To take the name in vain of the most reviled person on the planet is understandable. No one has brought so much harm and threat to so many so quickly as this transplanted Texan who relates to the 95% of humanity living beyond U.S. borders with threats, bombast and bombs.
But bashing Bush – and I am not exactly a fan – only feeds more negative energy into the massively negative forces already unleashed by a besmirched White House to engulf the world like a never-ending tsunami of contrary policies and escalating calamities.
The bloodshed and radioactive genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan… the racist abandonment and restructuring of Louisiana… ripping up Kyoto and blocking Bali and every other international attempt to slow climate shift, elimination of federal alternate energy incentives and other measures in order to increase civilization-threatening petroleum profits and pollution at a time when the United States already outstrips even countries three-times its population in per person carbon emissions… torture and illegal gulags as established U.S. policies… total electronic surveillance of all formerly private communications within the USA… the elimination of Constitutional rights and freedoms over what Bush called “just a goddamn piece of paper”… trillions of borrowed dollars transferred to corporate cronies as China continues to buy strategic U.S. corporations and financial institutions – in other words, the country itself – along with most of the entire planet… the list of disasters not yet specifically denounced by any front-running candidate goes on. And on. But you get the drift. No one has done deeper damage than delusional Dubya.
The thing is, though…
SHADOW PLAYS
It’s not Bush. He is not in charge. This latest in a long line of ventriloquist dummies speaks in the tongues of faceless controllers who “call the shots” by calling in loans and favors… setting the interest rates that determine compounding national, individual and corporate debt… printing money and manipulating currencies that determine individual and national buying power… owning the mass media and daily inserting video clips and “stories” manufactured by far-right/fundamentalist think-tanks and disguised as “news”…
Those guys.
If you want to know who’s throwing the shadow plays on the flickering walls of our blue-lit urban caves check out the membership lists online of the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council On Foreign Relations, Skull & Bones, Project For A New American Century and Defense Policy Board. See how many names and corporations overlap in this old boys’ network of interlocking interests.
And then Google Ed Bernays. Named as one of the 1000 most influential people of all time, this little known “father of public relations” wrote the bible of mass manipulation in 1928.
“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it,” Bernays argued in Propaganda. Eagerly read by Goebbels and every media exec who came after, Bernays’ “engineering of consent” perverted the insights and techniques of his uncle Freud to mold mass opinion. Amped up today in the carefully managed “virtual realities” of Hollywood movies and Big Network teevee, these same methods will go “hyper-real” with the coming compulsory advent of HD. (More on this in a later blog.)
“Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country,” Bernays revealed. “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
Get the picture?
SAME OLD, SAME OLD
Anyone who believes that “getting rid of Bush” in the next election will usher in genuinely life-affirming, planet-protecting change is not paying attention to the power elite that has run the USA for personal profit and control ever since the Morgans, Rockefellers and Rothschilds established the Federal Reserve during the Congressional Christmas recess in 1913.
This interlocking power elite of military-corporate-political interests went on to increase its grip through the Vietnam War-enabling bogus Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the carefully triangulated assassination of Federal Reserve-busting President Kennedy, the FBI-assisted bombing of the WTC in 1998, the internal demolition of the Murrah building using explosives with U.S. Army serial numbers, the U.S. Air Force “stand down” that facilitated the thermate-planted “take-downs” of Towers 1,2 and 7 on 9/11, the Patriot Act passed during the Congressional anthrax scare in 2001 – and whatever we allow to come next by not questioning what has been foisted on us before.
Independent Washington journalists Allan Nair and Kelley Beaucar Vlahos recently spoke about the upcoming U.S. elections with Amy Goodman at democracynow!
Vlahos described Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy team as “throwbacks” – “old faces, old names” who “haven’t changed their real vision of the world and foreign policy” since the formative years of the last century.
As Nairn narrated the Hillary Clinton lineup:
Madeleine Albright, she was the main force behind the Iraq sanctions that killed more than 400,000 Iraqi civilians. General Wesley Clark, he was the one who ran the [Depleted Uranium] bombing of Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, came out and publicly said that he was going after civilian targets, like electrical plants, like the TV station there. Richard Holbrooke, in the Carter administration he was the one who oversaw the shipment of weapons to the Indonesian military as they were invading—illegally invading East Timor and killing a third of the population there, and he was the one who kept the UN Security Council from enforcing its resolution against that invasion. Strobe Talbott, he was the one who, during the Clinton administration, oversaw Russia policy, a backing of Yeltsin, which resulted in turning over the national wealth to the oligarchs and a drop in life expectancy in much of Russia of about fifteen years—massive, massive death. And you have various backers of the Iraq invasion and occupation and the recent escalation, people like General Jack Keane, Michael O’Hanlon and others. That’s just Clinton.
Allan Nairn went on to point out that Obama’s top adviser is the same Zbigniew Brzezinski who covets Central Asian oil and boasted he had created the Afghan jihadi movement that produced Osama bin Laden. Anthony Lake – another key Obama adviser – “was the main force behind the US invasion of Haiti… which they brought back Aristide essentially in political chains” to support a brutal World Bank/IMF takeover of [this black nation’s] economy.”
Another Obama adviser, Air Force General Merrill McPeak “sent fighter planes to Indonesia after the massacre in East Timor.
“Another key Obama adviser, Dennis Ross, oversaw US policy toward Israel/Palestine by insisting that the “legal rights of the Palestinians, the rights recognized under international law, must be subordinated to the needs of the Israeli government.” Another Obama adviser, Sarah Sewall is a former Defense official, who “wrote the introduction to General Petraeus’ Marine Corps/Army counterinsurgency handbook, the handbook that is now being used worldwide by US troops in various killing operations. That’s the Obama team.”
Also going unmentioned during the January 15 Democratic “debate” were “anti-lobbyist” John Edwards’ top advisers. As Nairn continues: “Many of the military lobbyists are working on the Edwards foreign policy team, because the names that—the Edwards names that are out there mainly come from the Army and the Air Force and the Navy Material Command. Those are the portions of the Pentagon that do the Defense contracts, that do the deals with the big companies like Raytheon and Boeing, etc. One of those listed on the Edwards team is the lobbyist for the big military contractor EADS.”
DIFFERENT FACES, SAME SUITS
Vlahos concludes, “The presence of these advisers makes it clear that these candidates aren’t serious about enforcing the murder laws and that they’re willing to kill civilians, foreign civilians, en masse in order to advance US policy.”
Nairn agrees: “Fundamentally, there’s no difference on the basic principle of, are you against the killing of civilians and are you willing to enforce the murder laws. If we were willing to enforce the murder laws, the headquarters of each of these candidates could be raided, and various advisers and many candidates could be hauled away by the cops, because they have backed various actions that, under established principles like the Nuremberg Principles, like the principles set up in the Rwanda tribunals, the Bosnia tribunals, things that are unacceptable, like aggressive war, like the killing of civilians for political purposes. So, in a basic sense, there is no choice.”
As Vlahos explains:
There is no incentive for these candidates to reach out beyond any of this orbit or galaxy of foreign policy advisers who have been linked in, you know, we’re talking decades of war and events and actions and operations. And there seems, whether it be John Edwards reaching out to the Defense contracting community or Hillary Clinton reaching out to her husband’s former security advisers and operatives or whether it’s Obama reaching out to former Clinton types, there doesn’t seem to be any incentive to reach out beyond that… I think a lot of that is linked to money, it’s sort of like this hand-in-glove symbiotic relationship, where the bigger names you have, the more familiar names, the more entrenched you have in these cliques I spoke to previously, the more money you’re bringing into your campaign. So there’s no incentive to go beyond that, unless you’re ready for some amount of rebuke and some of the spigot being turned off.
How about Washington’s own Republican Guard? Ghoul-iani wants to ramp up the Bush Doctrine of bombing everyone everywhere all the time who does not bow down before U.S. Incorporation. The team of the man connected with the “pulling” of the lightly damaged Tower 7 at the World Trade Center features Norman Podhoretz. “Podhoretz’s new book is World War IV,” Vlahos reminds us. “Podhoretz says, bomb the Iranians. And he’s not just talking about pinpoint Iranian nuclear installations; he’s saying bomb the Iranians. And he says he prays that this will happen. Ex-Senator Robert Kasten, an old major backer of the Pakistani military dictatorships and the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, he’s another key Giuliani adviser.”
Then there’s Daniel Pipes. Leading the American fascist charge against ‘Islamofascism’ on college campuses, this Pied Piper is establishing his “Campus Watch” brown-shirt pogrom against professors he deems not pro-Israeli occupation and apartheid enough. Martin Kramer, Stephen Rosen, Peter Berkowitz of the right-wing Hoover Institution also hope to vacuum up dissenters – aided by “a small galaxy of neoconservatives from familiar think tanks as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Hoover, the Hudson.”
Vlahos completes this sorry rundown with a similarly bloodthirsty Bush clone:
McCain has General Alexander Haig, who oversaw the US policy of mass terror killings of civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, when American nuns and religious workers were abducted, raped and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard. McCain has a younger adviser, Max Boot, who now points to El Salvador, where 70,000 civilians were killed by American-backed death squads, as a model counterinsurgency, a model for what the US should be doing today. Henry Kissinger advises McCain And Kissinger, of course, was responsible for mass death in Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, countless other places. Bud McFarlane from the Reagan administration, who was a key backer of the Contras. Brent Scowcroft, is a leader of the realist school—the realist school basically says, yes, kill civilians, but make sure you win the war Scowcroft was the one who, during the Bush 1 administration, went to China right after the Tiananmen Square massacre and reassured the Chinese leadership, “Don’t worry about it, we’re still behind you.” [democracynow.org Jan 3/08]
Take your pick.
RIGGED AGAIN
The two candidates who speak truth, stand on personal integrity, and offer the wiser and compassionate leadership of a Ghandi – Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich – “are treated like pariahs by the establishment media,” observes Mike Whitney at Information Clearing House.
“This year we can choose from a slate of 8 candidates; all of whom are members of the secretive Council on Foreign Relations; and all of whom are wholly committed to the off-shoring of businesses, the outsourcing of jobs, the expansion of police-state powers, and the obscene enlargement the already over-bloated War Machine,” Whitney continues:
As for Hillary; she won nothing. The results are completely bogus. Her weepy performance before the balloting was orchestrated to create a credible narrative to explain the fraudulent shifting of votes away from Obama. It was exactly the same trick that Karl Rove played in 2004, when he had the entire corporate media standing behind his cockamamie story that 3 or 4 million fundamentalists—who had never voted before in a general election—suddenly poured down from the mountains to cast their ballot for their champion, George Bush. This absurd narrative was spouted from every media-soapbox in the nation until it was generally accepted as fact. The media then proceeded to quash any investigation of the massive voter fraud which took place across the country (particularly in Ohio) while discrediting critics as conspiracy theorists.
“Is it a conspiracy to think that the same guys who abduct foreign nationals off the streets of cities around the world and take them to black sites – where their eyes are gouged out and their finger nails ripped off – would get squeamish over something as trivial as ballot stuffing?” Whitney asks. “The system is broken… The primary was stolen.” [Information Clearing House Jan 11/08]
Prison Planet thinks so, too. “Going into New Hampshire Ron Paul was polling in the early teens and was a strong bet to take third place behind McCain and Romney. Four days before the vote, Rasmussen had Paul at 14% – a significant lead over Huckabee on 11% and Giuliani on 8% – and yet Ron Paul finished with just 8%.
“The New Hampshire town of Sutton admits that it voided every vote Ron Paul received. The Congressman got 31 votes and yet due to a ‘human error’ Sutton reported zero votes for Ron Paul. [Prison Planet Jan 9/08]
Any remaining doubts of the Democrat’s repressively Republican colors came during last week’s “debate” when the Dem’s quashed free speech by backing NBC’s refusal to include fourth place candidate Dennis Kucinich in the conversation.
Enforced just minutes from air time by a Bush-backing state Supreme Court overturning a lower court decision to let Kucinich speak, the nationally televised rigged roulette game from Las Vegas went to air with Clinton, Obama and Edwards spending only a few more minutes on – what was that again? – oh yeah, Iraq. [truthout Jan 16/08]
So Kucinich lost his first amendment right of free speech in order to “protect” the “freedom” of a press to eliminate free speech before a national audience thirsty for authenticity and truth.
HR 1955 AND YOU
Still, these goon squad tactics probably postponed long term detention of Kucinich and his crazed, Constitution-quoting followers in the homeland gulags already under rapid construction across America by Halliburton and Bechtel. Like so many other issues of extreme and urgent import – such as the deepening water crisis, and the upcoming North American Union under a single currency – the purpose of these detention centers has so far not been discussed by any candidate with access to a media megaphone.
But a bill overturning the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression, association, and assembly sponsored by California Democrat Jane Harman and passed in the House last October is certain to be ratified as law by the Senate under the sponsored of Republican Susan Collins.
“When HR 1955 becomes law, it will create a commission tasked with identifying extremist people, groups, and ideas,” reports Paul Craig Roberts at Counterpunch. This McCarthyesque commission will hold witch-hunt hearings across the land, taking false testimony and compiling lists of “dangerous people and beliefs.”
Will you make it onto one of these “extremists” lists? If you are a civil libertarian, a critic of Israel’s policies, a skeptic of the official 9/11 mythology, a critic of this or the next administration’s illegal wars and occupations, a critic of U.S., government kidnapping, rendition and torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, a critic of illegal White House spying on Americans, or a neighborhood mom or dad standing in the way powerful interest groups – “such as politically-connected developers” – welcome to incarceration, Roberts writes.
But you can be politically as quiet as any good German who said nothing against Hitler – and still be loaded into one of those Internet-rumored boxcars. The ones with the leg manacles bolted to the floor.
“That SOB who stole your girlfriend, that hussy who stole your boyfriend, the gun owner next door – just report them to Homeland Security as holders of extreme beliefs. Homeland Security needs suspects, so they are not going to check. Under the new regime, accusation is evidence… That boss who harasses you for coming late to work – he’s a good candidate to be reported; so is that minority employee that you can’t fire for any normal reason. So is the husband of that good-looking woman you have been unable to seduce.”
But no every one with “extremist views” is destined to be locked up. Or worse. Unelected-President Bush and the Just Us Department can “ignore habeas corpus, ignore the Geneva Conventions, seize people without evidence, hold them indefinitely without presenting charges, torture them until they confess to some made up crime, and take over the government by declaring an emergency” – and not be counted as “extremists” Roberts remarks.
Roberts does not duke it out in the lightweight division. He has served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He’s a savvy insider, and a darn good writer: See his The Tyranny of Good Intentions. [Counterpunch Jan 4/08]
See him inside, too.
UNLESS…
Americans awaken from their interchangeable-candidate, rigged-elections trance and GET MOVING RIGHT NOW to take back our country and our rights.
We can start by challenging candidates on issues of immediate import – including their stance on repealing the Federal Reserve Act, nixing the North American Union, backing Bali and alternative electricity generation that does not involve burning anything, and bringing all the troops home to begin dealing with escalating eco-emergencies already engulfing the red states. (Hello?)
Allan Nairn suggests, “I am making my support conditional on you renouncing support for the murder of civilians, on you firing all of your advisers who have been involved in the killing of civilians in the past, you turning them over to the International Criminal Court if you can get the International Criminal Court to accept it, you signing a pledge that says no more killing of civilians, you signing a pledge that says we will prevent preventable death.”
Other projects for a Survivable American Century include immediate impeachment proceedings against the Bush/Cheney chimera (signalling a significant “mea culprit” course change to the rest of the world), and nationwide town and city dialogues on new directions for the USA.
This much is for sure: Voting for the “lesser evils” next November will only ensure more evil.
Start creating local economic and political alternatives now.
Rants & Whispers 