Obama Is Preparing for War in South America

Interview with Eva Golinger…

1 Mike Whitney—-The US media is very critical of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He’s frequently denounced as “anti-American”, a “leftist strongman”, and a dictator. Can you briefly summarize some of the positive social, economic and judicial changes for which Chavez is mainly responsible?

Eva Golinger—-The first and foremost important achievement during the Chávez administration is the 1999 Constitution, which, although not written nor decreed by Chávez himself, was created through his vision of change for Venezuela. The 1999 Constitution was, in fact, drafted – written – by the people of Venezuela in one of the most participatory examples of nation building, and then was ratified through popular national referendum by 75% of Venezuelans. The 1999 Constitution is one of the most advanced in the world in the area of human rights. It guarantees the rights to housing, education, healthcare, food, indigenous lands, languages, women’s rights, worker’s rights, living wages and a whole host of other rights that few other countries recognize on a national level. My favorite right in the Venezuelan Constitution is the right to a dignified life. That pretty much sums up all the others. Laws to implement these rights began to surface in 2001, with land reform, oil industry redistribution, tax laws and the creation of more than a dozen social programs – called missions – dedicated to addressing the basic needs of Venezuela’s poor majority. In 2003, the first missions were directed at education and healthcare. Within two years, illiteracy was eradicated in the country and Venezuela was certified by UNESCO as a nation free of illiteracy. This was done with the help of a successful Cuban literacy program called “Yo si puedo” (Yes I can). Further educational missions were created to provide free universal education from primary to doctoral levels throughout the country. Today, Venezuela’s population is much more educated than before, and adults who previously had no high school education now are encouraged to not only go through a secondary school program, but also university and graduate school.

The healthcare program, called “Barrio Adentro”, has not only provided preventive healthcare to all Venezuelans – many who never had access to a doctor before – but also has guaranteed universal, free access to medical attention at the most advanced levels. MRIs, heart surgery, lab work, cancer treatments, are all provided free of cost to anyone (including foreigners) in need. Some of the most modern clinics, diagnostic treatment centers and hospitals have been built in the past five years under this program, placing Venezuela at the forefront of medical technology.

Other programs providing subsidized food and consumer products (Mercal, Pdval), job training (Mission Vuelvan Caras), subsidies to poor, single mothers (Madres del Barrio), attention to indigents and drug addicts (Mission Negra Hipolita) have reduced extreme poverty by 50% and raised Venezuelans standard of living and quality of life. While nothing is perfect, these changes are extraordinary and have transformed Venezuela into a nation far different from what it looked like 10 years ago. In fact, the most important achievement that Hugo Chávez himself is directly responsible for is the level of participation in the political process. Today, millions of Venezuelans previously invisible and excluded are visible and included. Those who were always marginalized and ignored in Venezuela by prior governments today have a voice, are seen and heard, and are actively participating in the building of a new economic, political and social model in their country.

2 MW—On Monday, President Chavez threw a Venezuelan judge in jail on charges of abuse of power for freeing a high-profile banker. Do you think he overstepped his authority as executive or violated the principle of separation of powers? What does this say about Chavez’s resolve to fight corruption?

Eva Golinger—-President Chávez did not put anyone in jail. Venezuela has an Attorney General and an independent branch of government in charge of public prosecutions. Chávez did publicly accuse the judge of corruption and violating the law because that judge overstepped her authority by releasing an individual charged with corruption and other criminal acts from detention, despite the fact that a previous court had not granted conditional freedom or bail to the suspect. And, the judge released the suspect in a very irregular way, without the presence of the prosecutor, and through a back door. The suspect then fled the country.

This is part of Venezuela’s fight against corruption. Unfortunately – as in a lot of countries – corruption is deeply rooted in the culture. The struggle to eradicate corruption is probably the most difficult of all and will probably not be achieved until new generations have grown up with different values and education. In the meantime, the Chávez administration is trying hard to ensure that corrupt public officials pay the consequences. That judge, for example, engaged in an act of corruption and abuse of authority by illegally releasing a suspect and therefore was charged by the Public Prosecutor’s office and will be tried. It has nothing to do with what Chávez said or didn’t say, it has to do with enforcing the law.

3 MW—Why is the United States building military bases in Colombia? Do they pose a threat to Chavez or the Bolivarian Revolution?

Eva Golinger—-On October 30th, the US formally entered into an agreement with the Colombian government to allow US access to seven military bases in Colombia and unlimited use of Colombian territory for military operations. The agreement itself is purported to be directed at counter-narcotics operations and counter-terrorism. But a US Air Force document released earlier this year discussing the need for a stronger US military presence in Colombia revealed the true intentions behind the military agreement. The document stated that the US military presence was necessary to combat the “constant threat from anti-US governments in the region”. Clearly, that is a reference to Venezuela, and probably Bolivia, maybe Ecuador. It’s no secret that Washington considers the Venezuelan government anti-US, though it’s not true. Venezuela is anti-imperialist, but not anti-US. The US Air Force document also stated that the Colombian bases would be used to engage in “full spectrum military operations” throughout South America, and even talked about surveillance, intelligence and reconnaisance missions, and improving the capacity of US forces to execute “expeditionary warfare” in Latin America.

Clearly, this is a threat to the peoples of Latin America and particularly those nations targeted, such as Venezuela. Most people in the US don’t know about this military agreement, but it they did, they should question why their government, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, is preparing for war in South America. And, in the midst of an economic crisis with millions of people in the US losing jobs and homes, why are millions of dollars being spent on military bases in Colombia? The US Congress already approved $46 million for one of the bases in Colombia. And surely more funds will be supplied in the future.

4 MW—What is ALBA? Is it a viable alternative to the “free trade” blocs promoted by the US?

Eva Golinger—-The Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas – Trade Agreement for the People, is a regional agreement created five years ago between Venezuela and Cuba, and now has 9 members: Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Dominica. ALBA is a trade agreement based on integration, cooperation and solidarity, contrary to US trade agreements which are based on competition and exploitation. It promotes a way of trading between nations that assures mutual benefits. For example, Venezuela sells oil to Cuba and Cuba pays with services – doctors, educators and technological experts that help to improve Venezuela’s industries. Venezuela sells oil to Nicaragua and Nicaragua pays with food products, agricultural technology and aide to build Venezuela’s own agricultural industry, which long ago was abandoned by prior governments only interested in the rich oil industry. ALBA seeks to not just provide economic benefits to its member nations, but also social and cultural advances. The idea is to find ways to help members develop and progress in all aspects of society. ALBA recently created a new currency, the SUCRE, which will be used as a form of exchange between member nations, eliminating the US dollar as the standard for trade.

5 MW—Are US NGO’s and intelligence agents still trying to foment political instability in Venezuela or have those operations ceased since the failed coup?

Eva Golinger—-In fact, the funding of political groups in Venezuela, and others throughout Latin America that promote US agenda, has increased since the April 2002 coup against President Chávez. Through two principal Department of State agencies, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US government has channeled more than $50 million to opposition groups in Venezuela since 2002. The USAID/NED budget to fund groups in Venezuela in 2010 is nearly $15 million, doubled from last year’s $7 million. This is a state policy of Washington, which the Obama Administration plans to amp up. They call it “democracy promotion”, but it’s really democracy subversion and destabilization. Funding political groups favorable to Empire, equipping them with resources, strategizing to help formulate political platforms and campaigns – all geared towards regime change – is a new form of invasion, a silent invasion. Through USAID and NED, and their “partner NGOs” and contractors, such as Freedom House, International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, Pan-American Development Foundation and Development Alternatives, Inc., hundreds of political groups, parties and programs are presently being funded in Venezuela to promote regime change against the Chávez government. US taxpayer dollars are being squandered on these efforts to overthrow a democratically elected government that simply isn’t convenient for Washington. Remember, Venezuela has 24% of world oil reserves. That’s a lot!

6 MW—How hard has Venezuela been hit by the economic crisis? Do the people understand Wall Street’s role in the meltdown?

Eva Golinger—-Actually, the Chávez government has taken important steps to shelter Venezuela from the financial crisis. People here in Venezuela absolutely understand Wall Street’s role in the crisis and know that the US capitalist-consumerist system is principally responsible for causing the financial crisis, but also the climate crisis that the world is facing. The Venezuelan government took preventive steps against the financial crisis, such as withdrawing Venezuela’s reserves from US banks two years ago, creating cushion funds to ensure social programs would not be cut and diversifying Venezuela’s oil clientele so as not to be dependent solely on US clients. Recently, several banks have been nationalized by the Venezuelan government and others have been liquidated. But this was more due to the mismanagement and internal corruption within those banks. The Venezuelan government reacted quickly to take over the banks and guarantee customers’ savings would not be lost. In fact, it’s the first time in Venezuela’s history that no customers have lost any of their money during a bank liquidation or takeover. This is part of the Chávez Administration’s policy of prioritizing social needs over economic gain.

7 MW—Here’s an excerpt from a special weekend report by Bloomberg News:

“Americans have grown gloomier about both the economy and the nation’s direction over the past three months even as the U.S. shows signs of moving from recession to recovery. Almost half the people now feel less financially secure than when President Barack Obama took office in January…Fewer than 1 in 3 Americans think the economy will improve in the next six months….Only 32 percent of poll respondents believe the country is headed in the right direction, down from 40 percent who said so in September.” (Bloomberg)

The frustration and disillusionment with the US political/economic system has never been greater in my lifetime. Do you think people in the United States are ready for their own Bolivarian Revolution and steps towards a more progressive, socialistic model of government?

Eva Golinger—-The rise of Barack Obama neutralized a growing sentiment for profound change inside the US. Hopefully, the slowdown in US activism will only be temporary. South of the border, there is tremendous change taking place. New social, political and economic models are being built by popular grassroots movements in Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American nations that seek economic and social justice. I believe strongly that models in process, like the Bolivarian Revolution, provide inspiration and hope to those in the US and around the world that alternatives to US capitalism do exist and can be successful.

The US has a rich history of revolution. There are many groups inside the US dedicated to building a better, more humanist system. Unity and a collective vision are essential aspects of building a strong movement capable of moving forward. Every nation has its moment in history. This is the time of Latin America. But there is great hope that the people of the US will soon unite with their brothers and sisters south of the border to bring down Empire and help build a true world community based on social and economic justice for all.

Eva Golinger, winner of the International Award for Journalism in Mexico (2009), named “La Novia de Venezuela” by President Hugo Chávez, is a Venezuelan-American attorney from New York, living in Caracas, Venezuela since 2005 and author of the best-selling books, “The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela” (2006 Olive Branch Press), “Bush vs. Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela” (2007, Monthly Review Press), “The Empire’s Web: Encyclopedia of Interventionism and Subversion”, “La Mirada del Imperio sobre el 4F: Los Documentos Desclasificados de Washington sobre la rebelión militar del 4 de febrero de 1992” and “La Agresión Permanente: USAID, NED y CIA”. Since 2003, Eva, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and CUNY Law School in New York, has been investigating, analyzing and writing about US intervention in Venezuela using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain information about the US Government’s efforts to destabilize progressive movements in Latin America. Her first book, The Chávez Code, has been translated and published in six languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian & Russian) and is presently being made into a feature film.

Dr King Spanks Obama: Part 4

Some months ago, at the 23rd Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday Celebration in San Francisco, attendees were asked to answer the question, “What would Dr. King want to say to Barack Obama?” [1] This article series is an effort to provide Dr. King an opportunity to answer that question for himself from the pages of a book he wrote in 1967 entitled: “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”. But more than a mere contrast between two persons, this article series seeks to compare recent American history with contemporary struggles, and to explore visions of a more desirable future. This is the spirit of Dr. King’s book title and of Obama’s campaign slogan, “Change We Can Believe In”. At this point, we’ve reached chapter 5 of Dr. King’s book, which advances the following centerpiece of his philosophy:

“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income… This proposal is not a “civil rights” program, in the sense that that term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white. I hope that both Negro and white will act in coalition to effect this change, because their combined strength will be necessary to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically anticipate.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1967 [2]

Now termed the “Basic Income Guarantee” (BIG), this measure doesn’t receive quite the discussion or popular acclaim that it did 40-years ago. But it has been advanced by a historic list of prominent supporters, including Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and more recently, Richard C. Cook. [3] This essay will argue that higher levels of economic democracy are a prerequisite, not a byproduct, of such a measure. Meanwhile, with a vast body of contemporary support, Barack Obama has recently advanced a similar proposal:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14-percent — 14-percent of its gross national product — on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim’s talking about when he says ‘everybody in, nobody out’, a single-payer health care plan, universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately, because first we’ve got to take back the White House, we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.” — Barack Obama, 2003 [4]

At first glance, Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. might seem to be on the same page, or at least somewhere in the same ballpark. But now that Democrats have finally taken back the White House and Congress, Rob Kall asks an essential question: “Who would have thought that Obama’s health care plan would enrich big Pharma and raise profits for health insurers while raising taxes on small businesses and threatening to jail people who were uninsured?” [5] As Progressives Democrats of America complain, “the one option that would produce enough savings to include every single American, contain rising costs, and ensure no one ever faces a medical bankruptcy again was never seriously considered despite the fact that 86 members of Congress have co-sponsored HR 676, The Medicare for All Act. Congress has failed to debate the one option that nearly 60% of doctors and nurses support, most Americans want, along with a growing number of unions, cities and towns” — single payer health care. [6]

In my home state of Washington, the Spokesman Review reports: “The 1 in 5 adults lacking insurance stand to sink the financial stability of the state’s health care providers… Many health care providers have softened the losses by charging more for those with insurance… We’re reaching a point where we can’t sustain this system”. [7] Even from a strictly “free market” perspective, this continuing trend is a market failure [8] that the Obama administration now seeks to mandate for every US citizen instead of a more sustainable single payer system that was originally proposed. According to Stephen Lendman: “If Obamacare is enacted, it will cost more, deliver less, leave millions uninsured, millions more underinsured and leave a broken system in place. It will enrich the insurance, drug and large hospital chain cartels at the expense of universal coverage. It will solidify a class-based system delivering the best care money can buy. Others will get sub-standard treatment, and for millions none at all.” [9] Kate Randall adds, “Obama’s health care counterrevolution is of a piece with his entire domestic agenda. It parallels the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks, the imposition of mass layoffs and wage and benefits cuts in the auto industry, and a stepped-up attack on public education and on teachers.” [10]

Nonetheless, public support for Barack Obama and his alleged “centrist” approach appears to remain fairly high, as for some reason he was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. According to the Nobel committee, Obama has created “a new climate in international politics.” But Paul Craig Roberts remands:”Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably. No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s ‘war on terror’. Apparently, the Nobel committee is suffering from the delusion that, being a minority, Obama is going to put a stop to Western hegemony over darker-skinned peoples. The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made ‘War is Peace’ the reality.” [11] So the Nobel committee has essentially discredited themselves and the Peace Prize itself by awarding it to a warmonger like Barack Obama. This should raise serious questions about how they were coerced into doing so, and by whom.

When Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he responded, “I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize. After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.” [12]

Meanwhile, the violence driven by American imperialism continues to spread throughout the world while most black Americans are still chained to the “lowest rung of the economic ladder” as Dr. King lamented more than 40-years ago. While they are joined by a growing population of whites, Hispanics and other races, it is significant to note that an inordinate proportion of African Americans still find themselves living in poverty. In fact, Professor David Harvey suggests the recent mortgage foreclosure crisis is largely a racial phenomenon, “a financial Katrina”, with its devastation focused mainly in the inner-city of places like Cleveland, Detroit and Baltimore where the concentration of ethnic minorities is typically highest. [13] [14] The Chicago Tribune reports that “deep recession is hitting African-Americans more severely than the overall population”. As the nation’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate nudged toward 10 percent, the African-American jobless rate was 15.5 percent with Illinois blacks at 18.6 percent in the third quarter, according to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute.

The Tribune goes on to say: “The United States historically has seen higher unemployment rates for minorities, but the gap has widened in this recession, in part because of job losses in the manufacturing and auto sectors. And the jobless growth, coupled with the predatory lending that flourished in segregated neighborhoods during the real estate boom, have led to dramatic spikes in mortgage foreclosures, sending home values into a downward spiral. The bottom line: A silent depression for African-Americans”. [15] According to Larry Pinkney, “the underbelly of this nation is the black underclass. Instead of becoming smaller and moving out of poverty and disenfranchisement, the black underclass has grown much, much larger and become even more impoverished and disenfranchised”.

In chapter 5 of his book, Dr. King implores the American black population to educate themselves and to become more actively involved in politics. [2] While some have successfully heeded this call to action, Pinkney further observes, “The relatively small black elite has shamelessly, in complicity with the elite of its white counterpart, helped spawn an insidious new form of racism and economic apartheid. Moreover, members of the black underclass are themselves chastised and blamed by this insidious black elite and intelligentsia for being the economic and social victims of a callous, avaricious, capitalist system which now finds itself in deep trouble nationally and globally”. [16]

But is it any surprise that a black rise to power under capitalism would be proportionately similar to a white rise to power under the same system? Is it any surprise that the interests of “black power” would closely match and collaborate with the interests of “white power”? Under capitalism, is it any surprise that the interests of power are directly opposed to the interests of the remaining population regardless of skin color? Is it any surprise that a black President would advance an agenda very similar to most of his lily white predecessors?

In chapter 2 entitled, “Black Power”, Dr. King argues, “The problem of transforming the ghetto is, therefore a problem of power — a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo.” With this, Dr. King obviously understands that opposing interests are involved. But until this antagonism is dissolved, any personal transition from one pole to the other merely erases one’s sympathetic relationship with the opposing pole. There is no incentive for any President of the United States to “transform the ghetto”, as his position of power is contingent upon the powerlessness of others. So the goal of “equality”, which Dr. King so fervently pursued, is not for any individual or group to rise to power over others, but to dismiss the existing power structure as much as possible in all human activity in order to maximize democracy and to minimize opposing interests. “Are we seeking power for power’s sake? Or are we seeking to make the world and our nation better places to live? If we seek the latter, violence can never provide the answer. The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.” In chapter 2, Dr. King goes on to say:

“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice… There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed. This has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in white. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.” [17]

Many argue that one year is not nearly long enough for any President to effect “change” in these regards. And granted, President Obama probably didn’t intend “Change We Can Believe In” to suggest he could solve all the world’s problems overnight. But it does seem entirely reasonable for us to expect him to at least initiate a “change” of direction in the most damaging trends. Instead, Barack Obama continues to deliberately fortify those trends in the same direction they have been headed for the past 40-years since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by his own government. [18] “For the first time in humanity, over 1 billion people are chronically hungry”, says a United Nations World Food Programme online video. The US Department of Agriculture reports recently that in 2008, one in six US households were “food insecure”, the highest number since the figures were first gathered in 1995. [19] Once again, these aren’t static snapshots, they are dynamic and growing economic trends.

How is it that citizens of the wealthiest nation in human history increasingly find themselves living in tents and under bridges and without adequate nourishment? At the same time, how is it that 75-percent of all American youth aged 17-24 are too fat and stupid to pass a military entrance exam? [20] [21] Is all this due to irresponsibility amongst the lower classes, or is it because of upper class greed? The best answer is probably that our class-based socioeconomic system is inherently is designed to channel economic wealth and political power away from producers and into the hands of non-producers. Whether we are aware of the fact or not, each of us consent to this antagonistic relationship and actively contribute to its predominance through daily participation.

One argument against this conclusion is that increasing numbers of workers, involuntarily displaced by technological advancement and other economic developments, qualify as “non-producers” who have no share in the wealth and power generated by production. But the result of their displacement is increased competition for jobs at the individual level, which tends to drive aggregate wages down. So the active role of rising unemployment and a growing “underclass” is to reduce and discipline the remaining workforce, to increase its productive output and to drive wages down, thereby delivering more wealth and power into the hands of a shrinking upper class. While some analysts might refer to this as “economic efficiency”, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presents another view:

“Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will… We have come to the point where we must make the non-producer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution… The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other… The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking. The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” [2]

While Dr. King’s vision is both admirable and perhaps attainable, he also anticipates “fierce opposition”. Moreover, he seems to realize his suggested measures are impossible without “deep structural change” implemented through “some form of constructive coercive power”. [22] For example, in chapter 5 of his book, King states: “It was not the marching alone that brought about integration of public facilities in 1963. The downtown business establishments suffered for weeks under our almost unbelievably effective boycott. The significant percentage of their sales that vanished, the 98 percent of their Negro customers who stayed home, educated them forcefully to the dignity of the Negro as a consumer.” [2]

It might be surmised from this that Dr. King merely advocates consumer activism whereby people “vote with their dollars.” But consumers can’t vote with dollars they don’t possess. Moreover, unemployment and poverty are structural features of the predominant economic system, not a mistake or an aberration that can be corrected through some kind of reform. So effective withdrawal of mass consent for the existing wage-based system involves more than a mere “boycott” or failure to participate. Structural transformation of the decision-making process involves the construction of an entirely new socioeconomic system where human beings are no longer enslaved by either masters or wages. Further study indicates that Dr. King not only understood the severe limitations of his prior campaigns but that he also had much higher goals in mind:

“We must frankly acknowledge that in past years our creativity and imagination were not employed in learning how to develop power. We found a method in nonviolent protest that worked, and we employed it enthusiastically. We did not have leisure to probe for a deeper understanding of its laws and lines of development. Although our actions were bold and crowned successes, they were substantially improvised and spontaneous. They attained the goals set for them but carried the blemishes of our inexperience… The future of the deep structural changes we seek will not be found in the decaying political machines. It lies in new alliances of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, labor, liberals, certain church and middle-class elements.” [2]

Here, Dr. King describes what David Harvey has more recently termed The Right To The City: “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate, what aesthetic values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” [23]

Both Dr. King and Professor Harvey go on to suggest that transforming our social relations to effect deep structural change involves far more than mere labor movements or consumer uprisings or civil rights activism or ecological arguments or mournful cries from the unemployed, homeless and starving. Instead, a unified cooperative alliance amongst all these common interests is essential to effect the needed transition from capitalism toward a more equitable and sustainable socioeconomic system. David Harvey insists that democratic control of productive surplus is imperative, and Dr. King is very explicit in defining his view of cooperative alliance:

“A true alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits and none must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others.” [2]

So a truly cooperative “alliance” involves a set of “common interests” with no “basic conflict”. There is nothing complicated about this, as most human interests are generally held in common and are best managed democratically. The most obvious exceptions are any sort of personal drive for financial independence or political power, derived through private accumulation and exclusive individual control of capital surplus. These pursuits tend to promote hostile relations with others and establish opposing sets of interests. Everyone wants control of capital surplus — and everyone should have it — democratically. For the very essence of capital is social improvement, and there is no justification for that power to be concentrated in the hands of an exclusively entitled minority. Economic democracy and political service are collaborative, not individual, pursuits, and the wreckage of our dying system is potentially fuel for more universal and sustainable levels of human cooperation. Unemployed capital and unemployed labor living side-by-side is always an opportunity to transform the system. So there is no reason Dr. King’s dream of racial equality through the abolition of poverty can’t materialize. But there is also no reason to expect such blessings to be delivered from the President of the United States or his floundering Congress. As Dr. King further suggests:

“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. When they have amassed such strength, the writing of a program becomes almost an administrative detail. It is immaterial who presents the program; what is material is the presence of an ability to make things happen. The powerful never lose opportunities — they remain available to them. The powerless, on the other hand, never experience opportunity — it is always arriving at a later time. The deeper truth is that the call to prepare programs distracts us excessively from our basic and primary tasks… Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us. It would be the height of naiveté to wait passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings of goodwill that it implored us for our programs. The first course is grounded in mature realism; the other is childish fantasy.” [2]

The abolition of poverty will begin here and now — in the United States of America — with a deliberate and aggressive expansion of the cooperative business sector supported by a network of publicly owned banks. [24] For higher levels of economic democracy are a prerequisite, not a byproduct, of programs like Basic Income Guarantee and Single Payer Health Care. To demand progressive programs from a conservative government is “the height of naiveté”. To expect a conservative government to magically become progressive with the election of a black man to the Presidency is “childish fantasy”. The challenge and the responsibility for the pursuit of progressive measures belongs to individuals and firms at the community level who already understand the root of the problem and the potential solutions. Lots of people simply “don’t get it”, and that’s okay. The responsibility of those who do understand is not to persuade or convince those who stubbornly object, but to transform social relations at the community level by providing a superior living example of economic democracy [25] to others who are more receptive.

Michael Moore recently distributed a list of “15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now” in these regards. [26] But as stated above, the most urgent measures on that list involve democratizing the workplace and capital investment: 1) Fire your boss and reorganize the workplace cooperatively. 2) Close your bank account and deposit your money in a credit union or some other form of publicly owned bank. That is, any kind of system that does not feed back into the currently predominant debt-based monetary system. The combination of both measures is a large-scale dismissal of the current socioeconomic system. Instead of money being loaned into circulation at interest from a fractional reserve and exclusively controlled by a handful of private bankers, cooperative firms will pool some portion of their productive surplus into an investment fund which is democratically ploughed back into the economy in the form of grants, specifically for the purpose of expanding the cooperative business sector.

Thus, money is earned, not loaned, into circulation, and economic growth for the sake of political power is no longer an imperative. The newborn economy will deliberately operate parallel to — and in direct competition with — the existing system, and it will steadily grow from within it. The main criteria for success is a transfer of popular consent from the old system to the new. So transition will most likely be slow and painful, and the new system must constantly innovate to develop and maintain competitive advantage without compromising the basic principles of the democratic local cooperative. Laws and customs will eventually change. But until they do, the challenging cooperative economy must be led voluntarily by a growing body of individuals and organizations who already understand the urgent need for deep systemic transformation. Without this fundamental understanding in mind, any movement against capitalism will certainly fail.

In summary, British philosopher James Allen (1864 – 1912) wrote a short volume called “As A Man Thinketh” during the turbulent Industrial Revolution of late nineteenth-century England. In that small book he presents the following overview of human cooperation: “It has been usual for men to think and to say, ‘Many men are slaves because one is an oppressor; let us hate the oppressor.’ Now, however, there is among an increasing few a tendency to reverse this judgment to say, ‘One man is an oppressor because many are slaves; let us despise the slaves.’ The truth is that oppressor and slave are cooperators in ignorance, and, while seeming to afflict each other, are in reality afflicting themselves. A perfect Knowledge perceives the action of law in the weakness of the oppressed and the misapplied power of the oppressor; a perfect Love, seeing the suffering which both states entail, condemns neither, a perfect Compassion embraces both oppressor and oppressed.” [27]

Notes:

[1] Staff. (February 02, 2009). “What would Dr. King want to say to Barack Obama?”. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/news/article/what_would_dr_king_want_to_say_to_barack_obama/

[2] King, Dr. Martin Luther (1968). “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?”. New York, NY: Beacon Press. Excerpts from chapter 5. ISBN 0807005711

[3] Wikipedia. (11-23-2009). “Economic democracy: National dividend”. Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy#National_dividend

[4] Obama, Barack. (2003). “Obama on single payer health insurance”, speech to the AFL-CIO. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE

[5] Kall, Rob. (11-10-2009). “Top-down blowback; The GOP Discovers that the Grassroots Bites Back”. OpEd News. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Top-down-blowback-The-GOP-by-Rob-Kall-091110-686.html

[6] Progressive Democrats of America. (07-23-2009). “The Mad as Hell Doctors Road Tour”. PDA Web site. http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/alliances/2009-07-23-09-33-18-alliances.php

[7] Stucke, John. (11-20-2009). “Ranks of uninsured swell in state”. Spokesman Review. Spokane, WA. pg 1. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/nov/20/ranks-of-uninsured-swell-in-state/

[8] Kendall, David. (09-03-2009). “Health Care and the Free Market”. OpEd News. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Health-Care-and-the-Free-M-by-David-Kendall-090830-360.html

[9] Lendman, Stephen. (11-18-2009). “Universal Single Payer Health Care Coverage: An Economic Stimulus Plan”. Countercurrents. http://www.countercurrents.org/lendman181109.htm

[10] Randall, Kate. (07-28-2009). “Obama’s health care counterrevolution”. World Socialist Web Site http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j28.shtml

[11] Roberts, Paul Craig. (10-10-2009). “Warmonger Wins Peace Prize “. Countercurrents. http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts101009.htm

[12] King, Dr. Martin Luther. (12-10-1964). “Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech”. Nobelprize.org. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-acceptance.html

[13] Harvey, David. (11-21-2009). “Race and the Mortgage Crisis”. WordPress. http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/race-and-the-mortgage-crisis/

[14] Harvey, David. (10-29-2008). “A Financial Katrina – Remarks on the Crisis”. City University of New York Graduate Center: Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey. http://davidharvey.org/2008/12/a-financial-katrina-remarks-on-the-crisis/

[15] Bergen, Kathy. (11-06-2009). “African-Americans hit inordinately hard by recession”. Chicago Tribune. Chicago, IL. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-fri-black-jobs-nov06,0,2759566.story

[16] Pinkney, Larry. (11-05-2009). “And What of the Black Underclass?”. The Black Commentator. http://www.blackcommentator.com/349/349_kir_black_underclass_printer_friendly.html

[17] King, Dr. Martin Luther (1968). “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?”. New York, NY: Beacon Press. Excerpts from chapter 2. ISBN 0807005711

[18] Douglass, James W. (March 15. 2000). “The King Assassination: After Three Decades, Another Verdict”. Christian Century. http://www.precaution.org/lib/09/prn_king_assassination_another_verdict.000315.htm

[19] Goodman, Amy. (11-19-2009). “Hungering for a True Thanksgiving”. Information Clearinghouse. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24016.htm

[20] Wallace, William S. (06-01-2009). “Most young people don’t meet standards for military service”. Spokesman Review. Spokane, WA. pg 1. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2008/jun/01/most-young-people-dont-meet-standards-for/?print-friendly

[21] Davenport, Christian, and Emma Brown. (11-06-2009). “Most young unfit for military”. Washington Post-ABC News poll reported in the Spokesman Review. Spokane, WA. pg 1. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/nov/06/most-young-unfit-for-military/

[22] King, Dr. Martin Luther (1968). “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?”. New York, NY: Beacon Press. Excerpts from chapter 4. ISBN 0807005711

[23] Harvey, David. (2008). “The Right To The City”. Text: http://davidharvey.org/media/righttothecity.pdf. Video Lecture: http://www.a0n.com/medellin/righttothecity.htm

[24] Dorrien, Gary. (05-15-2009). “A Case For Economic Democracy”. OpEd News. http://www.opednews.com/populum/print_friendly.php?p=A-Case-for-Economic-Democr-by-Gary-Dorrien-090513-750.html

[25] Wikipedia. (11-23-2009). “Economic democracy”. Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy

[26] Moore, Michael. (10-22-2009). “Michael Moore’s Action Plan: 15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now. MichaelMoore.com. http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/michael-moores-action-plan-15-things-every-american-can-do-right-now

[27] Allen, James. (B 1864 – D 1912) (published 1992). “As A Man Thinketh”. Barnes & Noble. pg 37

About The Social Contract: Our Society and the Future

This past week, in Detroit, Michigan, a group of Muslim immigrants engaged the FBI in a gun battle.

Journalists Paul Egan and Oralandar Brand-Williams of The Detroit News wrote, “The leader of a Detroit mosque who allegedly espoused violence and separatism was shot and killed Wednesday by the FBI in a gun battle at a Dearborn warehouse. Luqman Ameen Abdullah, imam of the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque in Detroit, was being arrested on a raft of federal charges including conspiracy, receipt of stolen goods, and firearms offenses. Charges were also filed against 11 of Abdullah’s followers. Eight were in custody Wednesday night awaiting detention hearings today; three remained at large. A federal complaint filed Wednesday identified Abdullah, 53, also known as Christopher Thomas, as “a highly placed leader of a nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group.” His black Muslim group calls itself “Ummah,” or the brotherhood, and wants to establish a separate state within the United States governed by Sharia law, Interim U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg and Andrew Arena, FBI special agent in charge in Detroit, said in a joint statement.”

While most Americans ignore that minor incident in Detroit, it proves indicative of a larger dilemma facing the United States’ immigration policy. Former President Bush in 2008, began importing 1,000 Iraqi immigrant refugees into the USA monthly. He jumped that to 19,000 a year for 2009. President Obama, earlier this year, signed a bill to add thousands more from Palestine.

How long can a country maintain its own language, culture and identity in the wake of endless immigration from cultures that do not assimilate into the host country? What happens when immigrant numbers grow greater than the native people?

For a simple example, look to North America in 1492 where 522 Indian tribes lived upon the land for centuries without change to their languages, religions and cultures. They enjoyed their ‘space’ all around America. The Blackfeet ‘ruled’ Montana. The Apache occupied Arizona, etc. The Seminoles lived in Florida. The Chippewa owned Michigan, etc.

By 1850, white settlers slaughtered millions of them and sent them to reservations. In the Smithsonian Indian exhibit in Washington DC, gives the reason for the destruction of the indigenous people of North America: “After first contact, the main destruction of the red man stemmed from guns, disease, the Bible and alcohol.”

Samuel P. Huntington said, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”

Today, American Indians suffer on reservations with 80 plus percent alcoholism, lost languages, loss of religion, cultures and ways of life. We subdued them, so much so, they could not respond to our onslaught.

But enter the 21^st century and enter Islam. Muslims now fan out around the world with one “prime directive” to “…convert or kill non-believers.” Muslims, whether peaceful or radical, they all follow the same edict in their Koran. Given enough numbers, they overwhelm their host country.

Example: Holland fights for its life today. It suspended any further immigration by Muslims last year. They pay immigrants to go back home. France mandated that all immigrants must speak French and no more wearing of the burka. Great Britain cowers under growing Sharia Law and more emboldened numbers of Muslims. They will not recover from their immigration dilemma nor will their culture as it becomes overwhelmed by immigrants: projections show them adding 11 million more within two decades. British society and British culture will not survive.

If you would like to learn more, visit www.thesocialcontract.com

“The English philosopher John Locke, whose thinking helped inspire the American Revolution, said that society should be governed by an understood set of values he termed the social contract. Under the social contract, governments have obligations to their citizens, and citizens have responsibilities to society,” the website reads, “Most public issues are basically moral and ethical ones. What is the right thing to do? How do we decide what we think is right? When rights collide, which ones take precedence? The concept of the social contract helps us sort out the difficult issues confronting American society today and helps us find balance.”

Each quarter THE SOCIAL CONTRACT journal examines trends, events, and ideas that have an impact on America’s delicate social fabric. This journal addresses the following key topics: Human Population issues; including absolute size, rate of growth, and distribution. Do cherished American ideals prosper or suffer through further population growth?

• Immigration issues. In order to best facilitate meeting the highest goals of the American people, (1) how many immigrants should we admit? (2) who should he admitted? And (3) how can we humanely enforce the rules?
• Language, assimilation, culture, and national unity considerations. What shared values are necessary to the maintenance of our social contract?
• The balance of individual rights with civic responsibilities. Since the previous issues are so often framed in terms of rights, what are the balancing obligations?
• Other nations’ efforts at creating and guarding their own social contracts. What practical insights can be gained. from observing the failures and successes in nation-building by other societies?

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT explores these complex and interrelated issues with articles, essays, and book reviews that vary greatly in outlook and philosophy. They encourage a wide spectrum of opinion as they publish contributions from many vantage points.

If you want to learn more, spend $25.00 a year for the “Social Contract Quarterly”. It educates beyond anything you will hear in the main stream media. MSM only reports accelerating consequences, but it’s better to solve the problems rather than to continue racing into them.

Just as the ‘tiny’ incident in Michigan will be dismissed, like a cancer, it will grow and it DOES grow without attention, until, it will become a tumor that destroys the ‘social contract’ that successfully served this civilization for 233 years. But, like what happened to the Aborigines of North America, we will become victims of our own immigration policies.

How do we stop what is happening to us? Empower your collective strengths by joining www.NumbersUSA.com ; www.capsweb.org ; www.alipac.us ; www.firecoalition.com ; www.fairus.org ; www.thesocialcontract.com

Is Capitalism on the Ropes?

Interview with Michael D. Yates and Fred Magdoff…

1. Mike Whitney—In your new book, “The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know”, you allude to right wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, which promote a “free market” ideology. How successful have these organizations been in shaping public attitudes about capitalism? Do you think that attitudes are beginning to change now that people understand the role that Wall Street and the big banks played in creating the crisis? (“The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know” By Fred Magdoff and Michael Yates, Monthly Review Press)

Michael Yates: Corporate America began to wage what turned out to be a one-sided war against working people in the mid-to late-1970s, when it became apparent that the post-World War Two “Golden Age” of U.S. capitalism was over. As profit rates fell, businesses began to develop a strategy for restoring them. This strategy had many prongs, and one of them was ideological, that is, a struggle for “hearts and minds,” to use a military term now being applied to Afghanistan. The presumed failure of Keynesian economics, marked by the simultaneous existence of escalating inflation and unemployment, gave the ideological struggle its foundation. Maybe there had been too many restrictions placed on the market, and these restrictions (minimum wages, health and safety regulations, laws facilitating union organizing in labor markets; public assistance in the form of money grants, housing subsidies, and the like; restrictions on the flow of money internationally) had led to results opposite those that liberal Keynesians had thought most likely. If these complex arguments could be tied to simple cliches, like “get the government off our backs,” “the unions have gotten too powerful” (with always a hint that they are too radical thrown into the argument), and “welfare queens” (with that always popular whiff of racism), they could provide ideological cover for what was really a matter of corporate economics, namely the making of money.

This ideological attack bore fruit quickly. President Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Volcker, under the guise of fighting inflation, immediately began to snuff the life out of working class communities by forcing interest rates up to nearly 20 percent. Today, Volcker is treated like a hero by Democrats and above reproach (though ignored by President Obama’s more right-wing economic advisors), which shows just how far to the right economic discourse has moved. What Carter began, Reagan completed, firing the Air Traffic Controllers and putting the nail in labor’s coffin. Behind the scenes in all of this and growing in strength for the next twenty years (funded by wealthy business leaders) or so were the right-wing think tanks you mention. Just as retired generals go to work for military contractors and defeated politicians become lobbyists, government economic advisors get jobs at Heritage or the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute. The staffs of these ideological centers churn out endless position papers and studies, which find their way into our newspapers and the offices of our congresspersons. A gigantic network of professors, journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and, today, a television network (Fox) bombard us with right-wing propaganda. That all of this has been successful is seen by the fact that the shibboleths of neoliberalism—such as the needs for privatization of public entities, the free reign of markets, the obviousness of the success of welfare reform, the evils of raising the minimum wage—are all commonplaces today.

While the public now knows that something is rotten, I am not sure that neoliberal ideas are so under attack that they will lose their sway. I think that the tenacity of these ideas owes something to the lack of an ideological alternative, which, in turn, is due to the abject failure of organized labor to provide one. For example, we need universal health care. Labor, however, has not consistently argued in favor of this or supported it at all. Now Congress is poised to enact healthcare legislation that might well be worse than the profit-driven system we have all come to hate. Labor should refuse to support this legislation, but I doubt it will. Then, when the new healthcare plans fail to deliver the goods, the right-wing will be lying in wait, ready to pounce and say, “See, we told you so. The government always makes things worse.” In other words, until there is a radical ideology to replace right-wing thinking, the latter is unlikely to lose its drawing power.

Fred Magdoff: Although these institutions were very successful, along with a number of other forces, in shaping public attitudes toward the economy, the reality of the current severe economic conditions are causing many, including some economists, to rethink their views of how “efficiently” markets function in the real world (as opposed to their ideological make-believe world) and that some different approaches may be needed. People seem to understand that the “big players” played a major role in the crisis, but most of the anger has been placed on the outrageous salaries of the top echelon. Of course, this is just “chump change” compared to the massive amounts at that are transferred to the wealthy through the speculative casino that our economy has become.

2. MW—Socialism has a huge public relations problem. Wouldn’t you agree that socialism has been effectively discredited in the U.S. media and that, even now–with unemployment soaring at 10 percent and more than 300,000 foreclosures per month–the average American worker still believes in the virtues of capitalism? How do you explain this phenomenon?

Michael Yates: Part of my answer here can be seen in my response to your first question. Socialism has, indeed, been discredited here, partly due to its rejection by its natural supporter, namely the labor movement. The CIO expelled in the late 1940s and early 1950s the left-wing forces who built the great industrial unions. When it did this, it abandoned the worker-centered ideology that might have laid the basis for support here for at least the kind of social democracy we find in the Scandinavian nations. This left the ideological field to the enemies of social democracy and socialism. Of course, we cannot ignore the long and inglorious history of police-state repression of those persons and organizations that championed socialism. Our government has never hesitated to arrest, imprison, and even kill the enemies of capitalism. So it has been dangerous to be a radical here, though not so much today when radical ideas aren’t taken seriously and there are no powerful radical organizations left. Suppose that after the Second World War, the left in the labor movement had grown, and the left-led unions had continued to successfully organize workers and win good collective bargaining agreements. Suppose that they had built upon their impressive worker education programs, made inroads in the South, and fought hard against U.S. imperialism and the Cold War. We might have a much different political terrain on which to fight today.

Two other factors that must be considered in the attachment of the working class to capitalism are racism and imperialism. In the past, employers routinely pitted white workers against black, and one weapon they used was to associate black workers (and the civil rights movement) with communism (It was interesting to note in this connection the attempts to make Obama out to be a radical socialist). The claim that black union supporters were reds helped to solidify white support for capitalism. By the same token, anti-imperialist struggles in the poor nations of the world (often former colonies of the rich countries) were typically led by political radicals. These could be made out to be anti-American, and then those in the United States who allied themselves with these struggles could also be labeled anti-American, despite the fact that they might also be supportive of policies that would benefit working people. The schools and the media could be counted out not to try to set anyone straight on any of this.

Now, having said this, I must also say that to the extent that left forces in the United States identified themselves uncritically with the former Soviet Union and its extremely undemocratic political system, they sometimes played into the hands of those opposed to socialism. And I must also admit that socialist forces were, at their strongest, never powerful enough here to force their best ideals permanently into the consciousness of the working class majority. Finally, in the past, the success of capitalism in the United States allowed for some sharing of the wealth with workers, and this, too, made people less willing to entertain radical ideas.

Old and deeply ingrained ideas die hard, and unless there are forces at work to develop new ones and unless there is at least widespread experimentation with new ways to organize production and distribution, little is likely to change, even in the face of economic catastrophe, such as so may working men and women are facing right now. Quite the contrary, workers might be persuaded that actions detrimental to their long-term self-
interest need to be taken, such as, for example, draconian measures against immigrants.

Fred Magdoff: There is no question that the term socialism has a public relations problem. But while it’s true that most people don’t fully understand the basic workings of the capitalist system nor what socialism is, there are indications that many people are ready to talk about alternatives—and that includes socialism. The positive public response to Michael Moore’s movie, “Capitalism,” is one indication. But a Rasmussen poll last spring found that only 58% of American’s say that capitalism is better than socialism. For adults under 30, 37% preferred capitalism and 33% preferred socialism. It’s not clear what the poll results really mean. But it does indicate that people are willing to hear about and talk about alternatives to capitalism.

3. MW—In a chapter titled “Neoliberlism” you focus on the disparity of wealth in the US today. Here’s an excerpt:

“By 2006 the top 1 percent of households received close to a quarter of all income and the top 10 percent got 50 percent of the income pie. In 2006, the 400 richest Americans had a collective net wealth of $1.6 trillion, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million people. This degree of income and wealth inequality was last seen just before the beginning of the Great Depression.” (pg 50)

Let’s ignore the moral issue for now, and focus on the supply/demand question. Is it possible for an economy to produce sufficient demand when more and more of the wealth and income goes to the upper 5 or 10 percent of the population? (isn’t this proof that capitalism is inherently crisis-prone?)

Michael d. Yates: If a certain amount of output is produced, an equal amount of income is generated. So, conceptually, there could be enough demand to buy the output, no matter that the incomes generated are getting more unequally distributed. It certainly has been the case that the rich people now getting such a large share of the pie spend gobs of money. And rich foreigners spend a great deal of money in the United States as well. However, the rich also save a lot of money (the more they get, the more they save), and this money does not enter immediately into the spending flow. Working people, on the other hand, can be counted on, by virtue of the limited income that they command, to spend all of their income. Therefore, the more income the rich have, the more savings there will be, and, unless some way is found to convert all this saving into spending on newly-produced goods and services, the more likely it is that there will be a crisis caused by not enough spending (and its corollaries of unsold goods and services and unemployed labor). If we understand that growing inequality is the normal trajectory of capitalist economies, a trajectory only mitigated by the power of organized working people to win a bigger share of the pie for themselves and to compel the government to intervene in the marketplace on their behalf, then it is correct to say that capitalist economies are crisis-prone for this reason alone.

Growing inequality also creates other potential problems for the system. Sometimes it can generate a political crisis, a crisis of legitimacy so to speak. The rich exert tremendous political power, and this power grows as those at the top command a larger and larger share of a society’s income. To the rest of us, the game looks increasingly rigged, with us having little chance to improve our circumstances through individual efforts. More inequality also has harmful social and economic consequences that we don’t normally think of. Recent research has shown that if we compare two entities (two states in the United States, for example) with equal average incomes but different degrees of inequality, then the place with more unequal incomes will also have higher rates of infant mortality, arrest and imprisonment, school dropouts, low infant birth weights, and many other measures of social well-being. Growing inequality actually kills some of us, makes some of us sicker, and puts some of us in jail.

I want to add an important point. To say that capitalist economies are crisis-prone, because of a tendency toward income inequality or whatever other reason, is not the same as saying that these economies are on their deathbeds, no matter how severe a crisis may be. It is possible for an economy to exist in a crisis or a prolonged period of slow growth (stagnation) without it being ready to collapse. In the end, it is political struggle, that is, class struggle, that truly destabilizes an economy and generates conditions in which it is possible to imagine the birth of a new system.

Fred Magdoff adds: It is one of the many contradictions of the system. If ordinary folk are paid well they can buy a lot of stuff and help keep the system going. So from the point of view of the system as a whole, higher paid workers would help the economy. However, there is only one driving force for individual capitalists–and that’s to make as much money as possible. What might be better for the overall economy can be of no concern to the individual trying to maximize profits. For an analogy, let’s take a look at ocean fishing. Almost every fish species is being fished to the point at which the population crashes. It would make sense for all of the companies operating the large trawlers to cooperate and fish less in order to preserve the resource on which they depend. So what’s good for their long-term future is sacrificed as each individually tries to maximize their catch and therefore profits.

4. MW—Here’s another excerpt from the book: “In 2006, the financial sector employed about 6 percent of the workers but ‘produced’ 40 percent of the profits of all domestic firms.”(pg 56) A few paragraphs later you add that, “Making money without actually making something turned out to be the largest growth sector of the U.S. economy from the early 1980s to the present crisis.”

This seems to imply that as manufacturing and other parts of the “real” economy have become less lucrative, the trading of paper assets has become Wall Street’s new profit-center, the Golden Goose. What impact has the “financialization” of the economy had on ordinary working people?

Michael Yates: I think that an answer here has two parts. First, it was the neoliberal “revolution” begun in the 1970s that did immense harm to working people. For example, unionization rates began to fall dramatically in the 1980s, as Reagan began his “magic of the marketplace” assault on the working class. Real wages (the purchasing power of our paychecks) began to stagnate in the 1970s and are not much higher today than then. Relatively high-wage public employment began to endure a long period of privatization, which also damaged working class living standards. The move toward “free trade” did workers here no good, as manufacturing began to flee our shores for low-wage havens abroad. None of these things had to do with financialization per se.

Second, however, once the neoliberal attack on working class living standards took hold and incomes began to flow upward, those with a great deal more money began to look for ways to put this money to work. The corporations that they owned also had higher profits, and they did the same. The United States has always had a robust financial sector, though in the past, it was not the tail that wagged the dog as far as our system of production and distribution was concerned. Neoliberalism brought with it a deregulation of international movements of money and goods and services. [It is important to note that we see neoliberalism as a political response to capital’s quest for restored profits beginning in the mid-1970s when the post-Second World War two economic boom ended and the slow growth (stagnation) common to mature capitalist economies reasserted itself.] These, in turn, required a certain amount of financial innovation, to reduce, for example, the risks of fluctuations in currency exchange rates and sharp changes in political conditions that could threaten investments. From these innovations came still more, until finance began to take on a life of its own. And while neoliberalism and direct corporate actions inside workplaces did reduce costs and raise profits, they did not create nearly enough capital spending opportunities (investment) to absorb the growing individual savings and business profits. Finance of one kind or another then began to be seen as a place to dispose of surplus and make still more money. Leveraged buyouts, stock market speculations, real estate “investments,” all took off from the 1980s on, absorbing money that could not find enough opportunities in the real economy of production. As these things happened, financial “innovation” exploded, with all of the alphabet soup of financial instruments we describe in our book.

This explosion of finance proved detrimental to working people in a number of ways. Leveraged buyouts inevitably resulted in the hollowing out of what were often perfectly viable businesses. Companies were saddled with debt, assets were stripped and sold, and workers were furloughed by the tens of thousands. The inflation of asset values gave rise to the notion that it was the job of managers to increase the share price of their businesses—in any way possible. Businesses came to be thought of as mere collections of assets rather than entities that produced things. Asset inflation gave rise to asset speculation and the development of ever more complex financial instruments, all leading sooner or later to financial bubbles and the inevitable bursting of the bubbles. As we have seen, the bursting of financial bubbles has had tremendously negative impacts on working people: shuttered workplaces and unemployment to name but the primary ones. The last bubble, in real estate markets, was harmful to workers not only after it burst but also as it was developing. In the aftermath of the dot.com bubble, Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Fed Board of Governors, directed Fed policy to pressure interest rates down to very low levels. This helped to push loose money into real estate. As house prices began to rise, banks and brokers started to encourage working people to do two things: borrow money against the appreciated value of their homes and buy homes, either as first-time buyers or as purchasers of more expensive homes (after selling old ones). Working people were eager to do both because they saw houses as sources of cash to compensate for stagnating household incomes and as a form of wealth that could help secure them against the hazards of ill health, lost pensions, or college-age children needing money for school. Working class households began to take on large amounts of debt, making themselves more vulnerable, even as they thought they were making wise financial decisions. Ironically, those who saw their incomes rise so high because of neoliberalism were now, in effect, loaning money to those who didn’t fare so well. As banks accumulated mortgages, farsighted Wall Street swindlers saw golden opportunities to develop a slew of new financial instruments based upon the packaging and repackaging of mortgages into new and exotic instruments. Greenspan played their shill, arguing that they had uncovered the secret of hedging infallibly against risk. From here it was but a short step to the criminal schemes of Countrywide and a host of other financial institutions. The billions of dollars made were used not only to finance a new gilded age of revoltingly lavish consumption but to corral the most tractable politicians money could buy.

Fred Magdoff adds: Financialization of the economy created the possibilities for people to take on more and more debt—credit cards, new cars, 2nd mortgages, etc. It was the selling of a lifestyle way beyond people’s ability to pay for it plus the easy access of loans that created the bind that many people find themselves in today. In essence, it allowed people to live beyond their means. They were encouraged to take on debt as their house values seemed headed up forever, and the great rise in foreclosures and bankruptcies is the unfortunate result of the financialization of the economy. Also, those people who had retirement money in individual accounts or with pension systems and thought that they had become very wealthy, now found themselves with much less to rely upon.

5. MW—In the last couple of decades, consumer debt has skyrocketed, as you note, “doubling from 1975 to 2005, to 127 percent of disposable income.” (pg 60) Have we gone as far as we can without deleveraging and paying down debts? What happens to a credit-dependent economy when the consumer can no longer increase his/her debt-load? Is this just the beginning of a decades-long down-cycle?

Michael Yates: Certainly no entity—not a person, a family, a business, even a government— can take on rising levels of debt (relative to income) indefinitely. Sooner or later, the piper has to be paid. Working-class consumers took on large amounts of debt, to compensate in part for stagnating wages and incomes, and, it is important to note, to pay for health problems and other household traumas. This meant that the burden of the debt rose, since income wasn’t rising as fast as the debt, and also because the interest rates charged on credit cards and subprime mortgages were so high. We at Monthly Review have been decrying the rise of consumer debt for many years, and we said that the debt chickens would come home to roost sooner of later. I must say that I was surprised that debt could be broadened and deepened for so long. The ingenuity of creditors in extending loan periods and devising so many new forms of debt has to be admired for its audacity. Then, the ways in which these debts were packaged and sold so that more debt could be extended was truly breathtaking. Unfortunately, consumers ultimately couldn’t pay and all hell broke loose. Now, with so much unemployment, workers are truly strapped. They will not be borrowing so much or spending so much anytime soon. [One interesting recent development is that, as some households have defaulted on debts or simply stopped making payments, consumer spending has showed a bit of an upward tick!] So the question arises: what spending will fuel a sustained recovery? It won’t likely be consumer spending. Capital spending was stagnating to begin with and was the root cause of the crisis. There are no new “epoch-making” innovations on the horizon that would generate the amounts of investment that were brought forth by the automobile. U.S. exports seem a very unlikely demand support. That leaves the government. In a capitalist economy, especially one like the United States with its lack of a history of generally accepted public spending, it seems very unlikely that public spending will make up for shortfalls in aggregate demand. Already, there are widespread entreaties (and not just from the far right) urging the federal government to wind down in spending programs—well before, I might add, the economy has recovered. As we see it, the United States is, indeed, in for a long period of stagnation, a “down cycle” as you put it.

Fred Magdoff: This is one of the major constraints on the system. The economy is in a process that economists call “deleveraging,” which is just another way of referring to somehow getting rid of debt. Some are able to pay off what they owe, a few are able to renegotiate down some of their debt, many are losing their homes, and some are going bankrupt. Until this works its way out, and a lot of debt is shed one way or another, there will be a drag on the “consumer” portion of the purchases. This is particularly significant to the U.S. economy because it is so dependent on consumer purchases—in 2007, these absorbed approximately 70% of the goods and services produced.

6. MW— “The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know” is as lucid and compelling summary of the financial crisis as any I have read. In the closing chapter you state that capitalism is undergoing a “crisis of legitimacy” and that “the system can never deliver what is needed for us to realize our capacities and enjoy our lives…That “instead of private gain” the purpose of society and the economy is “to serve the needs of people, by providing the necessities of life for all, without promoting excessive consumption (consumerism) while protecting earth’s life support systems.”

All of the things that which kept capitalism in check–progressive taxation, crucial regulations, and the power of unions–have either been reversed, repealed or greatly eroded. More and more people are beginning to see the greed which governs the system, and it scares them. But is the country really ready for structural change or will the vision of an economy which “serves the needs of its people” be dismissed as “pie-in-the-sky” Utopianism?

Michael Yates: Well, first thank you Mike for the kind words. They are much appreciated. Typically, the best we have been able to hope for from the public in the United States has been an amorphous populism; people are willing to say that the system is corrupt and that it is biased in favor of the rich. But proposals for change, much less a radical transformation of the economic system, are rare commodities. I think things would be different, however, if we had a real labor movement, one that was rooted in communities, broad in its composition, and not afraid to have principles and stand by them come hell or high water. This should be the lesson that progressives learned from the right-wing. The talking heads of Fox may seem insane to us, but they and their intellectual gurus almost never deviate from the set of reactionary principles with which they began to transform the “common sense” of the nation. We suggest at the end of our book that we ought to ask ourselves if a return to the pre-economic crisis status quo is what we want. In the best of times, there is plenty of unutilized labor, a degraded environment, poverty, dead-end jobs, and much more that is not so desirable. So we chose a number of alternative outcomes to what we have now that we think have mass appeal, from universal healthcare to basic food guarantees. However, as you say, these might well, and I think will cause people to react with a pie-in-the-sky indifference. What might make working men and women stand up and take notice would be for these goals to have a mass-based advocate, one that would make these goals matters of rigid principle and begin to fight for them through mass actions. We might think that the right-wing ideologues we see on television are insane. Yet, come hell or high water, they stick to their guns. Their political and economic adherents have wielded tremendous power for a long period of time, and even today when they seem to be losing their grip on the national “common sense,” they can still mobilize the faithful. The left needs to take a lesson from this. More particularly, the labor movement must take a firm and rigid stand on issues like national health care, food security, environmental degradation, full employment, good and cheap housing, U.S. war-making and imperialis, racism, and a host of others. Then it must educate members rigorously and constantly about such principles. Most importantly, it must begin to actively fight to achieve them, activating its millions of members and allies, wherever it can find them. It is through action, bold and unafraid, that people’s minds will get changed and a new “common sense” developed.

Having said this, I think it is clear that the labor movement, as currently constituted, is not up to the tasks at hand. Too many unions are moribund, stuck in the failed labor-management cooperation mind set of the past and run by people too old and infirm to do much of anything. So, not only will we have to have a worker-led opposition to the status quo, fighting to change it radically, but this opposition will have to be built on a new basis. There are some hopeful signs, such as the development of community-based worker centers, mainly in immigrant communities. These may be models for the labor movement of the future.

Fred Magdoff: Just getting what should be the most reasonable reforms through Congress is a major effort, which usually fails or is corrupted in the process. Look what’s happening with health care “reform.” Even if a “public option” is finally part of the bill, it will be a bill that helps some people, but is primarily a boon to the health care industry, which will get a lot of new revenue. It’s not a bill designed with the single purpose in mind: how can we supply medical care for everyone at reasonable cost. Rather it’s a bill designed with significant input from the for-profit sector that will end up supplying them with extra profits. It is clear that government-run systems (and there are a variety of ways to do this) are far cheaper and more efficient and can actually cover everyone. SO, it seems as though piecemeal reform is a) very difficult to obtain and b) can be reversed as the power of the wealthy increases. A system is needed that can break the power of the wealthy and create a real political and economic democracy in order to be able to meet the basic needs for all the people.

Michael D. Yates and Fred Magdoff, “The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know” Monthly Review Press, New York

Made in China

Importing America To Its Own Death…

During the Bolshevik Revolution that led to communist Russia, Comrade Vladimir Lenin said, “Sell the capitalists enough rope and they will hang themselves!”

Nearly 100 years later, Lenin’s predictions reveal his veracity with chilling fruition. The United States bleeds $11 trillion in debt. It suffers a $700 billion annual trade deficit, mostly with China, which by the way thrives as a communist nation selling us lots of ‘rope’, i.e., consumer goods. We import another $700 billion in oil annually from other countries. We borrow $2 billion daily to float our sinking economy. The average American’s credit card debt equals $9,425.00 according to NBC’s Brian Williams. We suffer 15 million unemployed American workers and 35 million subsisting on food stamps.

How did Lenin’s foreshadowing come to pass? How could he know that we would bring our downfall upon ourselves?

First of all, every empire in history fell to its own manifest destiny (ego), avarice and greed. Today, the U.S. empire features 572,000 military personnel on 700 bases in 120 countries around the world. Their purpose? Few Americans could tell you! The costs accelerate to unimaginable levels.

Secondly, major capitalists, the ‘gatekeepers’ or money changers, however you want to call them, ‘own’ the power to make their choices realized. Some call them the Rothchilds, Bilderbergers, etc. The fact remains, they pull all the money strings. We remain their puppets.

For instance, in the past 15 years, the second richest man in the world, Bill Gates, ‘persuaded’ our U.S. Congress to implement H-1B, H-2B and L-1 visas that brought foreign workers into this country to displace 1.0 million U.S. IT workers. How? Those visa beneficiaries arrived from third world countries and worked at a third the wage. Additionally, big manufacturing firms insourced jobs, outsourced jobs and offshored jobs. Maytag moved to Mexico. Levi Straus moved to India. Schwinn bikes moved to Taiwan, etc.

If you visit a Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, Sears, Penny’s, Kohl’s and hundreds of other retail outlets, you will notice 80 to 90 percent of the hard and soft goods “Made in China” ; “Made in Mexico” : “Made in Pakistan” : “Made in Bangladesh”, etc. The most popular cars sold in America originate from Japan, Korea and Germany.

Each year, China sells the United States $700 billion in goods. Unlike Clinton, we ‘inhale’ that much junk from China! The United States sells China $67 billion in goods annually as reported by Charles Gibson on ABC last week! How’s that for ‘free trade’ and you can see the communists figured out how to sell us enough ‘rope’ to kill ourselves—and we are! China holds nearly $1 trillion of our treasury bills. We feel the squeeze of our debt every year as we pay out over $540 billion in interest on our debt. Our leaders ‘keep’ us fighting at a cost to taxpayers of $12 billion a month wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for eight friggin’ years! Are you feeling incensed?

If you look inside the USA, you see Hormel, Tyson Chicken, McDonald’s, Berger Chef, Pizza Hut, Chipotle’s, Taco Bell, and many more as well as construction firms, landscaping firms, roofing firms and car washes hiring unlawful immigrants by the millions. At least 10 million unlawful immigrants work jobs at 21st century slave wages while our citizens stand in unemployment lines or live on welfare. At the same time, we lose our jobs to illegal aliens, or see our wages downgraded, or watch our schools, culture and language vanish in front of our eyes—those few corporate chiefs make horrific profits—while we pay for illegal aliens’ educations, medical care and incarceration. How did we arrive at this obscene juncture?

Because our corrupt capitalists can make many more billions of dollars! And, they can get away with it because their lobbyists “pay off” our U.S. Senators and House Reps to NOT enforce our laws against such activities. Of recent note, former U.S. House Rep. John “Duke” Cunningham serving an eight year jail sentence for taking $2.4 million in construction bribes. How about House Rep. William Jefferson hiding $100,000 in cash in his freezer?

How many scoundrel U.S. Congressional reps haven’t been caught? My estimate: dozens if not a hundred in the U.S. House and Senate.

Notice also, that AIG just awarded more annual bonuses of $6 to $10 million to their corporate bosses—after failing—and after we taxpayers bailed them out!

You cannot help but lament, “What a country!”

Not only that, we citizens fail to demand accountability. We citizens shop at Wal-Mart, Home Depot and other stores by the millions, which means we kill our own American jobs and manufacturing.

How can I say that? Just look at our economy. We’re in debt up to our nostrils! We’re dangling at the end of an economic rope bull-hooked into our wallets by 535 members of U.S. Congress and the last four presidents. And our newest president, Barack Obama, rides and talks the same bull!

As Mark Twain once said, “Suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of congress—ah, but I repeat myself.”

The greatest flaw of our founding fathers: not placing a 12 year term limit on every position in Congress. The cronyism, personal greed and outright materialism of most of them defy a sane man’s imagination.

Amazingly, the American voters stupidly re-elect such men as the late Teddy Kennedy for 44 years of incompetence, John McCain for 30 years of failing to protect our borders, Robert Byrd who can barely totter across the Senate floor, Arlen Spector with full blown cancer for 35 years and the list grows. Those men and some women bring death to this republic, but we elect them again and again to kill us and our futures.

You might think that importing 160,000 foreigners every month, in the form of legal immigrants, would stop with 14 million Americans unemployed and 35 million living on food stamps. But you would be wrong! Not only will Congress continue, but those 535 men and women will vote for an amnesty that will lead to adding 100 million people to this country in 26 years, over 70 million immigrants.

Lenin’s prophesy continues and Mark Twain remains right on the money—while the American people watch their language, culture and way of life swirl the toilet. America: made “in” and owned “by” China!

Translating the Bible into Hebrew

Or, How We Can Upset the Elders of Zion Conspiracy…

[A Talk at Rhodes Conference, 8-12 October 2009]

They say that at a press-conference before departing from Israel, President George W. Bush was asked: “What impressed you most of all in Israel?” The Texan replied: “The Bible in my room. It was in your tongue! Despite the wars and terrorism, you did not begrudge the effort and translated the Holy Bible into Hebrew in such a short time! That impressed me the most”.

Besides ridiculing proverbial Texan ignorance, this Israeli joke aims to remind us that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and every Old Testament book that you find in your hotel room is a translation from the ancient Hebrew text. There is a far-reaching implication: the Jews are the guardians and keepers of a primary sacred text of Christendom. This implication is subliminally or even consciously accepted by the West.

The consequences of this implication go far beyond textual details. India’s Brahmins are guardians of the Vedas, and this brings them influence, money, ministerial positions. Likewise in the West, the Jewish guardians of the Scripture possess by this right such extraordinary influence – totally out-of-sync with their demographic numbers – that can’t be explained in any other way.

Money, clannishness, media ownership – all are frequently mentioned among the reasons for this disproportionate Jewish influence. Here’s the problem, though: This influence is greatest in the US in particular and in the West in general. The Jews of Serbia and Greece, of Turkey and Syria, of India and China are not poor either, and are no less clannish, but they are much less influential. We may propose a different reason, then: the Texan-Israeli joke wouldn’t have been immediately understood in these countries, because for Muslims, for Hindus, for the Chinese as well as for Orthodox Christians, Jews have no sacred function – they are not the guardians of a holy text. Non-Christians have their own scriptures. And for Orthodox Christians, the Old Testament is the Septuagint, the Greek text composed some two hundred years before Christ and one thousand years before the present Jewish Bible (called MT, Masoretic Text) was completed.

Though the schism between the Eastern and the Western churches is usually connected with the filioque controversy, the true bifurcation point between the Christian East and the Christian West is located in their choice of the primary text (aside from the New Testament). Westerners (Catholics and Protestants) use the Old Testament they translated from the Jewish MT; Easterners use the Greek text as the original. This is an extremely important difference. When St Paul said that the opposites are united in Christ, he mentioned man and woman, Jew and Hellene (Galatians 3:28). Indeed, the ideal Jew and Hellene are as opposed to each other as the ideal man and woman, and the Jewish and Hellenic texts are equally opposed to each other. Moreover, translations from either of these texts carry the imprint of the original spirit with them. The Hellenic spirit found its expression in the Septuagint, while the Judaic spirit was expressed in the Masoretic Hebrew text, the MT. Christianity as a whole treads a narrow path between its Judaic and Hellenic tendencies, which are locked in an eternal fight like the Yin and the Yang. Their choice of primary text for the Old Testament caused the Eastern churches to favour the Hellenic, and the Western the Judaic tendency.

Before continuing, a full disclosure: until fairly recently, I was not aware of the problem, and like everybody else, I thought that the Old Testament in every language was a translation from the Hebrew MT original. A few months ago, I visited Moscow where I thoroughly enjoyed the fabulous hospitality of the Muscovites, who can turn every friendly meeting over a couple of vodkas into a Platonic symposium – a banquet of reason and a celebration of the soul. Once, my friend Michael, a Moscow University teacher, told me that a famous Starets wanted to receive me. “Starets,” the Russian equivalent of Greek gerōn, or “elder”, means, in Eastern Orthodoxy, a monastic spiritual leader – a charismatic spiritual guide who can aid others in attaining spiritual progress and success, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica tell us. The Starets is well known in Moscow as a confessor and heart-reader – a man who understands the human soul and its way to salvation. I was immensely touched and flattered by the invitation, for people normally wait months on end to see him and receive his blessing. Though I have met with princes of the Church – with bishops and cardinals, with the monks of Athos and Jerusalem – the elders are the hidden heart of the faith.

We drove out of Moscow to the monastery at four a.m. The road was empty, and there were only a few pilgrims in front of the monastery waiting for the heavy gates to open. This is neither the time nor the place to relate everything that happened at this meeting, but I’ll tell you the most important thing: the Starets told me of his desire to publish the Old Testament in Hebrew, corrected in accordance with the Queen Elizabeth Bible of the Russian Orthodox Church. At first, I was deeply shocked and confused. The Queen Elizabeth Bible (1751), or the QEB, is a translation, and a translation of the Greek translation into the Old Church Slavonic. Wasn’t this rather too daring a project, to correct the original according to a translation? Its scope would eclipse any post-modernist project!

Here another, even fuller disclosure is called for: the idea of translating a translation or even reconstructing the original according to a translation was not totally foreign to me. Translations are not machine-made neutral reproductions; they carry with them the twin loads of the original culture and of the translator’s culture. A translation can be translated. I was aware of this complexity – some years ago I had translated the Odyssey into Russian from the English translations of Lawrence (1932) and Rieu (1946) instead of from the Greek original. (It was published by Aletheia, the Heidegger-inspired St Petersburg publishers of Greek classics in AD 2000). I did it that way in order to convey Jorge Luis Borges’ idea that for the modern reader Joyce’s Ulysses precedes Homer’s Odyssey. The English post-Joyce translations of the Odyssey carried this subliminal message, and I tried to preserve it in my translation into Russian. (More on this in Russian on http://www.israelshamir.net/ru/odysseia0.htm )

The longer I considered the words of the Starets, the more sense they made to me. Practically, he was proposing to reconstruct the H70, the lost Hebrew original of the Septuagint, while using the QEB to select between numerous versions. You will see soon why this could begin the reversal of a long-term Judaisation and degradation process, and start the healing of the schism between the West and the East, while at the same time helping the Jews to overcome their hubris and to make peace with the nations. The Jews have translated the Bible into the languages of the nations in order to influence them; the world is indebted to them, and it’s time to pay them back by giving them the true original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, free from censorship and later additions, just as it was read in the days of the Second Temple.

Why will this bookish project influence the real world? Sacred matters influence our world far more than is acceptable to admit in polite society. The dummies believe that all things are done out of pecuniary considerations, but in truth, it is spiritual authority that decides. The world based on the Jewish Bible is not the same as would be a world based on the Greek Bible. Its priorities would be different. Even the texts themselves are different. The Hebrew text used today by Jews (and by tiny communities of Hebrew-speaking Christians), usually called MT (Masoretic text) is not the same text that was read by Christ and His apostles.

If you open the New Testament you’ll see that its references to the Old Testament do not fit. For instance, Matt. 12:21 quotes Isaiah: “in His name will the Gentiles trust”. But if you look up Isaiah 42:4, you’ll see something completely different: “the isles shall wait for his law”. Or (Acts 7:14) Stephen says “seventy-five” souls went down to Egypt with Jacob. But look up your Old Testament (Gen. 46:27; Deut. 10:22) – it says that only seventy people went to Egypt. This does not mean that the translators of King James, or any other translators of the Old Testament, made a mistake. They translated correctly, but from the wrong version, from the MT, while Jesus, His apostles and the New Testament writers in general had read and quoted the Septuagint (LXX) or its Hebrew Source (H70).

The transposition of the MT in place of the Septuagint (LXX) or its Hebrew Source (H70), making it the source for all subsequent Western translations, was the biggest coup the Jewish scholars ever pulled off, and this is the deep-lying cause of Judaisation of the West.

The MT is not particularly old. The oldest complete manuscript of the MT – The Leningrad Codex (1008) – is just over a thousand years old, whilst the LXX is much, much older. The LXX translation was created in a very different era – not only before Christ, but even before the Maccabee revolt. In those days, in the third century BC, the Hellenistic world embraced Palestine, Egypt, Syria and their neighbours. The Jews were integrating well into this Hellenic world, and the long struggle between the two spirits of the ancient faith of Israel had just started:

One was the inward-looking nationalist exclusivist spirit. It claimed private ownership over the Divine Law and exclusive access to the Creator for the Chosen of Israel. A stranger reading the Law was to be executed. A translation of the Bible into Greek was a most serious sin, equivalent to fashioning a golden calf (Ex 32:4), they said.

The other spirit proclaimed universality and led to Christ. The Law and God’s mercy were to be given to all.

In modern terms, these are the spirits of privatisation and nationalisation. The battle was fought in the three seats of ancient wisdom, – Alexandria, Babylon and Jerusalem. Alexandria was the most universalistic, Babylon the most proprietary – Jerusalem was their battleground. In Alexandria, a happy synthesis of Jewish and Hellenic ideas was reached in the translation of Seventy Elders appointed by the High Priest. Thus came the revelation of Israel to the world, preparing the way for Christ.

This translation was nothing short of miraculous. The translators consisted of six from each tribe of Israel, making altogether seventy-two. But the translation is called the Translation of the Seventy because seventy is the numeric value of “Sod” – “Secret” in Hebrew. The Seventy revealed the secret that the exclusivist Jews did not want to share. “A curse upon him who reveals our secret to the Gentiles”, they had written on the floor of the En-Gedi Synagogue. Three times the daughters of Jerusalem were charged “not to stir or awaken love until she pleases” (Song of Songs 3) and this meant “do not disclose our secret to Gentiles”, says the Talmud. Furious at the disclosure of the secret, the exclusivist Jews destroyed the Hebrew Source of the Septuagint. Every single copy perished. In Jerusalem, the nationalist Jews slaughtered the Hellenised proto-Christian Jews in the Maccabean revolt.

With the coming of Christ, the free Judeo-Hellenic spirit once again found its expression which was hated by the nationalists, who embarked on the long road to regaining full control over the Scripture. For hundreds of years, the scribes worked over the Old Testament, taking advantage of its ambiguous consonant readings, until they eventually achieved a text we know today. Its main paradigm was changed: if the old text led to Christ, the personal/universal Saviour, the new text implanted the nationalist concept of a messiah of and for the people of Israel. The nations of the world were to be seen as sinful semi-animals who had no access to God. The name ‘Jews’ stuck with this small fanatic band, while the Hellenised Jews became known as ‘Christians’ and were no longer called ‘Jews’. What was previously a battle between two schools of thought within the Judaic framework, became known as the battle between Judaic and Christian spirits.

The exclusivist Jews could not destroy the Septuagint – there were too many copies extant among non-Jews, and the LXX had been spread around and had succeeded in bringing the nations to Christ. That is why, in their attempt to force the genie of free spirit back into its bottle, the Jews made – one after another – three translations of the Old Testament into Greek to counter the LXX. These translations were made from their proto-Masoretic version, and were quite tendentious. “The Virgin” in the prophecy became “a young woman” in their rendering. Since then, the Jews have made and/or influenced dozens of translations into all languages, while ferociously defending their own Hebrew version, the MT, as the only legitimate primary source.

The young church had not worried overmuch, as they considered Hebrew only a language of the scribes, whilst cultured people used Greek, and the local masses spoke Aramaic. The Church dismissed the Hebrew version as an empty cocoon shed by a beautiful butterfly. LXX was considered the God-inspired text, and on its basis, the New Testament and the works of the Fathers of the Church were created. The Eastern Orthodox Church still prefers the Septuagint to the MT, for the translation of the Seventy Elders had been kept in the Church and by the Church, whereas the Hebrew text had been kept and prepared by anti-Christian forces.

When later Christian scholars became interested in the Old Testament, and compared the Judaic translations with the LXX, they unavoidably resorted to the Jewish Bible, for by that time the Jews had the edited Hebrew manuscripts and tools for their interpretation. As you will recall, the H70, the old Hebrew Source of the Septuagint had been destroyed by the nationalists. A great scholar, Origen, therefore turned to the Jews for advice, and they gave him plenty of advice – only their advice was based on their understanding of their text. Origen decided to improve the Septuagint and emended the LXX according to the Jewish Bible of his day. Some of these emendations made their way into the body of the LXX. Still, the Eastern Church remained rather safe, for the Septuagint remained the official version of the Old Testament for the Greek-speaking East from Constantinople to Alexandria.

But the West did not read Greek. For a long while, the West used the Old Latin translations from the Septuagint; the unity of the Church remained strong, but the translations were weak. Eventually Jerome, a wonderful man and a great scholar, who lived for 34 years in Palestine, decided to correct the Old Latin translations and update them. He even began his work using the Septuagint. Afterwards, though, he followed Origen and turned to the Jews for their advice and interpretation. That was his undoing. He got carried away, and took the fateful step that made the West susceptible to Jewish influence. He parted with LXX and made a brand new translation into Latin – from the Hebrew Bible of his day, the proto-MT. The Jews surely liked the result, but St Augustine was shocked by this deed, and wrote in The City of God:

Although the Jews acknowledge this very learned labour [of Jerome translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew] to be fruitful, while they contend that the Seventy translators have erred in many places, still the churches of Christ judge that no one should be preferred to the authority of [the Seventy], and we ought to believe that the prophetic gift is with [the Seventy].

Contemporaries condemned Jerome, as they noticed that he slowly began to appear more and more Jewish in his positions as he got older and his Jewish friends began to have more influence. One of his former friends, Rufinus, publicly attacked Jerome’s Jewish leanings. Jerome, in response to this work of Rufinus, freely admitted the truth of Rufinus’s claims. Jerome wrote in his own Apology: “There is nothing to blame in my getting the help of a Jew in translating from the Hebrew.” He said that he “did not understand how Jewish interpretations here and there would undermine the faith of Christians.” In this way the Jews managed to plant the seed that would eventually blossom into the acceptance of the Hebrew MT and the virtual abolition of the Greek Septuagint, the authentic Christian Scriptures of Christ and His Apostles.

A reason why Jerome, and Origen before him, accepted the Jewish version was their lack of historical perspective. Perspective in the visual art was discovered in 15th century, while the historical perspective was not known until the seventeenth century. Until that time, mankind was not aware of the torrent of Time. Don Quixote considered Achilles and Hector to have been knights like himself or like Lancelot. The Crusaders had thought the Muslim mosque of Jerusalem was the Temple of Solomon. For Origen and Jerome, the Old Testament was the Old Testament, and the Jews were the Jews. They did not understand that the Hebrew text of the OT had been changed since the days of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, when the Septuagint was produced. Some of these changes were tendentious, others were due to scribal errors, and still others were the result of misunderstanding.

Orthodox Bible scholar Nicolas Glubokovsky wrote: “The Greek translation reproduced an independent Hebrew textual type that was not severely censored and redacted by rabbinic authorities. That is why LXX and MT do differ profoundly, and their readings of messianic and Christian spirit are at loggerheads”.

Origen and Jerome believed the myth about careful Jewish stewardship of the OT scrolls. They did not know that the Jews had destroyed the manuscripts of other types. The Church had no such practice, and at Jerome’s time there were “tot exemplaria paene quot codices” — as many versions as there are codices. Islam, however, followed the Jewish way, and all differing versions of the Koran were destroyed, so only one type survived.

Jerome planted the seed of Jewish influence, and it had made its major inroads by the Ninth century, when the Vulgate of Jerome became universally accepted. Still, the Old Testament was not widely read – Latin was not universally understood and its influence remained somewhat limited – that is, until the Protestants began to spread their translations of the Old Testament in the vernacular.

The immediate result can be likened to an outbreak of a long-sleeping disease: Previously unheard-of devastation and massacres of civilians during the Thirty Years’ War were influenced by spread of the MT-based vernacular translations, as the nations were infected by its exclusivist nationalist spirit unknown in Europe until that time. The King James Bible was translated from the MT, and the result was amazing: the Brits began to consider themselves a racial new Israel of the flesh, as opposed to the Church being regarded the New Israel of the spirit. They fought the Church, and inflicted the ethnic cleansing prescribed in the book of Joshua on their colonies in the New World. They privatised the commons and turned ordinary British people into paupers. The German Bible translated from the MT turned the Germans into ferocious nationalists and eventually prepared the ground for Hitler. Thus, the MT and its translations had an enormous, even magical, effect. The petard placed in the second century below the walls of the Christian society went off!

The Jews became the collective Merlin behind the throne of a British King Arthur. People dissatisfied with this pre-eminence of the Jews left Christianity for various heathen cults, or became engrossed with the material side of the world. The Judaisation of the West and the degradation of its spirit accelerated.

Today, the translation battle continues as unabatedly and as one-sidedly as ever. The Jews produce dozens of translations into many languages, each more Judaic than the last. Some are openly Jewish, like the Jewish Publication Society Bible, others are crypto-Jewish or “Christian-Zionist”, like the Scofield Reference Bible that reduces the Christian faith to ‘love of Jews and of the Jewish state”. This long, hard work on these corrosive translations is the real Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.

Russia was the latest to submit to the Judaising influence of the MT translation. Until the late 19th century, the Russians were exposed only to the QEB, the Old Slavonic translation from the Septuagint, and they were pious, religious, loyal to the throne. In the late 19th century, the pro-British Masonic Bible Society had published a translation of the MT into the Russian vernacular. Very soon, the Jewish influence in Russia began to rise. However, the Russian Church did not accept this Judaised Russian Bible for liturgical purposes, and continues to pray and read from the QEB. This caused a tragic rift between the LXX-orientated Church and MT-induced reading public, a rift that came to forefront with the Revolution.

Let me add yet another disclosure: As an ex-Jew who was received into the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, I am acutely and personally aware of the continuous struggle of these two spirits in the world. Will the Christian world submit to Judaisation, or will the Jews accept Christ? A few days ago, in a church in the Holy Land, I saw a Bible in Hebrew published by a Christian society for the purpose of bringing the Jews to Christ. However, the Old Testament had been reproduced from the MT. If a Jew sees that Christians actually use the Jewish text prepared by anti-Christian Jewish Rabbis, how can he ever accept the Christian interpretation? The encounter of Jews and Christians should bring Jews to the Church, not lead to Christians leaving the Church in dismay.

Proselytising efforts usually fail because the Jews consider themselves the guardians of the Scripture, while they should be seen as keepers of their own distinct text on a par with the Aramaic Peshitta, the Ethiopian Bible or the Samaritan Torah.

The MT is the petard laid centuries ago under the besieged City of God’s fortifications. The reconstruction of the Hebrew OT according to the LXX would hoist the Jewish sappers on their own petard and relieve the siege. A truly Christian Hebrew Bible has now become a distinct possibility. The H70, the Hebrew Source of the LXX, can be reconstructed on the basis of the textological discoveries of the last hundred years, with the help of the Qumran scrolls. We can do it – we can do it fairly quickly and fairly accurately. We intend to do it, with your help. Such a publication will become the turning point in this millennial struggle. The battle will be carried into the adversary’s territory for the first time since A.D. 128, when Rabbi Akiba’s disciple and convert Aquila produced his Judaic translation of the OT into Greek. If this project had been attempted by the young Church in the second century, the Jewish influence today would be the same as the Samaritan one – negligible. Now it is late, but not too late.

People who doubt the very possibility of reconstructing H70 usually refer to the multiple interpretations and versions within the sea of LXX manuscripts. These objections are not sincere. The Church has an exact answer regarding interpretations and versions, and we can trust Her inspiration. In our dark times of confusion, we can follow the interpretation of the Queen Elizabeth Bible, as I said in the beginning.

Why the Queen Elizabeth Bible, and not any other? Why not the Greek text? The QE Bible was prepared in the least Judaised country of the Christian world, in 18th century Russia, under the royal protection of its least Judaised queen. Queen Elizabeth was asked to permit Jewish traders to enter Russia, as they would bring her much profit, and she replied: “I wish no profit from Christ’s enemies.” Western ideas (and in their guise, Judaic influence) made few inroads then. The QE Bible was edited by churchmen, not by scientists, and edited within the full view of the Church tradition. The QE Bible can be likened to a mammoth unearthed in the frozen tundra – its corpse survived for millennia because it was protected by permafrost. One may dislike permafrost and prefer the tropics, but permafrost is better for preservation. Likewise, one may prefer more Westernised, more Judaised Christianity, but if one wants to discover the pure old Hellene tradition, one can turn to Queen Elizabeth.

The Septuagint has plural interpretations and various versions. The QEB has the great advantage of being a single text based on the LXX and fully approved by the Church. Its language is lucid, its meaning is clear, and this allows us to find and reconstruct its lost Hebrew source. (However, other possible approaches could be considered.) The reconstruction of the Pentateuch can be completed soon – with your help.

In order to receive a few chapters of our tentative reconstruction of H70, send an email to adam@israelshamir.net with subject H70. Your contribution is tax-exempt in the US; for small contributions use PayPal to the email above; for bigger contributions a bank account will be supplied upon request.

The Architecture of Globalization

Bigger and Fewer…

“What answers are possible when man is resolutely evil? How can a family crisis be resolved when the members are all evil and persistent in their evil? What answer is there to rulers who are evil and have most people on their side? Again, when churchmen are evil, how can the church be other than evil? Very often reform and change are the least desirable solutions! To expect answers then is itself evil. It is rather a time for judgment and rebuilding.” Dr. R. J. Rushdoony

Centralization of authority is often a prelude to despotism. False and deceitful propaganda is used to secure a willing population. Totalitarian regimes coerce resistors into supporting conquest. Corporations gobble up other corporations and buy large individual proprietors. Control of these behemoths is centered several levels above their contact with the public. Centralization focuses on masses as opposed to individuals. Centralization squelches the voice of the individual.

This is where we are in America. In the past several decades more and more authority has been vested in the Presidency. Congress has forsaken its responsibilities allowing vital checks to be removed. Businesses have consolidated, purchased each other, and merged; they have become larger and larger and fewer and fewer.

Our schools have consolidated and control of education centered in the Federal Department of Education. Christian churches are more interested in growth than in God’s Kingdom and identity hiding, mega-churches are common.

The powerful, clandestine push for world government involves the ultimate centralization. David Rockefeller’s Council on Foreign Relations is deeply involved in that quest. Richard Haas, President of the United States CFR wrote in the Taipai Times, “Globalization implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker….States must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies if the international system is to function….Necessity may also lead to reducing or even eliminating sovereignty when a government, whether from a lack of capacity or conscious policy, is unable to provide for the basic needs of its citizens.” (Please note that Haas believes government should provide the basic needs of citizens – not citizens themselves!)

As we progress in the Electronic Age the high tech companies that manufacture the products involved are all geared to the masses. Decision makers in these companies are determined to evade direct contact with the public and use foreign entities to that end. Software glitches can involve volumes of useless reading and additional hours waiting for tech support which turns out to come from Asia in the form of preprogrammed, cost effective, English impaired Indian citizens.

Law enforcement has evolved in a similar fashion. The street cop enforces the law with no regard for justice; there is no spirit to the law, no discernment, no mercy. Cops are trained to be jackbooted tyrants whose duty is to fill the jails and extract exorbitant fines from the public, whose taxes, ironically, pay their salaries. Law is a force that, like most modern authority, allows no rebuttal. When the cop gives you a ticket for running a stop sign when there was no traffic for miles the injustice of the application of the law is never considered. Policemen function above the rights of every individual citizen. Encountering one of these shameless tyrants strips a citizen of all rights rendering him helpless and subject to arbitrary incarceration. Law enforcement and the courts that back it up are no longer friends to the public but rogue forces that will intimidate you, steal your money, and if you resist throw you into a jail your own taxes have paid for. Law that fails to produce justice is soon rightfully hated along with those that enforce it.

Few Americans understand that the government does no need to own the press and media in order to control it. For the past several decades the world press and media has acted as a stooge for world government. Happenings that should be investigated and accurately reported are ignored. Real and obvious conspiracies are subjected to large doses of mockery. Our news and media is tainted with a Zionist Jewish agenda and its associated propaganda. Majority ownership is confined to a tiny but powerful group of collusive Jewish Zionists. When Russian Jewry promoted and was deeply involved in the Russian Revolution they were driven by a desire for a world regime that would benefit Jewish causes. That agenda migrated with them to the United States and accounts for substantial Jewish support for world government.

Aided by a strong Jewish agenda the United States has traveled far down the road to totalitarian government. Their demands have about eliminated Christianity from the public square. They have supported abortion and homosexuality and will soon succeed in encoding laws that will result in the incarceration of Bible believing Christians. Yes, I understand that all Jews are not involved. But the Jews that are involved are influential, wealthy and powerful.

We are constantly bombarded with the idea that our soldiers are stationed all over the world and are engaged in a war in the Middle East to “protect our freedom”. We are enjoined to pray for and support our troops because they are fighting for our freedom. Most Americans actually believe this lie. Propaganda is a powerful opinion maker. Our freedom has nothing to do with the war or with the stationing of our troops throughout the world. What it has to do with is Empire – the American Empire. Our freedom is actually inversely proportional to extension of our hegemony over the world.

The Healthcare bill is the latest attempt to rob us of freedom by extending the power of the state. National healthcare is a dangerous proposition. John W. Robbins in an article entitled “The Ethics and Economics of Healthcare” paraphrased Leon Trotsky, “In a country where the sole physician is the State, opposition means death by healthcare rationing. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: Who does not cooperate shall not recover.” Robbins maintains that every dictator of the Twentieth Century was an advocate of national healthcare. He included in that group: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Lenin, Castro, Tito, Mai Tse-Tung, Yoshihito and Horohito, Peron of Argentina, Franco of Spain, and Salazar of Portugal.

Healthcare providers were used to commit dissenters for reprogramming in Russia and for experimentations on hapless human prisoners in Germany. Even without centralized healthcare United States providers have conducted some heinous procedures. The Tuskegee experiment has received a fair amount of publicity but the extent human experimentation is relatively unknown to most Americans. Click up this list. If every citizen could read and understand the mind set of our elite rulers do you think they would still want to make them responsible for their Health?

Caring for the sick is an act of compassion. Compassion is not an attribute of the state and the health of sick people cannot be related to monetary gain.

Medical care is unavailable to many United States citizens because compassion has been wrung out of the system. Doctors do not want to be bothered with sick patients because sick patients require time and time to the doctor means money; the more patients he sees the more billings he gets and the less time it takes the more leisure he has! We have thousands of doctors in the United States that do not see sick patients. Sick patients are referred to Emergency rooms where the working people of our nation are robbed blind so that aliens, derelicts and the poor can get free care. The government is partially to blame but doctors must bear their share of responsibility. Avarice and demands for leisure have overtaken compassion and the practice of medicine reflects that change.

Compassion cannot be bought and sold. Compassion is an individual characteristic; the government does not have compassion, neither does our system of medical care. If every medical doctor in the United States would begin seeing sick patients tomorrow morning with out regard to their ability to pay, the healthcare crisis would be solved.

Egalitarianism is not a Godly concept. When the government seeks to provide equal medical care to all citizens it embarks on the same disaster that is evident in our courts, our jails, and our laws. We defy God’s wisdom and create a tangled mess of injustice, cruelty, and death. Jesus did not heal everyone when He walked on the earth; He healed some and not others. He does not choose everyone; He chooses whom He chooses.

The Bible teaches that he who does not work will not eat. Compassion must be accompanied by a personal relationship. Help and healing should be dispensed with discretion.

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony writes about the difference between Christian compassion and government solutions. The elite powers that control government believe compassion is a characteristic of the lower classes; their intent is not compassion but control. “Compassion is now a socially approved and politically necessary virtue, and its expression is statist welfarism. The goal is to satisfy the poor, and to keep them far from the rich. Compassion has thus become an instrument of elitism rather than of Christian community.” Rushdoony quotes from the works of English writers Golby and Purdue “while Christian reforms worked to make men more Godly and thereby raise them out of their poverty and sin, the Enlightenment men placed their hope in making men more rational”.

God’s system of authority is de-centralized. He places primary power in the hands of the male heads of families and designates the Church and the government as agencies of safety and theological certitude. Human control is tyranny and elite secularist always seeks it.

Anti-Empire Report

Ridding The World of the Sickness of Pacifism…

Picture the scene: Afghanistan, two hijacked tankers filled with highly inflammable fuel, surrounded by a crowd of Afghans eager to syphon off some for free … What’s the last thing you want to do? Right — drop bombs on the tankers. That’s what a German military commander signaled an American drone airplane to do September 4. Kaboom!! At least 100 human beings incinerated. This incident has led to a lot of controversy in Germany, for Article 26 of Germany’s post-war Grundgesetz (Basic Law/Constitution) states: “Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional. They shall be made a criminal offense.”

But NATO (aka the United States) can take satisfaction in the fact that the Germans have put their silly pacifism aside and acted like real men, trained military killers; although prior to this incident the Germans had engaged in some aerial and ground combat, there hadn’t been such a dramatic and publicized taking of civilian lives. Deutschland now has more than 4,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, the third largest contingent in the country after the US and Britain, and at home they’ve just finished building a monument to fallen members of the Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces), founded in 1955; 38 members (so far) have surrendered their young lives in Afghanistan.

In January 2007 I wrote in this report about how the US was pushing Germany in this direction; that circumstances at that time indicated that Washington might be losing patience with the pace of Germany’s submission to the empire’s needs. Germany declined to send troops to Iraq and sent only non-combat forces to Afghanistan, not quite good enough for the Pentagon warriors and their NATO allies. Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, reported the following:

At a meeting in Washington, Bush administration officials, speaking in the context of Afghanistan, berated Karsten Voigt, German government representative for German-American relations: “You concentrate on rebuilding and peacekeeping, but the unpleasant things you leave to us.” … “The Germans have to learn to kill.”

A German officer at NATO headquarters was told by a British officer: “Every weekend we send home two metal coffins, while you Germans distribute crayons and woollen blankets.” Bruce George, the head of the British Defence Committee, said “some drink tea and beer and others risk their lives.”

A NATO colleague from Canada remarked that it was about time that “the Germans left their sleeping quarters and learned how to kill the Taliban.”

And in Quebec, a Canadian official told a German official: “We have the dead, you drink beer.” ¹

Ironically, in many other contexts since the end of World War II the Germans have been unable to disassociate themselves from the image of Nazi murderers and monsters.

Will there come the day when the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents will be mocked by “the Free World” for living in peace?

The United States has also engaged in a decades-long effort to wean Japan away from its post-WW2 pacifist constitution and foreign policy and set it back on the righteous path of again being a military power, only this time acting in coordination with US foreign policy needs.

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

“In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” — Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, 1947, words long cherished by a large majority of the Japanese people.

In the triumphalism of the end of the Second World War, the American occupation of Japan, in the person of General Douglas MacArthur, played a major role in the creation of this constitution. But after the communists came to power in China in 1949, the United States opted for a strong Japan safely ensconced in the anti-communist camp. It’s been all downhill since then. Step by step … MacArthur himself ordered the creation of a “national police reserve”, which became the embryo of the future Japanese military … Visiting Tokyo in 1956, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Japanese officials: “In the past, Japan had demonstrated her superiority over the Russians and over China. It was time for Japan to think again of being and acting like a Great Power.” ²… various US-Japanese security and defense cooperation treaties, which, for example, called on Japan to integrate its military technology with that of the US and NATO … the US supplying new sophisticated military aircraft and destroyers … all manner of Japanese logistical assistance to the US in its frequent military operations in Asia … repeated US pressure on Japan to increase its military budget and the size of its armed forces … more than a hundred US military bases in Japan, protected by Japanese armed forces … US-Japanese joint military exercises and joint research on a missile defense system … the US Ambassador to Japan, 2001: “I think the reality of circumstances in the world is going to suggest to the Japanese that they reinterpret or redefine Article 9.” ³ … under pressure from Washington, Japan sent several naval vessels to the Indian Ocean to refuel US and British warships as part of the Afghanistan campaign in 2002, then sent non-combat forces to Iraq to assist the American war as well as to East Timor, another made-in-America war scenario … Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2004: “If Japan is going to play a full role on the world stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council, and have the kind of obligations that it would pick up as a member of the Security Council, Article Nine would have to be examined in that light.” ⁴…

One outcome or symptom of all this can perhaps be seen in the 2005 case of Kimiko Nezu, a 54-year-old Japanese teacher, who was punished by being transferred from school to school, by suspensions, salary cuts, and threats of dismissal because of her refusal to stand during the playing of the national anthem, a World War II song chosen as the anthem in 1999. She opposed the song because it was the same one sung as the Imperial Army set forth from Japan calling for an “eternal reign” of the emperor. At graduation ceremonies in 2004, 198 teachers refused to stand for the song. After a series of fines and disciplinary actions, Nezu and nine other teachers were the only protesters the following year. Nezu was then allowed to teach only when another teacher was present. ⁵

Which brings us to Italy, the remaining member of the World War Two Tripartite, or Axis. Article 11 of the 1948 Italian Constitution says in part: “Italy rejects war as a means for settling international controversies and as an instrument of aggression against the freedoms of others peoples.” ⁶

But Washington laid claim early to Italy’s post-war soul. In 1948 the United States all but took over the Italian election campaign to insure the Christian Democrats (CD) defeat of the Communist-Socialist candidate. (And the US remained an electoral force in Italy for the next three decades maintaining the CD in power. The Christian Democrats, in turn, were loyal Cold-War partners.) ⁷ In 1949, the US saw to it that Italy became a founding member of NATO. This was not seen as a threat to Article 11 because NATO has always painted itself as a “defensive” organization, even in 1999 when it carried out a 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia as both Italy and Germany supplied military aircraft and a NATO air base at Aviano, Italy served as the main hub for the daily bombing runs. For decades, Italy has been the home of US military bases and airfields used by Washington in one military adventure after another from Europe to Asia.

There are now some 3,000 Italian soldiers in Afghanistan performing a variety of services which enables the United States and NATO to engage in their bloody warfare. And 15 Italian soldiers have also lost their lives in that woeful land. The pressure on Italy, as on Germany, to become full-fledged combatants in Afghanistan and elsewhere is unrelenting from their NATO comrades. ⁸

The Berlin Wall — Another Cold War Myth

Within a few weeks many of the Western media can be expected to turn on their propaganda machines to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989. All the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny will be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don’t like people to be free, to learn the “truth”. What other reason could there have been?

First of all, before the wall went up thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returned to the East in the evening. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. The wall was built primarily for two reasons:

1. The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.” ⁹
2. During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from terrorism to juvenile delinquency; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much more. ¹⁰

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Inevitably, the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West.

Let’s not forget that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union and wipe out Bolshevism forever. After the war, the Soviets were determined to close down the highway.

In 1999, USA Today reported: “When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism.” ¹¹

About the same time a new Russian proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth.”

Health care: ignoring the huge red elephant in the room

In the frenzied search of recent months for a better way of delivering health care to the American people, the American media has often discussed health-care systems in other countries, particularly Europe. Usually, little, if anything, is mentioned about Cuba’s system, where everyone is covered, for everything, where pre-existing conditions do not matter, and no patient pays for anything; i.e., nothing at all. The reason the Cuban system is seldom mentioned in the mass media is probably that it’s kind of embarrassing that this otherwise poor country, laboring under the awful yoke of (choke, gasp) socialism, can deliver health care that most Americans can only dream of.

Now we have a new book by T.R. Reid, former correspondent for the Washington Post and commentator for National Public Radio. It’s called “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care”. Reid does not avoid giving some credit to the Cuban system, but he makes sure that the reader knows that he’s not taken in by any commie propaganda. He refers to the Cuban government as “a totalitarian Communist fiefdom”, and adds: “In every country (except, perhaps, a police state like Cuba) there is one group of citizens who are not bound by the unified health care system: the rich.” ¹² Thus, the fact that Cuba has an egalitarian health care system is made to seem like something negative, something one could expect to find only in a police state.

In discussing the World Health Organization’s giving Cuba high marks for fairness in its system, Reid points out: “Of course, fairness and equal treatment extend only so far; when Fidel Castro himself fell ill in 2007, medical experts were flown in from Europe to treat him.” ¹³ Aha! I knew it! Americans, and not just the right-wing crazies, would never accept a medical system where everyone got completely free care for all ailments if the president ever got any kind of special treatment. Would they? We could at least ask them.

Speaking of the right-wing crazies, there was a report in the New York Times which said: “Tomorrow night, getting right into the thick of the battle,” the president will “carry his message to the people in a nationwide television and radio speech” fighting for enactment of his health reform bill, which opponents tagged as “socialized medicine” and “an entering wedge for the takeover of private medicine by the federal government.” The president was John F. Kennedy, the program was Medicare, the Times story was published on May 20, 1962. Despite the speech, the effort failed until passage in 1964. ¹⁴

And speaking of the totalitarian communist socialist fascist Cuban police-state dictatorship, Mr. Reid and others might be interested in an article I wrote which demonstrates that during the period of its revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best human-rights records in all of Latin America.

But how to get past a lifetime of conditioning and reach the American mind with that message? At the recent convention of the AFL-CIO, the country’s leading labor organization, there was a very progressive resolution put forth calling for the right of all Americans to travel to Cuba and for an end to the US embargo against the island nation. But at the end of the resolution the authors reminded us that they’re Americans, calling upon Cuba “to release all political prisoners”. ¹⁵

To appreciate what’s wrong with that resolution one must understand the following: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials, particularly in Havana through the United States Interests Section. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States, evidence gathered by Cuban double agents. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents.

Notes

1. Der Spiegel (Germany), November 20, 2006, p.24 ^?
2. Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1994 ^?
3. Washington Post, July 18, 2001 ^?
4. BBC, August 14, 2004 ^?
5. Washington Post, August 30, 2005 ^?
6. Wikipedia: “Article 11 of Italian Constitution” ^?
7. William Blum, “Killing Hope”, chapters 2 and 18 ^?
8. For further discussion of US opposition to Post-WW2 Axis pacifism, see “Former Axis Nations Abandon Post-World War II Military Restrictions“ ^?
9. New York Times, June 27, 1963, p.12 ^?
10. See Killing Hope, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion ^?
11. USA Today, October 11, 1999, p.1 ^?
12. p.234 of Reid’s book ^?
13. Ibid., p.150-1 ^?
14. Washington Post, September 9, 2009 ^?
15. PDF of resolution ?

$20 Per Gallon: Incremental Adaptations To Basics

Part 2: A book review…

Chris Steiner’s book, $20 PER GALLON, methodically illustrates how American society, in fact, world societies will change as the price of gasoline inevitably rises to $20 a gallon. Many may scream, “What about the 100 years of reserves in the Bakken Fields, or the ocean floor off of Alaska and more fields in the Gulf of Mexico?”

Again, emotions and sheer hearsay drive such hopeful myths. You may call the author a cretin, but the coming rises in the price of a gallon of gas cannot and will not be mitigated by hysteria. Again, as a teenager, I once bought gasoline at 19 cents a gallon in a gas war! If the Bakken fields held such vast quantities of oil as purported—you would see 19 cents a gallon again! Not!

With clever ingenuity, Steiner titles his chapters from Chapter $5 all the way to Chapter $20. He methodically illustrates how each of us will be affected by the costs of a gallon of gas. He advances some positive aspects of bettering humanity as prices rise.

“Oil prices enabled the SUV to thrive, but they will ultimately bury the SUV in its grave,” Steiner said. “Americans will, at long last, embrace diesel when gas reaches $6 a gallon. At the same time, $6 a gallon will mean fewer lives lost to crumpled steel and unyielding pavement.”

Steiner states that people will drive less, slower, smarter and wiser. Already in 2008 with $4.50 a gallon, Americans drove 100 billion less miles than they drove in 2007.

“Assuming the prices are sustained for a year at $4.00 a gallon, that would save 1,000 lives every month,” Steiner said. “That’s 12,000 people annually, almost a third of those killed on U.S. roads every year. At $6 a gallon, 15,600 lives will be saved and at $7 a gallon, 20,000 lives will be saved.” Currently, 44,000 Americans lose their lives on our highways annually.

When it comes to good health, Steiner said that rising prices will mean a trimmer America. Fat people, and America owns the record for obesity at 150 million plus, will walk or ride a bike. Obesity costs Americans $117 billion annually in early mortality and medical expenses.

“High gas prices will clean up our skies, clear our vistas and scrub our lungs,” Steiner said. “$6 gas will spark an infrastructure revolution and the era of widespread tolling. The yellow school bus will disappear from America’s roads. High prices will temper the major league travelling in youth sports. Police will patrol on foot.”

But hang onto your hats! At $8 a gallon, air travel will become quite constricted. In fact, Steiner said, “The skies will empty. When gas inevitably climbs to $8 a gallon, the airline carnage will be vast and it will come swiftly. When gas prices reach $8, airline carries will be throwing down 60 percent of their operating costs to fuel. That cannot be sustained. The ultimate contraction awaits. The airline dinosaurs will meet their asteroid deaths.”

Once the airlines cannot service Las Vegas, Vail, Aspen and Jackson Hole ski areas—as well as many other pricy resorts in the Caribbean—we will see major changes in the economy. When you cannot pay air fare to Disneyworld, those attractions will become extinct. Most college bound teens will see their school choices shrink drastically.

“Gas prices of $10 a gallon may seem far away, but if you look at the fundamentals of the world’s supplies, and the certainty of rising demands, it’s a number we will almost definitely see within the next 10 years,” Steiner said. “At the same time, plug-in hybrids will form the bridge we need to an electric car world.”

A man named Shai Agassi heads up Better Place, a company he founded to solve the logistical riddles facing electric cars in a world and infrastructure built for gasoline. “We don’t have a choice,” he said. “We either do this, or we suffer the catastrophic failures of economic ruin and global climate change.”

Steiner said, “Converting our personal transportation platform from one based on gasoline to one powered by electricity is one of the most imperative measures we will take in shaping a sustainable future for our country and for the global civilization as a whole. This will not be an easy transition. Car ownership will plummet at $10 a gallon. People will end up forfeiting their cars altogether. Traffic flows on major arteries will ebb and the side effects that began to take hold at $6 gas—fewer crash deaths, less pollution, less obesity—will be firing in full force at $10 gas.”

With rising gas prices, Steiner says we will face another big change: plastics! That pesky invention created the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, trash all over the planet and more gadgets than humans can handle.

Part 3: Finding out what will happen when gas rises from $12 to $20 a gallon. Back to basics for food, for water for living.

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.

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