By Kristine Mattis

And as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end
That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names …

Paul Weller (The Jam)

Scott Walker's triumph reflects not only the enduring power of money in US politics, but the confusion among voters in all parts of the nation, and a general disgust with Democratic party politics due to numerous betrayals.

We all know the old Albert Einstein adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. What does that say about Wisconsin? June 5^th 2012 saw an exact rematch of the 2010 gubernatorial election between Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Tom Barrett – and the exact same result, the only difference being that Walker won by an even wider margin than before.

While pundits have been pontificating about the causes of such a seemingly absurd victory by Scott Walker after the enormous groundswell of citizens fighting for sixteen months against the governor and his Tea Party Republican administration, most of the discussion has been shallow and fraught with inaccuracies. Furthermore, mere speculation on the causes of the Walker win only point to the ease with which our society retreats back to often unfounded conventional wisdom. Walker outspending Barrett 7 to 1, an ignorant electorate hell bent on voting against their own interests, and poor “messaging” by the Democratic party/candidate may all have played a part in the crushing Walker win, but these observations only scratch the surface of the problems facing Wisconsin, the country, and the world and serve to fuel the media’s incessant focus on the horse race. This insistence on focusing on the superficial always serves, by design, to impede the discourse on substantive issues.

The following represent some of the points directly and indirectly connected to the Wisconsin election which I failed to hear in the media discourse on the subject:

In Wisconsin:

• Scott Walker did NOT originally campaign on taking away collective bargaining rights. Thus, when he and his cronies claimed that he just carried out his campaign promises, they lied.

• The right to collective bargaining has nothing to do with and does not preclude balancing a budget.

In America:

• The fact that private sector and non-union employees do not have living wages, full benefits and access to health care is a travesty, but their friends and neighbors in unions in the public sector are not to blame. ALL workers should have such benefits, which all humans should be entitled to. By demonizing fellow workers who have these basic human rights, we only allow the elite to sit back with their excess riches while the rest fight for scraps. The haves promulgate the falsehood of entitlement abuse through exploiting the fear and selfishness of the have-nots. It is a divide and conquer strategy through which the elite pit the working class against one another in a race to the bottom. In reality, the hoarding by the super-rich few is to blame for the lack of basic resources for the many.

• An entitlement is a right, not a “handout.”

• The decline in wages and benefits across all sectors has mirrored the decline in unions in America; when unions are strong, ALL WORKERS benefit.

• Blind support of Democratic candidates by unions over the past several decades has resulted in no gains or benefits for workers. On the contrary, in the country as a whole as in Wisconsin, Democratic candidates have erroneously blamed public employees for financial woes and have demanded concessions from public workers while remaining unwavering in their support for corporations and the wealthy.

• The budget crises facing our governments on all levels are due to the enormous expenditures on subsidizing already wealthy and large corporations, the lowering of taxes on the rich, the virtual raping of the citizenry and our federal government by Wall Street millionaires and billionaires, and the unrelenting military spending on illegal and immoral wars and on redundant and unnecessary weapons.

• Corporate subsidies only enrich corporations and their upper management, not their rank and file employees and not citizens. Increased tax breaks and monies to corporations do not trickle down to workers. Corporations do not create more jobs through such measures as lower taxes and increased subsidies; they simply create more wealth for themselves.

• While Democrat and Republican politicians stress their minor differences through their socially more liberal or conservative beliefs, these amount to little in terms of concrete societal change, as both parties adhere to the identical dominant economic, plutocratic, oligarchic paradigm which is destroying the nation and the world. It is not by chance that all of the presidents of the past twenty-four years have been Ivy League graduates, as the next president will also be. The vast majority of these people are not admitted to elite institutions based simply on their merit; they are admitted due to their family wealth, power, and/or prestige. And for those like Bill Clinton who do not come from such pedigrees, the only way they are able to sustain their status after having been accepted into the power elite is by implicitly promising to maintain and propagate the dominant paradigm and the status quo.
   
• For those who decry the lack of a clear, cohesive, and compelling message by Democrats to counter Republicans, there lies a simple answer: Democrats do not have their own message because their message is the same as that of Republicans.

In the world:

• The ritual of voting is illusory; the pretense that it represents democracy is a complete fabrication. When people do not have choice in their candidates, as when the elite of the moneyed political parties choose their “electable” politicians, voting is simply an exercise in futility.

• The poor have always been and continue to be marginalized by all major political parties. Vast majorities of people around the world – including the poor themselves –  have bought into the false propaganda revering wealth and equating it with quality of character, while demonizing poverty and equating it with depravity. As psychological studies have shown, the exact opposite is true. The growing number of poor in the shadow of the more highly concentrated rich is a local and global concern addressed by virtually no one in politics.

• Wealth inequality is an immoral blight in our society. The obscene concentration of wealth in America and around the globe is emblematic of the lack of democracy, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as, “the principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.” We absolutely do not live in a democracy, not in the U.S. nor in the world community.

• Until ecology is prioritized ahead of economy, all other points are moot. Our already occurring global ecological decline will soon eclipse any of our current economic crises. We cannot live without ecological resources and we will poison ourselves to death in our quest to further create synthetic resources that do not fit within our natural ecological systems and our biosphere. NO ONE will dare address this reality in political circles.

While Scott Walker’s administration represents one of the most morally bankrupt, scientifically inept, and socially despicable governorship seen in recent decades, real change was not to be found among any of the Democratic candidates who opposed him, just as it is not found among the Democratic governors of other states in this nation.

By utilizing electoral politics as our source of change, our choice becomes thus:

We can be shoved off the cliff by the Republicans while being told that free-fall is freedom, or we can be coaxed along the path toward the cliff, while being distracted by trivialities and assured that the cliff does not exist (and when the cliff is in sight, being told that those who led us there really tried their best not to do so) by the Democrats.

Change can be very difficult, which is why people tend to cling to their jobs, their towns, their bad marriages even as they move toward dysfunction. We humans, particularly we industrialized, “civilized,” American humans, are creatures of habit, and we fear an alteration of our rituals. So we try our best to remain in our comfort zones, even as they become increasingly more and more uncomfortable – sometimes even untenable. That is why last year’s uprising in Wisconsin, like the entire Occupy movement across the country, was so remarkable. People changed their routines, relinquished their security, and finally stood up after enduring decade after decade of servitude, abuse, and disrespect. They said to their corporate overlords – at the state capitol of Wisconsin, on Wall Street, and in Washington – that they were not willing to complacently stand by and take it anymore.

 But apparently people are not mad enough to realize that the real change they may be seeking will never come through the voting process. It will never come through returning to “normalcy.” It will never come through adhering to and worshiping the inverted power structures that have been erected to maintain our complacency and servitude. These structures created the economy, the educational system, the workplace, the industrial infrastructure, the electoral process, and the law. Only when enough people – including all of us who intellectually, ideologically, and physically remain complicit – understand that our entire system is the problem will we have enough people power to work toward the genuine solution: changing our society.

 True change is extraordinarily difficult. It generates tremendous amounts of uncertainty, distress, and fear of the unknown. But it has the potential also to produce the most profound joy, creativity, and opportunity. And at this point, it may be our only chance at survival.

 So, what next?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

» Recovery or Collapse? Bet on Collapse

By Paul Craig Roberts| May 20, 2012

The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose.

In the US the police have proven themselves to be a greater threat to public safety than private sector criminals. I just googled “police brutality” and up came 183,000,000 results. (Here are two recent brutal assaults, one deadly, by police on hapless individuals: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/05/kelly-thomas-video-dad-they-are-killing-me-.html and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31364.htm )

The cost to society of the private financial system is even higher. Writing in CounterPunch (May 18), Rob Urie reports that two years ago Andrew Haldane, executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England (the UK’s version of the Federal Reserve) said that the financial crisis, now four years old, will in the end cost the world economy between $60 trillion and $200 trillion in lost GDP. If Urie’s report is correct, this is an astonishing admission from a member of the ruling elite. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/18/the-true-costs-of-bank-crises/print

Try to get your mind around these figures. The US GDP, the largest in the world, is about 15 trillion. What Haldane is telling us is that the financial crisis will end up costing the world lost real income between 4 and 13 times the size of the current Gross Domestic Product of the United States. This could turn out to be an optimistic forecast.

In the end, the financial crisis could destroy Western civilization.

Even if Urie’s report, or Haldane’s calculation, is incorrect, the obvious large economic loss from the financial crisis is still unprecedented. The enormous cost of the financial crisis has one single source–financial deregulation. Financial deregulation is likely to prove to be the mistake that destroys Western civilization. While we quake in our boots from fear of “Muslim terrorists,” it is financial deregulation that is destroying us, with help from jobs offshoring. Keep in mind that Haldane is a member of the ruling elite, not a critic of the system like myself, Gerald Celente, Michael Hudson, Pam Martins, and Nomi Prins. (This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of critics.)

Financial deregulation has had dangerous and adverse consequences. Deregulation permitted financial concentration that produced “banks too big to fail,” thus requiring the general public to absorb the costs of the banks’ mistakes and reckless gambling.

Deregulation permitted banks to leverage a small amount of capital with enormous debt in order to maximize return on equity, thereby maximizing the instability of the financial system and the cost to society of the banks’ bad bets.

Deregulation allowed financial institutions to sweep aside the position limits on speculators and to dominate commodity markets, turning them into a gambling casino and driving up the prices of energy and food.

Deregulation permits financial institutions to sell naked shorts, which means to sell a company’s stock or gold and silver bullion that the seller does not possess into the market in order to drive down the price. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-20120515

The informed reader can add more items to this list.

The dollar in its role as world reserve currency is the source of Washington’s power. It allows Washington to control the international payments system and to exclude from the financial system those countries that do not do Washington’s bidding. It allows Washington to print money with which to pay its bills and to purchase the cooperation of foreign governments or to fund opposition within those countries whose governments Washington is unable to purchase, such as Iran, Russia, and China. If the dollar was not the world reserve currency and actually reflected its true depreciated value from the mounting US debt and running of the printing press, Washington’s power would be dramatically curtailed.

The US dollar has come close to its demise several times recently. In 2011 the dollar’s value fell as low as 72 Swiss cents. Investors seeking safety for the value of their money flooded into Swiss francs, pushing the value of the franc so high that Switzerland’s exports began to suffer. The Swiss government responded to the inflow of dollars and euros seeking refuge in the franc by declaring that it would in the future print new francs to offset the inflows of foreign currency in order to prevent the rise in the value of the franc. In other words, currency flight from the US and Europe forced the Swiss to inflate in order to prevent the continuous rise in the exchange value of the Swiss currency.

Prior to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the dollar was also faced with a run-up in the value of the euro as foreign central banks and OPEC members shifted their reserves into euros from dollars. The euro was on its way to becoming an alternative reserve currency. However, Goldman Sachs, whose former employees dominate the US Treasury and financial regulatory agencies and also the European Central Bank and governments of Italy and, indirectly, Greece, helped the Greek government to disguise its true deficit, thus deceiving the private European banks who were purchasing the bonds of the Greek government. Once the European sovereign debt crisis was launched, Washington had an interest in keeping it going, as it sends holders of euros fleeing into “safe” dollars, thus boosting the exchange value of the dollar, despite the enormous rise in Washington’s own debt and the doubling of the US money supply.

Last year gold and silver were rapidly rising in price (measured in US dollars), with gold hitting $1,900 an ounce and on its way to $2,000 when suddenly short sales began dominating the bullion markets. The naked shorts of gold and silver bullion succeeded in driving the price of gold down $350 per ounce from its peak. Many informed observers believe that the reason Washington has not prosecuted the banksters for their known financial crimes is that the banksters serve as an auxiliary to Washington by protecting the value of the dollar by shorting bullion and rival currencies.

What happens if Greece exits the EU on its own or by the German boot? What happens if the other EU members reject German Chancellor Merkel’s austerity, as the new president of France promised to do? If Europe breaks apart, do more investors flee to the doomed US dollar?

Will a dollar bubble become the largest bubble in economic history?

When the dollar goes, interest rates will escalate, and bond prices will collapse. Everyone who sought safety in US Treasuries will be wiped out.
We should all be aware that such outcomes are not part of the public debate.

Recently Bill Moyers interviewed Simon Johnson, formerly chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and currently professor at MIT. It turns out that deregulation, which abolished the separation of investment banks from commercial banks, permitted Jamie Dimon’s JPMorganChase to gamble with federally insured deposits. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31356.htm Despite this, Moyers reports that Republicans remain determined to kill the weak Dodd-Frank law and restore full deregulation.

Simon Johnson says: “I think it [deregulation] is a recipe for disaster.” The problem is, Johnson says, that correct economic policy is blocked by the enormous donations banks make to political campaigns. This means Wall Street’s attitudes and faulty risk models will result in an even bigger financial crisis than the one from which we are still suffering. And it will happen prior to recovery from the current crisis.

Johnson warns that the Republicans will distract everyone from the real crisis by concocting another “crisis” over the debt ceiling.

Johnson says that “a few people, particularly in and around the financial system, have become too powerful. They were allowed to take a lot of risk, and they did massive damage to the economy — more than eight million jobs lost. We’re still struggling to get back anywhere close to employment levels where we were before 2008. And they’ve done massive damage to the budget. This damage to the budget is long lasting; it undermines the budget when we need it to be stronger because the society is aging. We need to support Social Security and support Medicare on a fair basis. We need to restore and rebuild revenue, revenue that was absolutely devastated by the financial crisis. People need to understand the link between what the banks did and the budget. And too many people fail to do that.”

Consequently, Johnson says, the banksters continue to receive mega-benefits while imposing enormous social costs on society.

Few Americans and no Washington policymakers understand the dire situation. They are too busy hyping a non-existent recovery and the next war. Statistician John Williams reports that when correctly measured as a cost of living indicator, which the CPI no longer is, the current inflation rate in the US is 5 to 7 percentage points higher than the officially reported rate, as every consumer knows. The unemployment rate falls because, and only because, people unable to find jobs drop out of the labor force and are no longer counted as unemployed. Every informed person knows that the official inflation and unemployment rates are fictions; yet, the presstitute media continue to report the rates with a straight face as fact.

The way the government has rigged the measure of unemployment, it is possible for the US to have a zero rate of unemployment and not a single person employed or in the work force.

The way the government has the measure of inflation rigged, it is possible for your living standing to fall while the government reports that you are better off.

Financial deregulation raises the returns from speculative schemes above the returns from productive activity. The highly leveraged debt and derivatives that gave us the financial crisis have nothing to do with financing businesses. The banks are not only risking their customers’ deposits on gambling bets but also jeopardizing the country’s financial stability and economic future.

With an eye on the approaching dollar crisis, which will wreck the international financial system, the presidents of China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, and the prime minister of India met last month to discuss forming a new bank that would shield their economies and commerce from mistakes made by Washington and the European Union. The five countries, known as the BRICS, intend to settle their trade with one another in their own currencies and cease relying on the dollar. The fact that Russia, the two Asian giants, and the largest economies in Africa and South America are leaving the dollar’s orbit sends a powerful message of lack of confidence in Washington’s handling of financial matters.

It is ironic that the outcome of financial deregulation in the US is the opposite of what its free market advocates promised. In place of highly competitive financial firms that live or die by their wits alone without government intervention, we have unprecedented financial concentration. Massive banks, “too big to fail,” now send their multi-trillion dollar losses to Washington to be paid by heavily indebted US taxpayers whose real incomes have not risen in 20 years. The banksters take home fortunes in annual bonuses for their success in socializing the “free market” banks’ losses and privatizing profits to the point of not even paying income taxes.

In the US free market economists unleashed avarice and permitted it to run amuck. Will the disastrous consequences discredit capitalism to the extent that the Soviet collapse discredited socialism?

Will Western civilization itself survive the financial tsunami that deregulated Wall Street has produced?

Ironic, isn’t it, that the United States, the home of the “indispensable people,” stands before us as the likely candidate whose government will be responsible for the collapse of the West.

Are Americans Catching On, Waking Up, Unplugging?

By Paul Craig Roberts / May 18, 2012

In response to the question in the title I can report that most of my readers are. Almost everyone got the point of the last column. They see the absurdity of the government’s claim that the identity of the tough, macho Navy Seals, who allegedly murdered Osama bin Laden, has to be kept secret in order to protect our fierce warriors from reprisals from Muslim terrorists, while those government officials responsible for the torture and deaths of large numbers of Muslims can walk around, identity known, unprotected and safe.

A few members of Congress are also awake, but not very many. Indeed, we are losing two of the most aware–Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Kucinich was redistricted in order to get rid of his independent voice. He carried 75% of the votes from that part of his old district that was included in his new one, but the new voters lacked the intelligence to vote for him. Ron Paul, in our time of tribulation, tried for the Republican presidential nomination on a platform of saving the US Constitution, but those who voted in Republican primaries weren’t interested in saving the US Constitution.

Now we are down to US Rep. Walter Jones. Initially, Jones was a member of the warmonger crowd. He was angered when the French government cast doubt on the George W. Bush regime’s reasons for the need for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jones said at that time that he was renaming French Fries “Freedom Fries.”

Jones unplugged from the Matrix and has been sentient for some time. Recently the tyrant Obama and the government operative Panetta, a political whore who has been in a variety of government positions and is currently Secretary of Warmongering, announced publicly that, the US Constitution notwithstanding, the executive branch no longer needed the authority of Congress to go to war. In our globalist existence, the authority for the US to initiate hostilities against another country comes from the UN, declared Obama and Panetta. If the executive branch can persuade or bribe the UN to give a war OK, Congress is no longer relevant.

This was too much for the awakened US Rep. Walter Jones. He has introduced House Congressional Resolution 107, which clearly states that the president’s use of US military in an act of aggression without the consent of Congress is an impeachable offense.

There is absolutely no question whatsoever that Rep. Jones is correct. However, you can bet that the Obama regime already has a John Yoo-type hireling busy at work in the Department of Justice (sic) writing a legal memo that the US Constitution gives no authority to Congress to declare war.

A person would think that members of Congress would flock to Rep. Jones’ resolution.

After all, it is Congress’ own power that is on the line. Normally, organizations defend their own power. Strangely, the US Congress has not defended its power since Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s. Because of the crisis of the Great Depression, Congress gave up its law-making powers to the executive agencies created by Roosevelt to run the country. Congress pretends to still be in control by having “oversight” over the ruling executive cabinet departments and agencies. Cabinet secretaries, assistant sectaries, and CIA directors have to go testify and be questioned before congressional committees and all that, like the Federal Reserve chairman who has unaccountable power over interest rates and inflation, but the laws are made by the executive branch. Ever since the 1930s, when Congress passes a law it is merely an authorization for some executive branch agency to define the law by writing the regulations. As the executive agency also enforces the regulations, we have the beginnings of tyranny as the same agency both makes the law and enforces it. (See, for example, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Ch. 11, “Abdicating Legislative Power.”)

The roots of tyranny in America go back to the 1930s and even further back to President Lincoln. The decline of Congress, which was created by the Founding Fathers to be a powerful political institution, has been a long term process. However, in recent years the decline of Congress’ power and relevance has accelerated. The Democrats are as responsible for this as Republicans. If US law had been enforced, and Democrats could have enforced the law, George W. Bush and essentially the entirety of his appointees would be in federal prison.

But the Democrats sacrificed the people’s power over government in order that the executive branch could protect us from a terrorism for which no evidence exists. No terrorist events have occurred since September 11, 2001, except for FBI orchestrated plots that “never endangered the public.” As for the government’s 9/11 story, thousands of experts have their doubts.

So, the US Constitution has simply been discarded on the basis of fear. First, the fear of the Great Depression, and secondly, the fear of Muslim Terrorism.

The United States of America is the Constitution. If the Constitution no longer exists as an enforceable document taken seriously by political elites, the United States no longer exists. Some other entity has taken its place.

Think about that. Describe to yourself the characteristics of this new entity. This will be easier for older people than for the young, who have been born into the new tyranny.

For the young, tyranny is all they know. For the young, tyranny is normal.

How old does a person have to be to remember when you boarded an airliner without any security? In previous columns I have pointed out the tiny, essentially insignificant infractions, that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in order to avoid impeachment. Compared to Bush or Obama, Nixon was flawless in his observation of US law and the US Constitution. No one of my generation can possibly imagine Nixon saying that the UN could replace Congress’ authority to initiate war, or that he could strip US citizens of their liberty and lives on suspicion alone without evidence or due process of law, simply on the basis of executive decree. All Nixon did was to lie about when he learned of a burglary of which he had no prior knowledge and no involvement.

The loss of our liberty is where we are today. Rep. Jones wants to retrieve Congress’ war-making power. He says that those Americans who wish to support this goal should inform their Senators and Representative and local newspaper of this fact. He provides the telephone number of the congressional switchboard which can connect you to the three offices that, allegedly, represent you. The number is 202 224-3121.

As you know, I keep trying, and so must we all. If we don’t keep trying, it means we accept our loss of our liberty and accountable government. If we give in now, what was the point of resisting the Soviet threat, other than profits and power for the military/security complex?

The US government and its media whores, presstitutes as Gerald Celente calls them, show increasing contempt for the intelligence, or lack thereof, of the American public. Even Americans spaced out on alcohol, drugs, junk food, television and sports events remember the name Osama bin Laden. This person, formerly an operative of the US government against the Soviet Union, was, we were told, the embodiment of total evil. He was responsible for 9/11.

President George W. Bush declared that Afghanistan’s refusal (apparently another Bush regime lie) to deliver Osama, the alleged (no proof) perpetrator of 9/11, to US authorities was the justification for attacking Afghanistan, a country at that time, as now, with two separate governments at war with one another. Shortly thereafter, Osama became, magically, the reason to invade Iraq, an old US ally who had attacked the government of the Iranian Revolution at Washington’s behest.

Suddenly America’s Iraqi ally had nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened American cities, in the words of Bush’s moronic National Security Advisor, with “mushroom clouds.”

How did all this absurdity occur? Yes, what Gerald Celente aptly designates as “the presstitute media” played a role. However, the whores were serving their customers, which are the government and private interests that benefit from war. The American public could have rejected the spin, but they put yellow ribbon decals on their SUVs and supported the troops.

If Americans were puzzled when the US government abandoned its position that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 and announced a new “mastermind,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the presstitutes didn’t mention it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was designated the “mastermind of 9/11” because the US government had in custody this hapless individual, perhaps sold to them by warlords for the bounty paid for “terrorists.” There’s no good in having a mastermind of 9/11 whom you cannot catch. So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed became the Mastermind of 9/11.

Once designated the Mastermind, the CIA torturers went to work on him, illegally, of course, but who cares, here was the Mastermind of 9/11.

After Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was water-boarded 183 times with the only evidence against him being coerced self-incrimination, both the former chief US prosecutor at Guantanamo, Colonel Morris Davis, and Admiral Donald Guter, Judge Advocate General of the US Navy, dismissed the Guantanamo military tribunal trials as show trials or “circuses.”

Indeed, the American trials of alleged “terrorists” are even less lawful than Stalin’s show trials of the Bolsheviks, who created the Russian Revolution in 1917, and Hitler’s trials of the German military who attempted to assassinate him in order to save Germany from destruction.

When America’s own chief military prosecutors denounce trials of alleged “terrorists,” the media and the public should take notice. But not in America where the government believes its own lies as fervently as the brainwashed public believes the presstitute media.

Astonishingly, before a show trial could dispatch Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the Mastermind of 9/11, the US government has produced a new culprit. It was not Osama bin Laden nor Sheikh Mohammed, but Iran that is responsible for 9/11. In a US federal court judgment issued in December 2011, Iran was found guilty of the 9/11 attacks (ref).

So who is responsible for 9/11? If not bin Laden, why did the Navy Seals allegedly murder him? If not Sheikh Mohammed, why is he being put on trial after being tortured for years?

The answer is that the criminals in Washington, who control our lives, no longer care about any of their previous propaganda. They now want to attack another country on totally false pretenses, as does the extreme right-wing Israeli government, the cancer of the Middle East.

Some of the Israeli military brass and much of the Israeli security/intelligence brass oppose an attack on Iran as an act of insanity. Yet, little, if any of the Israeli opposition to war has been reported in the US presstitute media. In order to negate internal opposition, the Israeli prime minister has formed a unity government with the main opposition party, as AIPAC stampedes the US Congress into voting for war with Iran (ref).

If the unaware American population can be programmed to believe that Iran is the 9/11 culprit, then Washington can initiate yet another war that enriches the military/security complex with money and power.

Will bin Laden’s family now sue Washington for blaming Osama for an offense which Washington now acknowledges he was not guilty? Will Sheikh Mohammed be found guiltless, because a US federal court now says it was Iran that was responsible for 9/11?

These would be the results if America had a justice system that was independent of the needs of the political elites and the private interests that they serve. But today in America the ruling interests produce by hook or crook justifications for war that serve the power and profit of the military/security complex. Whatever the mainstream media tells you serves this interest.

So, how do we rescue America from its government and from the corrupt media that serves as a Ministry of Truth for a corrupt government?

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________________

¶

ADVERT PRO NOBIS

IF YOU CAN’T SEND A DONATION, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, AND YOU THINK THIS PUBLICATION IS WORTH SUPPORTING, AT LEAST HELP THE GREANVILLE POST EXPAND ITS INFLUENCE BY MENTIONING IT TO YOUR FRIENDS VIA TWEET OR OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS! We are in a battle of communications with entrenched enemies that won’t stop until this world is destroyed and our remaining democratic rights stamped out. Only mass education and mobilization can stop this process.

It’s really up to you. Do your part while you can. •••

Donating? Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE GREEK AFFAIR: SYMBOL OF THE CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

OR PARADIGM OF EUROPE’S SALVATION

It is an ironic twist of history that Greece, the cradle of Western culture, today, 2500 years after the acme of Hellenic glory, appears on the stage of history in the best of cases as victim, and in the worst, as the symbol of the threat to the collapse of the West European society—but as a tough remedy for an insidious disease.

Theodoris  Dritsas

(Gaither Stewart in Rome) SYRIZA, an acronym signifying “Coalition of the Radical Left”, is favored to win upcoming re-elections following the inconclusive elections held last May 6. Today’s ungovernable and crisis-ridden Greece is shaking the foundation of the European Union. The left coalition is headed by the 38-year old Alexis Tsipras, prominent since his candidacy for Mayor of Athens in 2006. Tsipras, the leader of the left’s key component called SYNASPISMOS, also an umbrella group of Greece’s far left, originated from the youth wing of the Greek Communist Party, the KKE.

SYRIZA’s prominent parliamentary deputy and party Speaker in the nation’s last Parliament, Theodoris Dritsas, explained in an interview with the Italian radical left newspaper, Il Manifesto, that for its survival Greece must abandon the imposed austerity measures. Dritsas is convinced that recent left electoral victories in France, Germany and Italy mark the beginning of the end of unrestrained economic liberalism in Europe.

SYRIZA is favored to win the June 17 elections. Its electoral strength today is estimated at 22-26%. However, electoral predictions are impossible in a nation where everything changes from one day to the next. In any case, the Greek elections are assuming the character of a frontal clash between the left and the ultra-liberalism that imposed the austerity measures, both conservatives and Socialists.

There are three fundamental questions: Can SYRIZA in this brief time transform itself into a viable, effective political party capable of unifying the entire left and the will of the people? How much of the vote will SYRIZA garner next month? And if it wins the elections, which political alliances will it form in order govern the nation? In any case, it seems certain that the elections will produce a powerful left bloc more unified than it has ever been. Progressives and many Greeks believe that a government with a left core will have the greatest possibility of saving Greek society.

BACKGROUND TO SYRIZA

Like most Western Communist parties after the 1970s, Greek Communists of the KKE split into two camps: a national Communist Party in line with the Eurocommunism in Italy, France and Spain, and a pro-Moscow wing. SYNASPISMOS was an electoral alliance between the two which lasted until the 1990s when the main Moscow-oriented KKE abandoned the alliance, in the process purging half its members, who remained in SYNASPISMOS together with the Eurocommunists. Tsispras was among the latter. Thus SYNASPISMOS included diverse left factions and movements: from anti-globalists to Eurocommunists, left Social Democrats, far leftists and ecologists. In the 2004 elections, the party allied with other small parties to form SYRIZA. Under Tsipras leadership the new umbrella group got a 5.6% and 14 parliamentary deputies in 2007.

Today, Greek fear of a return of the far-right, together with the incapability of the traditional PASOK and NEW DEMOCRACY to govern, the economic crisis that has the country on its knees, and Tsipras’ wide popularity and pragmatism, may combine to thrust him, as a British journalist noted, into a role like that of Morales in Bolivia.

The fact remains that the prospects of a far-left, anti-NATO party at the helm of a EU member frightens the European center-right in general and its non-elected governing bodies in Brussels (and Berlin) in particular. Conservative NEW DEMOCRACY continues to try to convince voters that SYRIZA aims at leading Greece out of the Euro and the European Union. SYRIZA instead speaks of a limited program, the core of which would be a debtor-led partial default—suspension of interest payments on remaining debts and repudiation of the terms of the Troika-engineered bailouts. On the other hand, SYRIZA claims it is committed to the EU social model. Its current position would make attempts to force Greece out of the Euro seem to the Greeks an EU-German initiative.

A SYRIZA parliamentary deputy said that since austerity programs don’t work, SYRIZA’s job is to convince Europe to explore new directions without, however, rejecting the Euro. SYRIZA rejects the monetary policies of the Euro Zone and wants to reform the ECB. It believes that today is the opportune moment because the majority of Europeans throughout the union now favor more growth and less austerity. The Socialist victory of Hollande in France may change things in Greece, that is, if a left government comes to power in Athens with the will to make radical changes.

The electoral outcome looks like this: if SYRIZA scores 26% in the June 17 elections it would get just over a hundred parliamentary seats, the same as New Democracy got in May. If the Democratic Left gets the same 20 seats as in May and the Communists their 26 seats, that is near the 150 required for a parliamentary majority.

SYRIZA aims at transforming itself into a single party, making it the biggest Greek party, and thus gaining the “premium” 50 parliamentary seats. It would try to then form a majority with other left forces to carry Greece out of the political deadlock that produced the recession. Tsipras plans to extend party membership to a far left group, to a branch of the crisis-ridden and decimated PASOK and the ECO-Greens, which would broaden its reach further, both to its left and its right. Even without a majority, a SYRIZA-DL minority could attempt a legislative program that relied on the abstention of some parties and “non-opposition” from both the KKE, and the right wing anti-austerity party Independent Greeks (conservative nationalist).

At the same time, the resulting radical left government may, in effect, turn out to be little more than a left-social democratic government, despite its complex composition and the radicalism of some of its voters. By forcing the mainstream parties into positions where they could not express the will of the majority of centrist voters, the EU may end up destroying the Greek party system as it has been shaped since 1974.

The question for Greece remains: Left or Right? SYRIZA or NEW DEMOCRACY? A new politico-economic policy or more of the what led the nation where it is today?

Nowhere in Europe has corruption, political and social, been more rampant than in Greece. Nowhere have human dignity, social solidarity and democratic legitimacy been more painfully felt than in Greece. In order to be able to continue extracting full repayment from the Greek people, the EU and IMF even suspended the country’s democracy by imposing a technocratic government under the leadership of a former Vice-President of the European Central Bank. A remarkable detail is that Prime Minister Papademos was in charge of the Greek Central Bank when the country conspired with Goldman Sachs to mask its massive public debt through a quasi-legal financial transaction.

THE EUROPEAN LEFT REBORN ON THE ASHES OF ATHENS

I have extracted the following words from an interview with Theodoris Dritsas conducted by Argiris Panagopoulos for the Rome radical left daily, Il Manifesto:

Theodoris Dritsas is one of the best known activists in Greece. He began fighting for educational rights before the military dictatorship of 1967-74. He spent five years in Pireus as a city councillor in that conflictual port city. He has always favored base and mass movements and is a ferocious defender of their autonomy against encroachments by the political parties that he however considers indispensable. So it was not by chance that he became the paraliamentary Speaker for SYRIZA.

Dritsas: “In the May 6 elections, the Greek people delegitimized the entire traditional political system. After the Communist KKE rejected SYRIZA’s proposal to form a left government together, we have rejected all other proposals which were only attempts to let in through the window that which the people had booted out the door. We believe that a new path has been opened not only for Greece but also for Europe. We are optimistic that in the next elections on June 17 this future will become more stable and the door that has opened will become a still wider space in order to change the country. We don’t know yet who will be our coalition partners. But it’s certain that the next elections are assuming the character of a head-on clash between left and the economic neo-liberals who imposed the austerity cuts on Greece, both conservatives and Socialists. Left forces are best expressed in SYRIZA and the conservatives are represented chiefly in New democracy. I believe the electoral results will show that the left forces are stronger. In their electoral propaganda the parties of New Democracy and PASOK claim we want to bring back the Drachma. For nearly three years we have repeated that the austerity and the application of the Memorandum of Understanding that have destroyed our economy and our society also accentuate the crisis of the Euro Zone. It is more and more evident that Greece is not an isolated case but is part of the crisis of the entire Euro Zone and the European Union. Austerity policies accelerate the destruction of the Greek economy and the crisis of Europe.”

Senior Editor GAITHER STEWART serves as The Greanville Post‘s and Cyrano’s Journal Today‘s European correspondent.  His latest novel is The Trojan Spy (Punto Press).

_______________________________________________________________________________

¶

ADVERT PRO NOBIS

IF YOU CAN’T SEND A DONATION, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, AND YOU THINK THIS PUBLICATION IS WORTH SUPPORTING, AT LEAST HELP THE GREANVILLE POST EXPAND ITS INFLUENCE BY MENTIONING IT TO YOUR FRIENDS VIA TWEET OR OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS! We are in a battle of communications with entrenched enemies that won’t stop until this world is destroyed and our remaining democratic rights stamped out. Only mass education and mobilization can stop this process.

It’s really up to you. Do your part while you can. •••

Donating? Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

 A Response from Goldman Sachs

From Chairman Lloyd Blankfein
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) –

The following letter to Goldman Sachs’ worldwide clients was issued today by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein:

Dear Goldman Client:

By now, many of you have probably read the regrettable resignation letter published in today’s New York Times by former Goldman executive Greg Smith, explaining why he is leaving the firm after twelve years.

In the letter, in which he excoriates Goldman and his practices, Mr. Smith comes across as a man of conscience, ideals, and high moral standards. And as you read his words, you no doubt asked yourself this troubling question: how could Goldman have hired such a person?

At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world’s universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy. Once in our internship program, these youths are subjected to rigorous evaluations to root out even the slightest evidence of a soul. But, as the case of Mr. Smith shows, even the most time-tested system for detecting shreds of humanity can blow a gasket now and then. For that, we can only offer you our deepest apology and the reassurance that one good apple won’t spoil the whole bunch.

As to those of you who were serviced by Mr. Smith, it’s understandable that you would be concerned about who will be taking his place going forward. On that front, I have some exciting news: today, Goldman is pleased to announce that our new executive director and head of the United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa will be Mr. Joseph Kony. For those unfamiliar with Mr. Kony’s resume, let me assure you that he has the character and moral standards you have come to expect from Goldman, and like the rest of us here at the bank, he has dedicated his life to doing the Lord’s work.

Sincerely, Lloyd Blankfein CEO, Goldman Sachs

_______________________________________________________________________________

¶

ADVERT PRO NOBIS

IF YOU CAN’T SEND A DONATION, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, AND YOU THINK THIS PUBLICATION IS WORTH SUPPORTING, AT LEAST HELP THE GREANVILLE POST EXPAND ITS INFLUENCE BY MENTIONING IT TO YOUR FRIENDS VIA TWEET OR OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS! We are in a battle of communications with entrenched enemies that won’t stop until this world is destroyed and our remaining democratic rights stamped out. Only mass education and mobilization can stop this process.

It’s really up to you. Do your part while you can. •••

Donating? Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Chris Marsden, WSWS.org, a socialist organization

Marie Colvin, left, an American reporter working for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer, were killed in Syria, providing an excellent propaganda peg for the warmongers who wasted no time in shedding the accustomed crocodile tears.

The international media is conspiring to conceal the real aims and intentions of the United States and other major powers towards Syria.

This week a renewed push in the United Nations to condemn the regime of Bashir al-Assad for “crimes against humanity” has been accompanied by a drumbeat of accounts of rising casualties in Homs, including the deaths of journalists. The media barrage excludes any objective analysis of the social and political character of the opposition, its ties to the imperialist powers, or the historical origins of the present crisis. All casualties in a civil war stoked by the US and its allies are automatically attributed to government security forces.

This is a coordinated campaign to manipulate public opinion in support of military intervention in the name of “human rights,” following the script of last year’s bloody exercise in regime-change in Libya. The immediate demand is for the setting up of “humanitarian corridors” protected militarily by the Gulf States, Turkey and NATO, as well as the arming of the opposition.

Working people and youth should reject all attempts to drag them behind another colonial-style intervention by cynically playing on their humanitarian impulses. The destabilization of Syria is not the result of a mass popular upsurge against Assad. Unlike the revolutionary movement that erupted in Egypt, the Syrian opposition has little support in major urban centres such as Damascus and Aleppo, where the installation of a Sunni regime that will persecute Syria’s minorities is feared.

Immediately protests began against Assad’s repressive regime, Washington worked with the regional powers—Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey—to cultivate and arm a right-wing sectarian opposition with the aim of bringing about regime-change. The imperialist-backed opposition is led by Islamists associated with the right-wing Muslim Brotherhood. In alliance with bourgeois figures with long connections to the CIA and various ex-regime forces, they dominate the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian Army.

Many of the journalists pontificating on Syria are well aware that humanitarian concerns do not animate Western support for the opposition. In the February 26 New York Times, Steven Erlanger acknowledges that the conflict in Syria “has already become a proxy fight for larger powers in the region and beyond.” He writes: “For Washington, Europe and the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and the gulf, the impact on Iran is as important as the fate of Mr. Assad.”

Erlanger cites Olivier Roy, a French historian of the Middle East, who states bluntly: “Syria is almost the only country where the so-called Arab Spring could change the geo-strategic concept of the region… if the regime is toppled, we have a totally new landscape.”

Changing the landscape means isolating Iran, strategically located at the junction of the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia, and removing it as an obstacle to the establishment of US hegemony in the region.

Plans to overthrow Assad militarily to achieve this aim are being constantly leaked to the media. These leaks prepare public opinion for what comes next.

Asharq Al-Awsat, which is tied to the Saudi Royal family, has reported an unnamed source in the US military stating that the Pentagon is planning to intervene in Syria based on NATO’s 1998 strategy in Kosovo. It would begin by establishing “a secure zone” near the border with Turkey, followed by the provision of “humanitarian aid… first, through the International Red Cross and, then, through NATO forces that will move in from Turkey.”

This “paves the way for the declaration of an air exclusion zone” like those imposed on Kosovo and Iraq “before the overthrow of the regime of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.”

The UN’s Human Rights Commission is set to endorse a call to “permit humanitarian agencies” to deliver aid to “Homs, Deraa, Zabadani and other areas.” France has said the UN Security Council will then be presented with another draft resolution on the need to gain access to these areas.

What has so far stayed the hands of the Western powers is not only the opposition of Moscow and Beijing, nor embarrassment over the known presence of Al Qaeda elements in the Syrian opposition—the US and its European allies are working with such forces in Libya. It is also the fact, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted to the BBC, that there is “very strong opposition to foreign intervention, from inside Syria, from outside Syria.”

Presently, no political force articulates the public hostility to war cited by Clinton—not the venal Arab regimes and least of all the various pseudo-left parties, large and small, that once claimed to be socialist and anti-imperialist.

Syria is only the latest in a series of colonialist adventures carried out by the US, with the active support of the European powers. The first Gulf War in 1991 coincided with the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the hands of capitalist elements that emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy. The US saw this as an historic opportunity to rewind the clock of history all over the world.

A retreat from direct colonial rule was necessitated in the aftermath of World War II by the emergence of mass anti-imperialist movements that, despite the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union, drew inspiration from the October Revolution of 1917.

The capitalist regimes established could never represent the genuine liberation of the working class and oppressed masses from imperialism. Washington was nevertheless wounded by this challenge to its rule and sought to reestablish its control through bloody interventions, covert and proxy wars, and support for right-wing movements and regimes. It saw the end of Moscow’s position as a contending super power as giving it a free hand to use its military superiority to establish hegemony over strategically vital oil-producing regions. What followed were interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

The current round of wars for neo-colonial domination are overwhelmingly supported by the social democrats, Greens and liberals, with various pseudo-socialist groups trailing in their wake.

They have all sought to justify their stance by echoing the moral posturing of Washington, London, Paris and Berlin. Support for each new war for “human rights” and “democracy” requires a convenient bout of amnesia regarding the crimes committed in the last one. Clinton this week described Assad as a war criminal. But the world knows the US has committed war crimes, such as the destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, that dwarf anything being perpetrated by Assad.

This does not trouble the liberal interventionists of all stripes, who are the main champions of the UN’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine, used to legitimize whatever act of imperialist banditry is in preparation. Their moral outrage is always selective, conditioned by a desire to preserve their own wealthy lifestyles by reinforcing their standing as trusted defenders of the financial oligarchy.

War against Syria would only be a stepping-stone to the targeting of Iran. It has already helped polarize the Middle East along a sectarian Sunni-Shia axis. It can rapidly become a regional confrontation involving direct conflict between the US, Russia and China, for whom Syria and Iran are strategic partners.

The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections call on workers and youth to make their reply to the warmongers: “Hands off Syria!” It

_______________________________________________________________________________

¶

ADVERT PRO NOBIS

IF YOU CAN’T SEND A DONATION, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, AND YOU THINK THIS PUBLICATION IS WORTH SUPPORTING, AT LEAST HELP THE GREANVILLE POST EXPAND ITS INFLUENCE BY MENTIONING IT TO YOUR FRIENDS VIA TWEET OR OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS! We are in a battle of communications with entrenched enemies that won’t stop until this world is destroyed and our remaining democratic rights stamped out. Only mass education and mobilization can stop this process.

It’s really up to you. Do your part while you can. •••

Donating? Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________