Bulletin N° 871
The Power Principle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhj-WsjFj9w
or
(in 3 parts)
directed by Scott Noble
(4h 25min)
This
film explores how the US establishment promotes a culture of fear in order to
secure increased military expenses, year after year. It claims the US
government and the military-industrial complex, together with the US media
developed a powerful propaganda machinery (inspired in good part from Nazi
propaganda) in order to scare and convince the public that US invasions like
those in Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), US support for brutal
mass-killings, terror campaigns like those in Guatemala (1954), Indonesia
(1965), El Salvador (1979), US-designed assassination plots like those in
Nicaragua (1981) and in huge parts of Latin America (Operation Condor) and
support for overthrowing democratically elected governments like those in
Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973) were needed in order to prevent the spread of
communism, using mainly the domino theory.
The
movie also points at the help provided by the Western countries to fascist
regimes in order to counter movements supporting workers rights (socialism,
communism, anarchy). The fascism is presented as an instrument in the hands of
the plutocracy for oppressing and enslaving the working class.
The
meaning of the movie's title, "The power principle" is revealed as
the Mafia principle, which is "not allowing disobedience" - in this
case not allowing the countries in the developing world to have governments
that try to improve the life of the many.
The
movie traces the roots of the US establishment (both Republican and Democrat
parties) mindset into the doctrine of Edward Bernays,
pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, who believed the
democracy is hard to handle and people are just too stupid to govern themselves
in democracy, so there is a need of an elite, public guardians who manage the
society and there is a need of public relation practitioners who would be
professionals in working for the government for managing, manipulating the
public and engineering consent.
Subject : The Capitalist
Conspiracy, Part 7 : 'Artificial Intelligence,' ‘artificial
scarcity’ & the old mafia ‘protection racket.’
December
16, 2019
Grenoble,
France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
We
return momentarily to F. William Engdahl’s book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil
Politics and the New World Order (1992), to examine a radical analysis of US
foreign policy, with its roots embedded in the decisions of a power elite, who
are groomed for specific qualities generation after generation since the
founding of nation.
Engdahl introduces
chapter 9, “Running the World Economy in Reverse: Who made the 1970’s Oil
Shocks?”, with a description of President Nixon in a
financial panic at the end of his first term of office,
. . . in
1969, the U.S. economy had again gone into recession. In order to combat the
downturn, U.S. interest rates by 1970 were sharply lowered. As a consequence of
the falling interest rates, speculative ‘hot money’ began once more to leave
the dollar in record amounts, seeking higher short-term profits in Europe and
elsewhere.
One result of by now almost a decade–long
American refusal to devalue the dollar, and her reluctance to take serious
action to control the huge unregulated Eurodollar market, was an increasingly
unstable short-term currency speculation. As most of the world’s bankers well
knew, King Canute could pretend to hold the waves back for only so long.
As a result of Nixon’s expansionary
domestic U.S. monetary policy in 1970, the capital inflows of the previous year
reversed, and the U.S. incurred a net capital outflow of $6.5 billions. But, as
U.S. recession persisted, as interest rates continued to drop into 1971, and
money supply to expand, these outflows reached then-huge dimensions, totaling
$20 billions. Then, in May of 1971, the United States recorded its first
monthly trade deficit as well, triggering a virtual international panic sell-off
of the U.S. dollar. The situation was indeed becoming desperate.
By 1971 U.S. official gold reserves
represented less than one quarter of her official liabilities, meaning that
theoretically if all foreign dollar holders demanded gold instead, Washington
would have been unable to comply without drastic measures.
. . .
On
August 15, 1971 Nixon took the advice of a close circle of key advises which included
his chief Budget adviser, George Shultz, and a policy group then at the
Treasury Department including Paul Volcker, and Jack Bennett, who later went on
to become a director at Exxon. That sunny quiet August day, in a move which
rocked the world, the President of the United States announced formal
suspension of dollar convertibility into gold, effectively putting the world
fully onto a dollar standard with no gold backing, and by this, unilaterally
ripping apart the central provision of the 1944 Bretton
Woods system. No longer could foreign holders of U.S. dollars redeem their
paper for U.S. gold reserves.
. . .
By declaring to world dollar holders their
paper would no longer be redeemed for gold, Nixon ‘pulled the plug’ on the
world economy, setting into motion a series of events which was to rock the
world as never before. . . .
De Gaulle’s defiance of Washington in
April 1968 on the issue of gold and adhering to the rules of Bretton Woods, had not been sufficient to force through the
badly needed reordering of the international monetary system, but it had
sufficiently poisoned the well of Washington’s ill-conceived IMF Special Drawing
Rights scheme to cover over the problems of the dollar.
The suspension of gold
redemption and the resulting international ‘floating exchange rates’ of the
early 1970’s solved nothing. It only bought some time.
An eminently workable solution would have
been for the U.S. to set the dollar to a more realistic level. From France, de
Gaulle’s former economic adviser, Jacques Rueff,
continued to plead for a $70/oz. gold price, instead of the $35 level the U.S.
unsuccessfully defended. This would calm world speculation and allow the U.S.
to redeem her destabilizing Eurodollars balances abroad, without plunging the
domestic U.S. economy into any serve chaos, Rueff
argued. If done right, it could have given a tremendous spur to U.S. industry
as its exports could cost less in foreign currency. American industrial
interests would again have predominated over financial voices in U.S. policy
circles. But reason was not to prevail.
. . .
The real architects of the Nixon strategy
were in the influential City of London merchant banks. Sir Siegmund
Warburg, Edmond de Rothschild, Jocelyn Hambro and
others, saw a golden opportunity in Nixon’s dissolution of the Bretton
Woods gold standard the summer of 1971, London was once again to become a major
center of world finance, and again on ‘borrowed money,’ this time with American
Eurodollars.
After August 1971, dominant U.S. policy,
under White House National Security Adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, was to control,
not to develop, economies throughout the world. U.S. policy officials began
proudly calling themselves ‘neo-Malthusians.’ Population reduction in
developing nations, rather than technology transfer and industrial growth
strategies, began to be the dominating priority during the 1970s, yet another
throwback to nineteenth-century British colonial thinking. How this transformation
took place we shall soon see.
. . .
Permanent
instability had been introduced into world monetary affairs in a way not seen since
the early 1930’s, but this time, strategists in New York, Washington and the
City of London were preparing an unexpected surprise to regain the upper hand
and recover from the devastating loss of the monetary pillar of their system. (pp.155-158)
Engdahl goes on to elaborate
on the importance of the conspiratorial meeting of international power elites
held in Sweden in the spring of 1973, and the central role played by Henry
Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State.
The design behind Nixon’s August 15, 1971
dollar strategy did not emerge until October 1973, more than two years later
and even then few persons outside a handful of insiders grasped the connection.
The August 1971 de-monetization of the dollar was used by the London-New York
financial establishment to buy precious time, while policy insiders prepared a
bold new monetarist design, a ‘paradigm shift’ as one preferred to term it.
Certain influential voices in the Anglo-American financial establishment had
devised a strategy to create again a strong dollar, and one again to increase
their relative political power in the world, just when it appeared they were in
decisive rout.
In May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the
dollar still vivid, a group of 84 of the world’s top financial and political
insiders met at the secluded island resort of the Swedish Wallenberg banking
family, as Saltsjoebaden, Sweden. This gathering of
Prince Bernhard’s Bilderberg Group, heard an American
participant outline a ‘scenario’ for an imminent 400 percent increase in OPEC
petroleum revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjoebaden
meeting was not to prevent the expected oil price shock, but rather, plan how
to manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars, a process U.S.
Secretary of State Kissinger later called ‘recycling the petro-dollar flows.’(pp.158-160)
What the powerful men grouped around Bilderberg had evidently decided that May, was to launch a
colossal assault against industrial growth in the world, in order to tilt the
balance of power back to the advantage of Anglo-American financial interests, and
the dollar. In order to do this, they determined to use their most prized
weapon – control of the world’s oil flows. Bilderberg
policy was to trigger a global oil embargo, in order to force a dramatic
increase in world oil prices. Since 1945, world oil trade had by international
custom been priced in dollars as American oil companies dominated the postwar
market. A sharp sudden increase in the world demand for U.S. dollars to pay for
the necessary oil, therefore, meant an equally dramatic increase in world
demand for U.S. dollars to pay for that necessary oil.
Never in history had such a small circle
of interests centered in London and New York, controlled so much of the entire
world’s economic destiny. The Anglo-American financial establishment had
resolved to use their oil power in a manner no one could imagine possible. The
very outrageousness of their scheme was to their advantage, they clearly reckoned.(pp.163-164)
The
next step in creating the “oil shock” to further the plan of population control
and world domination, according to Engdahl, was the
carefully orchestrated “Yom Kippur War” (October 6-25, 1973).
On
October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, igniting what became known as
the ‘Yom Kippur’ war. Contrary to popular impression, the ‘Yom Kippur’ war was
not the simple result of miscalculation, blunder or an Arab decision to launch
a military strike against the state of Israel; The entire events surrounding outbreak
of the October
war were secretly orchestrated by Washington and London, using the powerful diplomatic
secret channels developed by Nixon’s White House National Security Adviser,
Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger effectively controlled
the Israeli policy response through his intimate relation with Israel’s
Washington ambassador, Simcha Dinitz.
As well, Kissinger cultivated channels to the Egyptian and Syrian side. His
method was simply to misrepresent to each party the critical elements of the
other, ensuring the war and its subsequent Arab oil embargo.
. . .
One
enormous consequence of the ensuing 400 percent rise in OPEC oil prices was
that investments of hundreds of millions of dollars by British Petroleum, Royal
Dutch Shell and other Anglo-American petroleum concerns in the risky North Sea could produce oil at
a profit. It is a curious fact of the time that the profitability of these new
North Sea oil fields was not at all secure until after Kissinger’s oil shock.
Of course, this could have only been a fortuitous coincidence.
By
October 16, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, following a meeting
on oil price in Vienna, had raised their price by a then-staggering 70 percent,
from $3.01/barrel to $5.11. That same day, the members of the Arab OPEC countries,
citing the U.S. support for Israel in the Mideast war, declared an embargo on
all oil sales to the United States and Netherlands – the major oil port of
Western Europe.
Saudi µArabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Abu
Dhabi, Qatar and Algeria announced on October 17, 1973 that they would cut
their production below the September level by 5 percent for October and an
additional 5 percent per month, ‘until Israeli withdrawal is completed from the
whole Arab territories occupied in June 1967 and the legal rights of the
Palestinian people are restored.’ The world’s first ‘oil shock,’ or as the
Japanese termed it, ‘Oil Shokku’ was underway.
. . .
Most
governments across Europe fell in this period, victim to the consequences of
the oil shock on their economies.
. . .
But the economic impact on the developing
economies of the world – for at this time they still could be rightly called
developing, rather than the fatalistic Third World designation so in vogue
today – the impact of an overnight price increase of 400 percent in their
primary energy source was staggering. The vast majority of the world’s
less-developed economies, without significant domestic oil resources, were
suddenly confronted with an unexpected and unplayable 400 percent increase in
costs of energy imports, to say nothing of costs chemicals and fertilizers for
agriculture derived from petroleum. During this time, commentators began
speaking of ‘triage,’ the wartime idea of survival of the fittest, and
introduced the vocabulary of ‘Third Word and ‘Fourth World’ (the non-OPEC
countries).
India in 1973 had a positive balance of
trade, a healthy situation for a developing economy. By 1974, India had total
foreign exchange reserves of $629 millions with which
to pay – in dollars – an annual oil import bill of almost double that of $1,241
million. Sudan, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand and throughout Africa and Latin
America country after country was faced in 1974 with gaping deficits in their
balance of payments. As a whole, developing countries in 1974 incurred a total
trade deficit of $35 billions according to the IMF, a
colossal sum in that day, and, not surprisingly, a deficit precisely 4 times as
large as in 1973, or just in proportion to the oil priced increase.
Following the several years of strong
industrial and trade growth of the early 1970’s, the severe drop in industrial
activity throughout the world economy in 1974-75 was greater than any such
decline since the war.
But while Kissinger’s 1973 oil shock had a
devastating impact on world industrial growth, it had an enormous benefit for
certain established interests – the major New York and London banks, and the
Severn Sisters oil multinationals of the U.S. and Britain. Exxon replaced
General Motors as the largest American corporation in gross revenues by 1974.
Her sisters were not far behind, including Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and Gulf.
The bulk of OPEC dollar revenues,
Kissinger’s ‘recycled petrodollars,’ was deposited with the leading banks of
London and New York, the banks which dealt in dollars as well as international
oil trade. Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America,
Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank, all enjoyed the windfall profits of the oil
shock. We shall later see how they recycled their ‘petro-dollars’ during the
1970’s, and how it set the stage for the great debt crisis of the 1980’s.(pp.164-170)
Thus
we see the origins of “Artificial Scarcity” as it was executed by
Anglo-American policymakers in the 1970s, through the coordination of oil,
finance, and diplomatic/military policies.
This
strategy of population control
replacing economic development, according
to Engdahl, included orchestrated attacks on
nuclear energy by huge petroleum interests and it embraced the Anglo-American
green agenda.
Beginning in the 1970’s an awesome
propaganda offensive was launched from select Anglo-American think-tanks and
journals, intended to shape a new ‘limits to growth’ agenda, which world insure
the ‘success’ of the dramatic oil shock strategy. The American oilman present
at the May 1973 Saltsjoebaden meeting of the Bilderberg group, Robert O. Anderson, was a central figure
in the implementation of the ensuing Anglo-American ecology agenda. It was to
become one of the most successful frauds in history.(p.173)
. . .
Robert
O. Anderson also contributed significant funds to a project initiated by the Rockefeller family at
the Rockefeller’s estate at Bellagio, Italy with Aurelio Peccei
and Alexander King. This Club of Rome, and the U.S. Association of the Club of
Rome, in 1972, gave widespread publicity to their publication of a
scientifically fraudulent computer simulation prepared by Dennis Meadows and
Jay Forrester, titled; ‘Limits to
Growth.’ Adding modern computer graphics to the discredited essay of
Malthus, Meadows and Forrester insisted that the world would ‘soon perish for
lack of adequate energy, food and other resources. As did Malthus, they chose to
ignore the impact of technological progress on improving the human condition.
Their message was one of unmitigated gloom and cultural pessimism.
One of the most targeted countries for
this new Anglo-American anti-nuclear offensive in this time was Germany. While
France’s nuclear program was equally if not more ambitious, Germany was deemed
an area where Anglo-American intelligence assets had greater likelihood of
success given their history in the postwar occupation of the Federal Republic.
Almost as soon as the ink had dried on the Schmidt government’s 1975 nuclear
development program, an offensive was launched.
A key operative in this new project was to
be a young woman whose mother was German and stepfather American and who had
lived in the U.S. until 1970, working for U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, among
other things. Petra K. Kelly had developed close ties in her U.S. years to one
of the principal new Anglo-American anti-nuclear organizations created by McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation, the Natural Resources
Defense Council. The Natural Resources Defense Council included Barbara Ward
(Lady Jackson) and Laurance Rockefeller among its
board at the time. In Germany, Kelly began organizing legal assaults against construction
of the German nuclear program during the min 1970’s, resulting in costly delays
and eventual large cuts in the entire German nuclear plan.
Engdahl
concludes this chapter on “The World economy in Reverse” with a brief
description of Malthusian theory of population growth and how this theory was adopted in the 1970s to
promote “population control” as an instrument for US “national security”:
In
1798 an obscure English clergyman, professor of political economy in the employ
of the British East India Company’s East India College at Haileybury,
was given instant fame by his English sponsors for his ‘Essay on the Principle
of Population.’ The essay itself was a scientific fraud, plagiarized largely
from a Venetian attack on the positive population theory of American Benjamin
Franklin.
The Venetian attack on µFranklin’s essay
had been written by Giammaria Ortes
in 1774. Malthus’ adaptation of Ortes’ ‘theory’ was
refined with a façade of mathematical legitimacy which he called the ‘law of
geometric progression,’ which held that human populations invariably expanded
geometrically, while the means of subsistence were arithmetically limited or
linear. The flaw in Malthus’ argument, as demonstrated irrefutably by the
spectacular growth of civilization, technology and agriculture productivity
since 1798, was Malthus’ deliberate ignoring of the contribution of advances in
science and technology to dramatically improve such factors
as crop yield, labor productivity and such.
By the mid-1070’s, indicative of the
effectiveness of the new propaganda onslaught from the Anglo-American establishment,
American government officials were openly boasting in public press conferences
that they were committed ‘neo-Malthusians,’ something for which they would have
been laughed out of office a mere decade or so earlier. But nowhere did the new
embrace of British Malthusian economics in the United States show itself more
brutally than in Kissinger’s National Security Council.
On April 24, 1974, in the midst of the oil
crisis, White House National Security adviser, Henry Alfred Kissinger, issued a
National Security Council Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), on the subject of
‘Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas
Interests.’ It was directed to all cabinet secretaries, the military Joint Chiefs
of Staff as well as the CIA and other key agencies. On October 16, 1975, on Kissinger’s
urging, President Gerald Ford issued a memorandum
confirming the need for ‘U.S. leadership in world population matters,’ based on
the contents of the classified NSSM 200 document. The document made
Malthusianism, for the first time in American history, an explicit item of
security policy of the government of the United States. More
bitter the irony, was the fact that it was initiated by a German-born
Jew. Even during the Nazi years, government officials in Germany were more
guarded about officially espousing such goals.
NSSM 200 argued that population expansion
in select developing countries which also contain key strategic resources
necessary to the US economy, posed potential U.S. ‘national
security threats’. The study warned that under pressure from an expanding
domestic population, countries with needed raw materials will tend to demand
better prices and higher terms of trade for their exports to the United States.
In this context, the NSSM 200 identified a target list of 13 countries singled
out as ‘strategic targets’ for U.S. efforts at population control. The list,
drawn up in 1974, no doubt, as with all other major decisions of Kissinger,
also involving close consultation with the British Foreign Office, is
instructive.
Kissinger explicitly stated in the
memorandum, ‘how much more efficient expenditures of population control might
be than (would be funds for) raising production through direct investments in
additional irrigation and power projects and factories.’ British 19th-century
Imperialism could have expressed it no better. By the middle 1970’s the government
of the United States, with this secret policy declaration, had committed itself
to an agenda which would contribute to its own economic demise as well as
untold famine, misery and unnecessary death throughout the develop sector. The
13 target countries named by Kissinger’s study were Brazil, Pakistan, India,
Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey,
Ethiopia and Colombia.(pp.176-179)
In
the following Chapter 10, titled, “Europe, Japan and a Response to the Oil
Shock,” F.
William Engdahl gives a detailed description of “the
petrodollar monetary order” that followed the 1974 oil price inflation that was
engineered by Kissinger and the Bilderberg Group. The
“developing world” was irretrievably devastated:
While
industrial countries experienced a certain slow recovery from the initial oil shock
by 1975, the overall position of developing economies deteriorated as a result
of the quadrupling of primary oil prices. Total current-account deficit of all
developing countries rose from a average of some $6 billion per year during the
early 1970’s, to more than $26 billion in 1974 (again, a quadrupling parallel
with the price of oil), and an unbearable seven-fold increase to $42 billion by
1976, with the vast majority of this deficit in countries of the developing sector
whose per capita income levels were the lowest in the world.
Under the threat of losing access to
further borrowing from the World Bank and private industrial-nation banks,
these less developed countries were forced to divert precious funds from
industrial and agricultural development into simply reducing this ‘balance of
payment’ deficit. Their oil imports had to be paid in dollars, while the cost
of their raw materials exports had fallen sharply in the global recession of
1974-75. The countries were forced to borrow short-term, to pay the huge oil
import payments and the only major lenders ready to
Lend
where the US and British ‘Eurodollar’ banks, recycling their huge new
Petrodollar windfall. The entire Indian subcontinent, most of Africa and entire
regions of Latin America were in serve economic and political crisis as a
result.
Private U.S. and European banks stepped in
to the breach, under the Bilderberg ‘petrodollar
recycling’ strategy, to lend to these countries, but only to ‘balance’ accounts
which had been left in shambles by the Anglo-American oil shock, not to finance
creation of necessary production infrastructure or technology development.
These private petrodollar loans came from London ‘Eurodollar’ banks of the
United States and Britain. OPEC oil revenues, paid to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
other countries, were paid in dollars and those dollars were channeled and
‘guided’ into offshore London Eurodollar banks for relending to the victims of
the new oil shock in the developing sector’.
Dr. Kissinger and friends left nothing to
chance in the process.(pp-183-184)
Engdahl goes on to
describe how the so-called “Third World” countries (no longer called
“developing countries”) eventually responded in an effort for self-defense, and
how this effort was systematically smashed.
[In
August] of 1976 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, heads of state and senior cabinet
officials of 85 nations, members of the so-called Group of Non-aligned Nations,
met under the host government of Prime Minister Sirimavo
Bandaranaike. Included among the leaders present were India’s Indira Gandhi, and numerous heads of state or officials of
African, Asian and Latin American governments, … [as
well as] Algeria, and Iraq.[p.188)
. . .
The
explosive issue of the foreign debt had been placed on the negotiating table
for the first time, not by a single government, but by 85 governments acting
collectively.(p.189)
At
the end of September 1976, Guyana’s Foreign Minister Frederick Wills had been
designated to present the demands of the Colombo group before the United
Nations General Assembly, where he dropped a “political bombshell” :
“The
International Monetary Fund and the monetary system of Bretton
Woods must provide a place for alternative structures such as international
development banks, which have as their goal, not the recovery and
reconstruction of Europe or preferential agreements for development of a market
economy, but rather the just development of the gains from an unequal global economic system.
“.
. . The burning problem of the debt and debt service has taken on a special
importance. Developing countries are not able to manage their basic
requirements, as noted in Colombo, without resort to some form of debt
restructuring or moratoria. We must make every effort to oppose attempts to
divide us through ‘case-by-case’ techniques. We cannot allow ourselves to mortgage
future unborn generations to the burdensome debt repayment and destructive debt
service. The time for debt moratorium has arrived.”(p.190)
Willis
challenged the authority of the United States and its British ally in their
draconian measures of what later would be called “genocidal policies of
austerity”:
“The
only Third World raw material that did well in the economic arena was oil, but
the large oil reserves were centered in the Middle East, and manipulation of
inter-Arab and Arab-Israeli conflicts, together with inculcation of a penchant
for prestige projects meant that Third World oil could no be used as factors in
Third World development. One by one Third World
countries were gripped by inflation and starvation, by low life-expectancy and
high infant mortality. The Old Order of Canniing and Castlereagh, Pitt and Disraeli remains.”(p.192)
Here
Engdahl remarks : “The reference to the methods of
British 19th-century Foreign Minister, Castlereagh,
the master artisan of British Balance of Power diplomacy at the 1815 Congress
of Vienna, was appropriate. The principal active opponent who deployed the full
power and force of the U.S. Government, intelligence services and economic
clout to destroy the dynamic set off at Colombo in 1976 was Secretary of State,
Henry Kissinger, a devout student of Castlereagh.”(p.192)
Kissinger’s
tried and proven tactic of
“divide and rule” prevailed against his European opponents who
had expressed solidarity with the Colombo Non-Aligned declaration. And as for
the strategists of this bold Declaration, within months they were forced out of
office, as Kissinger would term it, “case-by-case.” Indira
Gandhi was forced into elections in February 1977 and out of office by March,
less than six months after Willis present the declaration of the Non-Aligned
nations at the United Nations General Assembly. By May 1977 Sirimavo
Bandaranaike was out of office, following a wave of strikes that paralyzed her
country that were reportedly led by “Trotskyites” close to British intelligence
services. And on February 14, 1978, Guyana’s Foreign Minister, Frederick Wills,
the key strategist of the Non-Aligned initiative on economic development, was forced to
resign.(p.194)
The Third World threat to the
Anglo-American order and their regime of global taxation through petrodollars,
had apparently been eaten back. The floodgates were opened by the leading
Eurodollar banks of London and New York to lend ever grater sums to select
states of the Third World who agreed to the draconian IMF terms, to refinance
their oil-related deficits.(p.194)
We
are told of similar interventions when so-called Third World countries attempted
to develop an “atoms for peace” to replace oil as a primary energy supply in
order to permit economic development.
In
1977, Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
was overthrown in
a military coup led by General Zia ul-Haq.
Before
his death by handing, Bhutto had accused U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger of being behind this overthrow because of Bhutto’s insistence on
developing Pakistan’s independent nuclear program. Writing his defense from his
prison cell before his execution, Bhutto declared, ‘Dr. Henry Kissinger, the
Secretary of State of the United States, has a brilliant mind. He told me that
I should not insult the intelligence of the United States by saying that
Pakistan needed the Reprocessing Plant for her energy needs. In reply, I told
him that I will not insult the intelligence of the United States by discussing
the energy needs of Pakistan, but in the same token, he should not insult the
sovereignty and self-respect of Pakistan by discussing the plant at all . . . I
got the death sentence.’
General Zia reversed Bhutto’s independent
foreign policy and quickly embraced Washington, and abundant U.S. military
assistance followed.(p.196)
The creation of the Trilateral
Commission.
In
April 1975, at a private closed-door meeting in Tokyo - organized by David
Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank , and George W. Ball, the founder
of the Bilderberg
group - future polices of Rockefeller’s newly formed Trilateral
Commission were discussed by representatives of Anglo-American oil and banking
concerns.
What concerned the hundred or so
influential policy-makers at the April meeting of Rockefeller’s . . . Trilateral
Commission was the dangerous risk to the Anglo-American establishment of
continuing the offensive U.S. foreign policy stance against the rest of the
world, associated with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Republican
administration. Kissinger’s hard-line ‘divide and rule’ tactics had been to
isolate one after another country, whether European, developing sector or OPEC,
of portraying OPEC as the villain to developing countries whose economic growth
had been destroyed by the Bilderberger’s 1973 oil
shock policy.
By 1975, his thinly-veiled ‘thug’ approach
to international diplomacy was risking creating an enormous international
backlash. A new ‘image’ was needed to sell the world on the need for continued
American hegemony. Therefore, at the Tokyo gathering of the Trilateral
Commission that April;, little more than a year-and-a-half from the 1976
American presidential elections, David Rockefeller introduced a man to his
influential international friends, who was presented by Rockefeller as the next
president of the United States. Few Americans, let alone foreigners had ever
heard of the small-town Georgia peanut farmer who preferred to be called,
‘Jimmy’ Carter.
. . .
The public profile of Carter’s presidency
was ‘human rights’ for the Third World, ‘negotiation, not confrontation.’ He
portrayed himself as an ‘outsider’ to the Washington power establishment, but
the content of U.S. policy under Carter, with his pre-selected crew of
establishment advisers, was to maintain the American Century at all costs.
Under a rhetorical façade of ‘reforming the old order’ of U.S. foreign policy
the Carter Administration continued the
basic Anglo-American neo-Malthusian strategy initiated by Kissinger at the
National Security Council under National Security Study Memorandum 200. Third
World development was to be blocked, and a ‘limits to growth’ post-industrial
policy was to be imposed, to maintain the hegemony of the dollar imperium. Carter’s ‘human rights’ was to become a bludgeon
to justify unprecedented U.S. intervention into the internal affairs of
targeted Third World nations.
The strategy was to fail miserably.(p.198-200)
As
early as 1977, the European Community showed an interest in stabilizing their
currencies in the aftermath of the oil shocks. With the leadership of Juergen Ponto, chairman of Dresdner Bank, the vision
developed to restore order in the European economies by creating a stable
monetary system which would be based on a new alliance with southern Africa,
including South Africa, the Ivory Coast, and Angola.
Angola was rich in oil,
South Africa had industrial technology and infrastructure needed by Angola and
other African states. The region required financial investment and
secure foreign trade outlets for it to work. In late 1974, South African
Finance Minister Nicolaas Diederichs
publically called for a revaluation of the international central bank gold
price to market level, echoing the debate in Europe. ‘I have consistently
pressed for monetary authorities to be allowed to sell gold among themselves at
a market-related price . . . gold in official vaults of central banks would be
revalued; and there would be much more money to pay the Arabs; secondly, the dollar
would lose vale,’ he noted.
At
the same time, German and Italy initiated a bilateral agreement under which
gold was used as collateral for a German loan with gold valued at 80% of the market
price of $150. European discussions around some effective use of gold as an alternative
to the tyranny of the dollar standard were clearly growing in import.
. . .
Then, on July 31 in Frankfurt Dresdner
Bank head Juergen Ponto was assassinated by
terrorists claiming to be the Baader-Meinhof. Some
weeks later, in Cologne the chairman of the German Employer’ federation, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, was
kidnapped and later murdered by the same organization. While the assassins’
trail led back to the East, there was significant reason to believe that
certain powerful western intelligence services had a role in both
assassinations. In the event, West Germany was plunged into political chaos and
gripped by fear as never in the postwar period. The possibility of any
significant development initiative towards South Africa had been killed along
with Ponto and Schleyer. The initiative to break with
the dollar imperium had been stalled for the moment.(pp.200-202)
. . .
[D]espite all
efforts since the early 1970s, the ‘danger’ of independent industrial and trade
growth which undercut the prized domination of the dollar imperium,
was clearly becoming real in the minds of policy-shapers in Washington and
London. Even more drastic shocks were required to stop the insistence of
nations to pursue scientific and industrial development.
Drastic shocks they were.
In November 1978, President Carter named
the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, like Carter a
member was a member as well of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special
White House Iran
Task Force under the National Security Council’s Brezezinski.
Ball recommended Washington drop support of the Shah of Iran and support the
fundamentalist Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini, Robert Bowie for the
CIA was one of the lead ‘case officers’ in the new CIA-led coup against the man
their covert actions had placed into power only 25 years earlier.
Their scheme was based on detailed study
of the phenomenon of Islamic Fundamentalism as presented by British Islamic
expert, Dr. Bernard Lewis, then on assignment at Princeton University in the United
States. Lewis’ scheme, which was unveiled in the May 1979 Bilderberg
meeting in Austria, endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind
Khomeini, to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near
East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage
autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites,
Ethiopian Copts, Azerebaijani Turks and so forth. The
chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc of Crisis,’ which would spill over
into the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.
The coup against the Shah, as that against
Mossadegh in 1953, was run by British and American
intelligence, characteristically, with the bombastic American, Brzesinski, taking public ‘credit’ for getting rid of the
‘corrupt’ Shah, while the British remained safely in the
background.(pp.204-205)
. . .
Carter’s Security Adviser, Brzezinski, and
Secretary of State Vance, implemented their ‘Arc of Crisis’ policy, spreading
the instability of the Iranian revolution throughout the perimeter around the
Soviet Union. From Pakistan across Iran, U.S. initiatives created instability
or worse.
. . .
In October 1979, a devastating new Anglo-American
financial shock was unleashed on top of the second oil shock of that year. That
August, on the advice of David Rockefeller and other influential voices f the
Wall Street banking establishment, President Carter appointed Paul Volcker, the
man who, back in August 1971, had been a key architect of the policy of taking
the dollar off the gold standard, to head the Federal Reserve. Paul A. Volker,
a former official at Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, and of course , a
member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, was President of the New
York Federal Reserve at the time of his nomination to the post as head of the
world’s most powerful central bank.
. . .
The policy strategists based in the City
of London and New York, then resolved to impose a Malthusian monetary shock on
top of the oil shock, to tilt the balance of world development decisively to
their relative advantage.
In October 1979, Volcker unveiled a
radical new Federal Reserve monetary policy. He deceived a shocked Congress and
a desperate White House, by insisting that his radical monetarist cure was
aimed at ‘squeezing inflation out of the system.’ It was aimed at making the
U.S. dollar the most eagerly sought currency in the world, and, to stop
industrial growth dead in its tracks, in order that political and financial power
flow back to the dollar imperium. Volcker’s cold
rationalization to Congress was that ‘restraint on growth in money and credit,
maintained over a considerable period of time, must be an essential part of any
program to deal with entrenched inflation and inflationary expectations.’
The defect in Volcker’s monetary shock
therapy was that he never addressed the fundamental origins of the soaring
inflation – two oil price shocks since
1973, which had raised the price of the world’s basic energy and transportation
by 1,300% in six years. And Volcker’s insistence on restricting the U.S. money
supply by cutting credit to banks, consumers and the economy
was a calculated fraud. Volker knew fully, as did every major banker in New York
and London, that control of America’s domestic dollar supply was a minor part
of a far larger problem. Volcker knew well that his actions had little control
on the estimated $500 billion outside the United States, circulating in the
so-called Eurodollar markets of London and the Cayman Islands and such offshore
hot money havens. At the time of the October 1979 Volcker monetary shock
therapy, Morgan Guaranty Trust calculated the gross size of dollars in the Eurodollar
offshore markets at fully 57% of the entire domestic U.S. money supply. The
American citizen was to pay the cost of this rampant offshore money pool, as
thought it never existed.
In both his objectives, Volcker succeeded.
U.S. interest rates on the Eurodollar market soared from 10%
to 16%, on their way up to levels of 20% in a matter of weeks, as the world
looked on in stunned disbelief. Inflation was indeed being ‘squeezed’ as
the world economy was plunged into the deepest depression since the 1930’s. And
the dollar began what was to be an extraordinary five year long ascent.
The oil shock and the Volcker shock were
combined with a decision as well by the leading circles of the establishment to
‘take the bloom off the nuclear rose’ once and for all, in order to ensure that
the alarming trend of developing worldwide nuclear energy resources to replace
reliance on Anglo-American oil, was decisively ended.
Unprecedented diplomatic and legal
pressures from the Carter White House since 1977, had not succeeded in significantly blunting the attraction
of nuclear power. But on March 28, 1979, in a town in the center of
Pennsylvania, a bizarre event occurred, which was then portrayed to the world
press in fictitious terms as though it were a Hollywood movie script, or a
remake of H.G. Wells’ 1938 ‘War of the Words’ radio broadcast.
Unit-2 of the Three-Mile Island nuclear power
reactor complex in Harrisburg, underwent an improbable
sequence of ‘accidents.’ Later investigation revealed that critical valves had
been illegally and manually closed before the event, preventing emergency cooling
water from entering the reactor’s steam generator system. Within 15 seconds
emergency back-systems had brought the nuclear fission process to a stop. But
then, a plant operator violated all procedure and intervened to shut off
cooling water into the reactor core. The details of what then happened have
been documented elsewhere extensively.
On August 3, 1979 in its official report
on the event the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission posed sabotage or criminal
negligence as one of six possible causes for the Three-Mile Island event. But
even after eliminating the other five possible causes, the government refused
even to consider the possibility of sabotage seriously.
News to the world’s media during the
entire Harrisburg drama was strictly controlled by the newly-established White
House Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). No government or nuclear plant
official was allowed to speak to press except when screened by FEMA censors.
. . .
Curiously
as well, the same month, a spectacular Hollywood movie, ‘The China syndrome,’
starring Jane Fonda, portrayed a fictional account almost exactly parallel with
the Harrisburg events, further fuelling public hysteria over dangers of nuclear
energy.
By the end of 1979, the hegemony of the Anglo-American
financial establishment over the world’s economic and industrial potentials had
been reasserted in a manner never before imagined. Their control of world oil
flows had again been a central weapon of their peculiar brand of Malthusian
policy. Out of the chaos of Khomeini’s Iran and Volcker’s dollar shocks, these
influential policy arbiters saw themselves as virtual gods of Mt. Olympus.
Within a short decade their lofty mount, however, was to feel the rumblings of
an underlying volcano.(pp.207-211) .
. . .
The
23 + items below contain articles and essays offering information and interpretations which invite us to meditate
on our collective condition and to carefully examine the web of power relationships around us - both
international and domestic; to analyze them and better understand the forces
that govern our lives. Once our feet are on the ground, the inevitable question
is where do we stand in this torrent of events, animated
by corporate greed and its dire imperative to control entire populations and neutralize resistance
at any cost.
Francis
Feeley
---
Professeur honoraire de l'Université Grenoble-Alpes
Ancien Directeur des
Researches
Université de Paris-Nanterre
Director of The Center for the Advanced Study
of American Institutions and Social Movements
(CEIMSA-in-Exile)
The University of California-San Diego
http://www.ceimsa.org
a.
F. William Engdahl:
Lecture in
Moscow
(October 2011)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_NzsuyULoI
(28:40)
+
“On CIA, Arab
world, Arab spring, religious fanaticism”
(July 2013)
(8:21)
William Engdahl during his
visit in Moscow within the Initiative Postglobalization
delivered a lecture devoted to shale revolution, Arab spring and Eurasia. At
this part famous expert is speaking about CIA, Arab spring and the truth of
interest of the USA at the Middle East.
+
“On Lebanon, Syria, Katar,
Israel and Putin”
(July 2013)
(7:49)
During his visit in Moscow William Engdahl met with audience, which has an interest in
geopolitics and told about Arab Spring, situation at the Middle East and more
-- he is convinced that Russia position is rights in this conflict.
+
“On China, Russia and Iran as a resistance against
global fascism”
William Engdahl within Initiative
Postglobalization came to Moscow, where he delivered
a lecture about shale gas, Arab spring and Eurasia. There a short piece of the lecture, where expert
speaks about China and Russia and Iran resistance to global fascism.
+
"On Destruction of the USSR,
American economy, findings of new sources of financing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFQCwc3HJ0&feature=youtu.be
William Engdahl within Initiative Postglobalization
came to Moscow, where he delivered a lecture about shale gas, Arab spring and
Eurasia. There a short piece of the lecture, where expert explains motives of
the destruction of the USSR and attempts of the USA to find new source of
financing.
==========
b.
Crisis Management:
Kissinger, McNamara, and Rice
(July 2013)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbIdCPwzROw
(25:48)
from
This week Uncommon Knowledge brings us interview
excerpts from two former secretaries of state and Hoover fellows Henry
Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, and former secretary of defense Robert
McNamara. All three have influenced American foreign policy through the years
and through different crises, and all three believe that the United States
possesses a particular responsibility in the world.
+
Roger Waters Onstage ‘Attack’ Video Stuns Pink Floyd
Fans
https://www.alternativenation.net/roger-waters-onstage-attack-video-stuns-pink-floyd-fans/
+
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Subject: [MCM] Say it ain't so: Chris
Hedges and the Intercept join forces with the US war machine
Great
essay on the propaganda tactic of deploying trusted "leftist" voices
to defuse
resistance.
MCM
The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control
http://edwardcurtin.com/the-art-of-doublespeak-bellingcat-and-mind-control
by Ed Curtin
In
the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the
average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and
needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain. In a number of
books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays,
who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for
the ruling elites. Bernays had honed his skills
while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and
after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York
City.
There
is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self, where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp,
reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed
in his wake. He says the reason he couldn’t call his new business
“propaganda” was because the Germans had given propaganda a “bad name,” and so
he came up with the euphemism “public relations.” He then adds that “if
you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for
peace.” Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate
public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically
elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with
fake news broadcasts). He says “the Germans gave propaganda a bad name,”
not Bernays and the United States with their vast
campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for
going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction). He
sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it
led to support for the “war to end all wars” and subsequently to a hit movie
about WWI, Yankee Doodle Dandy,
made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn’t achieve
its lofty goal.
As
Bernays has said,
The American motion picture is the
greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda
in the world today.
He
was a propagandist to the end. I suspect most viewers of the film are
taken in by these softly spoken words of an old man sipping a glass of wine at
a dinner table with a woman who is asking him questions. I have shown this film
to hundreds of students and none has noticed his legerdemain. It is an
example of the sort of hocus-pocus I will be getting to shortly, the sly
insertion into seemingly liberal or matter-of-fact commentary of statements
that imply a different story. The placement of convincing or confusing
disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays
knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.
In
the following years, Bernays, Lippman,
and their ilk were joined by social “scientists,” psychologists, and sundry
others intent on making a sham out of the idea of democracy by developing
strategies and techniques for the engineering of social consensus consonant
with the wishes of the ruling classes. Their techniques of propaganda
developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the
CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency’s courting of
what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s “the compatible left,”
having already had the right in its pocket. Today most people are, as is said,
“wired,” and they get their information from the
electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots
with government propagandists. Ask yourself: Has the power of the
oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks
increased or decreased over your lifetime. The answer is obvious: the average
people that Lippman and Bernays
trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.
This
is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called
“average” people’s thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also
adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who
consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or
have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different
perspectives on a topic. This is what some call the professional and
intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not
the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces. It
is this segment of the population that considers itself “informed,” but the
information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both
intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public
matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.
Recently
I have noticed a group of interconnected examples of how this group of the
population that exerts influence incommensurate with their numbers has
contributed to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Within this
group there are opinion makers who are often journalists, writers, and cultural
producers of some sort or other, and then the larger number of the intellectual
or schooled class who follow their opinions. This second group then
passes on their received opinions to those who look up to them.
+
NOTE: Concerning Ed Curtin's piece on Bellingcat,
and the participation of some leftist voices in the exaltation of that
propaganda mill, a friend who knows the background of Chris Hedges' involvement
writes that "he was duped into presenting the Emmy to Bellingcat—and, from what I hear, he believes it was
done intentionally to smear him."
As this friend is someone I (and many others) quite admire for his
integrity and bravery, and as it's wholly plausible that Hedges would have been
set up, I am reserving judgement on his action, and
urge people on this list to do so, too.
This caveat does not detract from the essential soundness of Ed Curtin's
thesis: that the
lords of propaganda are
extraordinarily skilled at co-optation of the opposition.
MCM
+
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Vanessa Beeley, who knows more than anyone (outside the CIA) about the White Helmets, "de-platformed" throughout Canada for planning to discuss it
Attached here is Vanessa's excellent presentation on the White Helmets, which
I sent out back in the summer of 2017.
MCM
Award-Winning Journalist Vanessa Beeley Faces “Deplatforming” at Six Canadian Venues
Vanessa Beeley's final Canadian stop in Winnipeg - December 12 at 7pm
https://www.globalresearch.ca/award-winning-journalist-vanessa-beeley-faces-deplatforming-at-six-canadian-venues/5697546
By Michael Welch
Global Research, December 12, 2019
Vanessa Beeley, the award-winning journalist who has gained notoriety for her on the ground reporting on the Syrian conflict has faced opposition in her efforts to speak to Canadian audiences at the invitation of local anti war activists.
According to Ken Stone of the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War, a lead organizer of Beeley’s cross-Canada speaking tour, six venues have so far backed away from hosting the UK journalist’s talks. These include Palestine House in Mississauga, the Steelworkers Hall in Toronto, St. Paul’s University in Ottawa, the University of Montreal, the University of Winnipeg, and the Millenium Library, also in Winnipeg.
Stone explains that the withdrawal from agreements at each venue to host Beeley were preceded by the circulation of at least two hit pieces on the journalist upon her arrival in Canada – one by La Presse in Quebec and one by the Huffington Post. Stone explained that the decision to cancel in each case was precipitated by the circulation of these articles by unknown actors.
Says Stone,
“There wasn’t an organized effort, but there were people in individual cities where she was speaking who took it upon themselves to circulate these articles behind the scenes – shadowy figures who tried their very best to scare the managers of various venues into cancelling, and they did so six times.”
The proper name of the tour is ‘Canada’s Dirty War on Syria: The White Helmets and the Regime Change War billionaires.’ Ms. Beeley was intent on presenting her research into Canada’s role in undermining the government of President Bachar Al Assad. Beeley’s message directly contradicts mainstream reporting on the conflict, particularly her research into the White Helmets, which she and other independent journalists classify as a propaganda construct providing public relations cover for regime change efforts and continued economic sanctions that are decimating the country.
The justification for one venue after another cancelling is not clear, as none have officially provided any explanation. According to Stone, however, there were two venues on the tour that allowed the Beeley presentation to take place in spite of this unexpected opposition. One was the New Vision Church in Hamilton. The other was the Knox Metropolitan United Church in Regina. Both Ministers highlighted concerns from a complainant about ‘hate speech’ being directed toward the White Helmets, and the prospect of traumatizing vulnerable Syrian refugees.
lick on the link for the rest.
+
Bernard Lewis and Norman Podhoretz discuss the Middle East on Uncommon Knowledge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEmZAS3DnH8
==========
c.
Paul Volcker’s Long Shadow
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/paul-volckers-long-shadow/
by Ellen Brown
+
Central banks worldwide buying up
massive amounts of gold in a shift away from US dollar – Goldman Sachs
Gold prices will climb to $1,600 per ounce over the
next year, Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs projects. It says that central banks
are consuming a fifth of the global supply of the yellow metal.
“De-dollarization
in central banks – demand from central banks for gold is biggest since the
Nixon era, eating up 20 percent of global supply,” the head of global commodities research at Goldman,
Jeff Currie, told Bloomberg. “I am
going to like gold better than bonds because the bonds won’t reflect that
de-dollarization.”
Citing “fear-driven
demand” for the precious metal, Goldman analysts said last week
that investors should diversify their long-term bond holdings with gold.
“Going long-term
depends on what is going to happen to global growth. The further out you go,
the higher the probability that the US is going to hit a recession. We have
$1,600 holding out through 2021,” Goldman
Sachs analyst Mikhail Sprogis told Kitco News. Gold was trading at $1463.30 per ounce on
Tuesday.
Sprogis said that central bank gold demand will be driven
by demand from Russia, Turkey, China, and other countries, including Poland.
Statistics showed that hedge funds and other large
speculators boosted their bullish bets on the precious metal by 8.9 percent in
the week ended December 3. That is the biggest gain since late September.
For more stories on economy & finance
visit RT's business
section
+
Fed says no hikes in 2020.
What about gold?
https://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2019-12-13/Fed-says-no-hikes-in-2020-What-about-gold.html
+
The Wealthy Are Hoarding Physical Gold - Peter
Schiff's Gold News
https://schiffgold.com/key-gold-news/the-wealthy-are-hoarding-physical-gold/
==========
d.
The State of the Canadian Debt Slaves, How They
Compare to American Debt Slaves, and the Bank of Canada’s Response
+
Cornel West and Richard Wolff talk about Capitalism
and White Supremacy
+
William K. Black | The Real
News Network
https://therealnews.com/bios/william-k-black
==========
e.
The Oligarch
Takeover of US Pharma and Healthcare – And the
Resulting Human Crisis
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52658.htm
by Jon Hellevig
The
United States runs the by far biggest and most bloated healthcare sector in the
world when measured as a share of the total economy. Its annual value was $3.7
trillion, amounting to 17.9% of GDP (2018). That is nearly double the average
of developed Western countries (as a share of GDP). The enormous expense does
not buy Americans any better health than the Europeans get for half the price, in fact the health outcomes are far inferior in the US.
In life expectancy, the US has fallen down to 33rd place, even
overtaken by Cuba.
Exorbitant
prices on drugs, medical treatment and health insurances are crushing
consumers. Half of working age American adults have either no insurance at all
or only an inadequate insurance and therefore risk being financially ruined for
any kind of medical treatment – even just checking in at a hospital and leaving
the same day could land you with a five-figure bill. Studies have shown that
two-thirds of Americans are not able to afford a $500 unexpected cost for
medical emergency, a sum which will not get you even past reception at an
American hospital. According to the American Cancer Society, 137 million
Americans suffered medical financial hardship in 2018. They then had to resort
to borrow a total of $88 billion only to cover their necessary medical
expenses. Medical bills are now the primary factor in two-thirds of all
personal bankruptcies in the United States.
In
a unique study covering the entire US healthcare sector, Awara
Accounting https://www.awaragroup.com/
has dug into the problems of the US pharma and
healthcare industries, and the findings are shocking. The Awara
study shows https://www.awaragroup.com/blog/us-healthcare-system-in-crisis/
that in addition to the original sin of corporate greed, the exorbitant costs
of the US healthcare system stem from layers upon layers of distortions with
which the system is infested. Each part of the healthcare industry contributes
to what is a giant monopoly scam: the pharmaceutical companies, medical
equipment manufacturers, drug wholesalers, drug stores, group purchasing
organizations, health insurance companies, doctors, clinics and hospitals, and
even what should be impartial university research. And on top of that, there’s
the government as a giant enabler of monopolized corporations running roughshod
over the American consumer and patient.
But
it is worse than that. All the monopolists (in official parlance, oligopolies)
are in turn owned by the same set of investors in what is called horizontal
shareholding. The same some 15-20. investors have the controlling stake in all the leading
companies of the entire pharma and healthcare
industry.
That’s
not all. Two of the investors, BlackRock and
Vanguard, are the biggest owners in almost every single one of the leading
companies.
Furthermore,
BlackRock is owned by Vanguard, BlackRock’s
biggest owner being a mystical PNC Services, whose biggest owner in turn is
Vanguard. Vanguard itself is recorded directly as BlackRock’s
second biggest owner. Moreover, BlackRock and
Vanguard are the two biggest owners of almost all the other 15-20 biggest
investors, which most are cross-owned and together own the entire US pharma and healthcare sector. Ultimately, then we might
have the situation that the whole healthcare sector and Big Pharma
are controlled by one giant oligarch clan (and the very real people who stand
behind them), one single interest group of oligarch investors.
Besides,
it’s the same for the entire US economy. Those two investors control almost all
major US companies.
Incredible? Read on, the
evidence with charts and details is below in the text.
Now,
this means that we are not exaggerating when we talk about an oligarch takeover
of the US pharma and healthcare industries. It’s
real. And very real people suffer for real.
As
far as we know, this is the first report to reveal this mind-boggling extent of
monopolization and concentration of ownership in US pharma
and healthcare. This monopolization is fast approaching Soviet levels, with the
same lethal consequences.
Another
particularly important thing in the Awara report is
that the US healthcare crisis and global comparisons serve as a marvelous case
study to show what is wrong with neoliberalism and
how the so-called free-market is not necessarily better than a mixed economy.
At the very core of the US healthcare crisis, is the American ideological
precept that healthcare must be a private corporate for-profit business – never
mind any level of predatory monopolies. But compared with European countries
the US loses hands down on every parameter. European life expectancy and health
outcomes are far better at half the cost. In a European-style system all
citizens have nearly equal access to general health services without having to
incur financial hardship in a medical emergency. It has then been clearly shown
that, the European mixed system of universal healthcare with public insurance
and public hospitals, coupled with government regulation of drug prices and
their availability, works best. And there’s a lesson for the wider economy,
too.
Yet
when you mention government regulation, price controls and universal
healthcare, US politicians from both parties and most analysts (of the type
that make it into mainstream media) pull out the socialism card. But this is
not a question of the free-market vs. socialism. There can be no such question
because, first, a mixed economy is not socialism. And, second, there is no free
market in the United States any longer. What used to be a free market aka Capitalism, is nothing but a crony capitalist monopoly
ridden system almost exclusively controlled by an ever more consolidating group
of oligarchs. The choice is not between socialism and capitalism, but between a
real market economy and the present oligarchy.
[Note. Wherever the
original Awara Accounting study on US healthcare https://www.awaragroup.com/blog/us-healthcare-system-in-crisis/
contain the source references and links, they have as a rule not been
duplicated here.]
A
Healthcare System Run Amok
Drug
prices
in the United States are the highest in the world, American prices for
prescription drugs being two
to six times higher than those of the rest of the world. Prescription
drug prices in the US increased nearly 100% in only the past six years. Before
that, between 1997 and 2007, drug prices had already tripled.
==========
f.
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2019
Subject: [MCM] The Big Money's using Greta Thunberg (and AOC) to screw
all the rest of us (MUST-READ)
"Make no mistake. When the most influential multinational
corporations, the world’s largest institutional investors including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, the UN, the World Bank, the
Bank of England and other central banks of the BIS line up behind the
financing of a so-called green Agenda, call it Green New Deal or what, it is
time to look behind the surface of public climate activist campaigns to
the actual agenda. The picture that emerges is the attempted financial eorganization of the world economy using climate, something
the sun and its energy have orders
of magnitude more to do with than mankind ever could—to try to convince us
ordinary folk to make untold sacrifice to 'save our planet.'"
Climate
and the Money Trail
Global Research, September 25, 2019
Theme: Environment, Global Economy
In-depth Report: Climate Change
Climate.
Now who wudda thought. The
very mega-corporations and mega-billionaires behind the globalization of the
world economy over recent decades, whose pursuit of shareholder value and cost
reduction who have wreaked so much damage to our environment both in the
industrial world and in the under-developed economies of Africa, Asia, Latin
America, are the leading backers of the “grassroots” decarbonization
movement from Sweden to Germany to the USA and beyond.
Is
it pangs of guilty conscience, or could it be a deeper agenda of the financialization of the very air we breathe and more?
Whatever
one may believe about the dangers of CO2 and risks of global warming creating a
global catastrophe of 1.5 to 2 degree Celsius average temperature rise in the
next roughly 12 years, it is worth noting who is promoting the current
flood of propaganda and climate activism.
Green
Finance
Several
years before Al Gore and others decided to use a young Swedish school girl to
be the poster child for climate action urgency, or in the USA the call of
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a complete
reorganization of the economy around a Green New Deal, the giants of finance
began devising schemes for steering hundreds of billions of future funds to
investments in often worthless “climate” companies.
In
2013 after years of careful preparation, a Swedish real estate company, Vasakronan, issued the first corporate “Green Bond.” They
were followed by others including Apple, SNCF and the major French bank Credit Agricole. In November 2013 Elon
Musk’s problem-riddled Tesla Energy issued the first solar asset-backed
security. Today according to something called the Climate Bonds Initiative,
more than $500 billion in such Green Bonds are outstanding. The creators of the
bond idea state their aim is to win over a major share of the $45 trillion of
assets under management globally which have made nominal commitment to invest
in “climate friendly” projects.
Bonnie
Prince Charles, future UK Monarch, along with the Bank of England and City of
London finance have promoted “green financial instruments,” led by Green Bonds,
to redirect pension plans and mutual funds towards green projects. A key player
in the linking of world financial institutions with the Green Agenda is
outgoing Bank of England head Mark Carney. In December 2015,
the Bank for International Settlements’ Financial Stability Board (FSB),
chaired then by Carney, created the Task Force on Climate-related Financial
Disclosure (TCFD), to advise “investors, lenders and insurance about climate
related risks.” That was certainly a bizarre focus for world central bankers.
In
2016 the TCFD along with the City of London Corporation and the UK Government
initiated the Green Finance Initiative, aiming to channel trillions of dollars
to “green” investments. The central bankers of the FSB nominated 31 people to
form the TCFD. Chaired by billionaire Michael
Bloomberg of the financial wire, it includes key people from JP MorganChase; from BlackRock–one
of the world’s biggest asset managers with almost $7 trillion; Barclays Bank;
HSBC, the London-Hong Kong bank repeatedly fined for laundering drug and other
black funds; Swiss Re, the world’s second largest reinsurance; China’s ICBC
bank; Tata Steel, ENI oil, Dow Chemical, mining giant BHP Billington
and David Blood of Al Gore’s Generation Investment LLC. In effect it seems
the foxes are writing the rules for the new Green Hen House.
Bank
of England’s Carney was also a key actor in efforts
to make the City of London into the financial center of global Green Finance.
The outgoing UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, in July 2019
released a White Paper, “Green Finance Strategy: Transforming Finance for a
Greener Future.” The paper states, “One of the most influential initiatives to
emerge is the Financial Stability Board’s private sector Task Force on
Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), supported by Mark Carney and
chaired by Michael Bloomberg. This has been endorsed by institutions
representing $118 trillion of assets globally.” There
seems to be a plan here. The plan is the financialization
of the entire world economy using fear of an end of world scenario to reach
arbitrary aims such as “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.”
Goldman
Sachs Key Actor
Click
on the link for the rest:
+
Why a 'Green New Deal' must be decolonial
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/green-deal-decolonial-191202134707310.html
by Vijay Kolinjivadi
+
“Shame!” Indigenous Leaders & Delegates
from Global South Stage Dramatic Walkout at COP25 in Madrid
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/11/cop25_walkout_indigenous_leaders_global_south
with Tom
Goldtooth, from Indigenous Environmental Network, and
Karin Nansen, from Friends of the Earth International
==========
g.
Operation Condor 2.0
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52684.htm
by Peter
Koenig
+
We can't leave Afghanistan now, says Gen. Petraeus, because they have trillions of dollars worth of
minerals
+
Global weapons sales up; US leads market
https://www.koamnewsnow.com/news/world-news/global-weapons-sales-up-us-leads-market/1149528220
==========
h.
https://wikileaks.org/+-Government-+.html
+
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Why did the CPJ exclude Assange from its annual list of jailed journalists?
Why Did Respected Press
Freedom Organization Exclude Assange From Annual List
Of Jailed Journalists?
by Kevin Gasztola
A prominent press freedom organization in the United States declined to
include WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
in its annual list of journalists jailed throughout the world.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), based in New York City,
anticipated a backlash to the exclusion, and CPJ deputy executive director
Robert Mahoney wrote a post intended to head off criticism. But the post
raises several questions and invites further scrutiny.
Can a laudable press freedom organization claim Assange
is not a journalist without aiding the political case brought by prosecutors in
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department?
+
Warrant targeting Assange
supporter reveals scope of US government campaign against WikiLeaks
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/13/bean-d13.html
by Oscar Grenfell
+
Lawyers complain about lack of access to Julian Assange in jail
+
Ex-Australian Deputy PM on Julian Assange’s US Extradition: Where Does This One Stop?!
+
Hundreds of journalists around the world sign open letter
demanding freedom for Assange
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/09/jour-d09.html
by Oscar
Grenfell
+
Sheldon Adelson, hired “security” company to spy on Julian Assange?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52700.htm
by
Philip Giraldi
There are many possible suspects
The
Julian Assange drama drags on. Though he continues to
sit in a top security British prison awaiting developments in his expected
extradition to the United States, the Spanish High Court has been given permission
to interview him. Assange is claiming that the
Spanish company contracted with by the Ecuadorean government to do embassy
security in London spied on him using both audio and video devices. The
recordings apparently included conversations with Assange’s
lawyers outlining his defense strategies, which is an illegal activity under
Spanish law. The prosecution has also indicted the company director, former
military officer David Morales, on associated criminal charges of bribing a
government official and money laundering. Morales has
said that he is innocent.
Aware that
he might be monitored by the British government as well as by other interested
parties, Assange would often meet his legal team
using a white noise machine or in women’s bathrooms with the water running, but
the firm, UC Global, anticipated that and planted devices capable of defeating
the countermeasures. It planted microphones in the embassy fire extinguishing
system as well as in numerous other places in the building. The recordings were
reportedly streamed, undoubtedly encrypted, to another nearby location,
referred to in the trade as a listening post. The streamed material was also
reportedly transcribed and copied at the UC Global offices in Andalusia, but
hard copies of the material were made as well on CDs and DVDs to be turned over
directly to the client.
The
Spanish newspaper El Pais, which has
seen much of the evidence in the case, also mentioned how UC Global fixed
the windows in the rooms actually being used by Assange
so they would not vibrate, making it possible to use laser microphones from a
nearby line of sight building to record what was being said. Presumably the
listening post also served as the line-of-sight surveillance point.
The
British government willingness to let the interview take place is apparently
due in part to the Spanish judiciary’s claims that it has obtained an
overwhelming amount of documentary and other evidence that demonstrates that Assange is basically telling the truth.
And there
is inevitably more to the story. David Morales, who managed the project,
reportedly returned from a trip to the United States and told colleagues that
the UC Global would henceforth be doing some work “for the dark side” at
“another league” level. According
to the New York Times,
which has examined the documents obtained by El Pais and accepted that they are
authentic, “In the court filing, the prosecution asserts that Mr. Morales
returned from a security fair in Las Vegas in 2015… He signed a contract with
Las Vegas Sands, the casino and resort company of Sheldon Adelson,
and the prosecution contends that Mr. Morales passed information about Mr. Assange to security officials at the company, saying it
acted as a go-between with the C.I.A.”
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Assange 'blocked from seeing evidence' over extradition to US.
Julian Assange ‘blocked from seeing evidence’ over extradition to US, court told
WikiLeaks founder remains in prison ahead of full hearing over extradition in February
Julian Assange has been blocked from seeing evidence in his extradition case as he battles against being sent to the US, a court has heard.
Lawyers representing the WikiLeaks founder told a hearing they were not being given sufficient access to their client in prison.
Mr Assange appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court via a video link on Friday for the hearing, which was about extending his custody at HMP Belmarsh.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/newsfromunderground/CAGxB6W-vvqZz1yJ7gQEcv8L2wFRtrYAOyhA4zPEZnnCy%2BJwYmA%40mail.gmail.com.
==========
i.
NATO Names China as New
Target, Alongside Russia
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/12/05/nato-names-china-as-new-target-alongside-russia
China to be added to 'challenges' for the first timeJason Ditz
Posted onDecember 3, 2019
