Eric Zuesse
Summers has left his sordid imprint on the highest spheres of American power. He also polluted Harvard, of course, accidentally reopening the question of what elite US universities do in their “non-academic” time.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s has been well documented even by the BBC, in their 1992 classic documentary about the CIA’s (still-ongoing) Gladio Operation, America’s CIA basically took control of the international racist-fascist (i.e., ideologically nazi) movement after World War II, by protecting and hiring Hitler’s Nazis and their key aristocratic eastern European supporters undercover. The Gladio Operation was just one branch of a broader CIA strategy, developed by Allen Dulles and originally carried out by his protégé James Angleton, to use, for the purposes of America’s aristocracy, nazis’ intense racism, by retargeting it away from Jews and toward Russians, so as to weaken first the Soviet Union, and, then, after the end of that, Russia itself. (U.S. President Barack Obama’s involvement with Ukraine is very much a result of this post-WW-II pro-nazi Dulles-Angleton program.)
There were many other branches of this strategy, one being by the World Bank and IMF to introduce capitalism into the former Soviet states in a manner that would privatize their formerly government-owned assets to aristocrats in the West and in the formerly Soviet nations by means of insider fire-sales which enabled these state-assets to be picked up by cooperating local insiders at non-market super-low prices and thereby have these new “oligarchs” (the local copies there of Western capitalism’s own aristocrats) as being secret agents of the U.S. aristocracy, who would thus be extending the American aristocracy’s control eastward. Mark Ames has succinctly recounted this operation, and David McClintick did the major report on it prior to Ames. That operation was headed by Lawrence Summers, who, at the time, was on leave from Harvard’s economics department to run the World Bank and so to infiltrate into the newly ‘capitalist’ (actually the emerging oligarchic) economies of the east, economics advisors such as Andrei Shleifer and his local Russian operative Anatoly Chubais (though the question as to whether Shleifer was himself connected to the CIA has not been definitively answered), to establish the corruption there in the optimal way, both to subordinate those new aristocrats to America’s own, and also to weaken those countries in order to make them effectively vassal nations to the U.S. aristocracy. The corruption was rampant, and the roles of both the World Bank and the IMF in it were clear: both of those financial institutions operate closely with the CIA.
Regarding whether Professor Summers works with the CIA, that’s unknown. However, the financial disclosure form for Summers as he entered the Obama Administration in 2009, at
http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/financial_disclosures/Summers_Lawrence_278.pdf?_ga=1.117788681.1636534319.1424197432
showed that most of his income the prior year was from the international investment firm of D.E. Shaw & Co., in the form of a salary of $1,248,747, another salary of $183,750, a distributive share of partnership of $2,596,171, and another distributive share of partnership of $1,159,955, totaling $5,188,623. Summers had joined that company in 2006. Wikipedia’s article on D.E. Shaw & Co. says that, “After the Russian debt default in 1998, the company suffered losses in its fixed-income trading.” One might reasonably suppose that the multi-million-dollar value which Summers held for that investment firm was related to his insider knowledge from having overseen the privatizations of formerly communist countries. If Summers had not also been serving as a CIA asset while at the World Bank and Harvard, then one might wonder why not, especially considering the harm that Summers did to Russia (the CIA’s target to weaken), and also considering the CIA’s institutional hatred of Russia — a hatred so well served by Summers. If Summers was not an off-the-books CIA asset in that operation, then the question would be: Why didn’t they pay him? He was a powerful weapon in the war that they wage for the global dominance of America’s aristocracy.
The ruthless Boris Berezovsky, was a complex and gifted man who became a reliable Washington associate in plundering Russia. Some Western media have painted him as an avatar of democracy resisting “Putin’s tyranny”, but Berezovsky had been at one time a powerful supporter of Putin’s ascendancy in the post-Yeltsin period. His pro-US stance caused a rift between the two that only grew as time passed.
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]urthermore, on 14 April 2015, Graham Stak in Business New Europe’s bneintellinews bannered “The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchy,” and he revealed that, “Newly declassified documents from President Bill Clinton’s administration, released to bneIntelliNews, show how Putin’s candidacy [to lead Russia] was a compromise after a fierce battle for power in Russia between pro-US oligarchs [headed by Boris Berezovsky] and pro-state conservatives [headed by the former KGB chief Evgenny Primakov]. At stake was not just power in Russia, but the crucial question of Russia’s relationship with the West.
Berezovsky’s seven bankers [Berezovsky himself, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Vinogradov, Aleksandr Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin]” owned not just the banks but also the major Russian TV networks and especially Berezovsky’s own ORT-TV ‘news’ operation, which was Russia’s biggest. Berezovsky also “was involved in corrupt schemes such as siphoning funds from state-owned national carrier Aeroflot, as well as benefiting from crony privatizations,” and that’s precisely the type of person whom America’s aristocracy wanted to be controlling Russia, as their agent. Russia’s leader Boris Yeltsin was torn between the two sides, and he appointed to be his successor a lower-level former KGB operative, Vladimir Putin, in a surprise move that Yeltsin intended to satisfy both sides, both the independent-Russia side that Primakov favored, and the ‘pro-West’ (actually pro-vassal-state-of-America’s-aristocracy) side that were the client-beneficiaries of the Harvard Economics Department team, who were appointed by Bill Clinton, who was aiming to take over Russia for America’s aristocrats.
The scoundrel Bill Clinton: A slick phony and a war criminal, like all US presidents in recent memory. He was instrumental in extending NATO and US power to the very heart of Russia, and betraying the working class big time at home and abroad . He also unleashed the banksters on an unprotected public by lifting the remaining Glass-Steagall injunctions. The cartoon makes him look funny—and therefore harmless—but there’s nothing really funny about what this crook did to America and the world. (DonkeyHotey, via flickr)
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nother side of Bill Clinton’s operation for the U.S. aristocracy was the expansion of NATO eastward to Russia’s borders, so as to terrorize Russia into vassalage to ‘democracy’ and ‘the West’ and ‘Europe’; i.e., to America’s aristocracy (which is actually fascist, as are all aristocracies), not to any authentic democracy at all. On 19 April 2015 I headlined “NATO Increasingly Surrounds the ‘Russian Threat’,” and described how Bill Clinton started the process of extending NATO after NATO’s alleged opponent, the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact, had dissolved and ended in 1991. The alleged reason for NATO’s existence turned out not to be its actual reason for existence (since that reason, communism, was gone), which turns out to have been to serve as the marketing arm for U.S. armaments-producers, which constitute 56% of all global arms-sales. UK is only 11%. Russia is only 8%. France is only 6%. All others are below 2%. NATO is the American aristocracy’s arms-merchandising organization. It whips up fear and hatred of Russia, in order not only to weaken Russia, but also to boost U.S. aristocrats’ control over other aristocracies (whose governments purchase those weapons). NATO’s authentic function continues on, even though communism is gone and no longer a threat [technically never was, as communism is far preferable to capitalism—Eds], either to the United States, or to any other nation. The taxpayers, and the war-ravaged publics, are the people who pay the prices for this; America’s aristocracy get all the benefits from it.
Bill Clinton not only followed through on his predecessor, George H.W. Bush’s, con of Russia’s hopeful and well-intentioned leader Mikhail Gorbachev, by expanding — as did his successors GWB and Obama — NATO instead of abolishing it (which he should have done), but he also terminated the Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act, which after the 1929 crash (and until Clinton ended it in 1999) blocked the megabanks from gambling with depositors’ money in ways that would leave future U.S. taxpayers in hock to pay the losses whenever those megabank gambles lose money (such as in 2008); and, so, Clinton introduced a “heads I win, tails you lose” relationship between the aristocrats and the U.S. public. He exacerbated that by blocking Brooksley Born’s proposed regulation of derivatives-trading. These two Clinton actions created the (unregulated) Wall Street actual but unprosecuted crime-wave that produced the post-2008 explosion of the U.S. federal debt from the still ongoing “QE” bail-outs of the mega-banks’ counterparties (the aristocrats). Clinton was the ultimate anti-Democrat, if “Democrat” is understood in the sense of FDR’s tradition, the pre-Reagan dominant tradition. He was the Reagan ‘Democrat,’ and the ultimate model for Obama’s Presidency: the anti-FDR ‘Democrat.’
Clinton also introduced the international race-to-the-bottom in wages and in consumer and environmental protections, via the American aristocracy’s trade deals, NAFTA, etc., which are now being greatly intensified by Obama in his proposed secretly negotiated (and perhaps soon to be blindly approved by the aristocracy’s Congress) TPP, TTIP, and TISA. In Obama’s proposed versions, panels of international corporations will override the laws of individual nations regarding the environment, consumer protections, product safety, investor protections, workplace safety, wages, etc., so that voters will no longer have any significant say over these types of matters, but only the controlling stockholders in those international corporations will. Obama has had virtual 100% support of Republicans in Congress for these trade deals, but the Democratic leader Harry Reid essentially blocked the deals while he headed the Senate; and, now, his successor, Charles Schumer, has switched from pro to anti on them, because victory for Obama’s trade-deals would mean, essentially, victory in the whole ballgame for the Republican Party. While the U.S. aristocracy has owned the Republican Party ever since Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865, that aristocracy has now come to own also the very top, the national, level of the Democratic Party. But there still remains enough of a progressive power-base at work in local Democratic Party primary elections to provide significant blowback against any merely local Democratic politician who becomes so blatantly a sell-out to the aristocracy as Obama is as the nation’s President. Schumer, in other words, has decided not to end the Democratic Party — or, at least, not yet, to end it (as Clinton did end it, at the national level — DLC, etc.).
What used to be the Republican Party (in the sense, for example, that John Loftus and Mark Aarons understood the contest between the two Parties to be in their 1994, pre-Clinton-era, Secret War Against the Jews, which portrays the fascist — even to the point of nazism, or racist fascism — U.S. aristocracy, as operating almost entirely via the Republicans’ Dulles brothers and their agent James Angleton) has now become instead the actual one-party-state U.S., in which both political Parties are doing the bidding of America’s aristocracy, not only against America’s public, but also against all other aristocracies, to control the entire world.
The results have been a globally increasing inequality of wealth, a rampant global corruption, and a succession of local wars in which the U.S. aristocracy, and its energy-partners the Saudis and other Sunni oil aristocrats, finance and sponsor actions to support their global plan, which U.S. President Barack Obama stated to West Point’s graduating cadets on 28 May 2014, and which is really more anti-Russian than anti-‘terrorism,’ because the U.S.’s Arabic-aristocratic partners are the actual financiers of Islamic jihad, which is the ideology of Wahhabism, the Sauds’ true ideological commitment (which America’s aristocracy hopes to restrain but places as lower priority than is the defeat of Russia); so, here is what Obama told those cadets, about their career-obligation now, as future U.S. military officers:
“The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed [his intended word here was actually ‘past’] and it will be true for the century to come. [He’s telling future officers that all other nations are ‘dispensable’.]
“But the world is changing with accelerating speed. This presents opportunity, but also new dangers. We know all too well, after 9/11, just how technology and globalization has [his intended word here was actually ‘have’] put power once reserved for states in the hands of individuals, raising the capacity of terrorists to do harm. Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. And even as developing nations embrace democracy and market economies, 24-hour news and social media makes [his intended word here was ‘make’] it impossible to ignore the continuation of sectarian conflicts and failing states and popular uprisings that might have received only passing notice a generation ago.
“It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.”
Thus, the assignment, of the U.S. military, as set forth there, is economic in nature. But it’s carried out by military means. Despite the liberal rhetoric, which as usual is lying to say that military force is the ‘last resort,’ it’s the last resort only in the same sense that to a lender, the enforcer of a debt is the ‘last resort’: the lender’s side of a loan is nothing without the real threat of coercion; and, similarly, the American aristocracy’s continued dominance of the world would end without the U.S. military to back it up. Obama was telling the U.S. military that, when Russia, China, the other BRICS countries, and Russia’s Shiite allies Iran and Syria, say no to America’s aristocracy, the U.S. military’s assignment will be to go after those resistors, to kill them with bombs and everything else, in order to force them to comply with the demands of America’s aristocracy.
“Most [rank-and-file Democrats] just don’t care enough to find out, nor even to think things through. They virtually invite being deceived. They’d rather stay in their idealogical fantasyland…”
However, deception is the aristocrat’s first preference, it being a cheaper alternative as compared to the use of bullets and body-bags. (Similarly: lenders prefer not to need to pay enforcers; in this sense, the military really is “the last resort,” just as any carrying-through with a threat will inevitably be.) Thus, for example, on Saturday April 18th, the Sydney Morning Herald, in Australia, headlined “Barack Obama plays China card in TPP sales pitch,” and reported that, “Fast-track [approval] for Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal has Republican support but many Democrats doubt its purported benefits. US President Barack Obama warns of China’s intentions to fill any gap left open if Trans-Pacific Partnership fails.” America’s President is now trying to use an anti-China scare tactic, to drum up support for keeping the public out of the determination as regards whether national governments should become replaced by an international aristocratic dictatorship, on many important types of matters (via Obama’s trade-deals). His implicit message (and hoax) is that the public’s enemy isn’t their own nation’s aristocracy; it’s instead an entire alien people, specifically the Chinese. “‘If we do not help to shape the rules so that our businesses and our workers can compete in those markets, then China will set up rules that advantage Chinese workers and Chinese businesses,’ he said.” Part of his implicit message is that low-wage countries should remain low-wage countries. He carried that idea through at the start of his Administration, in Honduras — a land of grinding poverty, where he perhaps helped to overthrow a progressive democratic President and then he definitely locked-in a fascist regime, which the rest of the hemisphere outright opposed. As a consequence of Obama’s action (which was spearheaded by Hillary Clinton), Honduras went backward instead of forward.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the China matter, just as in the Russia matter, and just as in the international trade-deal matter, Barack Obama can rely upon congressional Republicans to vote for what he wants, but most congressional Democrats will vote against it, because he’s really a closeted Republican, who talks a liberal line but follows through with it on only ethnic and gender issues, which for lots of the Democratic Party’s electorate, are the only issues that they really care about. The aristocracy care little-to-nothing about those matters; it’s safe for Obama to pretend about matters like those — and, for example, Blacks still support him, even though they’re suffering the most economic harm of any group under his Presidency. The culture of Blacks, just like that of Jews and other minorities, has trained them to think racially, above all; and this is what the aristocracy needs, so that the broad majority middle class will blame the minorities and the poor, those even weaker than themselves, instead of blaming the fraction of 1% who actually hold the real power and so shape the views that are held by everybody else — including by those middle and lower classes. Hostility, for perceived injustices, then pours forth upon “Jews,” “Blacks,” etc., instead of upon that fraction of 1% who actually control things (see the summary here). (And, furthermore: it’s also worth keeping in mind, in this context, the broader reality, beyond that of merely one’s own nation, that the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%.” In other words: inequality is so enormous that, worldwide, the richest 0.7% “own 41% of the planet’s private assets. The world’s richest 8.4% own 83.3%. The world’s richest 31.3% own 97%. So: the bottom 68.7% own just 3% — and the richest 0.7% own 13.7 times as much as that. Furthermore, the gini, or measure of inequality, is higher — more unequal — in the U.S. than in all but five other nations on this entire planet.)
The aristocracy enjoys playing the public for suckers (like Obama’s touted “China” threat), because the public’s very real and incontrovertible suckerdom then reinforces, in aristocrats’ minds (and in their agents, such as Obama and Summers) the contempt they hold regarding the public.
Regarding the TTIP with Europe, the first and only independently produced economic analysis of that deal, published October 2014, finds that it would harm the public and benefit only owners of large international corporations; and that’s the very same finding which has been similarly published regarding the TPP with Asia, on 16 April 2015.
Barack Obama’s ultimate reward for his ample services to America’s aristocracy will probably be basically like Bill Clinton’s: leaving an enormous financial-and-power inheritance for his heirs, his daughters and their husbands and children. Abolition of inheritance-taxes (and of the affiliated gift-taxes) is a core issue for any aristocracy; and, though President Obama has never openly supported the Republicans on it, he has approved the continued lowering of those taxes upon unearned wealth, while the federal debt has been soaring (against future generations’ earned wealth) to pay for the bailouts and wars that have been floating America’s aristocrats on an ever-rising cloud of increasingly concentrated wealth (in largely unearned hands, which is what any aristocracy inevitably favors above all earned wealth).
This is called by them ‘the opportunity society.’ (Read all about it there, from Obama, and also from self-acknowledged Republicans. But, of course, Obama is playing the ‘good cop,’ to their “bad.” Larry Summers does the same. Their propaganda-line sounds as if it comes from central headquarters.) As if equality of opportunity can actually rise while inequality of wealth is rising. It can’t really happen. The PR line is only for fools. The aristocracy enjoys playing the public for suckers, like that (and like Obama’s touted “China” threat), because the public’s very real and incontrovertible suckerdom then reinforces, in aristocrats’ minds (and in their agents, such as Obama and Summers) the contempt they hold regarding the public. Which, in turn, causes aristocrats — many of whom are actually stupid themselves — to think that somehow they deserve what they have inherited, and that their heirs will, too. No wonder, then, how it came to be that so many of them aren’t merely fascists, but are outright nazis — racist fascists. It all makes sense. They believe in the moral rightness of what is inherited. Even though that belief is blatantly stupid — even ridiculous. It’s widespread among aristocrats.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here is no mystery about why things have come to this point. It’s the way things are and have always been. It’s ‘God’s way.’ It’s ‘nature’s way.’ It’s psychopathy’s way. But is it good? Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Lawrence Summers, and Republicans, clearly think so (regardless of what especially ‘Democrats’ among them might say). But Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an authentic democrat (and not merely a nominal one who adopted the ‘Democratic’ label in order the more effectively to serve his aristocratic masters), thought not. (After all, as FDR relentlessly pointed out: it’s basically “Might makes right.”) The ideological sea-change in America (to “Greed is good; the wealthiest are the best”) occurred when Ronald Reagan came into office. We are still fundamentally in the Reagan era. Ever since he was elected, the Barry Goldwater of 1964 has, in effect, been ideologically America’s President, but national ‘Democrats’ have been trying to find liberal terms for his “Conscience of a Conservative.” They do this to pretend that it’s somehow “liberal.” And that that “liberalism” is somehow ‘progressive.’ But it’s not. It’s the opposite of progressive; it is regressive. In other words: it is conservative. It goes backward. That entire political system is based on lies (not just on errors, but on outright frauds), though most of its believers aren’t aware of the fact. (Most of them just don’t care enough to find out, nor even to think things through. They virtually invite being deceived. They’d rather stay in their idealogical fantasyland. I deal with the actual history of this entire matter, of political and economic ideology, in my latest book.)
So: those are the forces that have produced the politics and government that exists, regardless of the politics and government that would be the best, or even good, or even just okay, for most people. Injustice and oppression are natural, even though they are also evil. And: just because something is natural doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s inevitable. Only the most extreme conservatives believe that “Might makes right.” The fact is: Might makes likely. And, real progress is always unlikely. But it does happen, especially in the best of countries. America’s great Founders defeated the aristocracy of their time. [Moe precisely, only Britain’s aristocracy, setting down the foundations for a new aristocracy at home.—Eds] Gradually, an American aristocracy has arisen to take its place. But, with what’s now known, perhaps those people can also be defeated; and, this time, because of what is now known, it might be able to be done in a way that will prevent any future aristocracy from forming here. The situation is far from hopeless. It is bad, but progress really is possible. And progress should be the goal.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
[box]Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics. [/box]
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