‘Anti-Semitism up, Islamophobia down” a New Academic Research Says

One-quarter of Europeans believe that “Jews have too much influence“

31% agree that “Jews in general do not care about anything or anyone but their own kind.”

45.7% of the Europeans somewhat or strongly agree that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”

About 37.4% agree with the following statement: “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews.”

Introduction by Gilad Atzmon

According to new research conducted by Bielefeld University hatred towards Muslims decreased over the past year while hatred of Jews is growing. Israelis must be concerned. The sudden drop in European Islamophobia doesn’t fit into the Zionist global plan in which Muslims are cornered and ostracised as reactionaries while Israel is dropping bombs in the name of democracy and liberalism. According to the leading Israeli paper Ynet, “the level of resentment against most minorities declined – sexism considerably, Islamophobia slightly. There were only two exceptions: homophobia and anti-Semitism.”(1)

Interestingly enough Ynet reports that “the percentage of people who believe ‘that there are too many Muslims’ in their country is especially high in those countries that actually have a low percentage of Muslims living in them.” One possible explanation may that within European countries benefiting from a large Muslim population, the fear of Islam is actually dissipating. This is not at all surprising given the fact that both Islamic and Christian cultures share very similar universal values and ethical precepts. Unlike Jewish ideology that maintains a certain level of tribal, cultural and social segregation and supremacy, Muslim communities seem to collectively merge into the working classes through the work place, education and economy.

Jewish Power

According to the research very many Europeans are concerned with Jewish domination and power. “One-quarter of Europeans (24.5%) believe that “Jews have too much influence“, and nearly one-third (31%) agree that “Jews in general do not care about anything or anyone but their own kind.” Bearing in mind the embarrassing fact that 50% of MPs in Britain’s shadow cabinet are Conservative Friends of Israel we can safely assume that, unlike our politicians, the voters out there are largely waking up to the danger of Zionist infiltration.

Ynet also has some ‘good news’ to report. “61.9% say that Jews “enrich our culture”, especially in the Netherlands, Britain and Germany.” The fact that Jews and ex Jews (in particular) enrich European life is indeed hard to ignore, yet setting aside Lord Cashpoint Levy and Uri ‘Spoon Bending’ Geller, it seems as if, amongst those Jews who contribute to European cultural life, not many openly identify with Israel and its crimes.

As much as Israel uses every possible means to drag us all into an endless war against Islam, the Europeans are coming to terms with the devastating reality of Zionist murderous brutality. Some 45.7% of the Europeans either “somewhat or strongly” agree that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.” In case someone fails to understand the meaning of it all, I will say it plainly: almost half of the Europeans accept that Israel employs genocidal tactics. They basically agree that Israelis are the Nazis of our time. According to Ynet, about 37.4% agree with the following statement: “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews.”

Zionism was there to create a civilized loveable Jew. Not only has it failed, thanks to Israel and Zionism, the resentment towards Jews seem to be greater than ever. The meaning of it all is rather obvious. Israel and its supporting lobbies failed to internalise the real universal meaning of the Holocaust: ‘love thy neighbour’. Instead of ethnic cleansing, starving and dropping white phosphorous, Israel should have learned to live amongst others.

If Europe is as democratic as it claims to be, this clear, escalating animosity towards Israel, Zionism and their relentless lobbies will mature eventually into a political shift.

(1) A clarification is needed here: ‘anti-Semitism’ is a misleading notion. When people refer to ‘anti Semitism’ what they really mean is ‘anti Jewish feelings’. The notion of ‘anti-Semitism’ is there to give a false impression that Jews are a racial group. The truth of the matter is obvious, Jews are neither a race nor have they established a racial continuum. In fact no one resents Jews for their racial belonging or ethnicity. Anti Jewish feelings is in most cases a political and ethical reaction to Jewish tribal politics, Zionism, Israel, Israeli lobbying, global Zionist affairs, Jewish ideology, Jewish supremacy, Israeli war crimes and so on.

Europe: Anti-Semitism up, Islamophobia down by Sarah Stricker
Ynetnews 6.12.09

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3815828,00.html

Study on ‘group-focused enmity’ conducted by researchers from University of Bielefeld in Germany finds hatred of Muslims decreased over past year, while hatred of Jews and homosexuals growing. Poland defined as most racist country

Right-wing parties are growing stronger in Europe, and Swiss citizens have even voted in favor of a ban on mosque minarets, yet the fear or hatred of Islam in the continent has dropped over the past year, according to a study conducted in Germany and published Sunday. However, hatred of Jews and homosexuals is on the rise.

For the last eight years, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at the University of Bielefeld has been running an annual study called “German Conditions” to learn about “group focused enmity“ such as xenophobia, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and prejudices against unemployed, disabled, homeless or homosexual people in Germany.

Due to the financial crisis and the fears of the future, poverty and unemployment that are being stoked by that, the researchers expected a rise this year.

But compared to last year’s results (as well as those of 2002), the level of resentment against most minorities declined – sexism and racism even considerably, Islamophobia slightly. There were only two exceptions: Homophobia and anti-Semitism.

Hatred of both groups is on the rise as they are considered to be found also among people of a high status.

Beate Küpper, one of the study’s main researchers, believes that the financial crisis may in fact be a possible explanation for that. Küpper said that although in comparison to other European countries Germany was on average, it was staggering that in the light of German history, 48% still agreed with anti-Semitic statements.

For the first time, the study also compared xenophobia among European countries like Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Poland, and Hungary. According to their findings, the level of prejudices against minorities in Europe is alarming.

About 50.4% of the population agreed that “there are too many immigrants” in their country, 54.4% believe that “the Islam is a religion of intolerance.” Interestingly enough, the percentage of people who believe “that there are too many Muslims” in their country is especially high in those countries that actually have a low percentage of Muslims living in them.

Nearly one-third (31.3%) of the Europeans somewhat or strongly agree that “there is a natural hierarchy between black and white people”. A majority of 60.2% stick to traditional gender roles, demanding that “women should take their role as wives and mothers more seriously.” Some 42.6% deny equal value of gay men and lesbian women and judge homosexuality as “immoral”.

Hiding behind criticism of Israel

Anti-Semitism is also still widely spread in Europe. The team of scientists from the universities of Amsterdam, Bielefeld, Budapest, Grenoble, Lisbon, Marburg, Oxford, Padua, Paris, and Warsaw found that 41.2% of Europeans believe that “Jews try to take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era”. The highest degree of affirmation was in Poland – 72%, and the lowest in the Netherlands – 5.6%.

One-quarter of Europeans (24.5%) believe that “Jews have too much influence“, and nearly one-third (31%) agree that “Jews in general do not care about anything or anyone but their own kind. On the other hand, 61.9% say that Jews “enrich our culture”, especially in the Netherlands, Britain and Germany.

They study also measured the degree of anti-Semitism hidden behind a specific criticism of Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians that uses anti-Semitic terms such as “war of persecution” and a generalization to “all Jews”.

Some 45.7% of the Europeans (apart for France, where this facet of anti-Semitism was not measured) somewhat or strongly agree that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.” About 37.4% agree with the following statement: “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews.”

Overall, the level of anti-Semitic attitudes varies quite a lot across Europe with comparably lower levels of anti-Semitic attitudes in Britain and the Netherlands and significantly higher levels in Portugal, and especially Poland and Hungary.

More Militant Vegans, Less Ethical Butchers

A friend of mine recently brought to my attention a former vegan who has now re-invented himself as the “Ethical Butcher” (a title right up there with Peacekeeper missiles, limited autonomy, and military intelligence). The butcher writes: “After 14 years as a vegetarian, a few of those as a quite ‘militant’ vegan, I became a butcher. The factors that went into me taking the position are many, but the result was maybe quite predictable. Within a month I was a full-fledged meat eater. What has not changed is my passion for the welfare of animals. Through my work as a butcher and chef, I now see a more direct way to influence and work for change in the meat industry and to improve the quality of life for all of the animals we rely on for food.”

Such backlash in the face of compassionate evolution is not uncommon. For example, just as more and more women begin to challenge gender roles, the patriarchal culture countered with Howard Stern, Maxim, and Spike TV. But I digress…

Becoming a butcher in the name of animal welfare is like joining the Marines to promote peace. What’s next, the Ethical Executioner with his “passion” for the “welfare” of prisoners? Surely, he’d just be choosing a “more direct way to influence and work for change,” following the lead of his butcher comrade.

In a society less and less capable of critical, independent thought, this pro-meat character will probably be widely praised as the antidote to “militant” vegans. You know, the food Nazis. By current standards, you could pack a calf into a veal crate or pump food down a goose’s gullet or grind up live male chicks to fertilize your fields and run no risk of being called militant. For that matter, you can clear cut forests, blow off mountain tops in search of coal, and drop white phosphorous on villages filled with brown children and garner virtually no attention at all…let alone be labeled a militant.

Choose a lifestyle of compassion and logic, speak out against vivisection, or protest the use of fur? You, my friends, are a worthy of a Hitler mustache.With the global economy collapsing like a house of cards, 80% of the world’s forests cut down, 90% of the large fish in the ocean gone, more military conflicts than anyone can count, and our eco-systems rapidly approaching the point of no return, there’s never been a more urgent time to be a truly militant vegan.

At some point, we each have to decide: Do we respect all life or not? If we choose life instead of death, then we must view the culture holistically. To divide issues of animal suffering, eco-destruction, and human rights, is to fall into the trap of the dinosaur Left. For example, ZNet founder Michael Albert, who writes: “I see no comparison in importance between seeking to eliminate the roots and branches of sexism, and seeking to eliminate the roots and branches of violence against animals. I see no comparison in importance between how chickens are treated and how women or any humans are treated. In fact, for me the animal rights agenda resonates barely at all, and the anti-sexism agenda is part of my life.”

Let’s be clear: Attempting to separate sexism from violence against animals (and all nature) is like trying to separate the human circulatory system from the respiratory system. If such obvious connections are not being made by the entrenched Left, I have to wonder: Why is anyone wasting even 5 minutes of their time on such myopia?

Since Michael Albert can’t seem to stop quoting Dylan, this song excerpt is for him, the Ethical Butcher, and all those who seek to fragment and obscure the big picture:

Don’t criticize what you can’t understand … your old road is rapidly agin’Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’

Bonaparte Blair & Co

Gordon brown urged European Socialist leaders last week to appoint Tony Blair as the European President. “Get real”, he told them, “This is a unique opportunity to get a strong progressive politician to be the president.”

Brown is obviously correct, nothing could be more refreshing, innovative ‘real’ and ‘progressive’ than assigning the job to a man who has more blood on his hands than any other person in Europe. It may also be right to argue that there is just one living person on this planet with more blood on his hands than Blair. That man dwells in Texas, his name is George and actually unlike our Bonaparte figure, he keeps relatively quiet. Unlike George, our Boney is craving for recognition, he cannot live without a crown or an official title. Someone should remind Boney that he already made it into history, he can really take a break. With more than one million fatalities in Iraq, he is not far behind Hitler and Stalin.

Murderers are, no doubt, a unique bunch of people, some criminologists insists that they are no less than psychopaths for psychopaths are people who disregard ethical principles. Psychopaths also lack any sense of conscience or compassion. Mass murderers are even more special, for they manage to evade, not just a couple of eyes, but rather very many. They even mange to turn deaf to public criticism and resentment towards their acts. Our Boney, is extraordinary by every possible means. Not only does he dismiss the pain he brought on millions, not only did he fail to show regret, he actually constantly demands our recognition of his imaginary greatness. He seems to lack any awareness or self-consciousness whatsoever.

While the majority of Europeans would prefer to see Boney schlepped to The Hague, face justice and hopefully locked up for life, he himself must be convinced that he possesses the necessary qualities for the European Presidency. From a united European perspective he was a light disaster. He managed to keep Britain out of the Euro, he also didn’t follow the Schengen open borders agreement. From a British perspective Boney was a total disaster. Together with his ‘best Treasurer ever’ he succeeded in ruining the Britain economy. He smashed the last pockets of British industry to infinitesimal pieces and on top of all that, he has managed to get all of us implicated in a war crime of a colossal magnitude. This was probably enough to make European leaders think again, They have now decided to restrain Boney’s self centric enthusiasm and relentless will to power..

However, Blair is not alone. As much as recent polls suggest that the vast majority of Brits find him unsuitable to the European presidency, in his rapidly disintegrating Nuevo Labour, he actually has some dedicated followers supporters and allies.

According to the British press he asked Lord Mandelson to act as his ‘chef de cabinet’. In the last decade alone, Mandelson has had to resign more than once for his misconduct. Mandelson has also recently been exposed as having close ties with one of Russia’s leading Oligarchs. A person of such a low ethical reputation at the hub of the European Union may well be a danger for the entire continent.

Another of Blair’s close allies and supporters is Foreign Secretary David Miliband who launched Boney’s campaign for presidency with the extraordinary claim that only Boney could ‘stop the traffic’ when he goes to foreign Capitals.

Like Boney, Miliband is rather enthusiastic about interventionism and ‘spreading democracy’. It is hard to believe but in Britain in 2009, the Wolfowitz doctrine is still making headlines especially amongst the so called ‘progressive’ politicians. I have learnt in recent days that Miliband is himself a leading candidate for the European Foreign office. I urge every European leader to look into Miliband’s Neoconservative ideology and amend their choice before it is too late.

Until recently Miliband managed to keep his Judeo-centric tribal affiliation to himself. This is not the case anymore. Facing an inevitable colossal electoral defeat for Labour, Miliband just couldn’t hold back. A few weeks ago he decided to pull the Jewish rabbit out of the of the Nuevo Labour sack. In a desperate and crude attempt to evoke public pity and empathy, he warned the British public that the coming Tory leadership is affiliated with notorious ‘Anti Semites and Neo Nazis’. Miliband has managed to drag Poland’s chief Rabbi into the British political discourse. From Miliband’s tribal perspective, it is down to a Polish rabbi to suggest to the British people who is kosher enough to vote for. At least Miliband’s philosophy of mutual intervention is consistent: As much as we, the Brits, should tell the world who is moral and what is wrong , it is down to a Polish Rabbi to tell us who to vote for.

Peculiarly enough, The Polish Rabbi has now changed his spots. He admitted that the leader of the Polish Law and Justice party, Michal Kaminski, is actually “against Anti Semitism”. Nevertheless, Miliband is yet to apologize for implying that the Tory leaders are Anti Semitic. Like his mentor Boney, Miliband seems to lack the elementary capacity of ethical judgment or conduct. Bearing in mind Miliband’s recent Judeo-centric assault, his enthusiasm for interventionism together with his ethical deficiency, we are entitled to regard the man as a danger to peace. Once in possession of power and influence we may end up being complicit again in a new genocide in the name of one liberal slogan or another (‘democracy’, ‘atheism’, ‘women’s rights’, ‘gay freedom’ etc’)

But the paddling in pseudo liberal Nuevo Labour chicken soup may not end just there. It would be intriguing to find out what kind of a job Boney has assigned to his Number 1 Lord Cashpoint Levy. I would also like to know whether ‘Liberal’ Jack Straw, the man who insisted to strip Muslim women of their Veil, had any potential assignment in Blair’s presidential administration. At the end of the day, Straw could extend and expand his dismissal of others to the entire continent.

Blair was sure that he had the presidency ‘in his pocket’. He was wrong, it is now rather clear that European leaders have woken up. The horrifying dream may be over. I guess that the idea they would have to stop the traffic in their Capitals just to let the convoy of a vile war criminal pass through was too much for them to cope with.

Blair as a European president could be a total farce, almost as sickening as him being ‘Peace Envoy’. I assume that all we have to do now is to pursue immediately the necessary action that would lead this criminal to face justice and to bear the consequences of his illegal war.

After all I am a Proper Zionist Jew

I am a Holocaust survivor…

Yes, I am a survivor, for I have managed to survive all the scary accounts of the Holocaust: the one about the soap (1), the one about the lamp shades, the one about the camps, the mass shooting, the one about the gas (2) and the one about the death march (3). I just managed to survive them all.

In spite of all these fear inflicting stories, that were purposely installed in my soul since I opened my eyes for the first time, I have become a functional and even a successful human being. I somehow survived the horror against all odds. I even manage to love my neighbour. In spite of all these fearful, traumatic indoctrination I miraculously managed to master my cheering alto saxophone rather than the sobbing violin.

In fact, I have already decided that in case the Queen, or any other member of the Royal Family should ever consider to make me into a ‘Sir’ for my bebop achievements, or even for facing Zionist barbarism with my bare pen, I will immediately change my surname from Atzmon to Vive, just to become the first and only Sir Vive.

I am also totally against Holocaust denial

I clearly resent those who deny the genocides that are taking place in the name of the Holocaust. Palestine is one example, Iraq is another and the one that is set for Iran, is probably too scary to contemplate.

The Holocaust is a relatively new religion (4). It lacks mercy or compassion, instead it promises revenge through retribution. For its followers, it is somehow liberating because it allows them to punish whoever they like as long they gain some pleasure. This may explain why the Israelis ended up punishing the Palestinians for crimes that were committed by Europeans. It is rather clear that the newly emerging religion is not just about ‘eye for an eye’; it is actually an eye for thousands and thousands of eyes.

A month ago, while visiting in Auschwitz, Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak left a note in the official visitors book: ‘a strong Israel is both the comfort and the revenge’(5). No one could summarise the aspiration of the religion any better. The Holocaust religion doesn’t offer redemption. It is a crude violent manifestation of sheer collective brutality. It cannot resolve anything, for aggression can only lead to more and more aggression. In the Holocaust religion there is neither room for peace or grace. Take it from Barak, revenge is where they find comfort.

To deny the danger posed by the Holocaust religion and its followers is to be complicit in a growing crime against humanity and against every possible human value.

I am also in total support of the Jewish National Project

Some believe that after 2000 years of ‘phantasmic Diaspora’ Jews are indeed entitled to an imaginary ‘national home land of their own’. The Zionists apparently meant it sincerely. The Jewish state is now realistic enough to have turned the entire Middle East into a ticking bomb.

Reviewing the Israeli record of crimes against humanity in the last six decades doesn’t leave much room for speculation. We are dealing here with a pathological sinister society. Hence, as much as some of us may agree that Jews should enjoy a hypothetical right for a land of their own, planet Earth is certainly not the ideal location for such an affair.

Hence, I would urge NASA to join in and to make a special effort to find a suitable alternative planet for the Zionist homeland in outer space or even in another galaxy. The Galactic Zionist project would signify the immediate move from ‘promised land’ to ‘promised planet’. I would enthusiastically stress that rather than searching for ‘a land with no people for a people with no land’, what we really want is a ‘lonely planet’. It can even be a ‘desert’ for they claim to know how to make the desert bloom. In a planet of their own the galactic Zionists wouldn’t need to oppress anyone, they wouldn’t ethnically cleanse either, they wouldn’t have to lock the indigenous people in concentration camps, for there won’t be any indigenous people around to abuse, starve, murder and cleanse. They wouldn’t have to pour white phosphorous over their neighbours for there won’t be any neighbours. I would highly recommend NASA to search for a planet with very low gravity just to make it light for people to wander around. After all, we want the new galactic Zionists to enjoy their futuristic project as much as the Palestinians and many others may enjoy their absence.

So here I am, a proper Jew after all: I am a survivor, I oppose Holocaust denial, I support the Jewish national aspiration. Even the chief Rabbi of Britain cannot ask for more than that.

(1) Acknowledged recently to be a ‘myth’ by the Israeli holocaust museum Yad Vashem

(2) A historical fact protected by European Law.

(3) A slightly confusing narrative. If the Nazis were interested in annihilating the entire European Jewish population as suggested by the orthodox Zionist holocaust narrative, then it is rather ambiguous as to just what led them to march what was left of European Jewry, into their crumbling Nazi fatherland at a time when it was clear that they were losing the war. The two narratives i.e. ‘annihilation’ and ‘death march’, seem to oppose each other. The issue deserves further elaboration. I would just suggest that the reasonable answers I have come across may severely damage the Zionist holocaust narrative.

(4) The Israeli Philosophy professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz was probably the first to define the holocaust as the ‘new Jewish religion’.

(5) http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3790707,00.html

Backstroking the Jewish Tomorrow

Earlier today in a conference in Jerusalem titled “Facing Tomorrow”, Israel’s leading politicians shared their vision of Israel’s future.

Following the recent agreement announced by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, Mohammad ElBaradei regarding Iranian Uranium enrichment, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak called on the international community “to give Iran a deadline for halting its nuclear program and impose additional sanctions against Tehran”. For some reason the Israelis are convinced that Nuclear energy is a ‘Jew only property’. The Jewish state insists on keeping its neighbours in a state of nuclear panic alert.

Tzipi Livni, another dedicated warmonger, is now an enthusiastic supporter of the ‘Two State Solution’. “Establishment of a Palestinian state is the only way of preserving Israel’s Jewish character”, she said. At last, the Left and right Wing Zionists are in agreement with each other. Someone should remind the ‘born again dove’ Livni that the Jewish state she refers to is located on stolen Palestinian land, Tel Aviv, Be’er Sheva and Haifa and are all part of occupied Greater Palestine.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai of Shas (an Israeli religious party) blamed the Palestinians for the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. “Unfortunately, the other side [Palestinians] lacks the ability to make brave decisions,” he said.

Minister Yishai is absolutely right. The Palestinians are not ‘brave’ enough to agree to live in concentration camps, they do not agree to the occupation of their land either. These facts take the Jewish leadership by total surprise. I’ll tell you why. The history of the Holocaust teaches us that the Jewish leadership at the time was actually very willing to collaborate with the Nazis all the way through. In fact it was the Judenrate* that managed and organised the mass deportation of European Jews from the ghettos to the camps. To follow Yishai’s logic, unlike the Palestinians, the Nazi era Jewish councils were taking some brave decisions. Seemingly the Palestinians are not ‘brave’ enough to do the same.

Even President Obama engaged himself with issues to do with the Jewish future. Here is his message to the conference:

“The American people and the Israeli people share a faith in the future, a belief that democracies can shape their own destiny and that opportunities should be available to all”

The only question to be asked here, is whether President Obama meant ‘opportunities for all’, or did he mean opportunities for Jews only? As far as Nuclear energy is concerned, already in June President Obama reiterated that Iran has some “right to nuclear energy provided it takes steps to prove its aspirations are peaceful”. I would urge Obama to accept that opportunities for nuclear weapons should also be ‘available to all’. Not just the Israelis but every country in the region. In order to be consistent Obama has to choose between either clearing Israel of its pile of WMD or otherwise encourage every other country in the region to pile up nuclear bombs just to restrain Israel’s proven murderous inclinations by power of deterrence.

However, far more crucial at this stage is to urge Obama to make it clear to the Israelis that by saying ‘opportunities should be available to all” he refers also to Palestinian children who are starved and slaughtered by the Israeli armed forces on a daily basis.

By now, after ten months in office, President Obama should grasp that the notion of ‘opportunities to all’ is not just foreign but in total opposition to the philosophy of the Jewish state, an apartheid racially orientated state.

Do Not Blame Barack

Contrary to what my title indicates, I probably judge Barack Obama more harshly than most reading this page. I don’t think he is just a misguided ideologue or merely a creature of expediency. I believe, practically speaking, that he is an evil man. That is to say, while he is largely ignorant like so many others, he has developed an affinity for evil. He mistakes it for good.

Yet, to be blunt, Obama doesn’t alarm me as much as the average American. To explain why, I’ll present something Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said 2000 years ago when lamenting Julius Caesar’s rise to dictator:

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions . . . . Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.’ Julius was always an ambitious villain, but he is only one man.

Barack Obama is only one man. A bad man, yes, but he is a symptom more than a cause. Without millions of fawning Americans, he would just be a community agitator, vainly preaching Alinsky principles from a soapbox. Of course, he is a symptom that exacerbates the underlying problem, and symptomatic treatment — to ease immediate pain and hardship — is certainly in order. But it is only the worst of physicians who focuses only on symptoms while ignoring the cancer eating away at the patient’s midst.

Some of us lament the presence of self-professed communists such as Van Jones — and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Cass Sunstein and John Holdren — in government, and how we elected a man who broke bread with self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers. But why complain now? We’ve had self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers — and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Ward Churchill, Cass Sunstein and John Holdren — in academia for many decades. And good Americans still donated money to universities and still sent their most precious possessions, their children, to them. So, should it be any surprise that millions of these children would, knowing nothing and feeling all the wrongs things, flock to the polls and cast votes for people just like their teachers and professors? You may say that their parents knew nothing of these universities’ true nature. But it was their place to find out. And Obama did not create the modern academy. He is more a creation of it.

We also criticize Obama for saying “We no longer are [just] a Christian nation” and while speaking in Turkey that “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation.” But can we really say he’s wrong? Has Christmas not become completely commercialized? How many of us say grace with our families before meals? How many of us pray every day? How many Americans subscribe to the modern perversion of the “separation of church and state” idea? How many of us say “God Bless” upon parting? Have the majority of American “Christians” not descended into moral relativism? It is here that some will call me a religious nut. All right, but I simply note that a Christian nation would actually practice Christianity and that if we are satisfied to be only nominally Christian, it lends weight to the argument that we’re not actually Christian. Of course, we certainly can condemn Obama for attending a pseudo-Christian church and being part of the problem, but he didn’t create our secular age. He is more a creation of it.

One thing Obama certainly did help create is the tea-party phenomenon. It is the largest, most impressive grassroots movement I can remember and I truly hope it grows beyond what even the most zealous reader would prefer. Yet, when I hear the protesters complain about the violation of the Constitution, I have to wonder where they’ve been. Did they miss the activist 1947 “separation of church and state ruling”? Have they learned about FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society? Don’t they realize that the federal government long ago exceeded its constitutional bounds? Where is the constitutional mandate for Uncle Scam to involve itself in and/or fund housing, food stamps, farm subsidies, Medicaid, global-warming research, mass transit, and school sports programs? The fact is that most things the federal government has its claws into are none of its affair. Thus, to only now complain about constitutional trespasses is like having finally noted the invasion of Poland when the Nazis started bombing Great Britain.

We also have to ask how serious most Americans really are about respecting the Constitution. Here’s a little test for them: Are you willing to give up your Social Security in the name of constitutional adherence?

I thought so.

The average American has his version of acceptable constitutional violation, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg has hers, and Obama has his. And Obama didn’t create the “living document” mentality. He is more a creation of it.

Then there is our putrid popular culture. Effete Hollywood types — such as the Obama sycophants in this bizarre Harpo Productions video — thuggish rappers, MTV stoner types and the rest of our decadence czars helped galvanize the youth and propel the empty vessel to victory. Yet, while entertainment is a bastion of the left, it’s not entirely a creation of it. The reality is that we, the people, empowered them. We watched their movies; laughed at their salacious jokes; were titillated by their prurience; and tolerated their mainstreaming obscenity, homosexuality and gratuitous violence. We allowed our children to dress in their ghetto styles and imbibe pure and utter filth. Like with so many other things, we helped create our entertainment — a major symptom of spiritual malaise — and then it helped induce many secondary symptoms. And one of them is Obama.

Of course, nothing is more associated with that symptom than the Shill Media, but I think you know what’s coming. Who bought the mainstream papers for all those decades, watched the nightly news and bought all the lies? “How could people know?” you ask? Well, some certainly knew — and some of those knew better than others.

Like Cicero, I’m sure I sound quite condemnatory, but I’m not here to lay a curse or consign anyone to Hell. I don’t want to be found guilty of the George Bernard Shaw mistake G.K. Chesterton criticized most colorfully when he wrote

It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots.

In reality, for us to have avoided that ever-repeated pattern of civilizational decline, the common man would have to be a very uncommon man, something, in the least, like a sublime moral philosopher. And, certainly, no person will have, metaphorically speaking, a hundred industrious hands, a hundred all-seeing eyes or even come close to enjoying demigod-like mental clarity. Yet a nation doesn’t have to resign itself to being blind and crippled, either. We can usually manage one more hand and eye.

Truth be known, when we elected Obama, the nation said “Look, ma, no hands!” with its eyes closed. It required corrupted judgment to be blind to what Obama was. Note that “corrupted” is different than “corrupt.” When saying a computer file is corrupted, there is no implication that it’s evil; rather, it simply means it no longer functions as it should.

This partially explains why facts often don’t matter today. Just as correct input may not yield correct output if fed into a malfunctioning computer, all the necessary facts may not yield a correct conclusion when processed by a corrupted mind. And anyone with a properly functioning virtue file would have sensed the lack of same in Obama. After all, there were so many indications, from his radical associations to his tolerance for infanticide (that’s what you call a clue) to the fact that he once allowed his then two-year-old daughter to listen to rap to his empty sloganeering. Yes, we could’ve . . . known.

Yet my point here is not about the average person, who isn’t reading substantive commentary anyway. It’s that even most of us who oppose Obama and are political are just political, content to fight the battle with one hand and one eye. So many of us — this includes readers and commentators — are satisfied with boilerplate; it’s Alinsky this and Alinsky that, San Fran Nan, Afghanistan and the Taliban, this bill and that political shill. This isn’t to say there’s not a place for such things, as many do need a course in politics 101. But if we want to have any chance of winning the war, we must move on to graduate work and fight it on the deepest levels, the spiritual and cultural. We must scrutinize ourselves and evaluate how we have been complicit in empowering the culture that spawns Barack Obamas. We must remember that those of us who are engaged are a minority weighed against an apathetic majority. A few stones however, can be substantial enough to tip the scales against a million pebbles. But this can only happen if we so greatly increase the weight of our virtue that it outweighs the vice that is everywhere.

I once heard a man of the cloth put it perfectly, saying “Everyone is in a different stage of conversion.” Every thought we contemplate, word we utter and action we take move us closer to or further away from perfection. And it’s always time for another hand and another eye.

The ADL Thought Police

When sociology Professor Bill Robinson stared down the Anti-Defamation League, it looked like a victory for academic freedom. Yet was it? Robinson was portrayed as an anti-Semite because he sent an email to students featuring a photo essay critical of Israel that had circulated online for weeks. While University of California administrators dallied, the ADL and its international network turned up the heat—signaling academics worldwide they could be next.

It looked like progress when the faculty at UC Santa Barbara urged “changes in procedures to avoid improprieties and abuses in the future….” But was it? By then the ADL campaign had created the intended chilling effect. This silencing campaign was featured news for five time-critical months while a newly elected U.S. president was reassessing U.S.-Israeli relations. How can anyone calculate the full extent of the damage—not only to Robinson’s reputation and to the stature of the University of California but also to national security?

So where’s the victory? Clearly Robinson deserves acclaim for resisting pressure as the ADL deployed its most seasoned operatives, including Marvin Heir, a rabbi at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Only an investigation can identify who mobilized the donor community that threatened UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang with the withdrawal of funds.

What was the motivation for this high profile intimidation campaign? Was the ADL driven simply by the discomfort that two students voiced on their receipt of his email criticizing Israeli policy? Or did the ADL network have its sights on a broader strategic goal?

Facts have since proven it was largely pro-Israelis who fixed the intelligence that manipulated the U.S. to invade Iraq. That same network has now mobilized to expand that war to Iran. A key barrier: the global condemnation of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. How does Tel Aviv limit the public relations fallout? On what leverage points should Israel focus to contain the censure while continuing to obscure Israel and pro-Israelis as the common source of this manipulation?

Aiding an enemy within?

The Founders faced a similar challenge during the Revolutionary War. How could they distinguish patriots from those loyal to a foreign nation? Knowing the vast risks that accompany betrayal, they lowered the evidentiary standard for treason. Guilt still required proof beyond a reasonable doubt but a conviction only required evidence of “adhering” to an enemy or giving them “aid and comfort.” To remove all doubt about the gravity of this capital offense, they even included those relaxed standards in Article III of the U.S. Constitution.

Fast-forward two centuries to the Information Age and consider the challenge of distinguishing friend from foe. With a new president sworn into office on a platform promising change, how should Tel Aviv continue to conceal the fact that it was pro-Israelis who deceived the U.S. to wage war in Iraq for the expansionist goals of Greater Israel?

During the Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Barack Obama promised no change in U.S.-Israeli relations. But that pledge was made while he and Hillary Clinton were vying for the pro-Israeli vote. What about now—particularly now that he knows Israel scheduled its assault on Gaza between Christmas and the Obama inaugural—knowing that interval would ensure Tel Aviv could operate largely free of official criticism?

Campaigning for president is one thing. Serving as commander in chief is another. What became of the prospects for change after this professor of constitutional law took a constitutional oath that obliged him to defend the U.S. from all enemies—both foreign and domestic?

Based on the success of pro-Israelis in inducing the U.S. to invade Iraq, how does this international network best expand this war to Iran? To succeed again, how can Tel Aviv best control the risk that facts unhelpful to its agenda find their way into the marketplace of ideas?

How about this for a psyops strategy: launch an intimidation campaign on a high-profile campus and portray a critic as an anti-Semite for sharing photos that had been circulating for weeks on the Internet. Then threaten his job, smear his reputation, put him in fear of his physical safety and threaten to withhold critical funding. Then see if on-campus critics still dare to speak out.

While the Faculty Senate should be commended for its stance, one must ask: what took so long? And what will be done to ensure that never again is a professor on any University of California campus subjected to such abuse with the complicity of university administrators? What steps will be taken to ensure this conduct does not recur on campuses nationwide?

Where was UC President Mark Yudof as this intimidation campaign progressed with such well-timed success? What role was played by the pro-Israeli bias of his wife, Judith, the immediate past president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism representing 760 synagogues?

Where was the Board of Regents while this silencing campaign advanced between the invasion of Gaza and President Obama’s White House meeting with Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Did Board of Regents chairman Richard Blum harbor an undisclosed bias that precluded him shutting down this ADL operation? How about his wife, pro-Israeli U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee? What role did bias play in a community-wide smear campaign led by Arthur Gross-Schaefer, a Santa Barbara rabbi?

Was this only an offense against a courageous professor who fought on while university administrators retreated? Or was this assault more strategic? The Faculty Senate cannot on its own correct these wrongs because key offenders remain beyond their reach. What they can—and must—do is dismiss any faculty member complicit in this operation, condemn any university administrator who failed to act promptly and rebuke complicit operatives in the community.

The reputation of Prof. Robinson was only grist for the same mill that churned out the phony intelligence required to induce the U.S. to war in Iraq. That same network of deceit now seeks to catalyze war with Iran. Robinson was not the target. His reputation was collateral damage. The target was the mindset of academics that—because of this assault—hesitated to criticize Israel.

Until steps are taken to deter future offenses, these psychological operations (psyops) will continue and the reputation of the U.S. will continue to be collateral damage. Most ominous of all, those who wage war “by way of deception” (the motto of the Israeli Mossad) will continue to displace the facts on which self-governance depends. Progress must be measured by how many educators grasp that what was done to one could be done to all.

Education – The ultimate battlefield

In unconventional warfare, the battlefield is the shared field of consciousness. Where does a “consensus” reside? That’s where battles are now waged for public opinion. Those who targeted University of California, Santa Barbara Professor Bill Robinson know that victory flows to those most adept at influencing the consensus mindset. Few know that better than the Anti-Defamation League.

For seasoned combatants, the psyops challenge lies in how best to displace facts with beliefs. The only modern component of this ancient craft is the means for taking such manipulation to global scale. The duplicity is the same regardless whether the operation creates a shared belief in Iraqi WMD, a shared consensus in the infallibility of unfettered financial markets or a shared opinion that Israel is a democracy and an ally. All false yet all widely believed to be true.

Robinson was smeared as an anti-Semite for sharing a photo essay with his students that was critical of Israeli policy. That essay first appeared in Adbusters, a magazine subtitled The Journal of the Mental Environment. That essay has since been posted on a website maintained by UCSB students in defense of academic freedom: http://sb4af.wordpress.com/robinson-case/

Kalle Lasn, founding editor of Adbusters, is a graphic artist who eventually awoke to the harm he was doing as an advertising executive. An Estonian, he saw firsthand how the Soviets exerted virtual control by manipulating the mental environment. In March 2004, Lasn published an article in Adbusters pointing out that, whereas less than two percent of Americans are Jewish, 26 of the top 50 neoconservatives advocating war in Iraq are Jewish (52%).

He titled the article: “Why Won’t Anyone Say They’re Jewish?” By ADL standards, that meant he was an “anti-Semite”—just for asking the question. What’s since been confirmed is that the bulk of those who fixed the intelligence around that predetermined goal were either Jewish or assets developed by operatives who were Jewish.

Displacement is how warfare is waged in the Information Age: displacing facts with beliefs. Why would anyone expect otherwise? Jewish critics of Israeli policy are “self-hating.” Non-Jewish critics are anti-Semites, Jew haters and/or Holocaust deniers. Although those charges are fast losing their potency from overuse, their toxicity still retains enough force to silence critics—as shown by the global traction gained by this thought control operation on a University of California campus.

Sir Gerald Kaufman, British founder of Independent Jewish Voices, uses his position as a Member of Parliament to criticize Israeli policy. Members of his family perished at the hands of the Nazis and in the Holocaust. As one of the U.K.’s harshest critics of Israeli policies, he routinely compares the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews—the same analogy for which Robinson (also Jewish) was smeared as an anti-Semite.

Kaufman’s heartfelt speech on Israel’s incursion into Gaza, given on the floor of the House of Commons, is a must-see for those concerned that criticism of Israeli policy remains absent on the floor of the U.S. Congress. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGuYjt6CP8 [Readers can draw their own conclusions as to who would be motivated to corrupt this YouTube version of his remarks.]

The psyops specialists who coordinated this on-campus silencing campaign know where modern wars are waged: in the shared mindset. The war fought to invade Iraq was waged in the mental environment long before U.S. troops invaded Iraq. Now the U.S. appears guilty by its association with an extremist enclave infamous worldwide for its prowess at waging war by way of deception—and for its aptitude at deceiving the U.S. to fight those wars.

The U.S. invaded Iraq only after facts were displaced by manipulated beliefs. The litany of manufactured beliefs is long and varied: Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague, Iraqi acquisition of yellowcake uranium from Niger and the list goes on. None were factual; all were deployed to deceive. And to advance an Israeli agenda.

Remember the campaign to discredit Joe Wilson overseen by (Jewish) White House operative Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff? A former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Wilson was targeted by Libby for exposing the phony intelligence on uranium from Niger. Campaigns to deceive and discredit have long been key weapons in the Israeli arsenal of deceit.

Remember how Colin Powell was dispatched by pro-Israeli war-planners to the U.N. Security Council just weeks before the March 2003 invasion? Why Powell? To associate his hard-earned credibility with what we now know was false intelligence about Iraq’s mobile biological weapons laboratories. At every turn we find the displacement of facts with beliefs to manipulate decision-makers. That operation successfully discredited not only Powell and the U.S. but also the U.N., an organization that Tel Aviv fears may yet hold Israel accountable for its conduct under international law.

Intelligence on which the U.S. relied was fixed by pro-Israelis in pursuit of a predetermined agenda: the expansionist goals for Greater Israel. Phony intelligence persuaded Washington decision-makers to dispatch the U.S. military to wage a preemptive war not for American interests but for Tel Aviv. When waging unconventional warfare, by the time you see troops on the ground, those complicit are often pre-staging the next venue—as now with the Israeli push to attack Iran.

The ADL-coordinated intimidation campaign launched on the UCSB campus reflects the face of fascism in the Information Age. To respond effectively, the Senate Faculty must provide the tools that enable those targeted to grasp how facts are displaced with induced beliefs—in plain sight and, to date, with legal impunity. No one likes to be deceived. Once “the mark” grasps how they were manipulated, they will see for themselves who is complicit and why. That’s when long overdue accountability can begin.

To focus only on the means (such as the attack on Robinson) leaves the end obscure. And leaves the mark—including UC students—without the tools required to defend against such duplicity. For educators, that shortcoming would transform this potential triumph into an academic tragedy.

Seizing Power and Property

Governments, local, county, state or federal, are artificial entities created by the people. Governments, collective organizations, were created to protect the life, liberty and property of each and every person.

Frederic Bastiat said: “If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.” [1]

Individuals cannot transfer rights or powers they do not inherently possess to an artificial government entity. One cannot bestow a right or privilege that one does not possess – those powers that each and every person possessed prior to the establishment of said government. Individuals may not legally plunder the property or resources of others, kill people, impose moral sanctions, or a plethora of other regulations, public and private extortions that governments regularly engage in.

Bastiat said: “Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?” [2]

The government, constitutionally, is limited only to those functions in which an individual citizen has a right to act. The government has derived its powers from the governed. People cannot delegate powers it does not possess to its creation. John Locke explained the concept: “For nobody can transfer to another more power than he has in himself and nobody has an absolute arbitrary power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own life, or take away the life of property of another.” [3]

For instance, if Citizen A has a vehicle and Citizen B doesn’t, Citizen B cannot arbitrarily seize citizen A’s vehicle. That would be stealing! Citizen B, despite the fact that he may lust after Citizen A’s vehicle, cannot legally delegate a government entity to take Citizen A’s vehicle in his behalf. If the government usurps such authority, that would constitute public plundering – the road to tyranny. America is obviously well down that road, given the current pandemic public plundering sanctioned and facilitated by the government.

The vehicle analogy is also applicable to car dealerships, many of which are being illegally seized and transferred to other parties. The following letter appeared in a Florida newspaper in late May 2009: “My name is George C. Joseph. I am the sole owner of Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu, a family owned and operated business in Melbourne, Florida. My family bought and paid for this automobile franchise 35 years ago in 1974. I am the second generation to manage this business. We currently employ 50+ people and before the economic slowdown we employed over 70 local people. We are active in the community and the local chamber of commerce. We deal with several dozen local vendors on a day to day basis and many more during a month. All depend on our business for part of their livelihood. We are financially strong with great respect in the market place and community. We have strong local presence and stability. I work every day the store is open, nine to ten hours a day. I know most of our customers and all our employees. Sunshine Dodge is my life. On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars. This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as “new,” nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service. There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory. Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler’s insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank. HOW IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CAN THIS HAPPEN? THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS NOT A GOVERNMENT ENTITY. This is beyond imagination! My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN. We did NOTHING wrong. This atrocity will most likely force my family into bankruptcy. This will also cause our 50+ employees to be unemployed. How will they provide for their families? This is a total economic disaster. HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN IN A FREE MARKET ECONOMY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

I am certain that George Joseph is just one of many dealers whose businesses have been seized by major car manufacturers, sanctioned by the bankers directing the current administration’s spoils system of rewarding campaign contributors, friends and corporate allies. This is a blatant Communistic redistribution of property. The Elite have no loyalties – other than to each other.

Unfortunately, government power was usurped long ago by the Elite, the majority of them lawyers, who impose laws favorable to themselves and their corporate cohorts but disastrous to the common citizen. To keep us fighting among ourselves, the Elite fashioned political parties. The sincere Republican and Democrat citizens are so preoccupied blaming the specific parties that they fail to recognize that the Elite within both parties utilize the spoils system – no matter which party is in power. Politicians are like professional wrestlers with orchestrated differences who choreograph their moves and celebrate after each match. Citizens naively believe the rhetoric because we hope things will improve while government Elites of both parties plunder our lives, liberties and pockets. We have all become enslaved and ransacked by a government that was “hired” to protect us from such egregious abuse.

In the 1700s the term “slave’ was applied to all indentured servants. Both black and white servants were granted their freedom as serving a specified length of time – typically seven years. Black and white slaves worked, lived, and played together, apparently indifferent to skin color differences. Racism was absent. That mutual acceptance was artificially altered when the minority colonial Elites, concerned about possible rebellion from the majority non-voting lower classes, took firm measures to divide poor whites and blacks “both socially and economically.” The bulk of society was composed of servants, landless tenants or small yeomen who owned inconsequential land that the Elite didn’t want. The Elite established a “divide and conquer” tactic that is still very much in place in most societies. [4]

Historian Edmund S. Morgan pointed out, “For those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class.” [5]

Edward Bernays, the grand master of propaganda stated: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.” [6]

The government and their compliant corporate press mold and manage our perceptions and prefer that we focus our anger and attention on numerous distractions – the illegal aliens, illusive terrorists, same-sex marriages, welfare recipients, North Korean testing, whether the CIA lied or was it Pelosi, Islamic fundamentalism, whether torture photos should be released or the current Supreme Court nominee, as if one court appointment can change the political landscape. The fact is that the government Elite set up this entire environment of contention to divert our attention from their treacherous unconstitutional, criminal activities – in both parties. This is all part of America’s drive into a One World Order, now hyper accelerated under the current administration.

You might ask – how did government Elites create the current environment. Decades ago the government abandoned the constitutional principles of non entanglement with foreign countries. Government officials are no longer public servants but private servants to deep-pocketed multinational corporations whose money keeps ego-driven politicians in power. Those same multinational corporations control the media flow of information in order to keep the people in an ignorant trance. Character-challenged politicians, mesmerized by power and money, cater to the insatiable greed of the privileged Elite under the pretext of spreading democracy, ousting cruel dictators, restricting the spread of Communism, Nazism, Fascism or terrorism.

The CIA created al Qaeda, the database and instigated Islamic fundamentalism by training 100,000 fundamentalist Muslim Mujahadeen. The CIA-friendly Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed that, unbeknownst to the American public and Congress, that Trilateralist Jimmy Carter authorized $500 million on July 3, 1979 to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism throughout Central Asia in order to destabilize the Soviet Union, another made-in-America enemy that had served the purpose of its creation and now had to be dismantled. The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and functioned from 1979 to 1989 at a cost of $20-30 million per year beginning in 1980 which rose to $630 million per year in 1987. The U.S. poured another $4 billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means student). Young zealots were recruited and sent to the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al Qaeda were taught sabotage skills – terrorism. Young Afghans, Egyptian and Jordanian Arabs and some African American Muslims were instructed in the latest sabotage skills.Underground Dissident [7]

Taxpayer funds financed the I-hate-America textbooks for Muslim students. Prior to 1967, Islamic fundamentalism was a relatively small movement. In the early 1980’s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) gave a taxpayer funded grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and it’s Center for Afghanistan Studies to develop specialized textbooks. For more than twenty years the U.S. spent millions of dollars producing fanatical Islamic schoolbooks for distribution in Afghanistan, a country now known for its terrorist training camps. The schoolbooks, used throughout the 1990s for the country’s core curriculum, included illustrations of guns, bullets, soldiers, and mines to indoctrinate young minds towards violent destruction. Who authorized this hateful instruction for young impressionable minds? [8]

For $190,000 a year, Donald Rumsfeld sat on the board and “attended nearly all of the board meetings” of the Swiss-based ABB Company between 1990 and February 2001. [9] In 2000 (based on a Clinton era contract) ABB sold $200 million worth of components to North Korea to allow construction of two nuclear reactors. Currently, there are concerns about their activities. In December 1983 and again in March 1984, Ronald Reagan sent his personal emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, a former Secretary of Defense, to meet with Saddam Hussein along with Reagan’s handwritten note. This first meeting, on December 20, 1983, was for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Iraq and the United States, the first since the 1967 war. We formally restored diplomatic relations with Iraq in November 1984. Then, Rumsfeld and his corporate cronies secretly supplied Saddam’s military with the components to build chemical and biological weapons. Rumsfeld is just one example from dozens of Elites who repeatedly shift from boardroom to government office while stuffing their pockets from both positions.

David Rockefeller admitted in his relatively-recent book: “For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” [10] What further proof do we need of a pervasive conspiracy – just look at the mounting evidence and forget the mesmerizing, feel-good political jargon emanating from Washington.

Footnotes:

1, The Law, The Classic Blueprint for a Just Society by Frederic Bastiat, Foundation for Economic Research, New York, pp. 2-3
2, The Law, The Classic Blueprint for a Just Society by Frederic Bastiat, Foundation for Economic Research, New York, pp. 2-3
3, Locke, John, 1632-1704. Two Treatises of Government: of Civil Government Book II, p. 135
4, Divided, the South’s Inner Civil War by David Williams, The New Press, New York, 2008, p. 15
5, American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan, W.W. Norton & Co., 2003, pp. 269-270
6, Propaganda by Edward Bernays, Organizing Chaos, p. 37
7, How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahadeen: Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski Le Nouvel Observateur (France), January 15-21, 1998, p. 76; The CIA’s “Operation Cyclone” – Stirring the Hornet’s Nest of Islamic Unrest, October 27, 2002,
8, From U.S., the ABC’s of Jihad; Violent Soviet-Era Textbooks Complicate Afghan Education Efforts by Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, Washington Post, March 23, 2002
9, Rumsfeld was on ABB board during deal with North Korea
10, David Rockefeller: Memoirs by David Rockefeller, Random House, owned since 1998 by the large German private media corporation Bertelsmann, 2002, p. 405

Empty Cradles, Demographic Destiny and the Death of the West

While the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding was good cinema, it was also a big fat Hollywood fiction. With Greece’s fertility rate of 1.36 children per woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1 — “big” is not a modifier demographers would associate with today’s Greek families. In fact, a more accurate film might be called My Big Fat Muslim Wedding.

Worse still, Greece is no anomaly. Long ago the cradle of Western civilization and more recently one of its backwaters, it’s now part of a phalanx of Western demographic failures. In fact, while it may seem counter-intuitive to those weaned on the stuff of Malthusian nightmares, the West is facing a population implosion of historic proportions. And the statistics are staggering. As I wrote when reviewing the documentary Demographic Winter last year:

. . . the number of children in the world is already declining . . . . Birthrates are now below replacement level . . . in approximately 70 countries; in Western Europe, the figure is 1.38, and in northern Italy and parts of Spain it is below 1. As a result, Europe’s 65-year-olds now outnumber her 14-year-olds, and one German province had to close 220 schools in 2006. Children were present in 80 percent of U.S. households a century ago; that number is now 32 percent.

Although pondering demographic malaise conjures up the image of sterile Western swingers, note that this phenomenon is, in a measure, manifesting itself worldwide. Take Eastern Europe, for example. Russia, with its birthrate of 1.4 children per woman, is experiencing a population decrease of 700,000 a year. With an even lower birthrate of 1.22, some Lithuanian officials are concerned about the eventual disappearance of their population. And this is mirrored in other Eastern European nations; Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and the rest are all turning in similar numbers.

The picture is no better in developed Asian nations. Although they’re still stuffing people into Tokyo subway cars like sardines, Japan’s rapidly graying population contracts with a birthrate of 1.22. South Koreans may have far more reason to bring children into the world than Kim Jong-il’s captives, but their 1.2 still can’t match the latter’s 2.0. And Hong Kong, not to be outdone — but perhaps soon undone — comes in second to last in the world with a birthrate of 1 even (only Macau ranks lower).

Even more surprisingly, the developing world is now following our lead. For example, Uruguay, Kazakhstan and Algeria have birthrates of, respectively, 1.94, 1.88 and 1.82. And while millions of illegal aliens still stream across our sieve-like southern border, believe it or not, even Mexico’s birthrate is plummeting muy rapido. As professional demographers have been telling us since the 1970s, the whole world is poised to experience a demographic winter.

Yet, isn’t this good news? Aren’t we dodging a real-life Soylent Green scenario of cramped, elbow-to-elbow living, strained resources and wilderness existing only in memory? This certainly has been the prevailing view for quite some time now, but there is another, more ominous side to this story. To quote demographer Phillip Longman, “The ongoing global decline in human birthrates is the single most powerful force affecting the fate of nations and the future of society in the 21st century.”

Let’s first discuss economic implications. Normally, a civilization can be represented with a population pyramid standing right-side-up, with the youngest people at the bottom and the age increasing as you move up (okay, we’ll forget pharaoh buried underneath). So the aged would be at the very top, with lots of youngsters down below to do civilization’s heavy lifting.

When birthrates collapse, however, this pyramid is turned on its head, with the elderly outnumbering the very young. This usually means hardship, as the young often have to care for their elders. Specifically, though, in our nation it means that the burden of paying an ever-increasing social security bill will fall on ever-dwindling young shoulders. Worse still, it can create a vicious circle: as the young pay progressively higher taxes, the financial strain makes it even less likely that they will have children. It’s a recipe for the winding down of a civilization toward the nadir of non-existence.

Yet there are problems even when social programs are removed from the equation. The young and vibrant are the worker bees; they are the inventors, innovators and creators of wealth. They drive the economy. Of course, the elderly may take jobs out of necessity or boredom, but they can match the economic engine of a peak-working-years population little more than they could match it on the athletic field. This is part of the reason why famed economist Adam Smith taught that decreasing population correlates with economic depression.

Now we come to the death of the West. Many of you know that Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, the face of 1980’s terrorism, has been relatively well-behaved for nigh on 25 years now. Of course, this may be because Ronald Reagan effected a bomb-induced attitude adjustment in 1986. Yet, such punitive action, while sometimes necessary, seldom yields a permanent change in behavior without a permanent change in vital signs. It didn’t scare Saddam Hussein or the Taliban sufficiently, that’s for sure. (Of course, they don’t wear dresses, either.) But is faint-heartedness on the part of Gaddafi the reason? Or is there another factor? Well, a clue can possibly be found in something he once said:

“There are signs that Allah will grant victory to Islam in Europe without swords, without guns, without conquest. We don’t need terrorists, we don’t need homicide bombers. The 50 million Muslims will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

Is this Gaddafi wearing pragmatist’s clothes? Perhaps he realizes that the West is voluntarily committing civilizational suicide, and all he need do is stay out of its way.

If so, he simply notes what civilizations from the good to the bad to the ugly always have understood, that their success largely hinges upon their ability to replenish that invaluable resource: people. For example, the ancient Romans at one point became obsessed with the idea that they weren’t creating enough babies; Joseph Stalin, hardly a pro-lifer, outlawed abortion; and the Nazis had their Lebensborn program. And even today governments are taking note of the problem. To name a handful, Russia, Poland, France and an Italian town are offering citizens substantial monetary incentives (i.e., cash and sometimes tax breaks) to be fruitful and multiply. Yet it isn’t working — and for good reason: a cultural problem cannot be solved with a political solution. Why, even demographically correct Augustus Caesar, who wielded absolute power, could not remedy the birth dearth among Roman nobility.

This almost universal concern is warranted because a people is like a species: a failure to reproduce leads to extinction. Now, this doesn’t mean that neutron bomb-like cityscapes lie in the West’s future. More likely is that its peoples will be dominated — and supplanted — by other cultures. Oh, its new master may not be Islam; it may be China, India or, even more likely, different groups in different parts of the West. The point is that while the Third World and Asia are following in our footsteps, they are far healthier demographically and may be able to recover. But we may soon be at the point of no return.

Now the question is, does this matter? If you listen to the left, our demographic demise is something to be ignored when possible and applauded when not. As Kathryn Joyce did in an incredibly snide and stupid article titled “Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies,” the concern about the West’s baby bust is often chalked up to just “old-fashioned race panic.” The left’s implication is that cultural suicide is our civilization’s comeuppance.

The irony of this is that the people extinguishing themselves are leftists, people who aren’t enlightened enough to understand that their “enlightened” values will die with them. Whether tomorrow brings us a Chinese hegemon, a worldwide caliphate or, more likely, a bipolar or multi-polar world, it may be a place ruled neither by the virtues of Christendom nor the values of those crucifying her. For when the people who birthed political correctness disappear, they won’t be able to reproduce it any more than little baby libertines. Of course, also true is that the West’s glorious triumphs, such as its unprecedented respect for human rights, would also fade into history.

And this is something mature people consider. Would the world be a better place with China as the dominant force? If you have trouble with that one, ponder how the Chinese are currently raping Africa as they zealously exploit the continent’s resources. They are making European colonialism look beneficent.

Mature people also do something else — they acknowledge facts. And what bothers me about the current debate over population is the steadfast refusal to do so. If you believe that man is a pox upon the planet, be forthcoming. If you think he needs to cut his numbers by 90 percent, make your case. If you want a “Planetary Regime” to control world population — which Obama’s science czar John Holdren wrote about — stand and be counted. But, as liberal icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” Before debating where we should go, there must be an acknowledgement of where we are.

And where is this? It’s a phase civilizations have seen before, eerily illuminated by setting suns of their own design. For example, even 2000 years ago, Greek weddings weren’t all that big and fat. As Greek historian Polybius wrote circa 140 B.C. when lamenting his civilization’s decline,

“In our time, all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and general decay of population . . . . This evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to the passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life.”

When I ponder our materialism, promiscuity, frivolity and selfishness, our abortion-mill archipelago that churns with Nazi-like efficiency, it occurs to me that perhaps the leftists are right — just not for the reasons they think. It’s not sins of our past that haunt us but those of our present, and maybe the euthanizing of Western civilization is, after all, our comeuppance.

The Tower of Basel

Secretive Plans for the Issuing of a Global Currency…

Do we really want the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) issuing our global currency

by Ellen Brown

Global Research – In an April 7 article in The London Telegraph titled “The G20 Moves the World a Step Closer to a Global Currency,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote:

“A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.

“‘We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,’ it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.

“In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”

Indeed they will.  The article is subtitled, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.”  Which naturally raises the question, who or what will serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity?  When the world’s central bankers met in Washington last September, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role.  A former governor of the Bank of England stated:

“[T]he answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). . . . The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.”1

And if the vision of a global currency outside government control does not set off conspiracy theorists, putting the BIS in charge of it surely will.  The BIS has been scandal-ridden ever since it was branded with pro-Nazi leanings in the 1930s.  Founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930, the BIS has been called “the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.”  Charles Higham wrote in his book Trading with the Enemy that by the late 1930s, the BIS had assumed an openly pro-Nazi bias, a theme that was expanded on in a BBC Timewatch film titled “Banking with Hitler” broadcast in 1998.2  In 1944, the American government backed a resolution at the Bretton-Woods Conference calling for the liquidation of the BIS, following Czech accusations that it was laundering gold stolen by the Nazis from occupied Europe; but the central bankers succeeded in quietly snuffing out the American resolution.3

Modest beginnings, BIS Office, Hotel Savoy-Univers, Basel

First Annual General Meeting, 1931

In Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), Dr. Carroll Quigley revealed the key role played in global finance by the BIS behind the scenes.  Dr. Quigley was Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he was President Bill Clinton’s mentor.  He was also an insider, groomed by the powerful clique he called “the international bankers.”  His credibility is heightened by the fact that he actually espoused their goals.  He wrote:

“I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960′s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. . . . [I]n general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

Quigley wrote of this international banking network:

“[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.  This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.  The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.”

The key to their success, said Quigley, was that the international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government.  The statement echoed one made in the eighteenth century by the patriarch of what would become the most powerful banking dynasty in the world.  Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild famously said in 1791:

“Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”

Mayer’s five sons were sent to the major capitals of Europe – London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Naples – with the mission of establishing a banking system that would be outside government control.  The economic and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by bankers, for the benefit of bankers.  Eventually, a privately-owned “central bank” was established in nearly every country; and this central banking system has now gained control over the economies of the world.  Central banks have the authority to print money in their respective countries, and it is from these banks that governments must borrow money to pay their debts and fund their operations.  The result is a global economy in which not only industry but government itself runs on “credit” (or debt) created by a banking monopoly headed by a network of private central banks; and at the top of this network is the BIS, the “central bank of central banks” in Basel.

Behind the Curtain

For many years the BIS kept a very low profile, operating behind the scenes in an abandoned hotel.  It was here that decisions were reached to devalue or defend currencies, fix the price of gold, regulate offshore banking, and raise or lower short-term interest rates.  In 1977, however, the BIS gave up its anonymity in exchange for more efficient headquarters.  The new building has been described as “an eighteen story-high circular skyscraper that rises above the medieval city like some misplaced nuclear reactor.”  It quickly became known as the “Tower of Basel.”  Today the BIS has governmental immunity, pays no taxes, and has its own private police force.⁴ It is, as Mayer Rothschild envisioned, above the law.

The BIS is now composed of 55 member nations, but the club that meets regularly in Basel is a much smaller group; and even within it, there is a hierarchy.  In a 1983 article in Harper’s Magazine called “Ruling the World of Money,” Edward Jay Epstein wrote that where the real business gets done is in “a sort of inner club made up of the half dozen or so powerful central bankers who find themselves more or less in the same monetary boat” – those from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Japan and England.  Epstein said:

“The prime value, which also seems to demarcate the inner club from the rest of the BIS members, is the firm belief that central banks should act independently of their home governments. . . . A second and closely related belief of the inner club is that politicians should not be trusted to decide the fate of the international monetary system.”

In 1974, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created by the central bank Governors of the Group of Ten nations (now expanded to twenty).  The BIS provides the twelve-member Secretariat for the Committee.  The Committee, in turn, sets the rules for banking globally, including capital requirements and reserve controls.  In a 2003 article titled “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” Joan Veon wrote:

“The BIS is where all of the world’s central banks meet to analyze the global economy and determine what course of action they will take next to put more money in their pockets, since they control the amount of money in circulation and how much interest they are going to charge governments and banks for borrowing from them. . . .

“When you understand that the BIS pulls the strings of the world’s monetary system, you then understand that they have the ability to create a financial boom or bust in a country.  If that country is not doing what the money lenders want, then all they have to do is sell its currency.”5

The Controversial Basel Accords

The power of the BIS to make or break economies was demonstrated in 1988, when it issued a Basel Accord raising bank capital requirements from 6% to 8%.  By then, Japan had emerged as the world’s largest creditor; but Japan’s banks were less well capitalized than other major international banks.  Raising the capital requirement forced them to cut back on lending, creating a recession in Japan like that suffered in the U.S. today.  Property prices fell and loans went into default as the security for them shriveled up.  A downward spiral followed, ending with the total bankruptcy of the banks.  The banks had to be nationalized, although that word was not used in order to avoid criticism.6

Among other collateral damage produced by the Basel Accords was a spate of suicides among Indian farmers unable to get loans.  The BIS capital adequacy standards required loans to private borrowers to be “risk-weighted,” with the degree of risk determined by private rating agencies; and farmers and small business owners could not afford the agencies’ fees.  Banks therefore assigned 100 percent risk to the loans, and then resisted extending credit to these “high-risk” borrowers because more capital was required to cover the loans.  When the conscience of the nation was aroused by the Indian suicides, the government, lamenting the neglect of farmers by commercial banks, established a policy of ending the “financial exclusion” of the weak; but this step had little real effect on lending practices, due largely to the strictures imposed by the BIS from abroad.7

Similar complaints have come from Korea.  An article in the December 12, 2008 Korea Times titled “BIS Calls Trigger Vicious Cycle” described how Korean entrepreneurs with good collateral cannot get operational loans from Korean banks, at a time when the economic downturn requires increased investment and easier credit:

“‘The Bank of Korea has provided more than 35 trillion won to banks since September when the global financial crisis went full throttle,’ said a Seoul analyst, who declined to be named.  ‘But the effect is not seen at all with the banks keeping the liquidity in their safes.  They simply don’t lend and one of the biggest reasons is to keep the BIS ratio high enough to survive,’ he said. . . .

“Chang Ha-joon, an economics professor at Cambridge University, concurs with the  analyst. ‘What banks do for their own interests, or to improve the BIS ratio, is against the interests of the whole society.  This is a bad idea,’ Chang said in a recent telephone interview with Korea Times.”

In a May 2002 article in The Asia Times titled “Global Economy: The BIS vs. National Banks,” economist Henry C K Liu observed that the Basel Accords have forced national banking systems “to march to the same tune, designed to serve the needs of highly sophisticated global financial markets, regardless of the developmental needs of their national economies.”  He wrote:

“[N]ational banking systems are suddenly thrown into the rigid arms of the Basel Capital Accord sponsored by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS), or to face the penalty of usurious risk premium in securing international interbank loans. . . . National policies suddenly are subjected to profit incentives of private financial institutions, all members of a hierarchical system controlled and directed from the money center banks in New York. The result is to force national banking systems to privatize . . . .

“BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. . . . The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.”

Ironically, noted Liu, developing countries with their own natural resources did not actually need the foreign investment that trapped them in debt to outsiders:

“Applying the State Theory of Money [which assumes that a sovereign nation has the power to issue its own money], any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation.”

When governments fall into the trap of accepting loans in foreign currencies, however, they become “debtor nations” subject to IMF and BIS regulation.  They are forced to divert their production to exports, just to earn the foreign currency necessary to pay the interest on their loans.  National banks deemed “capital inadequate” have to deal with strictures comparable to the “conditionalities” imposed by the IMF on debtor nations: “escalating capital requirement, loan writeoffs and liquidation, and restructuring through selloffs, layoffs, downsizing, cost-cutting and freeze on capital spending.”  Liu wrote:

“Reversing the logic that a sound banking system should lead to full employment and developmental growth, BIS regulations demand high unemployment and developmental degradation in national economies as the fair price for a sound global private banking system.”

The Last Domino to Fall

While banks in developing nations were being penalized for falling short of the BIS capital requirements, large international banks managed to escape the rules, although they actually carried enormous risk because of their derivative exposure.  The mega-banks succeeded in avoiding the Basel rules by separating the “risk” of default out from the loans and selling it off to investors, using a form of derivative known as “credit default swaps.”

BIS Tower Building, Basel

Botta 1 Building, Basel

However, it was not in the game plan that U.S. banks should escape the BIS net.  When they managed to sidestep the first Basel Accord, a second set of rules was imposed known as Basel II.  The new rules were established in 2004, but they were not levied on U.S. banks until November 2007, the month after the Dow passed 14,000 to reach its all-time high.  It has been all downhill from there.  Basel II had the same effect on U.S. banks that Basel I had on Japanese banks: they have been struggling ever since to survive.8

Basel II requires banks to adjust the value of their marketable securities to the “market price” of the security, a rule called “mark to market.”9  The rule has theoretical merit, but the problem is timing: it was imposed ex post facto, after the banks already had the hard-to-market assets on their books.  Lenders that had been considered sufficiently well capitalized to make new loans suddenly found they were insolvent.  At least, they would have been insolvent if they had tried to sell their assets, an assumption required by the new rule.  Financial analyst John Berlau complained:

“The crisis is often called a ‘market failure,’ and the term ‘mark-to-market’ seems to reinforce that. But the mark-to-market rules are profoundly anti-market and hinder the free-market function of price discovery. . . . In this case, the accounting rules fail to allow the market players to hold on to an asset if they don’t like what the market is currently fetching, an important market action that affects price discovery in areas from agriculture to antiques.”10

Imposing the mark-to-market rule on U.S. banks caused an instant credit freeze, which proceeded to take down the economies not only of the U.S. but of countries worldwide.  In early April 2009, the mark-to-market rule was finally softened by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB); but critics said the modification did not go far enough, and it was done in response to pressure from politicians and bankers, not out of any fundamental change of heart or policies by the BIS.

And that is where the conspiracy theorists come in.  Why did the BIS not retract or at least modify Basel II after seeing the devastation it had caused?  Why did it sit idly by as the global economy came crashing down?  Was the goal to create so much economic havoc that the world would rush with relief into the waiting arms of the BIS with its privately-created global currency?  The plot thickens . . . .

Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.

NOTES

1.        Andrew Marshall, “The Financial New World Order: Towards a Global Currency and World Government,” Global Research (April 6, 2009).

2        Alfred Mendez, “The Network,” The World Central Bank: The Bank for International Settlements, http://copy_bilderberg.tripod.com/bis.htm.

3        “BIS – Bank of International Settlement: The Mother of All Central Banks,” hubpages.com (2009).

4         Ibid.

5        Joan Veon, “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” News with Views (August 26, 2003).

6         Peter Myers, “The 1988 Basle Accord – Destroyer of Japan’s Finance System,” http://www.mailstar.net/basle.html (updated September 9, 2008).

7         Nirmal Chandra, “Is Inclusive Growth Feasible in Neoliberal India?”,  www.networkideas.org (September 2008).

8         Bruce Wiseman, “The Financial Crisis: A look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain,” Canada Free Press (March 19, 2009).

9         See Ellen Brown, “Credit Where Credit Is Due,” www.webofdebt.com/articles/creditcrunch.php (January 11, 2009).

10        John Berlau, “The International Mark-to-market Contagion,” OpenMarket.org (October 10, 2008).

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