask for a meeting with Qaddafi, you can’t order him to step down and get out, who the hell do you think you are?”

Muslim Brotherhood said, “We are opposed (to) the military intervention because the real intention of the United States and its European allies was to get into position to benefit from Libya’s oil supplies. The countries aligned against Libya are there not for humanitarian reasons but to further their own interests.”

Obama fails to look at history, much like his predecessor George W. Bush. Both men failed their world history exams in high school.  However, countless Americans and other world citizens pay with their lives.  Meddling in other countries’ business will prove the undoing of the United States of America.  Nothing good can come of it.

A Perfect Storm of GMOs, Chemicals and Cancer

Several books, including Seeds of Destruction and Corrupt to the Core, along with the film, The Idiot Cycle, lay out the framework for and evidence of a concerted effort to sicken and then treat humanity, while earning obscene profits. When we factor in other recent actions taken by transnational corporations and lawmakers, the conspiracy adopts a more ominous tone.

Authors William Engdahl and Shiv Chopra appear in Emmanuelle Schick Garcia’s powerful film, The Idiot Cycle: What you aren’t being told about cancer. Both writers provide detailed evidence of a corporate-government conspiracy to adulterate the food and water supply with dangerous substances linked to a host of illnesses. The Case Against Fluoride, a book using hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, provides more evidence. In David Gumpert’s Raw Milk Revolution, we get a peek at the US government’s war on the natural dairy industry.

Looking at six companies, Dow Chemical, BASF, Bayer, Dupont, Astrazeneca (Syngenta), and Monsanto, Idiot Cycle exposes corporate-government collusion in the release of carcinogenic chemicals, but also reveals how some of the same chemical companies then profit from treating cancer. It’s a cycle only an idiot would tolerate. Going further, much of the film then addresses genetically modified food and its potentially disastrous effect on health and the environment.

Before making the film, Garcia and her team spent three years on research, and it shows. The film is chock full of disturbing facts. How many people know, for example, which synthetic chemical will cause more cancer than any others? Or that only 5-10% of all cancers are genetically inherited? Or that testicular cancer in young men has increased 50% in every industrial country? In 2002, the film asserts, the top ten drug companies made more money than the top 490 wealthiest US companies combined. At $1,600 a month for cancer-treatment, we can see why it’s called Big Pharma.

Important tidbits like these make the film a must-see. But the filmmaker shows real courage when she then includes the connection with genetically modified foods. It is with this additional component that a global conspiracy more fully comes into focus.

Idiot Cycle interviews world renowned scientists Arpad Pusztai, Eric-Gilles Seralini and Shiv Chopra, two of whom suffered job loss and all of whom endured campaigns to smear their professional reputations. In the GM debate, getting the message out about hazards to human health and the environment can cost you your career.

 

Silencing Negative Findings of Independent Scientists

1. Arpad Pusztai

Arpad Pusztai is no doubt the most famous scientist in the film. He first blew the whistle in 1998 on the hazards of GM crops, costing him his job at Rowett Research Institute in Scotland. Having studied biotechnology for 35 years, Pusztai had well earned the title as the world’s leading expert in this highly specialized field. In 1995, he won a three-year, $1.5 million contract from the UK government to establish a testing methodology for regulators when assessing the safety of GM crops.

This marked the world’s first independent study of GM food safety, according to Engdahl. He interviewed Pusztai in 2007 for his book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. Engdahl notes that Pusztai “was fully certain the study would confirm the safety of GM foods.” His team used potatoes modified by Monsanto to produce an insecticide. Writes Engdahl:

“The rats fed for more than 110 days on a diet of GM potatoes had marked changes to their development. They were significantly smaller in size and body weight than ordinary potato-fed control rats in the same experiment. More alarming, however, was the fact that the GMO rats showed markedly smaller liver and heart sizes, and demonstrated weaker immune systems. The most alarming finding from Pusztai’s laboratory tests, however, was the markedly smaller brain size of GMO-fed rats compared with normal potato-fed rats.”

When he reported his findings on national television, excluding the smaller brain size info for fear it would induce mass panic, he also added that he wouldn’t eat GM foods. For two days, the Institute applauded and supported him, even issuing a press release clarifying that his concerns were based on “ a range of carefully controlled studies.”

But then the firestorm hit. President Bill Clinton contacted Prime Minister Tony Blair, who then contacted Pusztai’s boss at the Institute. Within two days, he was fired, along with his wife, another respected researcher at Rowett. Then began a mass media campaign to discredit him and his work, as revealed by UK journalist, Andrew Rowell. The Pusztais were gagged from defending Arpad under threat of losing their pensions.

In Idiot Cycle, Pusztai called it “criminal” that GM crops have been foisted on the world without full and complete safety studies, especially in light of preliminary studies showing serious potential harm.

2. Eric-Gilles Seralini

The next most famous scientist in the GM debate, arguably, is Eric-Gilles Seralini, whose groundbreaking studies we covered here. Seralini has also been vilified by the biotech community. In The Idiot Cycle, he describes the battle that he endured to publicize Monsanto’s blood test results of rats that had eaten GM corn for three months. Once the information was made public, independent scientists could then review Monsanto’s “safe” finding.

Normally, two years of testing is the “gold standard” in the scientific community. Seralini called it “absurd” that only three months of testing allowed the GM corn to be approved in over a dozen nations. Any reputable scientist would agree. Upon reviewing Monsanto’s raw data, he and his team found, among other problems, liver damage and physiological changes into a pre-diabetic condition among the rats which had eaten Monsanto’s GM corn. And that’s just from three months of eating such food.

The rate of diabetes in the U.S. has nearly doubled since GM foods were secretly foisted on us in 1996. Today, 26 million people have it and another 79 million are pre-diabetic, according to new estimates released in January. These figures include those actually diagnosed with the disease, plus an estimate of those who have diabetes but are undiagnosed. If we look at just the “diagnosed” numbers over the last three decades (which is less than the actual number who have diabetes), we see that diabetes has tripled since 1980:

Many believe that the prevalence of GM corn and GM sugarbeets used as sweeteners in processed foods (such as high fructose corn syrup) is a leading contributing factor to the spike in diabetes. Actos, made by Takeda Pharmaceutical, and Avandia, made by GlaxoSmithKline, reportedly treat Type II diabetes, and both increase the risk of heart failure – in one study by 72%.

3. Shiv Chopra

Canada Health whistleblower Shiv Chopra, who authored Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower, explains the genesis of the misanthropic aims of these chemical companies and their government protectors. Beginning 50-60 years ago, he says in the film, chemicals began playing a major part in agriculture. “On the one hand, they’re contaminating people’s food, and they do damage. Then they come back with chemicals to treat them.”

Chopra was eventually fired from Health Canada, along with two others, for “insubordination” because they refused to authorize (among other food processes) the long-term use of antibiotics and GM hormones in food-producing animals, given their questionable safety. In particular, he adamantly refused to authorize rBST, a genetically modified bovine growth hormone created by Monsanto and Eli Lilly to stimulate milk production in dairy cows. Studies show that large percentages of cows develop lameness and mastitis from the GM hormone.

In Corrupt to the Core, we learn that one of the other “food processes” they objected to was feeding BSE-infested slaughterhouse waste to meat and milk animals. BSE, more popularly known as mad cow disease, gives humans the lethal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Chopra makes a significant contribution to human health when he discusses his Five Pillars of Food Safety:

“The source of food-borne diseases during approximately the last 50 years is reported to originate from indiscriminate application of the following five substances in food production: hormones, antibiotics, slaughterhouse wastes, genetically modified organisms and pesticides.”

In the book and in Idiot Cycle, he charges that use of these substances violates the Food and Drug Act of both the U.S. and Canada. Because the first three are banned in the European Union, the US and Canada cannot ship beef to the EU. This issue, incidentally, continues to be debated at the World Trade Organization.

4. Andres Carrasco

Though not in the film, another globally recognized scientist in the biotech world is Andres Carrasco. He and his team from Argentina and Paraguay found that Monsanto’s Roundup causes birth defects in frogs and chickens. “The findings in the lab are compatible with malformations observed in humans exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy,” he told GMWatch. In 2009, he was threatened at his lab, and in 2010 physically attacked by local police and the hired hands of a wealthy GM rice grower.

 

Contaminating the Natural Food Supply

GM crops contaminate natural plants, converting ownership to the patent holder under twisted, but recognized, legal logic. Idiot Cycle stresses this as a deliberate move toward complete control of the world’s food supply. It’s no idle accusation. GeneWatch UK and Greenpeace have documented over 300 contaminations through July 2010. Genetic contamination of natural plants is vast and ongoing and, until recently, courts have repeatedly penalized the farmer victimized by such contamination.

Many have heard of Percy Schmeiser’s battle with Monsanto that resulted in a pyrrhic victory for the farmer. Unaware his crops had been contaminated with transgenes, he reused the seeds. Monsanto sued, but this time, after a long and expensive litigation process, the Canadian Supreme Court backed Schmeiser and ordered Monsanto to pay for the clean up of his fields. Though not in the final release of Idiot Cycle, he does appear in the bonus clips.

An 84-page report by the Center for Food Safety published in 2005 details cases like these and others. In 2008, Vanity Fair’s Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele also posted an in-depth investigation, providing more details of farmers being victimized by contamination and then being successfully sued by Monsanto. The CFS report also describes cases where farmers bought GM seeds third hand, signing no agreement about their use or reuse. This happened to Tennessee farmer, Kem Ralph, who is also featured in The Idiot Cycle.

In court, Monsanto presented an agreement which bore his forged signature. Judge Rodney Sippel, a former Monsanto attorney, awarded judgment for Monsanto in the amount of $2.9 million. CFS documents evidence of Monsanto presenting forged signatures in court. “Forging farmers’ signatures on Technology Agreements is called ‘common’ by seed dealers. Nearly one in 10 of Monsanto’s lawsuits involve such forgeries.”

In the film we learn that Judge Sippel in Kem Ralph’s case sat on ten other lawsuits involving Monsanto, corruptly refusing to recuse himself. In all of those cases, Monsanto won.

We also find such conflicts of interest on the U.S. Supreme Court with the ethically challenged Clarence Thomas, a former Monsanto attorney. In 2001, he wrote the high court decisionallowing biotech companies to patent GM seeds. Thomas also corruptly refused to recuse himself from Monsanto v Geertson Seed, which allowed the USDA to impose a partial deregulation of GM alfalfa last June. (This January, the USDA completely deregulated GM alfalfa, even removing the requirement for buffer zones.) Plus, Thomas’ new sidekick on the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, defended Monsanto’s right to contaminate natural alfalfa crops when she served as Solicitor General arguing against Geertson.

But not all judges work for the biotech industry.After Bayer CropScience contaminated a third of the US rice supply in 2006, it found itself facing 6,000 lawsuits. In addition to cases it has already lost or settled, each under $2 million, Bayer now faces a whopping $380 million lawsuit from Riceland Foods in a trial currently underway in Arkansas. Stuttgart Daily Leader has been covering the trial, with articles postedFeb. 22, 2/24, 2/25, 2/28, March 4, Mar. 8 and Mar. 10.

Cases like these are what is surely behind a recent decision by the world’s largest seed company to modify its Technology Stewardship Agreement wherein Monsanto has shifted all liability arising from transgenic crops onto farmers who plant their seeds. How’s that for taking corporate immorality to new depths?

This falls in line nicely with a recent Supreme Court decision that protects vaccine makers from liability. In the film, one European regulator, Willy de Greef, informs us that GM crops only account for 5% of all biotechnology. Most drugs and vaccines contain GMOs. A host of deleterious effects from vaccines has been documented, including narcolepsy, sterility, mental retardation, paralysis, autism, and death. “First do no harm” has succumbed to “Make the most money.”

Given the USDA’s recent deregulation of GM alfalfa, and the certainty that natural alfalfa will become contaminated, Monsanto’s attempt to shirk responsibility with this no-liability clause “appears to be unconscionable” said environmental attorney Anthony Patchett in a  with Morph City. Patchett formerly worked as Assistant Head Deputy District Attorney of Environmental Crimes, OSHA Division.

That decision to deregulate a perennial plant with tiny seeds that can travel miles can be seen as nothing other than a deliberate intent to contaminate North American natural alfalfa. Biotech firms will gain ownership of contaminated fields. This will also destroy the organic meat and dairy industry in the United States, and likely Canada, as well. Biotech and chemical firms, along with all growers who chemically douse their crops, will profit enormously from the collapse of the untainted food industry. The question is, can we survive their victory?

 

Sick Food, Dangerous Vaccines & Eugenics

Controlling the world’s food supply is one thing. As evidence mounts that biotech crops sicken us, this assures increased profits for biotech companies that develop drugs to treat us. But, some wonder if GM crops will do more than sicken us. We have preliminary findings that GM crops cause sterility in test animals, and that Roundup is associated with spontaneous abortions in farm animals fed wheatlage under weed management using glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup. Coupling this with globalist concern with rising population, how can we avoid questioning if biotechnology is being used as a weapon?

In the film, author William Engdahl talks about his research for Seeds of Destruction. He briefly describes the relationship between depopulationists like the Rockefellers and IG Farben, the company that gassed millions to death in Nazi Germany and which also killed thousands more when testing drugs and vaccines on captured populations. For these crimes against humanity, after the war, IG Farben was broken into its original constituent companies. Bayer, BASF and Hoechst (now Aventis) eventually expanded into plant genetics. (In 2002, Bayer acquired Aventis.)

Engdahl writes: “The Rockefeller-I.G. Farben relationship went back to 1927, around the same time the Rockefeller Foundation began heavily funding German eugenics research.” Paraphrasing from his book, he explains:

“‘The Project’ I referred to is the project of the Rockefeller Foundation and powerful financial interests since the 1920’s to use eugenics, later renamed genetics, to justify creation of a genetically-engineered Master Race. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race.

“The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the ‘defining gene sequence’ which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler’s eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.”

Seeds of Destruction provides a wealth of detailed evidence of “the hidden agenda of genetic manipulation.” It’s clear from having read the book why Garcia chose to interview him for her film. Seeds highlights bioweaponry, in the form of pandemics, and the drugs used to treat them. The recent Swine flu hype was a repeat of the Avian flu engineered just a few years before. Vaccines used in Nicaragua and the Phillipines actually sterilized people. Spermicidal corn was developed for Mexico.

Though Rockefeller, et al. may be looking to improve human genetics for traits they deem more desirable in their club, “you ain’t in it.” Neither am I; nor is 93% of humanity, if the Georgia Guidestones are any indication of what the ideal population level should be. What we get, instead, are toxic foods, grown or raised on toxic farms, and further treated and processed in toxic factories. Then we’re prescribed toxic drugs that cause side effects which hasten our death. Nice racket.

Bayer and BASF aren’t alone. Monsanto also has a history of “incidental” ecocide and genocide by the creation and deployment of Agent Orange (dioxin), PCBs, DDT, rBST, and the neurotoxin, Aspartame.

Biotech and pharmaceutical companies have also produced several hundred “pharma crops” – food that contains vaccines against a variety of diseases. Never mind that such a plan fails to consider appropriate dosage specific to a person’s age, weight and medical condition. The same failure applies to fluoride treated water, which lowers intelligence, causes skeletal and dental fluorosis, and induces depression and lethargy. (See the 2010 book, The Case Against Fluoride and this short 30-minute film, .)

 

Criminalizing Nature

One final element briefly mentioned in the film plays heavily into this growing body of evidence supporting the idea of a global conspiracy to harm humanity for profit. The Idiot Cyclementions Iraq Order 81, which bans the saving of seeds. Iraqi farmers must buy GM seeds, every year. This outrageous law is a direct attack on the right to food freedom: the evolutionary imperative of humans to eat whatever natural foods their bodies crave.

Beyond that, a string of national and international laws, rules, and regulations criminalize natural plants. This will give the pharmaceutical industry complete control of healthcare, since the world’s best medicines come from plants. For example, prior to 2000, Monsanto began genetically modifying marijuana, and last November, the US Drug Enforcement Agency proposed a subtle rule change that will decriminalize synthetic THC for use as a medicine, reports Pencil Method, a medical marijuana news site:

“Paul Armentano of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws reads the proposal as a way of legalizing marijuana so just Big Pharma can make money from it.

“’DEA is taking a shortcut by saying, well, we can reschedule organic THC because it mimics an existing drug on the market,’ Armentano said. ‘Which is ironic given that they are saying the organic substance is derivative of the synthetic substance that is actually based on the organic substance.’”

Kitty Campion, a world renowned herbalist who has written several books, and who holds a PhD from the School of Natural Healing (Utah), warns that:

“[G]overnments all over the world are joining hands with Big Pharma and Big Food, (meaning the industrialised processed food giants) in an unprecedented pogrom against herbal medicine. I left Britain in December last year after 30 years in full time herbal practice and came into Australia on a Distinguished Talent Visa, precisely because so many of the herbs I needed in my extensive herbal pharmacy had been banned by the European Commission. The Gestapo tactics have long begun. In Germany and in the UK, the ‘drug police’ recently confiscated natural remedies as though they were contraband drugs. The EU’s main strategy has been to try and place every natural product, natural remedy or natural service firmly under the thumb of prescription drug law and, of course, if a substance is treated like a drug it has to be evaluated and studied like a drug. The millions that this costs, mainly for safety and efficacy evaluation, is out of reach of the vast majority of herbal manufacturers – in effect it is a de facto ban.”

Several similar laws around the globe further the scheme to criminalize nature. Here’s a brief sampling, with some victories for food freedom:

• On May 1, 2011, thousands of herbal medicinal products become illegal in the European Union. In an email, Shiv Chopra said, “As for the sale of herbal remedies, homeopathic, Ayurvedic and Chinese medicines, EU and NAFTA are on the same page. All of them, without counting Mexico, are determined to ban any substance that interferes in the sale of their big pharma products, including drugs and vaccines causing disease and death. I am not sure what China plans to do about it but India as we all know is selling out its stakes to join the rich man’s club, without any concern for the public interest.”
• Australia has proposed a ban on thousands of plants including its national flower, since they contain DMT – a naturally-occurring hallucinogen. Marketed as a war on drugs, the bill ignores that most of these common garden plants have never been used to extract DMT, since only trace amounts are found in them. Humans also produce DMT in their bodies, so we know this is something we need.
• Canada just passed a “consumer protection” law known as C36, though the final version exempted natural health products after a nationwide fight. However, the law violates human rights by authorizing home invasions to search for suspected products. Through Canada’s 2004 Food and Drug Act and other regulations, thousands of natural health products are no longer available, writes Karen Stephenson.
• Last December, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered one pharmacy to stop making injectable Vitamin C, a known cure for cancer. When taken intravenously in large doses, it has remarkable healing properties. IV Vitamin C even cured a New Zealand man on death’s door with the swine flu.
• The FDA is also waging a war on natural dairy, shutting down producers and distributors even though no one has become ill from their products. David Gumpert’s book, The Raw Milk Revolution, details the government’s war on food rights (which I reviewed here). As a complete food, raw milk provides innumerable benefits, including reducing childhood allergies. Many who are labeled “lactose-intolerant” safely drink raw milk.
• Also on the dairy front, Monsanto complained to the Federal Trade Commission about organic dairy farmers who labeled their product free of artificial hormones. Though the FDA allows such labeling, it maintains that rBST (also known as rBGH) is safe and that there is no difference between organic and GMO milk. Last September, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appealsdisagreed, overturning an Ohio law banning such labels. The court found a “compositional difference” between the two kinds of milk, and also ruled that prohibiting such labels violates the first amendment rights of organic producers.
• The US Food Safety Modernization Act, signed into law in January, “extends control over all food in the US, violating the fundamental human right to food,” explains Steve Green. Providing a comment for that article, Shiv Chopra said that the bill precludes “the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice.”
• Operating under the UN and the World Health Organization, Codex Alimentarius harmonizes international food standards, ostensibly to facilitate trade. Summarizing the work of Scott Tips and the Alliance for Natural Health, Brandon Turberville writes, “At best, the guidelines will reduce dose levels [of vitamins and other supplements] to minuscule amounts too small to be beneficial, as well as causing the prices to skyrocket for both consumers and producers.”

Taken together, we are witnessing corporate-government seizure of the means by which humans survive and thrive. Major corporations, backed by government, are causing cancer and other diseases with their toxic products. Yet, natural foods and remedies are being criminalized, forcing us to rely on Western drugs with often lethal side effects. On top of this, our water supply is deliberately treated with a substance that, among other problems, lowers intelligence.

The Idiot Cycle provides an excellent summary of the major forces working against humanity, which are well documented in several books, including those listed below.

 

Recommended Sources:

The Idiot Cycle
Written and Directed by Emmanuelle Schick Garcia
JPS Films (2009, 96 mins)
Website: stoptheidiotcycle.com
Screenings: Showtimes
The film can be rented for 4.99 euros ($7 USD) at JPS.

Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
F. William Engdahl
Global Research: 2007 (341 pp.)
www.globalresearch.ca/books/SoD.html

Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower
Shiv Chopra
KOS Publishing: 2009 (340 pp.)
www.kospublishing.com/html/corrupt_to_the_core.html

The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle over Food Rights

David E. Gumpert
Chelsea Green Publishing: 2009 (254 pp.)
www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/the_raw_milk_revolution:paperback

The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There
Paul Connett, James Beck, Spedding Micklem
Chelsea Green Publishing: 2010 (384 pp.)
www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/the_case_against_fluoride:paperback

The Enduring Mystique of the Marshall Plan

Amidst all the stirring political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East the name “Marshall Plan” keeps being repeated by political figures and media around the world as the key to rebuilding the economies of those societies to complement the political advances, which hopefully will be somewhat progressive. But caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.

During my years of writing and speaking about the harm and injustice inflicted upon the world by unending United States interventions, I’ve often been met with resentment from those who accuse me of chronicling only the negative side of US foreign policy and ignoring the many positive sides. When I ask the person to give me some examples of what s/he thinks show the virtuous face of America’s dealings with the world in modern times, one of the things mentioned — almost without exception — is The Marshall Plan. This is usually described along the lines of: “After World War II, the United States unselfishly built up Europe economically, including our wartime enemies, and allowed them to compete with us.” Even those today who are very cynical about US foreign policy, who are quick to question the White House’s motives in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, have little problem in accepting this picture of an altruistic America of the period 1948-1952. But let’s have a look at the Marshall Plan outside the official and popular versions.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called “communism” stood in the way, politically, militarily, and ideologically. The entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this “enemy”, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign, when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. This return to anti-communism included the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan as a warning to the Soviets. ¹

After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires:

1. Spreading the capitalist gospel — to counter strong postwar tendencies towards socialism.
2. Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations — a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g., a billion dollars of tobacco at today’s prices, spurred by US tobacco interests.
3. Pushing for the creation of the Common Market and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat.
4. Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist Parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the communists from any kind of influential role.

The CIA also skimmed large amounts of Marshall Plan funds to covertly maintain cultural institutions, journalists, and publishers, at home and abroad, for the heated and omnipresent propaganda of the Cold War; the selling of the Marshall Plan to the American public and elsewhere was entwined with fighting “the red menace”. Moreover, in its covert operations, CIA personnel at times used the Marshall Plan as cover, and one of the Plan’s chief architects, Richard Bissell, then moved to the CIA, stopping off briefly at the Ford Foundation, a long time conduit for CIA covert funds. One big happy family.

The Marshall Plan imposed all kinds of restrictions on the recipient countries, all manner of economic and fiscal criteria which had to be met, designed for a wide open return to free enterprise. The US had the right to control not only how Marshall Plan dollars were spent, but also to approve the expenditure of an equivalent amount of the local currency, giving Washington substantial power over the internal plans and programs of the European states; welfare programs for the needy survivors of the war were looked upon with disfavor by the United States; even rationing smelled too much like socialism and had to go or be scaled down; nationalization of industry was even more vehemently opposed by Washington. The great bulk of Marshall Plan funds returned to the United States, or never left, to purchase American goods, making American corporations among the chief beneficiaries.

The program could be seen as more a joint business operation between governments than an American “handout”; often it was a business arrangement between American and European ruling classes, many of the latter fresh from their service to the Third Reich, some of the former as well; or it was an arrangement between Congressmen and their favorite corporations to export certain commodities, including a lot of military goods. Thus did the Marshall Plan help lay the foundation for the military industrial complex as a permanent feature of American life.

It is very difficult to find, or put together, a clear, credible description of how the Marshall Plan played a pivotal or indispensable role in the recovery in each of the 16 recipient nations. The opposing view, at least as clear, is that the Europeans — highly educated, skilled and experienced — could have recovered from the war on their own without an extensive master plan and aid program from abroad, and indeed had already made significant strides in this direction before the Plan’s funds began flowing. Marshall Plan funds were not directed primarily toward the urgently needed feeding of individuals or rebuilding their homes, schools, or factories, but at strengthening the economic superstructure, particularly the iron, steel and power industries. The period was in fact marked by deflationary policies, unemployment and recession. The one unambiguous outcome was the full restoration of the propertied class. ²

The rising up of the people … and the conservative mind

James Baker served as the Chief of Staff in President Ronald Reagan’s first administration and in the final year of the administration of President George H.W. Bush. He was also Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and Secretary of State under Bush. Thus, by establishment standards and values, inside marble-columned institutions, Baker is a man to be taken seriously when it comes to affairs of state. Here he is on February 3, during an interview by our favorite TV station, our very own shining beacon of truth, Fox News:

“We want to see the people in the Middle East have a chance at democracy and free markets … I’m sorry, democracy and human rights.” ³

Baker has a record of speaking his mind, whether Freudian-slip-like or not. When he was Secretary of State, on an occasion when the Middle East was being discussed at a government meeting, and Jewish-American influence was mentioned, Baker was reported to have said “Fuck the Jews! They don’t vote for us anyway.” ⁴

They couldn’t resist, could they?

News flash: “Judge Mustafa Abdel Jallil, the Libyan justice minister who resigned last week in protest over the use of force against unarmed civilians, said he has proof that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi ordered the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988. He would not disclose details of the alleged evidence.” ⁵

Hmmm, let me guess now why he wouldn’t disclose details of the alleged evidence … hmmm … Ah, I know — because it doesn’t exist! How could Gadhafi’s many enemies in Libya resist kicking him like this when he’s down? Or perhaps the honorable judge is simply protecting himself from a future international criminal tribunal for his years of service to the Libyan state? If you read any more of such nonsense — and you will — reach for some of the antidote I’ve been providing for more than 20 years. ⁶

The empire’s deep dark secret

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined,” declared US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on February 25.

Remarkable. Every one of the many wars the United States has engaged in since the end of World War II has been presented to the American people, explicitly or implicitly, as a war of necessity, not a war of choice; a war urgently needed to protect American citizens, American allies, vital American “interests”, freedom, or democracy. Here is President Obama speaking of Afghanistan: “But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” ⁷

This being the case, how can a future administration say it will not go to war if any of these noble causes is seriously threatened? The answer is that these noble causes are irrelevant. The United States goes to war where and when it wants, and if a noble cause is not self-evident, the government, with indispensable help from the American media, will manufacture it. Secretary Gates is now admitting that there is choice involved. Well, Bob, thanks for telling us. You were Bush’s Secretary of Defense as well, and before that 26 years in the CIA and the National Security Council. You sure know how to keep a secret.

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

• In its more than 50 years of revolution Cuba has never reciprocated the US aggression against it; no military or terrorist assaults have emanated from Havana in spite of the many hundreds of CIA aerial bombings, ground attacks, acts of sabotage, and assassination attempts. Oh, did I mention all the chemical and biological warfare? Oddly, the State Department’s list of “State sponsors of terrorism” includes Cuba, but not the United States. The little nation of Cuba has defied all rational odds against its socialist survival.
• The wit and wisdom of Mr. Barack Obama: “To ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad, we all share the belief we have to maintain the strongest military on the planet.” (December 1, 2008, Agence France Presse) How true. All Americans share that belief, as they rejoice in the strongest military on the planet and a veritable overflowing of prosperity at home and peace abroad.
• Steven Bradbury, Department of Justice lawyer under George W. Bush, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was discussing the legal status of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: “The president is always right.” (Washington Post, July 12, 2006)
• “There are 3 billion people in the world and we have only 200 million of them. We are outnumbered 15 to 1. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want.” – President Lyndon Johnson, 1966
• As the George W. Bush administration was entering office in 2000, Donald Rumsfeld exuberantly expressed grandiose ambitions for Middle East domination, telling the National Security Council: “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with US interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond.” A few weeks later, Bush speechwriter David Frum declared to the New York Times Magazine: “An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.”
• Shortly after Salvador Allende became president of Chile in 1970, Nixon’s National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, recorded a conversation in which Secretary of State William Rogers agreed that “we ought, as you say, to cold-bloodedly decide what to do and then do it,” but warned it should be done “discreetly so that it doesn’t backfire.” Rogers predicted that “after all we have said about elections, if the first time a Communist wins the U.S. tries to prevent the constitutional process from coming into play we will look very bad.”
• “The revulsion against war … will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent wartime economy.” Charles E. Wilson, 1944. During World War II he held leading positions overseeing the huge US military production effort; after the war he resumed his position as CEO of General Electric, one of the leading defense corporations.
• Remember Ben Tre? That was the Vietnamese village the Americans destroyed in 1968, saying “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” Since then the Americans have been saving towns all over the globe, in Cambodia, Laos, Panama, Nicaragua, Sudan, Iraq, Yugoslavia and more. Then on Sept 11, 2001, someone, no doubt overcome with gratitude, decided to save some Americans. – Bev Currie, Canada
• United Nations Resolution 1244, adopted in 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to which Serbia was the recognized successor state, and established that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia. Today, Kosovo is independent, because the United States wants it that way, because Serbia is still being punished for its refusal in the 1990s to act like a proper European state displaying subservience to the United States, the European Union, NATO, and capitalism. Independent Kosovo is perhaps the most genuinely gangster-state in the world. It’s led by Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, whom a Council of Europe investigation recently accused of being the boss of a criminal operation to kidnap people and steal their kidneys.(sic) (Associated Press, December 14 and 15, 2010) He and Washington, naturally, are on the best of terms.
• “Look,” said Russian president Vladimir Putin about NATO in 2001, “this is a military organization. It’s moving towards our border. Why?” He subsequently described NATO as “the stinking corpse of the cold war.” (Associated Press, June 16, 2001; Press Trust of India, December 21, 2007)
• Senator John McCain, re: fighting in Georgia, 2008: “I’m interested in good relations between the United States and Russia. But in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” (Washington Post, August 14, 2008) One really has to wonder at times about the sanity of neo-conservatives, or at least their IQ.
• Re: “collateral damage” produced by US bombing in many countries: Killing innocent bystanders when targeting someone else has long been considered murder in Western law.
• “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” – Voltaire
• “The central aim of the war in Afghanistan — planned well before the attacks of September 11, 2001 — was to take advantage of the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution to assert US domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.” – Bill Van Auken, World Socialist Web Site
• “To me, I confess, [countries] are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world.” Lord Curzon, British viceroy of India, speaking about Afghanistan, 1898
• Ricardo Alarcon, President of the Cuban National Assembly, stated in 2008: Cuba allows CNN, AP and Chicago Tribune to maintain offices in Cuba, but the US refuses to allow Cuban journalists to work in the United States.
• Washington’s “Plan Colombia”, launched in 2000, was the militarization of the war on drugs.
• Michael Moore, March 24, 2008: “I see that Frontline on PBS this week has a documentary called ‘Bush’s War’. That’s what I’ve been calling it for a long time. It’s not the ‘Iraq War’. Iraq did nothing. Iraq didn’t plan 9/11. It didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. It DID have movie theaters and bars and women wearing what they wanted and a significant Christian population and one of the few Arab capitals with an open synagogue. But that’s all gone now. Show a movie and you’ll be shot in the head. Over a hundred women have been randomly executed for not wearing a scarf.”
• Michael Collon: “Let’s replace the word ‘democratic’ by ‘with us’ and the word ‘terrorist’ by ‘against us’.”
• The American Century went the way of the Thousand Year Reich.
• Reagan invaded Grenada in October 1983 because he cut and ran from Beirut after the United States lost 241 Marines in the infamous truck bombing. The United States invaded Grenada two days later.
• Noam Chomsky: “The whole debate about the Iranian ‘interference’ in Iraq makes sense only on one assumption; namely, that ‘we own the world’. If we own the world, then the only question that can arise is that someone else is interfering in a country we have invaded and occupied. So if you look over the debate that took place and is still taking place about Iranian interference, no one points out this is insane. How can Iran be interfering in a country that we invaded and occupied? It’s only appropriate on the presupposition that we own the world. Once you have that established in your head, the discussion is perfectly sensible.”
• In late 1997, according to Dana Priest’s book, The Mission, the Bill Clinton White House wanted CENTCOM commander Gen. Anthony Zinni to order his pilots to provoke a military confrontation with Iraq in the no-fly zone by deliberately drawing fire from Iraqi planes.
• Reagan accepted a fateful trade-off when he agreed not to complain about Pakistan’s efforts to acquire a nuclear weapons capability in exchange for Pakistani cooperation in helping the Afghan rebels.
• “The presumption of ‘government incompetence’ is seldom a useful assumption in evaluating the behavior of governments. We only reach such a conclusion if we take their official rhetoric at face value. In terms of ‘achieving democracy’, the official rhetoric, Bush has been ‘incompetent’ in Iraq. But in terms of the real agenda — building permanent bases and controlling the oil — he has in fact been successful. I have found that this is always the pattern: some real agenda is always being achieved by the policies in force, despite the apparent bungling in terms of the official agenda.” – Richard K. Moore
• The 9/11 attacks reflected the anger and rage that US foreign policy had produced in the past and then provided the excuse for US officials to continue such policy in the future.

Upcoming talks by William Blum

Saturday, April 2, 7:00 pm
University of Pittsburgh at Titusville, PA
504 East Main Street
Henne Auditorium
Titusville is about 2 hours by car from Pittsburgh and 2 1/2 hours from Cleveland.
For further information call
Or email Mary Ann Caton: 

Thursday, May 19
Paris, France
Conference: “Ethics and US Foreign Policy in the 21st Century”
Université de Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense, Amphi B-2
All day, beginning at 9 am
Email me for full schedule

Notes

1. See William Blum’s essay on the use of the atomic bomb ^↩
2. For discussion of various aspects of the Marshall Plan see, for example, Joyce & Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and US Foreign Policy 1945-1954 (1972), chapters 13, 16, 17; Sallie Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (1991) passim; Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the world of arts and letters (2000) passim ^↩
3. ^↩
4. The Guardian (London), December 12, 2000; Haaretz (Israel), November 14, 2008 ^↩
5. McClatchy Newspapers, February 26, 2011 ^↩
6. The Bombing of PanAm Flight 103: Case Not Closed ^↩
7. Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 17, 2009

Inside Job: how bankers caused the financial crisis

The film Inside Job brilliantly exposes the corruption in US banking that led to the 2008 crash. We ask four bankers for their verdict on this damning indictment of their world

Peter Bradshaw reviews Inside Job…

• Phillip Inman and Patrick Kingsley
• guardian.co.uk
• Article history

Michael Moore made his debut feature, Roger and Me, he set about vilifying the boss of General Motors, the now deceased Roger B Smith, for destroying his home town of Flint, Michigan. Charles Ferguson’s film Inside Job attempts to blame a wider cast list for the banking crash of 2008 and explains why so little has been done to reform the financial world or bring criminal prosecutions against the main protagonists.

1. Inside Job
2. Production year: 2010
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 12A
5. Runtime: 108 mins
6. Directors: Charles Ferguson
7. Cast: Matt Damon
8. More on this film

His villainous lineup includes bankers, politicians (many of whom were previously bankers), regulators, the credit ratings agencies and academics. When Glenn Hubbard, George Bush’s chief economic adviser and dean of Columbia Business School, is shown as a partisan advocate of deregulation, we have one of the movie’s punch-the-air moments. During the interview, Hubbard, who denies he was corrupted by his paid-for relationships with government, angrily barks: “You’ve got five minutes, mister. Give it your best shot.”

The spotlight has largely bypassed academics in the UK. There are plenty of economists who believed the banks understood what they were doing and supported deregulation. Whether they took large slugs of cash for writing poorly researched, cheerleading reports on the economic miracle in Iceland (pre-crash), as former US central banker Frederic Mishkin is found doing, is less clear. Over here, the relationship between academia and business appears to be more arm’s length, though London Business School dean Sir Andrew Likierman sits on the Barclays board, while Howard Davies, who argued for light-touch regulation while head of the Financial Services Authority, has become director of the London School of Economics. The UK’s chief villian, however, is probably the disgraced, but largely unpunished, banker Sir Fred Goodwin, the former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland, once the fifth-largest bank in the world.

In Inside Job, the name that keeps cropping up is Larry Summers, a friend of President Bill Clinton and more recently Barack Obama. Summers exemplifies the links between cheerleaders in academia, Wall Street, supine regulators and an ignorant Capitol Hill that Ferguson stresses were at the root of the problem. It helps that Summers looks like a mafia boss, but the difficulties in making the case against him are shown by the need to explain financial products like credit default swaps and how securitisation was used by banks to increase their borrowing.

Still, no matter how much it is explained, the general public is not going to understand. How does one go into battle yelling slogans about credit default swaps? The bankers know ignorance is their trump card. Maybe Inside Job will make us more savvy in time for the next crash.

Phillip Inman

The derivatives trader

“The film’s first half-hour was absolutely dead-on. The explanation of what happened was a chilling re-run of all the events that led up to the financial crisis. It also showed very accurately the denial by everybody inside or outside the industry that such a crisis was even occurring – even up to the last minute before Lehman’s bankruptcy.

I have an issue with some of the elements pursued in the rest of the film. One was the vilification of individual people. Chuck Prince, the CEO of Citigroup at the time of the crisis, may have been overpaid – but I don’t think he was particularly at fault. At worst he perhaps should have known more about what was going on, but really he’s just the nice old geezer at the top who shakes people’s hands at cocktail parties. There may be people lower down who knowingly did criminal things, but that is a different matter.

A weak point was the anti-free market and conspiratorial tone of the film. Yes, deregulation did go too far – particularly with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which might have prevented banks gambling with depositors’ money. But to imply that all deregulation in the last 20 years was a conspiracy perpetrated by an academic elite of economists in the pay of the banks is paranoid and absurd.

An oversight by the film was to ignore how risk managers at many banks knowingly failed to voice their fears about the way their companies operated. A risk manager once told me that to raise an issue that undermined the bank’s multi-billion-dollar profits would have been to “sign his own death warrant”. This inability to challenge trading desks generating billions in phantom profits was endemic.

Inside Job clearly catches some of the anti-banker mood, and the public is quite right to be outraged at how banks refinanced at the taxpayers’ expense are paying outsized bonuses. Staff at banks such as RBS should be retained by longer-term incentive schemes such as the one being introduced at Barclays. But, as a free marketeer, I believe banks that have not taken public money should be able to do as they please within the law.”

Ian Hart was a Wall St derivatives trader, before becoming a head-hunter for, among other banks, Lehman Brothers. He now runs Sacred Microdistillery. sacredgin.com

The bank director

“This was a well-researched film that clearly explained the complexities of the crisis and the greed of bankers. It laid the blame squarely where it belongs – at the feet of bankers, of ratings agencies, of regulators – and it interviewed a lot of heavyweight people, such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Eliot Spitzer, Raghuram Rajan and Glenn Hubbard.

It will doubtless make many people – especially those who lost their jobs and savings – angry at not only what the banks did, but that many of the people responsible are still in their jobs, and that no one’s gone to prison. It beggars belief that ordinary taxpayers are facing higher taxes and spending cuts, while bankers walked away scot-free. The film shows that people who had bought a house they couldn’t afford are now living in a tent, whereas bankers have still got their jobs. Consumers enjoyed buying houses that ultimately they couldn’t afford, but mortgages were shoved down their throats without any care on the part of the bankers. In the old days, the bank would say: “We don’t think you can afford that mortgage, so we won’t lend you money.” The film showed how this kind of advice was thrown out of the window.

Unfortunately, it’s clear that for many investment banks business continues pretty much as normal and that another crisis is only a matter of time. Sure, there’s greater scrutiny of bonuses – but many bankers think they were not responsible personally for the crisis and they’re worth every penny they’re paid. Clearly they’re not.

I thought the film also brought out well the “capture” of regulators, politicians and academics who all became cheerleaders for the continued deregulation of finance that began under Ronald Reagan and that culminated in the great crisis. Massive re-regulation is required to ensure that finance is safely locked up in a straitjacket again.

Of particular interest is the dubious role played by academic economists, especially those in the US. Many were paid vast, undeclared sums to produce biased reports saying CDOs and other dodgy derivatives were safe and that Iceland was fine to be gambling with 10 times its annual GDP. The corruption of top US economists and their complete lack of awareness of what they had done was truly shameful.”

The broker

“The film was right that banking became synonymous with living the high life, with drug-taking, and basically being above the law. This culture filtered down from the top, and needs to be stopped and questioned a lot more. In Europe, we have tried to since the crisis. Where I work, we are compliant up to our eyeballs – be it drug checks, expenses checks, or simply the monitoring of all phonecalls and emails.

But it was too simplistic for the film to imply that we need more financial regulation. It’s not a black-and-white issue, and you can’t be that kneejerk: the UK is a service-based economy. I would love that to change, but right now, a lot of the GDP comes from people in and around finance. The City itself employs vast numbers of people – not just as bankers, but also on the periphery – and until we move away from that, and find other ways of employing these people, you can’t just shut down an industry. With very harsh regulation, that’s unfortunately what you risk. As a lot of these banks are global and flexible, they can just go overseas. HSBC’s been threatening for years to move its headquarters to Asia. For the UK, that would be a disaster. So I think the government has to tread a fine line between bringing in regulation bit by bit, and regulating all at once.

I’m one of the few women in banking and it’s really obvious watching Inside Job that this is the case. We see the French minister of finance [Christine Lagarde], there’s a woman from the Securities and Exchange Commission – but they’re few and far between. As they say in the film, banking is such an alpha-male society and it’s very hard for women to succeed within it and yet maintain some sense of femininity. If they had more women in banking, I really think there would be more sense of community, and perhaps things such as this crisis wouldn’t happen quite so often, because you wouldn’t have this sense of being part of a boys’ club.”

The investment banker

“Inside Job ignored the enormous level of consumption by ordinary people that drove debt levels so high. The film suggested it was the bankers and the politicians who were driving the collapse – and fair enough, there was some mis-selling of mortgages. But it wasn’t just mortgages: it was bank debt, credit-card debt, car loans. Blame the banker for providing the credit, but the consumer must also take some of the rap. If you talk to a sole trader, they’ll tell you that when times are good, put some money away for when times are bad. But the consumers just spent and spent, and assumed the good times would go on for ever.

Another angle missed by the film was the role of accounting firms. There is a huge amount of blame to be attributed to them. It was their responsibility to monitor the accounts of banks, and when they signed off a bank’s results, they were stating their confidence in the bank’s ability to trade solvently. The film ignored the failure of accountants to say anything. It talked about regulators and ratings agencies. But the accountancy firms are just as big as some of the larger banks and not to analyse their role in the crisis was a huge omission.

The film was very much in the style of Michael Moore – they’d clipped and edited the interviews to twist slightly what was said in them – but it was also very watchable, succinct and very good at simplifying a chain of events. And the accusation that the worlds of academia and politics were complicit in the crisis was completely valid. There is a lot of cronyism out there, and people who criticised regulation did end up in the Obama government. There’s a gentleman’s club, and they all look after each other.”

Interviews by Patrick Kingsley. The interviewees above wished to remain anonymous.

Mother of all smears

BBC Panorama prepares a ‘mother of all smears’ against Wikileaks and against Israel Shamir, following the Guardian’s preparation softening of the target, says Shamir.

The campaign by the establishment press against Julian Assange is intensifying. CBS’s 60 Minutes tried to trash him last Sunday, but Assange left CBS’ interviewer, Steve Kroft,  floundering. Last Sunday also saw New York Times editor Bill Keller consume several thousand words in the NYT’s Magazine abusing Assange with disgraceful lack of scruple, Assange being a man who gave the New York Times some actual news scoops, instead of its regular staple of gastroporn  from Sam Sifton.  Here Israel Shamir reports, with some personal involvement,  on the impending slurring of Assange  on the BBC, and the attacks on him  in The Guardian. Alexander Cockburn/JStClair

I picked up the phone on the third ring, and a melodious British voice informed me that the BBC wanted to include me in its Panorama programme. The BBC wanted to hear my views on the world, and was especially interested in Wikileaks. Oh what a glorious moment! I felt myself puff with pride. There is something about “the Beeb” that makes my heart flutter! I have always been partial to their style, and I considered it an honour to have the BBC listed on my CV, even though it was over thirty years ago. When I worked in the Bush House on the Strand, the BBC’s Panorama was one of the best investigative programmes anywhere – and suddenly here they are, soliciting my comments! Eager to build a relationship of trust, I answered all their preparatory questions with an unvarnished honesty. I thought I had done well; they offered to fly me to London, or if that were inconvenient they would fly out and speak to me in Moscow – civil chaps, aren’t they?

Looking back, the signs of danger are easy to see. They were producing a programme about Wikileaks, but they had no plans to interview Julian Assange. Perhaps he is too busy? Furthermore, the questions began to take on a sinister tone. I shrugged off the feeling as a by-product of all the dirty politics we were discussing, but a few telephone conversations later my ill feelings finally seeped into my swelled head and it dawned on me what was going on. These nice chaps from the BBC were actually collecting dirt to use against Wikileaks! I was being played for a sucker. Suddenly I felt like Julian Assange, face to face with the honey trap.

The clincher was a letter I just received from producer John Sweeney, outlining the substance of the broadcast. It does not read like a television show, it reads like a criminal indictment. Every wild accusation is listed, and those without a shred of evidence are given pride of place. Most amazing of all, the Sweeney letter includes some lines lifted from a missive I had sent to Julian some time ago. The words were taken out of context and they were a misquotation of the original, but I recognise my prose. Some questions immediately spring to mind. How did the BBC get their hands on my private correspondence? Does the BBC actually steal private mail, or do they hire out? Ominously, this is not the first time this has happened to me. Another private letter of mine was (mis)quoted by The Guardian’s investigative editor David Leigh. Is it too conspiratorial of me to recognise a disturbing pattern? Could it be that three stolen laptops of Julian Assange found their last resting place at Leigh&Sweeney after a brief sojourn at Langley?

John Sweeney and David Leigh are cut from different cloth, but they both know how to play the journalism game. Leigh smoulders with jealousy. He plays the Salieri to Assange’s Mozart, but he thinks of himself as theunsung hero of Wikileaks. A hero? Rather, a villain. As Bill Keller of the New York Times admitted it was Leigh who “concluded that these rogue leaks (he engineered them) released The Guardian from any pledge”. Since then, he’s started his own private war against Wikileaks. His liaison with Sweeney was a convenient one. Sweeney is a pit bull; he’s the sort of guy you assign to smear Mother Theresa. He has skated along thus far because only the very rich might contemplate suing the BBC, but he has been found by a court to be a criminal libeller at least one time. Sweeney’s lunatic outbursts of fury are calculated to intimidate interviewees and have been preserved for . It is all too plain to me now why Assange and company refused to have anything to do with Panorama and its pre-planned outcome. It is all too obvious to me now why they came hunting for your humble narrator.

The Panorama programme on Wikileaks will run on February 7, 2011, the very day that the trial of Julian Assange will be reopened. The result of the trial is unpredictable, not so the programme. Assange has more than a chance before the British courts, but if this Sweeney letter is anything to judge by, Panorama will leave no survivors. This is the British version of The Empire Strikes Back, the ultimate response to those who try to challenge mainstream corporate media’s hold over the public mind. In the meantime, the FBI and Scotland Yard have been keeping busy, making as many as 45 raids on various premises connected with Wikileaks, so that the alliance between the BBC and The Guardian is an ethereal mirror of some very earthy, if not subterranean, activity.

I doubt we will see the BBC’s Panorama make any attempt to examine what was disclosed by Wikileaks. I’m sure they will neglect to include Julian Assange’s philosophy of clarity as the people’s weapon against conspiracies of powerful; nor will they discuss the wilful redacting of the cables by The Guardian, or theirarbitrary use of misleading headlines. I do not think they will investigate The Guardian’s journalistic attempts to destroy Julian Assange, including publishing an anticipatory book about the fall of Wikileaks. I wonder if they will inquire into OpenLeaks, the Guardian-sponsored alternative to Wikileaks, and how their version of “transparency” might be used to unmask whistleblowers and deliver their leaks back to their masters.

The one thing I do expect to see: smears! Some of these smears will deal with the alleged rape. I am no prophet, but I am willing to bet they will not mention these salient facts: the fact that the alleged victim was seen enjoying the company of the alleged rapist the day after the alleged crime, and the breathless twitterssent by the alleged victim after the alleged crime about how “amazing” it was to hang out with Julian and the Wikileaks crew. They will certainly not bring up Karl Rove’s involvement in the entrapment, nor will they list the complainant’s connections to the CIA. I suspect they will not bother to interview the eminent Swedish judge Brita Sundberg-Weitman about why she thinks the extradition request is illegal, and why she thinks that the people behind the request are pursuing their own agenda. I doubt the programme will quote Swedish attorney Marianne Ny, who said that it is better to keep a man in jail even if he turns out to be innocent.

Judging by Sweeney’s letter, there will be more than smears; there will be megasmears! Israel Shamir (that’s me) is a veritable lightning rod for smear jobs. Some folks can’t take the heat, and frankly, I don’t blame them. The Sweeney letter accuses me of being an “anti-Semite” and a “Holocaust denier”. Presumably it will be repeated in the broadcast.

To ensure their case is fireproof, the BBC has hired expert “anti-Semitism fighter” Professor Richard Evans – the BBC spares no expense when the game is afoot. Evans was an expert witness in the David Irving libel trial, and walked away with seventy thousand pounds ($110,000) from the court and a grand total of a quarter of a million pounds ($400,000) altogether for “fighting” anti-Semitism.

This windfall overexcited the Professor and, eager to repeat the coup, he tried to frame a feminist scholar Diane Purkiss for Holocaust denial as she expressed some unusual thoughts about… no, not Jews but witches in medieval England. This was a bridge too far, and he was forced to apologise grudgingly. Evans is no stranger to perjury: under cross examination, Evans, under oath, stated that he would not publish a book and thereby gain further profit from his participation in the trial. Yet of course he did publish a book, and yes, he profited from it. His enthusiasm is not hard to understand – he’s found a real gold mine! Without his reputation as an “anti-Semitism fighter”, his “glumly unimaginative style … [that] makes Evans’s account like a long draft of flat beer” (as Walden said in Bloomberg) would leave him on the margins of life. I’ll be glad to refute Professor Evans’s insights, but let’s maintain a proper historical perspective. I’d reserve my comments until after the BBC hires Evans to analyse the anti-Semitism of George VI, Shakespeare, Eliot and Marx.

I wrote hundreds of pages on the topic, but for the benefit of the reader I’ll sum it up. Naturally, as a son of Jewish parents and a man living in the Jewish state and deeply and intimately involved with Jewish culture, I harbour no hate to a Jew because he is a Jew. I doubt many people do. However I did and do criticise various aspects of Jewish Weltanschauung like so many Jewish and Christian thinkers before me, or even more so for I witnessed crimes of the Jewish state that originated in this worldview.

As for the accusation of “Holocaust denial”, my family lost too many of its sons and daughters for me to deny the facts of Jewish tragedy, but I do deny its religious salvific significance implied in the very term ‘Holocaust’; I do deny its metaphysical uniqueness, I do deny the morbid cult of Holocaust and I think every God-fearing man, a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim should reject it as Abraham rejected and smashed idols. I deny that it is good to remember or immortalise such traumatic events, and I wrote many articles against modern obsession with massacres, be it Jewish holocaust of 1940s, Armenian massacre of 1915, Ukrainian “holodomor”, Polish Katyn, Khmer Rouge etc. Poles, Armenians, Ukrainians understood me, so did Jews – otherwise I would be charged with the crime of factual denial which is known to the Israeli law. It took Evans and Sweeney to feint indignation.

I am not offended easily by morons. However, this ‘denier’ rhetoric keeps many of my erstwhile associates at arm’s length; no one likes being labelled, and I do not wish these labels to be rubbed off onto my friends, especially those like Julian Assange who never were interested in the subject. My Zionist opponents are obsessed with race and holocausts; I am not. Moreover, now I take time off my long involvement with the Jewish topic, involvement that began with translating the works of the Modern Hebrew writer S Y Agnon, moved on to translating the Medieval Hebrew works of Samuel Zacuto, and then finally had a go at undoing the crimes of Zionism. I do not renounce anything I’ve said or wrote, but there is life outside this subject. Wikileaks is the best example of this. Wikileaks has changed the face of the Middle East more radically than my ramblings ever could. Without Wikileaks, Al-Jazeera would never have published its Palestine Papers, and Tunisia and Egypt would not have begun their battle away from dictatorship and towards freedom.

These attacks on me have two reasons: one, to undermine Wikileaks and Julian Assange by association with me, “antisemite and denier”; two, to undermine my efforts to give you, readers, the cables unfiltered by the embedded media. This was confirmed by a new piece in the Guardian that provided foretaste of the forthcoming Panorama, like a 0.5″ tracer precedes payload. It repeats the same points – how anyone can have a view on Belarus that differs from that of Mr Leigh? The piece concludes: “while the newspapers hammered out a deal to handle the cables in a responsible fashion, Shamir’s backstairs antics certainly made WikiLeaks look rather less so”. Dear Guardian editors, your “responsible fashion” was analysed in the Counterpunchand found wanting. Moreover, Bill Keller admitted that every publication of the cables was screened and vetted by “unsmiling men” from CIA and State Department. I have tried to free the cables from the cage you locked them in. I am responsible too – but to people, not to officialdom.

I was mainly involved with the post-Soviet space, and there I delivered cables to very different media outlets, to the mainstream Russkiy Reporter, the mass-circulation Komsomolskaya Pravda, to opposition Novaya Gazeta, to the Naviny, an independent site in Belarus because I did not like The Guardian’s arrangement of keeping embedded media in full control. If it worked in the East, it may work in the West: we may free ourselves from their mind control.

I believe the viewers of Panorama are too smart to be misled by ad hominem attacks. I believe you will judge me and Julian Assange by what we do: breaking the conspiracy of the powerful against the powerless. This is what the BBC is trying to make us forget. We have spent too much time and space dealing with their indictments of the messengers. Instead, we should indict them for trying to distract us from the message.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More may be revealed in the remaining cables.

Profiteering Leaves World open to Future Price Manipulation

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

describes the legislative climate when the bill passed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biotech Crops Expand Globally in 2009

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

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

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

A Wary Future

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

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

Afghans: Still on the edge of extinction?

It’s hard to write about Afghanistan with any kind of accuracy because only approximately 7% of Americans even actually know where the freaking place is — let alone know anything about what is actually going on there.   I mean seriously.  How many of us have taken the time to read about Afghanistan in WikiLeaks or even USA Today?  And how many of us have even actually been there?  It’s not as if Afghanistan was Hawaii or Cancun.

But I still want to write about Afghanistan anyway — even if it does mean having to do some actual research.  But why would I want to do that?  Easy answer there — because most of the taxes that Americans pay will eventually end up in Afghanistan, not Cancun.  So let’s follow the money.

According to journalist Tom Engelhardt, “While Americans fight bitterly over whether the stimulus package for the domestic economy was too large or too small, few in the U.S. even notice that the American stimulus package in Kabul, Islamabad, Baghdad, and elsewhere in our embattled Raj is going great guns.  Embassies the size of pyramids are still being built; military bases to stagger the imagination continue to be constructed; and nowhere, not even in Iraq, is it clear that Washington is committed to packing up its tents, abandoning its billion-dollar monuments, and coming home.”

And just exactly how is this huge tax investment in Afghanistan going?  According to journalist Jeremy Scahill, it’s not going so good.  “The US killing of civilians, combined with a widely held perception that the Afghan government exists only for facilitating the corruption of powerful warlords, drug dealers and war criminals, is producing a situation in which the Taliban and the Haqqani network are gaining support from the Pashtun heartland in communities that would not otherwise be backing them.”  Good grief.  No wonder nobody in America seems to want to know anything about what is happening in Afghanistan.  It’s all just one big mess of bad news!

And, according to the Washington Post, even Afghanistan’s president is pissed off at the huge U.S. military presence there.  “Karzai has long been publicly critical of civilian casualties at the hands of U.S. and NATO troops and has repeatedly called for curtailing night raids into Afghan homes.  Under Petraeus and his predecessor, such raids by U.S. Special Operations troops have increased sharply, to about 200 a month, or six times the number being carried out 18 months ago, said a senior NATO military official, who requested anonymity so that he could speak candidly about the situation.  These operations capture or kill their target 50 to 60 percent of the time, the official said.”  That’s a whole freaking bunch of dead Afghans.

“Karzai said that he wanted American troops off the roads and out of Afghan homes,” WaPo continued, “and that the long-term presence of so many foreign soldiers would only worsen the war. His comments placed him at odds with U.S. commander Gen. David H. Petraeus, who has made capture-and-kill missions a central component of his counterinsurgency strategy, and who claims the 30,000 new troops have made substantial progress in beating back the insurgency.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/13/AR2010111304001.html?sid=ST2010111305091

But I did manage to locate some good news as well.  Apparently if you can’t find a job in America, you can always get a hot new job in Afghanistan, working with the US/AID.  Check this out.  “Looking for a challenge?  The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is actively recruiting experienced officers to serve in Afghanistan.  These are non-career Foreign Service Limited Appointments, for up to five years, requiring:  Eight years of relevant experience, four of which must be overseas; Bachelor’s degree or higher; U.S. citizenship.” http://www.usaid.gov/locations/asia/countries/afghanistan/opportunities.html.  And did you notice that bit about America (and you) staying there for the next five years?  So much for a quick end to that war.

“There are about 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan [as of November 2010],” the Washington Post also tells us.  Talk about your job opportunities!

Next I read a book called “My Forbidden Face,” published back before Bush and Cheney started bombing the crap out of Afghanistan — back when the original “Taliban” were still in power in Kabul.  Writing under the pseudonym of “Latifa,” its author vividly described how the Taliban back in the 1990s basically tried to kill off all Afghan women — and apparently they almost succeeded too.  The Taliban imprisoned women in their homes, beat them with steel-tipped whips, hung them on gibbets in public, deprived them of all medical care, took away their jobs, starved them, raped them, mutilated them and did everything else that they possible could to make Afghan women extinct.  Obviously the Taliban were not thinking ahead!

Without women to give birth to the next generation, all Afghans (not just Afghan women) faced the danger of becoming extinct.

And then the book’s author suggests that these brutal 1990s Taliban had been sponsored and financed by Pakistan — and that in fact many of the Taliban were even Pakistanis themselves.

Pakistan’s connection with the Taliban then got me to wondering how a small country like Pakistan could even afford to mount such an expensive campaign.  The answer to that question lies in Washington too.  I betcha dollars to donuts that most of the money to train and support Talibs was pulled out of Pakistan’s deep pockets — pockets stuffed with American military aid.

And apparently, unlike the Taliban, Pakistan WAS thinking ahead.  “Without all those pesky Afghans standing around and mucking it all up, the wealth of Afghanistan would be ours for the taking!” they apparently said to themselves — and started out on a campaign to annihilate Afghans in the above-stated manner, whether they were women or men (or even children).  Then as more and more Afghans died, Pakistan happily started putting its plan into action by seizing Afghan land next to their border, the area we now call “Af-Pak”.  Yeah right.

“But Jane,” you might ask, “how does what happened back in the 1990s pertain to what is happening in Afghanistan today?”  Good question.  And since I couldn’t find an answer to that question anywhere else in my reading explorations, I’m going to have to make this one up. Here it is:

“If Pakistan thought it was such a hot idea to sponsor the Taliban before, then isn’t it likely that they are probably sponsoring them again now?”  Pakistan’s ploy to seize Afghan land worked for them before — so why change policy in mid-stream?

And what else has my research taught me?  Hmmm.  First Genghis Khan killed Afghans.  Then the British killed Afghans.  Then the Soviets and the Americans took turns killing Afghans.  Then the Mujahideen killed Afghans.  Then the Taliban killed Afghans.  And Pakistanis killed Afghans.  And Afghans themselves even obliged by killing themselves.  And now the Americans (and their allies from Europe and Canada) have jumped back into this highly-popular hot game called “Let’s kill us some Afghans”.

But WHY are people from all over the freaking world so completely intent on killing Afghans?  I clearly don’t understand this.  How come all of the players in this bloody game seem to be trying their level best to force Afghans into extinction?  And you thought that the polar bears had it hard!

According to Jeremy Scahill, “The US strategy seems to be to force the Taliban to the table through a fierce killing campaign.  According to the US military, over a ninety-day period this past summer, US and coalition Special Operations Forces killed or captured more than 2,900 ‘insurgents,’ with an estimated dozen killed a day.”

And if this new insurgence of the Taliban is being sponsored by Pakistan too like the old one apparently was, wouldn’t it make sense to cut off all U.S. military aid to Pakistan and thus cut off this hydra at its head?

But what if all U.S. military aid to Pakistan was to be suddenly cut off and Pakistan was then summarily forced to stop back-dooring funds and money to the Taliban — and as a result America finally began to get the upper hand in Kandahar and Helmand and finally started to win the longest freaking war in American history?

But even if America does win its war against the Taliban (be they old or new) it will once again be the Afghans themselves (both men and women) who will lose because their country will still be occupied by Americans — and the Afghans, like the polar bears, will still be in danger of extinction.

And even if Washington does finally win this unwinable “war,” would that mean that Americans would finally pack up their occupation and go home?  Apparently not.  Apparently Afghanistan also serves as a buffer zone of influence between Russia, India, China and lord knows who else.  Will Washington ever give up the Khyber Pass and the Oil (formerly Silk) Road?  Not bloody likely.

I guess the main thing that I have learned from my research so far is that while everyone in the freaking world seems to be warring over this particular piece of the turf, it is the average Afghan who suffers.

PS:  Here’s just one last piece of research that I did — running this essay past a friend of mine who is an expert on Afghanistan.  And here’s his reply:  “I don’t see any glaring errors per se in this article, Jane, but you might want to let readers know early on that while Latifa’s position might appeal to many Americans who still buy into the ‘Great White Saviors of Helpless Brown Women for Savage Brown Men’ concept because it is rather erotic and therefore difficult to unseat because it does not reside in the cerebrum but rather somewhere in the limbic system or reproductive glands, the same horrible things were being done to Afghan men as well as Afghan women during that time.”  Got it.

“And here are some further points your readers might not know about the 1990s Taliban:  First, the Taliban beat both men and women because they were focused on physical means of public discipline as a way of maintaining control — using techniques like those used by the Romans (and most historic cultures).

“Second, the Taliban were trying to restore order to a very chaotic situation.  Before the Taliban rose to power, the U.S., Pakistan, the Saudis and the Iranians had all funded the mujahideen overthrow of the Najibullah regime, but the result by April 1992 was violent chaos.  And the Taliban did succeed in restoring order where, since 2002, the combined U.S., ISAF and Afghan forces have failed to do so.  Evidence:  The Taliban could and did ban opium production in 2000.

“But while my comments mainly reinforce your points, those little factoids might still be a surprise, alas.”  Yes, and it is also a surprise to me that the human race still hasn’t learned a better way to resolve conflicts than to resort to the old Roman (and caveman) tactics of violence and killing.

PPS:  When I was in Kabul a few years ago, I met a whole bunch of REALLY NICE Afghans — which has made me painfully aware that, right at this very moment, Americans, Canadians, the Taliban, Pakistanis, NATO forces, etc. aren’t just over there killing anonymous and nameless “Afghans”.  They are killing real people who have families just like you and me and who are hard-working people who bleed when you hurt them and who are NICE.  And some of them are my friends.

In her recent book, “Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories,” journalist Anna Badkhen writes about the real people, the innocent bystanders in Afghanistan who get killed in its wars.  “We often dismiss the peopled landscapes of Afghanistan—and Iraq and Kashmir, Chechnya and Somalia—as merely a sere battleground of the global war against Islamist terrorism.  We erect an emotional wall between ourselves and the millions of nameless, two-dimensional figures that move across our television screens, foreign and strange, almost cartoon-like, unsung.  One goes up.  One goes down. We switch to a different channel.”

I met Badkhen once at Camp Victory in Iraq, when we were roommates at Camp Victory’s can city.  Ever resourceful, she loaned me some masking tape so that I could repair a broken shoe strap.  She just looked just too young and innocent to be a hardened war veteran — but she was.

Badkhen states that, between when the U.S. started keeping records in 2007 and the publication of her book, 7,324 Afghan civilians had died in the war.  And a whole lot more of them have died due to lack of medical facilities, etc.  “One in eight Afghan women dies during childbirth.  One in four children dies before the age of 5, mostly of waterborne diseases.  Only a third of Afghans have access to clean drinking water; fewer than one in 10 have access to sanitation facilities.  Life expectancy, both for men and women, is 44 years.”  Yet no one ever tallies these deaths that are directly related to war.

“‘Peace Meals’ is a tribute to all my host families who live, and perish, on the edges of the world.  It is my invitation to connect with the ordinary people trapped in mass violence of the last decade in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and in East Africa; to break bread with them; and to peer past the looking glass of warfare led or backed by the United States into the lives of the people who, despite the violence and privation that kill their loved ones and decimate their towns, somehow, persevere.  Even if they are not mentioned in the daily news feed, they have names.”

PPPPS:  Afghans aren’t the only ones getting killed over there.  Americans are too.  Journalist David Pratt has this to say about that:  “…More recently, just a few weeks ago in fact, I met a 22-year-old British marine called Ryan Gorman in Helmand, Afghanistan.  As a sniper with 45 Commando, his mental snapshots were of a different kind.  ‘Lots of the lads here when they fire back are shooting at shapes and blurs, but I could draw you a picture of the men I see, even the features on their faces.’  Being a sniper is not something Gorman likes to talk about when back home in East Kilbride. ‘Even my closest mates wouldn’t understand,’ he confides.”  Me neither.

“But then just who,” Pratt points out, “other than soldiers themselves, could ever be expected to understand such experiences?  How many of us can honestly relate to what it must be like to watch a close friend die horribly in battle, or carry the psychological weight of having ‘confirmed kills’ attributed to you?”  http://www.heraldscotland.com/understanding-generation-kill-1.830158

Who indeed?

They’re Leaving as Heroes?

“They’re leaving as heroes. I want them to walk home with pride in their hearts,” declared Col. John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in Iraq. ¹

It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes of an American, enough to make him choke up.

Enough to make him forget.

But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured … the people of that unhappy land have 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 lie in wait for children to pick them up … an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight the American invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia … a river of blood runs 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. Iraq is forced by the United States to continue paying reparations for its own invasion of Kuwait in 1990. How much will the American heroes pay the people of Iraq?

“Unhappy the land that has no heroes …
No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes.”
– Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo

“What we need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war; something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved to be incompatible.”
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Perhaps the groundwork for that heroism already exists … February 15, 2003, a month before the US invasion of Iraq, probably the largest protest in human history, between six and ten million protesters took to the streets of some 800 cities in nearly sixty countries across the globe.

Iraq. Love it or leave it.

PanAm 103

The British government recently warned Libya against celebrating the one-year anniversary of Scotland’s release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan who’s the only person ever convicted of the 1988 blowing up of PanAm flight 103 over Scotland, which took the lives of 270 largely Americans and British. Britain’s Foreign Office has declared: “On this anniversary we understand the continuing anguish that al-Megrahi’s release has caused his victims both in the U.K. and the U.S. He was convicted for the worst act of terrorism in British history. Any celebration of al-Megrahi’s release would be tasteless, offensive and deeply insensitive to the victims’ families.”

John Brennan, President Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser, stated that the United States has “expressed our strong conviction” to Scottish officials that Megrahi should not remain free. Brennan criticized what he termed the “unfortunate and inappropriate and wrong decision” to allow Megrahi’s return to Libya on compassionate grounds on Aug. 20, 2009 because he had cancer and was not expected to live more than about three months. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement saying that the United States “continues to categorically disagree” with Scotland’s decision to release Megrahi a year ago. “As we have expressed repeatedly to Scottish authorities, we maintain that Megrahi should serve out the entirety of his sentence in prison in Scotland.” ² The US Senate has called for an investigation and family members of the crash victims have demanded that Megrahi’s medical records be released. The Libyan’s failure to die as promised has upset many people.

But how many of our wonderful leaders are upset that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi spent eight years in prison despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that he had anything to do with the bombing of flight 103? The Scottish court that convicted him knew he was innocent. To understand that just read their 2001 “Opinion of the Court”, or read my analysis of it at killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm.

As to the British government being so upset about Libya celebrating Megrahi’s release — keeping in mind that it strongly appears that UK oil deals with Libya played more of a role in his release than his medical condition did — we should remember that in July 1988 an American Navy ship in the Persian Gulf, the Vincennes, shot down an Iranian passenger plane, taking the lives of 290 people; i.e., more than died from flight 103. And while the Iranian people mourned their lost loved ones, the United States celebrated by handing out medals and ribbons to the captain and crew of the Vincennes. ³ The shootdown had another consequence: It inspired Iran to take revenge, which it did in December of that year, financing the operation to blow up PanAm 103 (carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –- General Command).

Why do they hate us?

Passions are flying all over the place concerning the proposed building of an Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks from 9/11 Ground Zero in New York. Even people who are not particularly anti-Muslim think it would be in bad taste, offensive. But implicit in all the hostility is the idea that what happened on that fateful day in 2001 was a religious act, fanatic Muslims acting as Muslims attacking infidels. However — even if one accepts the official government version of 19 Muslims hijacking four airliners — the question remains: Why did they choose the targets they chose? If they wanted to kill lots of American infidels why not fly the planes into the stands of packed football or baseball stadiums in the midwest or the south? Certainly a lot less protected than the Pentagon or the financial center of downtown Manhattan. Why did they choose symbols of US military might and imperialism? Because it was not a religious act, it was a political act. It was revenge for decades of American political and military abuse in the Middle East. ⁴ It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to continuous hateful policies of Washington, there were countless acts of terrorism against American diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations; nothing to do with religion.

Somehow, American leaders have to learn that their country is not exempt from history, that their actions have consequences.

Afghanistan

In their need to defend the US occupation of Afghanistan, many Americans have cited the severe oppression of women in that desperate land and would have you believe that the United States is the last great hope of those poor ladies. However, in the 1980s the United States played an indispensable role in the overthrow of a secular and relatively progressive Afghan government, one which endeavored to grant women much more freedom than they’ll ever have under the current government, more perhaps than ever again. Here are some excerpts from a 1986 US Army manual on Afghanistan discussing the policies of this government concerning women: “provisions of complete freedom of choice of marriage partner, and fixation of the minimum age at marriage at 16 for women and 18 for men”; “abolished forced marriages”; “bring [women] out of seclusion, and initiate social programs”; “extensive literacy programs, especially for women”; “putting girls and boys in the same classroom”; “concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics”. ⁵

The overthrow of this government paved the way for the coming to power of an Islamic fundamentalist regime, followed by the awful Taliban. And why did the United States in its infinite wisdom choose to do such a thing? Mainly because the Afghan government was allied with the Soviet Union and Washington wanted to draw the Russians into a hopeless military quagmire — “We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War”, said Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser. ⁶

The women of Afghanistan will never know how the campaign to raise them to the status of full human beings would have turned out, but this, some might argue, is but a small price to pay for a marvelous Cold War victory.

Cuba

Why does the mainstream media routinely refer to Cuba as a dictatorship? Why is it not uncommon even for people on the left to do the same? I think that many of the latter do so in the belief that to say otherwise runs the risk of not being taken seriously, largely a vestige of the Cold War when Communists all over the world were ridiculed for following Moscow’s party line. But what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship? No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is, if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money — secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba — would own or control most of the media worth owning or controlling?

Is it “free elections” that Cuba lacks? They regularly have elections at municipal, regional and national levels. Money plays virtually no role in these elections; neither does party politics, including the Communist Party, since candidates run as individuals.⁷ Again, what is the standard by which Cuban elections are to be judged? Most Americans, if they gave it any thought, might find it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic election, without great concentrations of corporate money, would look like, or how it would operate. Would Ralph Nader finally be able to get on all 50 state ballots, take part in national television debates, and be able to match the two monopoly parties in media advertising? If that were the case, I think he’d probably win; and that’s why it’s not the case. Or perhaps what Cuba lacks is our marvelous “electoral college” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. If we really think this system is a good example of democracy why don’t we use it for local and state elections as well?

Is Cuba a dictatorship because it arrests dissidents? Thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. Many have been beaten by police and mistreated while incarcerated. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. (This is documented by Cuba in a 1999 suit against the United States detailing $181.1 billion in compensation for victims: the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding or disabling of 2,099 others. The Cuban suit has been in the hands of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the United Nations since 2001, a committee made up of all 15 members of the Security Council, which of course includes the United States, and which may account for the inaction on the matter.)

Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government agents. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known members of that organization? In recent years the United States has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents. While others may call Cuba’s security policies dictatorship, I call it self-defense.⁸

The terrorist list

As casually and as routinely as calling Cuba a dictatorship, the mainstream media drops the line into news stories that “Hezbollah [or Hamas, or FARC, etc.] is considered a terrorist group by the United States”, stated as matter-of-factly as saying that Hezbollah is located in Lebanon. Inclusion on the list limits an organization in various ways, such as its ability to raise funds and travel internationally. And inclusion is scarcely more than a political decision made by the US government. Who is put on or left off the State Department’s terrorist list bears a strong relation to how supportive of US or Israeli policies the group is. The list, for example, never includes any of the anti-Castro Cuban groups or individuals in Florida although those people have carried out literally hundreds of terrorist acts over the past few decades, in Latin America, in the US, and in Europe. As you read this, the two men responsible for blowing up a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, are walking around free in the Florida sunshine. Imagine that Osama bin Laden was walking freely around the Streets of an Afghan or Pakistan city taking part in political demonstrations as Posada does in Florida. Venezuela asked the United States to extradite Posada five years ago and is still waiting.

Bosch and Posada are but two of hundreds of Latin-American terrorists who’ve been given haven in the United States over the years. ⁹ Various administrations, both Democrat and Republican, have also provided close support of terrorists in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, including those with known connections to al Qaeda. Yet, in the grand offices of the State Department sit learned men who list Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”, along with Syria, Sudan and Iran. ¹⁰ That’s the complete list.

Meanwhile, the five Cubans sent to Miami to monitor the anti-Castro terrorists are in their 12th year in US prisons. The Cuban government made the very foolish error of turning over to the FBI the evidence of terrorist activities gathered by the five Cubans. Instead of arresting the terrorists, the FBI arrested the five Cubans (sic).

Steroids

“Hall of Shamer: Clemens Indicted” — page one headline in large type about fabled baseball pitcher Roger Clemens charged with lying to Congress about his use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. ¹¹ Of all the things that athletes put into their bodies to improve their health, fitness and performance, why are steroids singled out? Doesn’t taking vitamin and mineral supplements give an athlete an advantage over athletes who don’t take them? Should these supplements be banned from sport competition? Vitamin and mineral supplements are not necessarily any more “natural” than steroids, which in fact are very important in our body chemistry; among the steroids are the male and female sex hormones. Moreover, why not punish those who follow a “healthy diet” because of the advantage this may give them?

Notes

1. Washington Post, August 19, 2010
2. Associated Press, August 21, 2010
3. Newsweek, July 13, 1992
4. See chapter one of Blum’s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
5. US Department of the Army, Afghanistan, A Country Study (1986), pp.121, 128, 130, 223, 232
6. See Brzezinski’s Wikipedia entry
7. See Anti-Empire Report of September 25, 2006, 3rd item, for more information about the Cuban election process
8. For a detailed discussion of Cuba’s alleged political prisoners see article ‘Cuba and the Number of “Political Prisoners”‘, Huffington Post, August 24th 2010
9. Rogue State, Chapter 9
10. See State Department: www.state.gov/s/ct/c14151.htm
11. The Examiner (Washington, DC), August 20, 2010

The Role of Heroin In Sustaining The Afghan “war”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Materialism that Sustains the Western Democracies is Exhausting Itself

Interview with Fredrick Toben…

Dr. Fredrick Toben is a German author and founder and former director of the Adelaide Institute. He has written numerous books on education, political science and history and is best known as a historical revisionist who has extensively argued the veracity of Holocaust accounts by the Jewish historians. Due to his holocaust denial, he has been imprisoned three times in Germany, United Kingdom and Australia.

This is an in-depth interview with Dr. Toben in which we’ve discussed his viewpoints regarding holocaust, the unconditional supports of the United States for Israel, the plight of Palestinian nation under the Israeli occupation and the fate of Middle East peace process.

Kourosh Ziabari: Western politician usually boast of their commitment to liberal values and democratic principles such as the freedom of speech and human rights; however, you were sentenced to prison two times as a result of expressing your viewpoints and ideas. Should the same case happen in a third-world, non-aligned country such as Iran, one can hardly imagine the extent of international condemnations and criticism that would come next. Aggregately, you spent 12 months in prison and this should be very painful. Tell us about your experiences in the prisons of Germany, United Kingdom and Australia.

Fredrick Toben: I think the best way to begin answering this question is by repeating my sometime misunderstood quip: ‘The world is my prison’. This realization has been strengthened by my regularly visiting Iran since 1999 when I left Mannheim Prison after seven months and spent a week in Teheran. I was impressed with the Iranian youth who had a strong national bond with their country, so different to the Germans and other peoples in the so-called western democracies.

This difference is one of mindset. In the West we have pushed the hedonistic-consumer life-style to the point where individuals self-destruct through substance abuse and nihilistic thought processes that suggest life is fun and games. As a teacher I opposed such a world view because the act of thinking about things is actually hard work. Admittedly, for some it is easier than for others but all of us should have to think about our value system, the guide that enables us to lead a productive and balanced life.

I was impressed how determined Iranian students are in their attitudes towards life. Admittedly, it helps that there are still some legal constraints that support a form of public modesty, something we have lost in the west. I was also impressed by the wisdom they expressed, for example, some could not understand why in the West an individual who has personal problems, as if that is an abnormal thing, goes off and pays money to a stranger who then listens to his personal problems, often about his most intimate problems. I was informed that in Iran this matter is handled by a person visiting family and friends, cousins, aunts or uncles, who then advise on how best to solve a pressing problem. I have been advised that now there is also a new growth industry – psychological counselling, which is a brain-child of the Freudian mindset, and in turn its wellspring is found in Talmud, the Jewish moral guide. It is little wonder that too many individuals cannot accept such thoughts intruding into their value system and becoming a part of their Weltanschauung-world view.

Just getting back to freedom as such, if we use the concept freedom then we must always ask the questions: freedom from what and freedom for what? In the West we have the freedom to self-destruct, this being the logical consequences of consumer society’s motor that predatory capitalism has constructed for us. I have just returned from a seven-week American tour and saw the tragedies being played out as the financial system is crashing all around and vainly trying to resurrect itself. The home foreclosures are a catastrophe, but as is fitting within the hedonistic blame-game, the individuals who received loans from banks that they could never repay are blamed for causing their own destruction. This is sad because we should be looking at the system operating in one of the wealthiest countries in the world that permits poverty and homelessness to flourish while individuals within that system receive millions of dollars in performance bonuses.

As far as my prison time is concerned, I refuse to adopt a victim mentality because that is unproductive. As Captain Eric May’s wife, Gretchen, reminded me when I visited them in July this year in Houston, as she tended to her totally disabled husband, “It’s useless to sit on the pity-pot and better to get on with the job’. That’s the imperative, to get on with the job, and if your body gives up on you, then it is the brain that sees you through. This is also true of prison itself. The authorities may have your body but they still do not have your mind, not yet. There were moved afoot to declare individuals who refuse to believe in the ‘Holocaust’ as ‘delusional’, the first step to have them psychiatrically committed. But then we know how such a story tragically ends, as in the 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

In 1999 I spent time at Yalta, Crimea, where I met a psychiatrist who informed me how he had to certify insane any Soviet Union dissenter. Anyone who refused to go along with Marxism as a state ideology would be given the treatment. In Poland up to 1989 it was a dogma to believe that the Germans perpetrated the Katyn Massacre, when in fact it was the mainly Jewish staffed Soviet secret service that did it. The ‘Holocaust’ has reached this stage in a number of European countries – and we have to ask ourselves why this is so.

The usual response is that questioning the ‘holocaust’ is hurtful to the survivors and it is defaming the memory of the dead, and it is also diminishing the Nazi war-crimes and will lead to a re-surgence of Nazism. All of these reasons are baseless because history does not repeat itself in any such detail. Further, any ‘Holocaust’ trial is a mere show-trial reminiscent of the Soviet show trials where the accused is already guilty but where a confession of guilt helps to minimize the sentence. During the witch trial era a show of contrition and remorse helped to make the execution a little swifter because it eliminated torture sessions prior to being executed.

Any country that enacts such laws on the pretext of protecting the ‘Holocaust’ is perverting its legal system. The Austrians, Germans and Swiss have done it, but the Anglo-Common Law countries are resisting it vehemently because they can see that it could have a backlash on its own system of law, which guarantees basic individual rights.

But it must be remembered that all western democracies have that far more subtler mechanism of imprisonment for its people, namely the financial straight jacket. In today’s world the only value that a person needs to develop is his credit worthiness, while such things as character are irrelevant. A person’s credit rating supersedes all, until one begins to question the underpinning ideology of this financial system, which, among others, is upheld by the ‘Holocaust’ ideology.

KZ: Let’s talk about the main issue of our concern. Some scholars and thinkers believe that, in order to escape from the responsibility of hosting the Jewish immigrants who were displaced following the Second World War, Canada, the United States, Germany and Britain, planned the establishment of a Jewish state on the Palestinian land so as to get away with the burden of receiving the Jewish refugees themselves. What do you think about this viewpoint?

FT: The Second World War’s legacy is still with us to this day and that is why it is important to have an historical perspective on all this, namely that World War One and World War Two were actually a 30-year war period, which can be called a European civil war. The outcome was the establishment of the State of Israel that is quite clear when one asks: who benefited from this conflict? The Zionist program of the 1890s had come to fruition at the expense of the Palestinians. The fabricated ‘Holocaust’ narrative assists in cementing the myth that Palestine was a land without people, and the world knows that to this day ethnic cleansing continues unabated with the western democracies not lifting a finger to stop this process.

When White House correspondent of over 50 years, Lebanese Helen Thomas, was asked about the Palestinian crisis she responded honestly: send the Jews back home. Where is home, she was asked. Germany and Poland, she replied. The next day she apologized and lost her job.

It must be remembered that any kind of war is multi-faceted, as we witnessed in our time with the Iraq-Iran war, the 2003 Iraq invasion by the Anglo-American-Zionist forces, the Afghan conflict and the current intention by these forces to attack Iran.

The ideological battle lines are still national versus international, and not the false dialectic of left and right-wing politics, as Anthony Lowenstein wishes to believe. As a Jew Lowenstein opposes the Zionists but believes in the ‘Holocaust’ ideology-lies as well as in the Marxist-Trotskyist nonsense that is based on Talmud thinking.

KZ: Your viewpoint regarding Holocaust has been usually distorted and misrepresented. What’s your exact stance on it? Did the mass killing of Jews by the Nazi forces in concentration camps take place? Has its extent been exaggerated by the Israelis to attract the commiseration of the Western powers? Is it being employed as an instrument of subjugating and oppressing the Palestinian people?

FT: I follow Professors Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson in their deliberations on this topic, and both conclude that the premise, pillars on which the ‘Holocaust’ narrative rests, 6 million Jews killed, systematic state extermination policy, murder weapon a gas chamber, cannot be sustained as being the truth of the matter. As Butz says, it is rubbish to hold such a view, and Faurisson calls it a lie. It is not for Revisionists to prove their assertions but for those who believe in the ‘Holocaust’ to prove their case, which to date has not been done. Faurisson’s challenge: ‘Show me or draw me the homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz’ has not been taken up by anyone. What does happen is legal persecution that leads to personal and financial ruin and imprisonment. That speaks for itself, and then there is the defamation of those who refuse to believe in the ‘Holocaust’ with the following shut-up words, hater, Holocaust denier, antisemitist, racist, Nazi, and even terrorist.

It is thanks to the courageous Iranian President, Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who informed the world that the ‘Holocaust’ is being misused by those who oppress the Palestinian people. This linkage is fundamental in solving the crisis facing the Middle East, and only after its resolution will the area come to rest. The focus on Iran as a rogue nuclear state is a mere pretext used by the Anglo-American-Zionist powers to retain the myth of the Zionist entity called Israel.

KZ: You’ve proclaimed that Germans never gassed anyone during World War II and have no need to feel guilty about anything except for neglecting their cultural roots. We may accept the notion that Holocaust did not happen during the Second World War and was minimally a lie which the Zionists fabricated to take advantage from Europe; however, we have a number of renowned Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel, Władysław Bartoszewski, Eric Kandel, Jack Triemel and Arek Harsh who have retold their own accounts of those days and even seen the demise of their relatives and family members in person. What do you say about that?

FT: The fact that serious Holocaust questioners are routinely legally silenced speaks for itself. Only in the USA with its First Amendment is there still absolute freedom to discuss this topic. But even now there are moves afoot to eliminate the First Amendment, and the recent appointment of Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court may cause this to happen.

In my book Arbeit Macht Frei: Impertinent Incarceration, I make reference to a television program, ABC Good Morning America, 18 February 2009, where a Herman Rosenblat admits he has not been telling the truth about his concentration camp experience, but for him this made-up story was truthful because he imagined it to be true! Such nonsense is well documented as typical ‘Holocaust’ material.

The above individuals would have great problems in a court of law where truth-telling is still demanded. For example, in the 1988 Zündel Toronto court case Professor Rauol Hilberg, the author of the definitive 1985 book: The Destruction of the European Jews, stated that the mentioned two written Hitler orders did not exist. We are thus led to believe that Germans began the extermination process without a plan, without an order, without anything except an intuitive feel of what Adolf Hitler wanted them to do. Such premise is a nonsense because anyone who knows how societies work and how bureaucracies don’t move unless there is a written order.

That Elie Wiesel is a fraudster has been well established and Google will produce the goods on this, but he has academic tenure, which protects him, and so the mythology will continue until he is no more.

KZ: Why does the United States support Israel so unconditionally? In actuality, Israel has been immune to all of the international laws and regulations without being questioned by any of the international bodies. It has attacked Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia since its establishment and recurrently subjugated the Palestinian people, killing the innocent civilians, destroying their homes, building illegal settlements and above all, possessing nuclear weapons in violation of the UNSC resolution 487. What would happen if any country rather than Israel had committed such inhumane crimes?

FT: Essentially, Israel embodies the New World Order that emerged out of the World War Two conflict, and this NWO is crumbling because of its own internal contradictions, something that the Iranians have recognised so well. However, the materialism that still physically sustains the western democracies is exhausting itself. This is so evident by the number of countries where US troops are stationed. This physical overreach has a negative impact on the US itself, one being that its physical infrastructure is falling apart. The Arizona effort to secure its won borders from Mexico is a mere symptom of a national resistance against the internationalism preached by the proponents of the NWO.

An additional problem to this is that the proponents of this new internationalism in the form of the New World Order requires a steady tax life-line. The aim of the carbon tax that was supposed to help us fight climate change/global warming/greenhouse effect/ozone hole, etc. was designed to give the NWO that steady sustaining tax income. It has not happened and one consequence in Australia of that failure was a change in Prime Minister. Mr Kevin Rudd was a strong proponent of this internationalism in the form of the climate change ideology. His attendance at the 2009 Copenhagen conference aimed to establish a global tax system that the World Bank or the IMF would administer.

KZ: On March 14, you quoted Herald Scotland’s reporter Rob Edwards as writing that hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs were shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran. Do you take these actions seriously? Israel and United States, over the past 6 years, have been threatening Iran with an imminent war recurrently; however, their threats never went beyond mere propaganda. Will the United States and Israel be attacking Iran over its nuclear program?

FT: The problem faced by the western predatory capitalistic war machine is the financial collapse that is built into its faulty model. The cycle is grow and bust, then plunder and recede and enjoy. The 9:11 tragedy of 2001 managed to hide one such a ‘bust’ but by 2008 there was another one and the end is not yet in sight. Countries that are reasonably self-sufficent will survive the crash, while others dependent on world markets will not.

Such economic model; was opposed by the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler who withdrew from international financial agreements because it was causing too much fain for its people. The new policy was to become AUTARK, self-sufficient and not as is the case so markedly, a network of interdependent enterprises that produce goods as cheaply as possible without having any allegiance to a community, except that of the international banking system’s set of values, which is profits above social wellbeing of individuals.

The scenario for war against Iran is a logical step within the Anglo-American-Zionist’s war machine strategic planning, and the Iraq and Afghan wars are not enough to sustain the global economy. The overreach is becoming evident as, for example, US soldiers return from tours of duty totally crushed by the hopelessness of the situation, by the conflict dragging on too long.

Such weariness is also felt in Israel where individuals cannot anymore participate in being members of an army that is administering a state. The flight of Jews from Israel to Germany, the USA-Canada, Britain and Australia-New Zealand is seriously undermining morale. It is only a matter of time that there will not be any one willing to continue the occupation. We see similar trends within the US military where aliens join up to fight and their reward is receiving US citizenship. This gives the notion of a mercenary army, as was the French Foreign Legion, a new meaning. It is essentially an outsourcing of military services, something detrimental to a national state.

The Iranian nuclear program issue, like the ‘Holocaust’ is a smokescreen that hides far deeper issues with which the Anglo-American-Zionist war machine has to come to terms with.

KZ: Do you differentiate between Zionists as the followers of an expansionistic, racist ideology whose ultimate objective is establishing a state with its frontiers spanned from Nile to Euphrates and the Jews as the followers of a monotheistic, divine religion? It’s been seen frequently said that the Zionists and Jews have been conflated unjustly. What’s your take on that?

FT: My academic training has been in philosophy and that enables me to think and work in universals, truth, honour, justice, etc. I have difficulties thinking in racial terms because I follow Carl Jung’s mindset, as opposed to Siegmund Freud’s infantile emphasis on sexual matters. Jung’s archetype thinking postulates that humans have a common denominator that expresses itself in character types.

I vividly recall my teaching time in Nigeria where I came across individuals who were eager to learn and develop their minds, and for a teacher this is inspirational. As I retuned to Australia I came across students who didn’t want to learn because for them thinking was hard work and they were not imbued with such mindset because our education philosophy is still based on hedonism, learning has to be fun. To that I say, yes, let’s have fun but then let’s also do some serious thinking, and that’s hard work.

The Jews are not a race and to have Zionists calling themselves Jewish is a contradiction in terms. It is much like Antony Lowenstein fighting the Zionists-nationalists but at the same time calling himself an atheist but also a Jewish Trotzkyist who believes in the ‘Holocaust’. Out of this Talmudic mindset emerges a victim mentality that is played to the full when it is a matter of the battle-of-the-wills. If a person does not get their way, then they play victim, of discrimination, etc. When they get their way, they become tyrannical in their behaviour, as we see the Zionists behaving in Palestine. It is the case of the man who kills his parents, then pleads before a judge for mercy because he is now an orphan.

I cannot discriminate against individuals who hold a firm and sincere religious belief, and that is why I cannot accept that being Jewish is a racist matter. For example Sir Yehudi Menuhin’s son, Gerard, who wrote the Introduction to my book 50 Days in Gaol, is anything but a Zionist and like his father opposed the settlements. In 1991 before the Israeli parliament he said, among other things:

“This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people, the Jews, who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them.” Jerusalem Post, 6 May 1991.

Nathan Chofshi of Herliza, one of the pioneer Jewish settlers in Palestine, said in the Jewish Letter, New York, February 9, 1959: “We came and tuned the native Arabs into refugees, and still we dare to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil committed….we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.” This is what the Zionists did to the world, which then “bowed down to them.”

This above quotations, of course raises further issues but it follows the line of reasoning that the UN Security Council gave on 1 April 1948: “The occupant does not in any way acquire sovereign right in the occupied territory but exercise a temporary right of administration on a trustee basis….”

But it’s not only the Jewish world that is at fault, and my quip: Don’t blame the Jews, blame those that bend to their pressure, still holds. For example, there are Israel’s supporters who let all this happen at the expense of the peoples them residing in Palestine.

Think of the following: The “Provisional Government of Israel” consisted of international Zionists gangsters, aliens from many foreign countries throughout the world; How could Israel possible convert robbery, looting and its acts of crime into an act of benevolence or transmit them into acts of decency and transform aggression into “peace-loving?” Many leading Americans defended and praised this atrocity. Voices such as the following were in the minority: Father Ralph Gorman, Editor of the Sign Magazine, wrote in February 1960: “We aided and abetted the Zionists and Israelis who drove nearly a million Arabs from their homes and replaced them with a million Jewish immigrants.”

The UN Charter admits as a member “A peace-loving State which accepts the obligations of the Charter – is able and willing to carry out these obligations”. This the Jews have never recognized but instead have ignored the UN and the Security Council ever since. In any case a so-called state of Israel never existed in fact or in law or in history and so it is nothing but an illegal “proclamation” and an illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

The demographic factor in this area, of course, is also of importance and were there any democratic solution drawn up in time the Palestinians would outbreed the Jews living in Israel and a solution would emerge where Arabic-speaking Palestinians would hold the majority vote. For the ultra-Orthodox Jews this is untenable because they want to be by themselves, even not associate with their ‘secular’ Jews. This latter point could develop into a societal implosion, something that has already begun with Israel relying on migrant workers to keep the country going. Add to that the legal definition of who is a Jew and many more societal problems will emerge, which perhaps will rescue the dogmatic into yielding to the inevitable – a one-state solution as proposed by Iran.

Finally: Let’s remember that the international Zionists leaders led by David Ben-Gurion committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine as defined by Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter by which the German National Socialist leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal and hanged…but there is a pragmatic and non idealistic mindset that aims to establish physical facts on the ground that sets a new dialectic, then physical force enables them to exercise power over others. The latest example that particularly succeeded before the lie became evident was the insider-job of 9:11, which pitted the so-called western democracies against the world of Islam on the pretext that the west is bringing freedom and democracy to the Muslim world where there is no freedom and democracy. But thinking along such lines goes beyond this current interview – and I thank you for the opportunity for giving me a say.

Europe Chooses Depression

Forget about a smooth recovery. Finance ministers and central bank governors of the G-20, met this weekend in Busan, South Korea and decided to abandon “tried and true” expansionary fiscal policies for their own strange brew of belt-tightening policies and austerity measures. The EU members are eager to restore the illusory “confidence of the markets”, something that will surely be lost when the eurozone slides back into recession and the hobbled banking sector begins hemorrhaging red ink. Trimming deficits while the economy is still on the mend will weaken demand and force businesses to lay off more workers. That will decrease economic activity and slow growth. It’s a prescription for disaster.

Here’s an excerpt from Paul Krugman’s blog: “Slashing spending while the economy is still deeply depressed is both an extremely costly and quite ineffective way to reduce future debt. Costly, because it depresses the economy further; ineffective, because by depressing the economy, fiscal contraction now reduces tax receipts….

The right thing, overwhelmingly, is to do things that will reduce spending and/or raise revenue after the economy has recovered — specifically, wait until after the economy is strong enough that monetary policy can offset the contractionary effects of fiscal austerity. But no: the deficit hawks want their cuts while unemployment rates are still at near-record highs and monetary policy is still hard up against the zero bound.” (“lost Decade, Here We Come”, Paul Krugman, New York Times)

Europe is marching headlong into a depression. The attachment to stone age economics is shocking. It is as if John Maynard Keynes never lived. When GDP shrinks–as it inevitably will–the deficits will grow and bond yields will widen making it more expensive to fund business. Public confidence will wane, relations between member states will sour, and cities will fill with angry demonstrators. Fiscal consolidation will rip the 16-state EU apart and trigger a crisis bigger than Lehman Bros. The ECB needs to support demand by encouraging government spending while households patch their tattered balance sheets and regulators take over underwater banks. Any deviation from this plan will only exacerbate the problems.

How sick is the EU banking system? Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times:

“It’s a $2.6 trillion mystery. That’s the amount that foreign banks and other financial companies have lent to public and private institutions in Greece, Spain and Portugal, three countries so mired in economic troubles that analysts and investors assume that a significant portion of that mountain of debt may never be repaid.

The problem is, alas, that no one — not investors, not regulators, not even bankers themselves — knows exactly which banks are sitting on the biggest stockpiles of rotting loans within that pile. And doubt, as it always does during economic crises, has made Europe’s already vulnerable financial system occasionally appear to seize up. Early last month, in an indication of just how dangerous the situation had become, European banks — which appear to hold more than half of that $2.6 trillion in debt — nearly stopped lending money to one another….”

Analysts at the Royal Bank of Scotland estimate that of the 2.2 trillion euros that European banks and other institutions outside Greece, Spain and Portugal may have lent to those countries, about 567 billion euros is government debt, about 534 billion euros are loans to nonbanking companies in the private sector, and about 1 trillion euros are loans to other banks. While the crisis originated in Greece, much more was borrowed by Spain and its private sector — 1.5 trillion euros, compared with Greece’s 338 billion. (“Debtors’ Prism: Who Has Europe’s Loans?”, Jack Ewing, New York Times)

This proves that the real problem is the banks, not “sovereign debt”. (which is only 567 billion of the 2.2 trillion euros total) The EU is faced with the same problem as the US; either take over insolvent banks and restructure their debt–making bondholders and equity holders take a haircut–or endure years of hellish subpar economic performance with high unemployment, dwindling investment, grinding deflation and social unrest. The EU has chosen the latter, and for reasons which may not be that clear at first glance. A cheaper euro makes EU exports more competitive, which will keep the EU’s most powerful member (Germany) happy. Also, deflationary policies protect the interests of bondholders who are heavily invested in financial institutions whose asset values are grossly inflated by cheap money and massive leverage. Finally, austerity measures transfer the losses from banks and shadow banks onto the backs of workers, consumers and retirees. Screwing workers to enrich bondholders and bankers is a political calculation. It makes no economic sense.

Belt-tightening in the EU means that the world will (again) have to rely on the US consumer to bounce back, shrug off his historic burden of personal debt, and resume spending like a madman. With unemployment hovering at 10%, credit lines being slashed by the day, and retirement just around the corner (for many baby boomers); that looks like an unlikely prospect.

Europe is Headed For a Mini-depression

Despite a nearly-$1 trillion rescue operation, financial conditions in the eurozone continue to deteriorate. All the gauges of market stress are edging upwards and credit default swaps (CDS) spreads have widened to levels not seen since the weekend of the emergency euro-summit. Libor is on the rise and liquidity is draining from the commercial paper (CP) and money markets. According to the Federal Reserve, the total amount of (foreign banks) CP has shrunk 15 percent or $32 billion since late April. Central bank officials insist that there’s no chance of another Lehman-type meltdown, but their actions don’t match their words. Apart from the massive $920 billion EU Stabilization Fund, the ECB has beefed-up its liquidity facilities and is aggressively purchasing state bonds from struggling countries in the south. Without the ECB’s assistance, the slow-motion slide into recession could turn into a full-blown market crash. Brussels has every reason to be worried.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“In the latest indication that European banks are in ill health, the European Central Bank warned late Monday that euro-zone banks face €195 billion ($239.26 billion) in write-downs this year and the next due to an economic outlook that remained “clouded by uncertainty….Europe’s intertwined banking system remains stressed. Investors have hammered the sector, banks are stashing near-record amounts of deposits at the ECB—€305 billion as of Friday—instead of lending the funds to other institutions, risk-wary U.S. financial institutions are reducing their exposure to euro-zone banks.” (“ECB Warns Write-Downs Could Reach $239 Billion” David Enrich and Stephen Fidler, Wall Street Journal)

German and French banks have vast exposure to public and private debt in Club Med countries; Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy. When those countries finances begin to teeter, it’s harder for the banks to exchange assets in the repo market where they get the bulk of their funding. They are forced to take a “haircut” on the value of their collateral which erodes their capital cushion and pushes them closer to default. This is what happened in the US when the French Bank Paribas started listing in late 2007. PIMCO’s Paul McCulley explains the origins of the financial crisis in a speech he gave at the Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you have to pick a day for the Minsky Moment, it was August 9. And, actually, it didn’t happen here in the United States. It happened in France, when Paribas Bank (BNP) said that it could not value the toxic mortgage assets in three of its off-balance sheet vehicles, and that, therefore, the liability holders, who thought they could get out at any time, were frozen. I remember the day like my son’s birthday. And that happens every year. Because the unraveling started on that day. In fact, it was later that month that I actually coined the term “Shadow Banking System”….

…”What’s going on is really simple. We’re having a run on the Shadow Banking System and the only question is how intensely it will self-feed as its assets and liabilities are put back onto the balance sheet of the conventional banking system.”….It was pretty much an orderly run up until September 15, 2008. (Lehman Bros default) And it was orderly primarily because the Fed…evoked Section 13-3 of the Federal Reserve Act in March of 2008 in order to facilitate the merger of under-a-run Bear Stearns into JPMorgan. Concurrently, the Fed opened its balance sheet to the biggest shadow banks of all, the investment banks that were primary dealers, including most important, the big five. It was called the Primary Dealer Credit Facility.” (“McCulley: After the Crisis, Planning a New Financial Structure”, Credit Writedowns)

So when Paribas made its announcement on August 9, the collateral (mainly mortgage-backed securities) that the banks had been using in exchange for funding in the repo market, was called into question. No one really knew what MBS were worth, because many were comprised of subprime loans that would never be repaid. Thus, repo transactions slowed to a crawl, interbank lending collapsed, libor spiked to record highs, and the banking system suffered a major heart attack.

Now it’s Europe’s turn. But don’t expect a repeat of the Fed’s strategy. The member states won’t allow the ECB to dictate policy without deliberation. Germany has already forbidden quantitative easing (QE) unless the funds that are used to purchase state bonds are sterilized, that is, unless the ECB soaks up the extra liquidity via some other offsetting transaction.

Officials with the Bundesbank say that ECB head Jean Claude Trichet has launched a “stealth bailout” of the eurozone banks holding Greek debt. The facts appear to support the claims. Greece has already received the $135 billion bailout, enough to meet its funding needs until 2012. But the ECB has purchased an additional $25 billion in Greek debt in the last three weeks. That means the debt must have been purchased from French or German banks. It looks like Trichet is trying to pull a fast-one on Germany by secretly diverting money to underwater banks.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“ECB critics within the Bundesbank say the price of Greek bonds is now largely irrelevant to Athens, making the main beneficiaries of the bond purchases the banks that hold much of Greece’s roughly €300 billion in outstanding debt.”…”We haven’t gone beyond our goal of re-establishing a more correct transmission mechanism of our monetary policy,” said Mr. Trichet……”In simple words: We are not printing money.” (“Bundesbank Attacks ECB Bond-Buying Plan”, David Crawford Brian Blackstone, Wall Street Journal)

German officials haven’t been fooled by the hype surrounding quantitative easing. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, Bundesbank chief Karl Otto Pöhl summed up the ECB’s efforts like this:

“It was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs. On the day that the rescue package was agreed on, shares of French banks rose by up to 24 percent. Looking at that, you can see what this was really about — namely, rescuing the banks and the rich Greeks.”

This is a banking crisis not a sovereign debt crisis. Bank funding is getting more expensive because shadow banks are not willing to pay as much for collateral that looks dodgy. The problem is particular to the repo system, where the demand for triple A collateral creates a powerful incentive for ratings inflation. High ratings lead to mispriced risk and credit excesses. When the bubble finally bursts, assets prices plunge leaving balance sheets deep in the red. If the banks had done their jobs and performed due diligence, they would have seen that Greece was headed for trouble and their bonds were a bad investment. But they purchased the debt anyway, to boost leverage and to increase short-term profitability. Now the downgrades are coming fast and furious, and the “run” on the shadow banking system is gaining momentum. Eventually, Greece will have to restructure its debt and the losses will push banks in France and Germany into default. Equity and bondholders will be wiped out or suffer big losses.

The amount of money at stake is humongous, certainly enough to trigger another banking crisis or mini-depression. Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

“All told, more than €2 trillion of public and private debt from Greece, Spain and Portugal is sitting on the balance sheets of financial institutions outside the three countries, according to a Royal Bank of Scotland report last week. Investors, bankers and government officials are worried that as that debt loses value, banks across Europe could be saddled with losses.

“Make no mistake: This is big,” said Jacques Cailloux, RBS’s chief European economist and the report’s author. “We’re talking about systemic risk [and] the potential for contagion.” (“ECB Warns Write-Downs Could Reach $239 Billion” David Enrich and Stephen Fidler, Wall Street Journal)

EU banks are over-leveraged, under-capitalized, and too exposed to emerging market debt. In the next 12 months, they’ll have to roll over more than $400 billion in loans in a market where funding is scarce and liquidity is drying up. The ECB should present a plan for restructuring Greek debt now instead of trying to keep the bubble afloat and hoping for a miracle.

The run on the shadow system is forcing more banks to seek funding from the ECB. The central bank has loaned out more than $850 billion and that figure is expected to rise. The ECB’s balance sheet is proof that the wholesale funding system is broken and needs basic structural change. The EU is moving forward with a raft of regulatory reforms on everything from hedge funds to naked shorts, from corporate governance to a financial transaction tax, from tighter oversight on CDS to revamping the ratings agencies. So far, however, the shadow banking system has escaped their attention, which is unfortunate. The system is inherently unstable and will lead to more serious crises in the future. Financial institutions that act as banks (investment banks, hedge funds, insurers) must be regulated as banks, that’s the bottom line. The dangers of maximizing leverage and unsupervised credit expansion, should be clear to everyone by now.

Talking Zionism in the Financial Times and from the Mount of the Beatitudes

Tony Judt is a University Professor at New York University who recently wrote that “Israel must unpick its ethnic myth” published first in the Financial Times. Judt  also provides the lead for this Christian Anarchist’s response regarding Zionism.

Judt wrote: What exactly is “Zionism”?

Its core claim was always that Jews represent a common and single people; that their millennia-long dispersion and suffering has done nothing to diminish their distinctive, collective attributes; and that the only way they can live freely as Jews – in the same way that, say, Swedes live freely as Swedes – is to dwell in a Jewish state.

I can certainly confirm, from personal experience, that anti-religious sentiment – often of an intensity that I found discomforting – was widespread in left-leaning Israeli circles of the 1960s. Religion, I was informed, was for the haredim and the “crazies” of Jerusalem’s Mea Sharim quarter. “We” are modern and rational and “western”, it was explained to me by my Zionist teachers. But what they did not say was that the Israel they wished me to join was therefore grounded, and could only be grounded, in an ethnically rigid view of Jews and Jewishness…

If the Jews of Europe and North America took their distance from Israel (as many have begun to do), the assertion that Israel was “their” state would take on an absurd air. Over time, even Washington might come to see the futility of attaching American foreign policy to the delusions of one small Middle Eastern state. This, I believe, is the best thing that could possibly happen to Israel itself. It would be obliged to acknowledge its limits. It would have to make other friends, preferably among its neighbours.

The civil war in Northern Ireland came to an end in part because an American president instructed the Irish emigrant community in the US to stop sending arms and cash to the Provisional IRA. If American Jews stopped associating their fate with Israel and used their charitable cheques for better purposes, something similar might happen in the Middle East. [1]

On March 20, 2006, I traveled three hours away from the Little Town of Bethlehem: Occupied Territory to the Mount of Beatitudes in Israel. The awe-inspiring site sits above the shimmering Sea of Galilee where Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount.

My Sabeel [Arabic for The Way] Reality Tour through the West Bank had concluded and I needed to be alone and silent, but I ended up delivering my own Sermon on the Mount.

At dinner a Catholic Pentecostal from Scotland introduced himself and asked me why I was there and what church I was from. I responded I have Irish Roman Catholic, Polish Jew, Russian Orthodox and Episcopal roots but that my rock is The Beatitudes.

He looked even more perplexed when I told him I came to the Mount of Beatitudes to decompress and reflect upon my nine days in Occupied Territory.

I asked him if he were aware of the work of Sabeel, the Palestinian founded organization that promotes a theology of liberation based on justice, peace, non-violence and reconciliation for all, regardless of faith path or nationality.

He sternly admonished me, “God gave this land to the Jews! The Bible never mentions Palestine, and that is that! God gave this land to the Jews and that is that!”

I responded just as fervently that the Palestinian Christians are the descendants of those who first followed Christ and they have been denied inalienable human rights by the Israeli government.

I told him the Christians in the Holy Land have shrunk from 20% of the total population to less than 1.3% since 1948 and if things don’t change soon, there will be no Christian witness in the land where Christ promised that it is the peacemakers who are the children of God.

He sputtered, “But the Jews have suffered! God gave this land to the Jews and that is that!”

That really got my Irish up and I retorted, “Yes they did suffer because good people did nothing for far too long, and now the once oppressed have become the oppressors. In the 21st century good people are unaware, ignoring or are in total denial of the injustices in the Holy Land. And what about all the Hebrew prophets, such as Micah who reminded the Jews of what the Lord requires: To be just, to be merciful and to walk humbly with your God!”

I could NOT shut up although I knew that that Scotsman was trying to get away and he looked most terrified by my passionate plea and as I was on a tear, I barely took a breath as I told him that instead of him staying in Israel for his entire visit, he should go and witness life in the occupied territories; go and see the effects of The Wall on his spirit and see what it has done to the Palestinian economy. I told him he should go and tour some of the six decades old refugee camps and see the ruins of all the uncompensated home demolitions.

I brought it on home by telling him that I also doubted that God was ever in the real estate business!

That Scotsman’s eyes had bugged out and his mouth had dropped open while the torrent of words spewed out of me and after I finally shut up, he stammered, “But there is suffering everywhere!”

I retorted, “Yes there is, and Christ always stood up for the poor and the oppressed. And he told us what ever we do or don’t do for the least and the outcast; we do it or don’t do it unto God.”

The Scot shook his head and turned and walked quickly away and never again looked my way again. Nobody else spoke to me the rest of the evening or the next day. That was fine with me, for I was listening to the voice within and what I kept hearing was Luke 23:34: “Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

But when you know and if you are of good will and a person of CONSCIENCE you must do something, and as the saying goes-we must preach to our own, so I address USA Christians regarding the fastest growing cult in the USA-and also perhaps in Scotland- the cult of Christian Zionism.

What is Christian Zionism?

Christian Zionism is an extremist Christian movement which supports the claims of those who believe that the State of Israel should take control of all of the land currently disputed between Palestinians and Israelis. It views the creation and expansion of the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy toward the second coming of Jesus.

Christian Zionism is a modern theological and political movement that embraces the most extreme ideological positions of Zionism, thereby becoming detrimental to a just peace within Palestine and Israel. The Christian Zionist program provides a worldview where the Gospel is identified with the ideology of empire, colonialism and militarism. In its extreme form, it laces an emphasis on apocalyptic events leading to the end of history rather than living Christ’s love and justice today.

What is the Christian Zionist connection with the Holy Land?

Believing that God fights on the side of Israel, Christian Zionists call for the unqualified support for the most extreme political positions related to the Holy Land. Christian Zionist spokes persons have attributed Hurricane Katrina to God’s wrath over our failure to stop Israel from pulling out of Gaza. They consistently oppose any moves towards a solution to the conflict, which would validate the political aspirations of both Palestinians and Israelis.

Who Supports Christian Zionism?

Christian Zionism has significant support within American Protestant fundamentalists, who number between 10 and 20 million. Its reach is broad, by virtue of its favorite themes related to the “End Times” and an Israel-fixated Christian media.  Christian Zionism is both a political movement and a way of interpreting current events. Its focus is on Israel and the Middle East, as much an ideology as a “movement.” Its promoters share many beliefs but are not organized through any one institution.

Throughout history Christians have at times twisted scripture to justify violence: for the Crusades, for Anti-Semitism, and for slavery. Too often the church has been slow to respond to these biblical distortions with disastrous results.

Today Christian Zionists – particularly those with dispensationalist leanings – are at it again. Although their motives are couched in terms of compassion toward the Jewish people based on a literal reading of scripture the political agenda of territorial expansion advocated by Christian Zionists has given rise to injustice against Palestinians and added fuel to the fire of conflict in the Middle East. For some time, individuals, and theologians have spoken out against Christian Zionism. In the past few years, whole church bodies are adding their official voices to the distortions and injustices perpetuated by Christian Zionism.

The GOOD NEWS is that some mainstream churches have spoken out against this inherently anti-Semitic theology. What follows are but a few words from some of those who have:

The Presbyterian Church in the USA at its July 2004, National General Assembly issued a statement on Confronting Christian Zionism: “Christian Zionism promotes a theology that justifies grievous violations of basic rights of people who are also made in the image of God, and is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The United Church of Christ in July 2003, at its National General Synod offered An Alternative Voice to Christian Zionism: “We believe that the tenets of Christian Zionism neither reflect the intention of the teachings of Jesus and the prophets, nor promote peace in the Middle East, and respectfully recommend …an alternative voice to this theology.”

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in June 2005 at its Chicago Metropolitan Synod issued a Resolution to Encourage the Study of Christian Zionism: “the movement of Christian Zionism based on these biblical interpretations seeks to influence U.S. policy toward Israel in a manner that would arguably facilitate mistreatment of Palestinians, continued occupation of the land, opposition to a two-state solution, and exclusive Israeli control of Jerusalem.”

The United Methodist Church, in June 2005 at its Illinois Conference on Unwrapping the Rapture warned, “Every household should give prayerful consideration as to how God will actually judge us for our silence about and complicity in the crushing of the Palestinian people.”

The Episcopal Church, in November 2004 at its Diocese of Chicago Confronted Christian Zionism: “A partial response to Christian Zionism would be to say that we read Scripture in light of [Jesus’] two great commandments – to love God and our neighbor.”

In the gospel [good news] told in Mark 3: 31-35, the mother of Jesus’ and his brothers arrived at the house where he was teaching.

Standing outside, they sent word to Jesus and called him out. The crowd around Jesus told him, “Your mother, sisters and brothers are outside asking for you.”

Jesus replied, “I am here with my mother, sisters and brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother, sister and mother.”-Mark 3: 31-35

“What does God require? He has told you o’man! Be just, be merciful, and walk humbly with your Lord.” -Micah 6:8

Being just means correct, true, accurate, right and fair.

Merciful is to have, feel and show compassion, that sense of viscerally feeling the pain of another and being moved to help.

Being humble is knowing yourself; the good and the bad, for both cut through every human heart.

1.  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7f8fafee-e366-11de-8d36-00144feab49a.html

Anti-Empire Report

“And on the most exalted throne in the world sits nothing but a man’s arse.” Montaigne

If there’s anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was “highly objectionable”. His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were “outrageous and disgusting”. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “angry and repulsed”, while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images “deeply upsetting.” Miliband warned: “How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya’s reentry into the civilized community of nations.” ¹

Ah yes, “the civilized community of nations”, that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward. ² No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an “accident”. Why then give awards to those responsible?

Today’s oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi’s innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he’s innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi’s trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case. ³ The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror.

The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non — loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport — for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act.

And the court admitted it: “The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.” ⁴

The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany — guaranteed, sworn to, scout’s honor, case closed — until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya — the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq — that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington.

The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite. ⁵

In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr. Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. “If he goes back to Libya,” Swire says, “it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case. … I’ve lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive.” ⁶

And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost 20 years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years.

The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: “American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.” Added the Times: “The DIA briefing discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was ‘no current credible intelligence’ implicating her.” ⁷

If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it’s highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect.

One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya’s guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take “responsibility” for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing.

Humankind shall never fly

All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are “socialist”. (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with “Socialism” in large letters, as the only word.⁸) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol’ capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans — like most of their countrymen — might be rather surprised to discover that they don’t really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled “The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?”

A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can’t do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than 80 percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W. Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs. ⁹ Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction — putting the outside contractors in the best light.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.

The continual selling of the Afghanistan war

“But we must never forget,” said President Obama recently, “this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.” ¹⁰

Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It’s simple — We’re fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We’re fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001. Never mind that the “plot to kill Americans” in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

As to “plotting to do so again” … there’s no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda.

There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn’t have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn’t even have to be such a thing as a “member of al Qaeda”. It tells us nothing that some of them can be called “al Qaeda”. Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

In any event, as in Iraq, the American “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon.

The only “necessity” that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire?

But the war against the Taliban can’t be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out.

The revolution was televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials.
Because the revolution will not be televised. …

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
The revolution will not be right back after a message
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised

These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron’s song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as ’60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called “revolution”.

Fast Forward to 2009 … Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:

WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution?

GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution. ¹¹

Oh? So that’s it? That’s what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.

Yugoslavia

During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence.

– David Gibbs, ““

There’s no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs’ new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities.

Notes

1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26, 2009 ^↩
2. Newsweek magazine, July 13, 1992 ^↩
3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17, 2009 ^↩
4. “Opinion of the Court”, Par. 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001 ^↩
5. Read many further details about the case at http://killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm ^↩
6. The Independent (London daily), April 26, 2009 ^↩
7. Sunday Times (London), August 16, 2009 ^↩
8. Washington Post, August 6, 2009, p.C2 ^↩
9. Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned ^↩
10. Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17, 2009 ^↩
11. Washington Post, August 26, 2009 ^↩

Video: Lockerbie & the CIA

Mainstream documentary that looks at the various scenarios surrounding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988. Was a CIA heroin trafficking operation compromised, allowing a bomb to be placed on board?

Sky Television – Conspiracies: Lockerbie & the CIA

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