On February 22, 1946, George Kennan sent “The Long Telegram” to the State Department. It guided US policy throughout the Cold War.
Here is a new “Long, Long Telegram” from retired USG analyst and celebrated Challenger disaster whistleblower Richard Cook. It is a much better policy guide than Kennan’s. (Scroll down—way, way down—to the end of the article to see Cook’s specific policy proposals.)
Mainstream media reporting on Ukraine is context-free propaganda. Here is the missing context. Lots of it.
Richard Cook will join my radio show this Friday, July 22, 8 to 9 pm Eastern to discuss this article.
The US, the Ukraine Disaster, and the Future—The Long View
By Richard C. Cook
Warning: this is a long read.
Introduction
It’s July 2022, and the question naturally arises as the situation in Ukraine goes from bad to worse, are we actually witnessing the collapse of US foreign policy? When whole nations collapse, in whole or in part, it’s usually a slow-motion train wreck. But at some point, the whole thing falls off the track and explodes. That day may be fast arriving.
This is a topic that is being treated exhaustively and effectively by many independent writers in the alternative news media, but it’s easy to mistake the trees for the forest. My aim is to offer a bird’s eye view of the forest. Naturally this will take time.
My choice in this article is to take the long view by carrying out a review of US history, making note of some of the major trends, both positive and negative, that have brought us to where we are today. These trends are social, political, economic, historical, and, may I say, spiritual. I believe this review shows that we now have a choice of directions that must be made without further delay—whether to allow our nation to fall into deep collapse and perdition, or finally to start turning things around for a better future. I believe there is reason for both fear and hope.
A Personal Witness
I am a personal witness to this history. My first American ancestor from Europe, John Bliss, arrived in Massachusetts in 1638 as a dissenter escaping English religious persecution. I also have Native American ancestry through my French-Canadian grandfather. My male forebears fought in all the American wars through WWII. A great-grandfather acquired land in an Oklahoma land rush but was a friend to the Shawnee and spoke their language. A grandfather was a gambler and card sharp. My mother grew up in the forests and mountains of Montana and later became a historian and tour guide for Colonial Williamsburg. When we moved to Virginia when I was 13, we lived a mile from the CIA’s training center at Camp Peary, not far from the world’s largest conglomeration of military bases. I graduated from the College of William and Mary and worked as a policy analyst for the federal government for 32 years. I became a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, then spent the rest of my career at the US Treasury Department. As a public servant, then a writer on public policy over the last 15 years, I have watched US foreign policy slam into the wall again and again, often descending into actions that could well be called state terrorism. The Biden administration may be the end of the line.
America’s Distinct Non-European Culture
It is essential to understand that the US is far from being a European culture and that anyone who tries to portray it as such is making a serious, self-limiting error. The Europeans who did emigrate to the Americas came for a variety of motives. Some came for religious freedom, some for physical survival by leaving a Europe that was oppressive and suffocating toward the lower castes, some for adventure, and some for profit and wealth. Immigration continues to this day and is a hot political issue. Many immigrants in recent decades have come as refugees, including those from areas like Vietnam and the Middle East, places the US has wrecked through wars of aggression. Others, like many from Central America, have fled a region the US has contributed to destroying by enabling of genocidal dictatorships.
The continents the Europeans began to settle after 1492 were occupied by millions of Native Americans, “Indians,” with a history of diverse cultures and languages going back at least 30,000 years. To generalize, the French who settled Canada tended to tolerate the Indians, the men often marrying native women. In the regions that became the US and were initially settled mainly by people from the British Isles, the Indians were largely subjected to campaigns of extermination, lasting into the 20th century. In Central and South America, the Spanish and Portuguese enslaved the Indians or drove them to the bottom of their caste system. Today in Latin America, some nations have a much more prominent native heritage and culture than others. Compare, for instance, Mexico with Argentina.
The various regions of European America began as colonies of the European powers, mainly Spain, France, and England. Starting in 1619, the colonists began to import black Africans as slaves to work the plantations in the American South, the Caribbean, and Portuguese Brazil. The slave trade earned fortunes for European and American merchants and financiers. The slave culture was founded on greed and terrorism and created a burden of guilt and oppression that has never been truly and honestly redeemed, especially in the US.
By the mid-18th century, the British colonies on the Eastern Seaboard had grown in population and prosperity to the point of demanding and achieving independence from the British Crown. Borrowing ideas from the European enlightenment, the colonies formed a republic that retained considerable power for the constituent states. The US Constitution vested much power with the landowning oligarchs and retained the institution of slavery at a time when it was on the way to being abolished within the British Empire. People of a more democratic bent were able to secure a Bill of Rights guaranteeing certain individual freedoms against the power of the central government. Again, slaves were not included. Another American innovation was to establish a large and growing free trade area, theoretically unlimited in territorial extent.
At a time when the British were moving toward greater accommodation with the Indians of North America, the Revolutionary War and its aftermath freed the US government and the constituent states to step up their extermination campaigns. During that war, for instance, Washington waged a campaign of genocide against the Iroquois who were allied with Britain.
In 1812, the US fought a second war against Britain, but failed in its attempt to conquer Canada. Allied with the British were the Indians of the Ohio Valley. Tecumseh, the Shawnee war chief, is still honored in Canada as one who was instrumental in keeping Canada free from a US takeover.
By the 1830s, Indians and their tribes had been banished from all lands east of the Mississippi River, except the Florida Everglades. In the West, the Indians were herded onto reservations, though by the late 19th century, the government was trying to abolish even these refuges of historic native culture. A place where the Indians escaped the worst of US oppression was western Montana, where the large Flathead and Blackfeet Reservations are located. Another was the Navaho lands of the Four Corners.
From the 1790s to the Civil War, the US developed as two largely distinct regions—the South, with its slaveholding states, and the free labor states of the North. The North was on its way to becoming an industrial powerhouse, while the South lived off plantation agriculture, particularly tobacco and cotton.
I want to point out as well that I do not consider the US to be a “Christian” nation. The inclusion of a provision in Article One of the Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom of religion was put there for a purpose. Over the course of US history, the country has been home to every religion under the sun. Christianity, of course, has played a large role, but it has been a Christianity of a multitude of denominations and persuasions that change constantly and have often been hostile to each other. Native American religions have been practiced without ceasing and are respected increasingly across the nation. Judaism has gained a strong foothold in American society, as has Islam. Though fewer in number, followers of the Asian religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Taoism, and others have inspired many and are practiced freely. We also have multiple brands of paganism, spiritualism, and many other “isms.” Some people consider yoga to be their religion, and millions of people refer to themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Millions more profess no spirituality or religion at all. But all have been given life by the same God, and all are free under the US Constitution to follow their inclinations as they wish, as long as they respect the freedom of others. In saying this I want to be clear that while I respect all religions, what I am writing is not biased toward or against any.
I consider the followers of any path to be equally entitled to the rights and responsibilities of lawfully-acquired American citizenship. But no one who is not a citizen has an entitlement to become one—that is up to the laws made by Congress. But everyone here is, or should be, equal under the law. Unfortunately, it is the US government that often considers itself above the law. And the application of the law differs widely for people of different social and economic strata.
Money the Mint, and Paper Notes
The question of the US money supply was of increasing concern during the formative years of the nation. Coinage of foreign nations circulated, both before and after independence, and barter was widespread, particularly in agricultural commodities. The first US Mint was established in Philadelphia in 1792. Individuals possessing gold or silver could take it to the Mint to be stamped into coins. Congress established a value ratio between gold and silver of 35:1.
The scarcity of these metals obviously limited the quantity of coins in circulation and made mining for gold and silver a lucrative occupation, where fortunes could be made overnight. With the discovery of gold in the West, particularly in California in 1848, the amount of circulating coinage skyrocketed. The same thing happened with the mining of gold in the Yukon and elsewhere in the world during the 19th century, when the mining of precious metals became more commercialized.
Obviously, a scarcity of money in a developing economy limits commerce, to the point of economic crisis as populations grow and industry advances. An apparent solution to the shortage of ready money has always been printed paper. During colonial times, money was issued by brokers for hogsheads of tobacco and by state agencies, such as the Pennsylvania Land Bank, where loans were made using real estate as collateral.
Paper notes of credit had long been in use in the western world to support trade. Throughout history, including at times in our own day, merchants or manufacturers also paid their obligations in “scrip,” a type of paper note redeemable in goods or services at the issuing business location. Scrip could circulate within a community and be bought and sold as a commodity, either at face value or a discount.
Fractional Reserve Banking
But fractional reserve banking was something much different. The practice had been institutionalized in Europe going back to the late Middle Ages by allowing a broker or bank to issue paper promissory notes in excess of the amount of gold or silver held as deposits from the broker or bank’s customers. The money supply could thereby be multiplied many times over the original value. Such multiplication could easily lead to inflation or default by whomever was unlucky enough to hold the notes when a crash came.
Despite these disadvantages, over time, fractional reserve banking came to dominate the western world. Some even say it allowed the West eventually to conquer the entire globe. The practice allowed the purchasing power of money to far exceed its tangible backing; i.e., its real value. True, the money was usually redeemable in gold, or possibly silver, on the part of the issuing bank, which was fine as long as all the holders of paper did not show up at the same time seeking redemption. Such a “run” on a bank would result in bankruptcy and collapse. The bankers could even be prosecuted under the law, sometimes even put to death.
The fact that money “created out of thin air” was often made “legal tender” by government decree, combined with charges levied by a bank through interest charged as “rent”, made it easy for sober-minded people to declare it to be a thing of the devil. But eventually the financial system of fractional reserve banking became the basis of all economic relationships in the US and all other countries. This was because it was the easiest way for the monetary system to keep up with economic growth while delivering profits to the system’s controllers and the politicians whose legislation they needed to enforce the obligations of their debtors.
The First and Second Banks of the United States
National banking appeared in America during the Revolutionary War but made its debut as a federal institution with the chartering by Congress of the First Bank of the United States in 1791. The Bank was the brainchild of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and immediately became the most powerful institution of the new nation. The Bank got its operating capital by the selling of shares to both domestic and foreign investors and by serving as a depository for customs duties and excise taxes collected by the new federal government. So the bank was from the start a profit-making instrument for the capitalistic class.
It was how and to whom the Bank lent money that made it an immediate source of controversy and a potential source of corruption. The Bank could lend money for business and trade but could also lend it to the government by the purchase of federal bonds. This was the introduction of deficit financing, which had already been practiced by the Continental Congress through the sale of war bonds during the Revolution.
Government deficit financing meant that in order to stay afloat, the government had to repay its debt either through economic growth in the tax base or through inflation. The growth imperative was fine as long as the nation’s population, trade, and industry were growing. But any slowdown, particularly at times of recession or depression, could quickly become a crisis, or even a catastrophe. If multiple nations ran their governments on the basis of deficit financing, competition would be inevitable, almost always leading to war. This was a root cause of the constant internecine wars among the nations of Europe.
With the First Bank of the United States, the US was now drawn into this system. The system also made more developed nations predators with respect to less developed parts of the world. The race for colonies had been ongoing for over 250 years when the US became independent.
The race would continue with a vengeance to the present day, though nowadays nations are seeking economic colonies rather than outright ownership of whole nations. Thus at a time when the colonies of Europe began to seek political independence, they still were suppressed and fought over as economic dependencies. Major international institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, also have, as one of their purposes, maintaining a neocolonial system through lending and debt. Neocolonialism is also maintained through ownership of a nation’s resources by the banks, corporations, and equity firms of more powerful nations.
The US Constitution did not contain a provision for the First Bank of the United States or for drawing the US into the European system of banking and finance. But Thomas Jefferson and his supporters saw the danger. The opposition of Jefferson to the Bank split the nation into rival political parties, a divide that continues to this day, though the origin of the split is forgotten. Hamilton became the leader of the Federalists, with Jefferson the head of the Democratic-Republicans. Jefferson and his party saw the Bank as based on the fundamentally dubious principle of creating money out of thin air and lending it to favored clients at potentially ruinous compound interest. It was usury writ large—usury the medieval church in Roman Catholic Europe had banned on Biblical principles before abandoning those principles during the Renaissance. Hamilton now confided to the British ambassador that he saw the Bank as the key to a future American “empire”, much as the Bank of England had become for Great Britain.
The US population and its political representatives, at least among Jefferson’s followers and successors, were deeply skeptical of the power of central banking. Too often people had seen the power of banks in putting merchants and farmers into debt, then seizing their property through foreclosure for pennies on the dollar. The First Bank of the United States lasted for twenty years, but its charter was not renewed. Its successor was the Second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816. This Bank collapsed in 1833, when President Andrew Jackson withdrew federal deposits. Jackson said, “Either I will kill the bank, or the bank will kill me.” There was no more central national banking in the US until the Federal Reserve System was established by Congress in 1913.
Growth of Private Banking
Private banking can operate without a central bank simply on the basis of business charters. Such banking began to flourish in the pre-Civil War era through a vast array of individual banks chartered primarily by state governments that one day came to be known collectively, and derisively, as “Wildcat Banks.” But these were essential to commerce. Some of these banks were actually owned and operated by the states, though most were locally chartered to serve individual cities, towns, and farming regions. They were usually capitalized by local merchants and operated on a fractional reserve basis. They were required to redeem the paper money they issued in gold or silver, called specie. Sometimes rival banks would organize runs in an attempt to put each other out of business by arranging that holders of paper notes present them en masse for redemption. Overall, the success of the system was encouraged by the fact that only by investing in bona fide productive enterprise could the banks stay in business. Even so, loose lending practices, financial uncertainties, runs, and even bad weather could lead to bank failures and panics.
But the system served its intended purpose of a circulating paper currency, though by the time of the Civil War, centralization and consolidation of banking was well underway. Major banking centers grew up in locations where commerce and industry contributed to the capitalization of banks on a scale unknown in earlier times. The major banking centers were New York, Boston, and Philadelphia on the East Coast, and later, Chicago in the Midwest and San Francisco in the West. Over time, every American city that grew into a focal point of trade and manufacturing also became a banking center. Another source of circulating currency, though on a larger scale, was certificates in joint stock companies, where value was established by stock market quotations. Another was the aforementioned scrip.
The Mexican War
We will return to matters of banking frequently as our narrative continues. Returning to the timeline, we have now reached the Mexican War, when in 1846 the US Congress declared war against our southern neighbor. Texas had already been settled by white Americans, declared itself an independent republic, then was annexed by Congress for the US. By means of this war the US acquired what is today Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and much of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. The cause of the war was straightforward. The Americans had begun to move into the region. They liked what they saw and took it, and Mexico was too weak to defend it. Much of the land was sparsely occupied except by age-old Native American cultures and some Hispanics, especially along the Texas border, in central New Mexico, and along the California coast. Texas became the largest in area of the US slave states. The Mexican War was a big step along the lines of Alexander Hamilton’s dream of an American empire based on trade and conquest.
The American Civil War
Then came the American Civil War. Many of the officers of the Civil War gained their field experience by fighting Mexicans a little over a decade earlier. But it’s incredible the extent to which the role of the South in the Civil War has become romanticized. If you visit a place like the Antietam Battlefield, where over 20,000 young men shot each other in a single day, you are brought back to earth a little.
The South was a vast agricultural region, perpetually in debt to New York bankers. The Southerners’ lifestyle was based on capital consisting almost entirely of land and slaves. The North was becoming a dynamic manufacturing powerhouse that lacked sufficient purchasing power to realize its potential. Its immediate challenge in 1861 was financing the war. It did this by raising taxes, including a federal income tax, increasing industrial output by massively contracting for war materiel, and issuing Greenbacks from the US Treasury. This was paper money, redeemable in gold, paid directly to troops and suppliers, that remained in circulation into the 20th century. During the Civil War, Congress utilized Greenbacks in lieu of borrowing at high interest rates from the same New York banks that held the South in bondage.
The Civil War lasted from 1861-1865, with the South crushed in a war of attrition. The National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 established a loose network of national banks that were authorized to issue currency in the form of national bank notes. State and local banks continued to operate on a limited basis. The popularity of the Civil War-era Greenbacks led to the formation of a Greenback Party that was able to nominate candidates for the presidency before merging with the newly-founded Populist Party. But political power in the US was moving inexorably in the direction of the New York banks. These banks became heavily involved in politics but tended to favor the Republicans, which had always been the party of big business interests.
Population Expansion
After the Civil War, the US population soared with new immigrants pouring in from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and Russia, including large Jewish populations settling in New York City. US farmland from the Ohio River valley to the Rocky Mountains was filling up, while the US cavalry terrorized and decimated the Plains Indian tribes. Particularly brutal was the slaughter of millions of buffalo to deprive the Indians of their chief staple. Passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 broke up the Indian reservations into individual allotments to be held “in trust” by the federal government, which often leased the land and mineral rights to white ranchers and miners at fire sale prices. In the South, the freed blacks gradually began to establish their own institutions for education and religious training and created an artisan and servant class in the segregated southern towns and cities. They also began to filter north to Chicago and New York, where they settled in what became urban ghettoes, though they were able to build a rich ethnic culture.
Rothschild Influence
Deeply embedded in the New York banking structure were figures connected with the European Rothschild family. The Rothschilds dominated the world of big finance in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria. In the US, President Andrew Jackson, despite his opposition to the Second Bank of the United States, became a personal client of the Rothschilds. In 1837, a banker named August Schönberg arrived in the US to represent Rothschild interests. Schönberg changed his name to August Belmont, and soon the Rothschilds became the European financial agents of the US government. Over the next several decades, Belmont spearheaded the Rothschild infiltration of every aspect of American society, including politics. While acting as one of the principal power brokers of the Democratic Party, Belmont was influential in preventing the European powers from supporting the Confederacy.
Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table
In Great Britain, the Rothschilds became the principal financial support for Cecil Rhodes’ diamond mining enterprise in South Africa and his founding of the Round Table. Rhodes (1853-1902) had already secured his fortune in South Africa by the time the Boer War started, during which Britain pioneered the creation of concentration camps as holding pens for captive Dutch settlers. The Boer War also gave Winston Churchill his start in public life as a journalist. The result of the war was the creation of the British colony of the Union of South Africa. Social life was based on apartheid between the white rulers and the native black population.
The Round Table, with Nathaniel Rothschild a key member, became the leader in promoting the extension and power of the British Empire. Rhodes wrote in his Confession of Faith in 1877:
“I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence. Look again at the extra employment [i.e., in England] a new country added to our dominions gives.”
Rhodes continued: “Why should we not form a secret society with but one object: the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule for the recovery of the United States [and] for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire.”
(https://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Rhodes-Confession.htm
For those who believe the Freemasons are behind every conspiracy known to man, it should be noted that Rhodes had only contempt for the Freemasons. He derided them for their obsession with rites and rituals, and for their many spiritual superstitions, in contrast to his own Round Table, which was going about the real business of the rich men’s world. As far as we can tell, Rhodes’ only interests, and presumably those of his Rothschild banker friends as well, were money and power.
In his will, of which Nathaniel Rothschild was executor, Rhodes specified again his aim of the “recovery” of the US as part of the Empire. Later, the Round Table gave way to “Milner’s Kindergarten” working under British politician Alfred, Lord Milner. This clique, described in Carroll Quigley’s classic The Anglo-American Establishment, guided British imperial policy into the 1960s, and some say, to this day. True to Cecil Rhodes’ injunction, the clique has always operated in the utmost secrecy, with direct ties to the British Privy Council, headed by the reigning monarch.
One of the projects of the Round Table was the eventual creation of the nation of Israel, following on the Balfour Declaration of 1917, addressed to the Second Baron Rothschild—Lionel, son of Nathaniel—announcing support for the founding of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Rhodes’ fortune also became the basis for the Rhodes Scholarships, where promising youth, including future US president Bill Clinton, were to be indoctrinated in the principles of Anglo-American imperialism.
The Banking Trust and the Federal Reserve
Back in the US, the New York banks joined with the railroads and the industrial enterprises of individuals like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, to dominate the exploding wealth and power of the growing nation. By the early 1900s, banking had become concentrated in what was called the Banking Trust, headed by J.P. Morgan. Through the Rothschilds and other New York banking dynasties, including the Schiffs, the world of American banking blended seamlessly with that of other major European banking houses. For centuries, a primary source of banking revenue for the financial industry had been borrowing by European governments to finance their constant wars and by European aristocrats seeking to support their luxurious lifestyles. So it was to be in America. It was the Gilded Age, the era of the Robber Barons. In many ways, at least in America and Britain, that era has never ended.
World War I came to Europe in 1917, then called the “Great War.” Hardly by coincidence, in 1913 the New York Banking Trust had succeeded in pushing through Congress the legislation that create the Federal Reserve System. The architect of the system was a banker from Hamburg Germany, a Rothschild protégé named Paul Warburg. Like the European central banks, the Federal Reserve would be owned by its member private banks but would act as the “fiscal agent” for the central government. It would manage government revenues held on deposit, buy and sell government bonds, and purchase bonds in its own right if necessary. Government debt would be held as a Federal Reserve asset and would form part of the basis for fractional reserve lending by member banks which would then lend at higher interest rates to private enterprise, to state and local governments, and to foreign businesses and governments.
It was fractional reserve lending at its best. Using only a minimal initial investment of your own money, you would become rich beyond imagining by lending money created as ledger entries—“out of thin air”—to anyone willing to sign a note promising repayment with interest.
Soon after the Federal Reserve was created, the Sixteenth Amendment to the constitution was passed authorizing a federal income tax, which was seen as a necessity to pay for the loans the Federal Reserve and private investors would be making to the US government to fight its wars. The bankers also succeeded in buying influence in many of the major US newspapers to assure that the necessary propaganda would appear in print in support of the US’s entering World War I on the side of Great Britain. The US entered the war soon after President Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on a campaign slogan that, “He kept us out of war”. In other words, he lied.
War and the Bankers
US entrance into World War I fulfilled Cecil Rhodes’ dream of “recovering” the US for the British Empire. The dream was financed by money provided or created by the Rothschilds, the Morgans, and now the Rockefellers, the latter having joined the financier elite through crushing their competition in creating the Standard Oil conglomeration. It was done through the fractional reserve banking system that now controlled Britain and all of Europe, as well as America. Along the way, Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb, and Co., New York, had enough cash on hand, along with other bankers, to finance the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, along with the international Zionist movement that eventually led to the creation of Israel.
The Bolshevik Revolution, the Zionist movement, and the international banking conglomerates of the early 20th century, including the Federal Reserve, were deeply connected and involved many of the same people and business interests.
Besides gaining control of US print media, the bankers, now with the Rockefellers a key presence, assured a constant stream of pro-British and pro-war propaganda by setting up the Council on Foreign Relations, headquartered in New York, in imitation of the British Royal Institute of International Affairs. Following World War I, further entanglement in European political matters was deeply unpopular among the American electorate, causing the Senate to reject the Treaty of Versailles that ended the war on heavily punitive terms against Germany, as well as to reject US membership in the League of Nations. Such “isolationist” attitudes continued until World War II, even through the financial crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. But even greater changes on the world scene were coming.
The British Geopolitical Objective
But what was the grand geopolitical objective of the globalist controllers who at this time were concentrated among the British aristocracy, were working closely with Round Table politicians, with whom the Rothschilds and other nouveau riche bankers were now tightly integrated, and to whom the German-derived royal house of Britain, including Queen Victoria herself, were subservient? (The Rothschilds even financed Prince Albert’s massive construction project at Balmoral Castle.) Put concisely, the objective was the long-standing British policy of opposing by force of arms whichever nation happened to be the one which, at any given moment, was attempting to establish Continental European hegemony. But there were deeper motives.
This requires a digression. It also requires some digging, but it is possible to ascertain the first notions of English global conquest in the age of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). During her reign, England was engaged in a fight for its life with Spain, which attacked with the famous Armada in 1588 that was destroyed by English warships and privateers, and by bad weather.
The idea of England as the dominant world power was originally the brainchild of Elizabethan occultist and courtier John Dee. Dee was likely the model for the figure of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well as that of Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play of the same name. Much has been published about John Dee in recent years. He was an alchemist who believed that if he could conjure enough gold from base metals, England’s worldly power would be assured. From the time of Dee forward, the figure of Faust—the learned man who sold his soul to the devil for earthly pleasure, power, and profit—would be an archetypal theme in Western literature. See particularly the treatments by Goethe and by 20th century German author Thomas Mann. True to the myth, Dee himself came to a bad end. But his dreams lived on.
British Continental Wars
But gold was the thing, and English ships attacked Spain’s gold-laden galleons returning from the New World. After the Armada was defeated, England combined in coalitions to take down the Hapsburg family that ruled Spain, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire. But as Spain declined, France arose, particularly under the Sun King, Louis XIV (1638-1715). Again, England—by now Great Britain, once its hold on the British Isles had been consolidated—worked through coalitions to take down its new Continental rival. Britain’s leading commander in the anti-French coalitions was the celebrated John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, ancestor of Winston Churchill. A key event in Britain’s defeat of France was the Seven Year’s War (1756-1763), when it tore from France’s hands that nation’s North American and East Indian possessions and set the stage for bankruptcy of the French monarchy, followed by the French Revolution.
Britain’s war against France continued through the reign of Napoleon, until British general Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in an alliance with Prussia. The hand of the Rothschilds was evident. From The Rothschild Archive: “The Rothschild brothers rose to prominence in European finance thanks in large part to their skill in providing funds to the Duke of Wellington on campaign against Napoleon, culminating in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.” The Rothschilds were also tightly bonded with British politicians such as Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) and Randolph Churchill, (1849-1895).
The Rothschild Archive boasts: “The father of Winston Churchill was an intimate of the Rothschild family. He formed a close association with Nathaniel, 1st Lord Rothschild, on whose behalf he reported on the development of the mining industry in South Africa. Churchill was a frequent guest at Rothschild houses. The Rothschilds made extensive loans to Churchill.”
With Spain and France now slivers of their former selves, Britain, with its vast maritime empire and Napoleon now removed, sat securely astride the world through the rest of the 19th century. Cecil Rhodes and his Round Table, with Rothschild support, intended to keep it there.
But in 1871, a new would-be rival had burst on the scene at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. The humiliation of France was complete when the German Empire was declared at Versailles in France, with Wilhelm I being named emperor and Otto von Bismarck at his side as Reichchancellor. Against Bismarck’s advice of caution, and after his removal in 1890, Germany, behind the machinations of Admiral Tirpitz, had begun to build an ocean-going fleet aimed at challenging Britain’s domination of the high seas. It was a fatal error by the Reich. Along with France and Russia, Britain had formed the Triple Entente, threatening Germany with a two-front war, and soon World War I was on.
The carnage of World War I was beyond imagining. As it became clear that Britain, France, and Russia, which was knocked out of the war in 1917, could not defeat Germany on their own, Britain turned to the US. The entrance of the US into the war in 1917 proved decisive, though it would take a second world war to put Germany down for good. The heavy lifting in World War II was done by the Soviet Union through its march eastward to Berlin after Germany’s failed invasion in Operation Barbarossa. The war would cost the Soviet Union over 25 million lives. It would now be the Soviet Union and its successor the Russian Federation that would become the new enemy de jour of the Anglo-American alliance that inherited Britain’s age-old drive for global control. Again, the US would be there to help.
The Roaring Twenties and the Growth of Organized Crime
We now return to the thread of the historical narrative with the conclusion of World War I and the start of the Roaring Twenties. The US, whose manpower and money had defeated Germany on the Western Front in 1917-1918, now stood at the top of the world, or at least close to it. The British Empire had been rescued, and, once the post-war Spanish Flu pandemic faded, the US and Britain set off together to enjoy themselves.
In America, the frolics produced enough surplus cash to fuel a drastic rise in organized crime. Until around 1900, the US was largely a law-abiding society, though the growing cities obviously had their underworlds of petty crime and political corruption. True, there were crimes on a larger scale, if you count such events as lynchings in the South of former black slaves, genocide by the US cavalry against the Plains Indians, the attempts by the banking industry to take over US family farming through mortgages and foreclosures, the violent suppression of labor unrest by industrial concerns, the corrupt wealth of the railroads garnered by sales of land along rights-of-way granted by congressional legislation, and the strong-armed formation of monopolies by such entities as the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil Company.
But the violence of organized criminal gangs was a relatively new feature on the urban landscape. Such violence took particularly virulent forms in neighborhoods settled by Italian immigrants from Sicily and southern Italy and by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia. These gangs typically derived their income from protection and shake-down rackets, safeguarded by payoffs to judges, police, and politicians. The gangs were particularly concentrated in Manhattan, but spread to other large American cities, especially Detroit, Chicago, and later, Los Angeles and Miami. Chinese and other ethic gangsterism was also prevalent in San Francisco and elsewhere. In Boston, it was Irish gangs that dominated.
Prohibition and Organized Crime
As described in the classic book by Stephen Fox, Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America, the event that caused organized crime to explode and spread its tentacles across the entirety of the US in cities and towns of every size and description, was the implementation of Prohibition from 1920-1933. This failed attempt to outlaw alcoholic beverages resulted in the creation of vast fortunes from criminal enterprise and turned a majority of the US population into scofflaws. Among the bootlegging fortunes was that of Joseph Kennedy of Boston, the father of future President John F. Kennedy.
Prohibition was among the worst public policy failures of modern history. The gangsters who controlled the alcohol trade combined it with profiteering in every other imaginable vice, including gambling, prostitution, extortion, bribery, human trafficking, etc., and later illicit drugs. Alcoholism became worse than ever. The result of all this was a profound decline in private and public morality among the entire US population, with effects that persist today.
Which brings us back to the Roaring Twenties, vividly characterized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Despite the fun everyone was having, though Gatsby himself was shot to death in a swimming pool, there was the ever-present lack of money to keep up with explosive economic growth and all the new consumer industries.
Not to worry though. Bank lending by the financial magnates of New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, and their satellites kept the world humming with manufacturing, trade, and entertainment, even as the rest of the world, consisting largely of Europe’s colonies and financial dependencies, above all those of Great Britain, labored to provide the world’s money masters with an abundance of cheap labor, along with raw materials and markets for Europe and America’s industrial output.
The Stock Market Crash
Lending of money also extended to huge amounts of purchases “on margin” for stock market speculation, pushing the paper wealth of the upper and middle classes into the stratosphere. Bank lending today follows a similar trajectory with the vast amount of lending for buying and selling of whole industries, along with hedge funds and derivatives piled one on top of another in an orgy of financial abuse. The bubble economy, always the deformed offspring of fractional reserve banking, was already well-advanced by the 1920s. The bubble burst in 1929 with the crash of the New York stock market, and the Great Depression was underway. Working people around the world, even in the developed nations of Western Europe and America, were now on the verge of starvation as industrial production went down the drain when its customers went broke.
But in the Soviet Union, the communist economy seemed at least to be surviving. State planning and control, while imperfect, at least was able to feed and house the masses. Soviet industry, largely capitalized during the 1920s by Western banks, kept humming. During the 1930s the Soviet system built a huge industrial machine that Germany would run into head-on when Hitler launched his invasion against it in 1941.
The New Deal
Revolution now began to stir in the US and Europe, fueling both right- and left-wing political movements. In the US, President Franklin Roosevelt answered with the New Deal, which was based largely on sequestering sufficient purchasing power from the banks and the upper classes to fund a host of social programs, including social security, industrial and infrastructure reconstruction, safeguarding of bank deposits, and government-run employment programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. Like it or not, the Roosevelt administration had numerous bona-fide communists working in its midst, with many sympathetic toward the Soviet Union. The New Deal created the roots of the modern welfare state, and also lay the groundwork for the US-British-Soviet alliance against Germany in World War II.
Obviously, American bankers and capitalists were none too pleased with the direction Roosevelt had taken. He was viewed as a “traitor to his class,” although today he is credited with saving capitalism. Some even tried to persuade Marine General Smedley Butler to overthrow Roosevelt in a right-wing coup, but the man who coined the phrase, “War is a racket”, refused to go along.
However, the bankers and their industrialist friends did succeed in funneling large amounts of capital into Germany to support the war machine of the rising star Adolph Hitler, whom they saw as their favored darling in crushing the Soviet Union and ending the communist menace on the world stage once and for all. This was the same banking class that had financed the rise of communism in Russia in the first place. Banks make money no matter what, and it’s always profitable to lend money to both sides in a war in which millions of people die.
Life During the Great Depression
During the 1930s in America, people largely stayed at home. Poverty was rife. Desperation produced internal migration, such as from the Midwest Dustbowl to the migrant worker camps of California. There, plantation labor had made a comeback. There was also continued migration of blacks from the South into northern cities. Society saw strict racial segregation and a virtual caste system everywhere. Cultural life at the upper levels was dominated by the WASPs, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Industrialization and decline of family subsistence farming saw the growth of the urban working class, with political power starting to tilt in their direction with the strengthening of labor unions that were allied with the Democratic Party. The coalition Roosevelt had built with the New Deal and labor support elected him to the presidency four times. Organized crime, which had begun to infiltrate organized labor, also contributed to Roosevelt’s power base.
In the West, Native American cultures were stirring to life, though the Indians remained the wards of the federal government with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its stringent paternalism. The policy of destroying the Indian reservations had failed. Some Indians became independent farmers and ranchers, and many migrated to cities in the West and Midwest, but the reservations began to move toward a degree of self-government after passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. The act halted the allotment of tribal communal lands to individual Indians and white homesteaders and allowed the return of surplus lands to the tribes to start. It also encouraged written constitutions and charters giving Indians the power to manage their internal affairs.
Word War II and the British Plan
Meanwhile, the New Deal was faltering, as economic recovery slowed in the late 1930s. Though it has never been proven conclusively that Roosevelt deliberately helped provoke World War II against Germany and Japan in order to rescue the US economy, such calculations were obviously part of the thinking of the time. And the strategy, to the extent it existed, certainly worked.
But we also need to understand that World War II was really just another phase of the larger European conflagration whereby Great Britain saw as its divinely-sanctioned mission to assure world domination by taking down the leading Continental power that was Germany, though the Soviet Union with its vast resources and technologically capable population was waiting in the wings. Thus World Wars I and II have been aptly characterized as European civil wars.
Again, we can see that the plan concocted by Cecil Rhodes and his Round Table, rooted in John Dee’s alchemical desires, had clearly succeeded in recovering the US for the British Empire, though by now there was a growing question about whether Britain or the US was actually in charge. Stepping into the confusion with guns blazing was Winston Churchill, the Man of the Hour, with his exalted last name, his great martial forebears, his American mother, and his profound linkage with the Rothschild financial galaxy.
Churchill’s concept of the imperial destiny of the “English-Speaking Peoples” proved the inspiration that was needed, though the best he could say of the Americans was to refer to them as being “numerous and talkative.” He also made note of his observation that by studying the American Civil War, he could see that the male citizens of the US would be more than willing to sacrifice their lives by the millions for a worthy cause. This gave him a degree of confidence as he contemplated the coming conflagration of World War II.
American Decision for Global Military Domination
But back on the American side of “the Pond”, decision-making took a slightly different turn. It’s a little-known fact that even before the US entered the war on the side of Great Britain, a decision had been made at America’s highest official circles that the long-term objective of the US was to become the world’s dominant military power, not as a partner of Britain, but in its own right. Churchill may or may not have known it, but the British Empire was to be kaput. In the long run, the only area of common life where the British have retained their supremacy may be in such BBC television productions as Upstairs, Downstairs,
All Creatures Great and Small, and Downton Abbey.
The hard-to-believe fact of planned American global military domination has been documented in extensive detail in an impeccably scholarly book published in 2020, Tomorrow the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy by Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace.
Wertheim relates that as war clouds began to gather over Europe in the late 1930s, consultations were taking place within the Roosevelt White House, the US State Department, and the War Department—all still minuscule by today’s standard of bloated executive bureaucracies and intelligence agencies—on what should be the policy of the US once war in Europe broke out. While Germany and the Soviet Union divided and devoured Poland in September 1939, causing Britain and France to declare war on Germany—though not on the Soviets—the debate within the US became more urgent. Then when the Germans occupied Denmark and Norway, followed by its blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France in 1940, the US faced two contingencies. Either Britain would also be defeated, leaving all Europe in German hands—once again, except for the Soviet Union—or Britain would hold out until the German victories could be rolled back. Meanwhile, in the Far East, Japan had invaded China following its earlier conquest of Manchuria in the 1930s.
Whether Britain would stand or fall, it was obviously an excellent opportunity for the US. It was President Calvin Coolidge who had said in 1925 that, “The business of America is business,” and it was Roosevelt’s implementation of the Lend-Lease Act, making the US the “arsenal of democracy,” that finally ended the Depression and set America off on a staggering period of economic prosperity lasting until the 1960s. Still, the government’s assumption was that mainland Europe was going to be controlled by the two authoritarian states of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, at least in the near term. So where would the US draw its line in the sand that it would defend at all costs? The consensus was forming that the US would be able to secure control of the Western Hemisphere, but possibly not much else.
The debate was fierce, with a more radical party emerging which believed that long-term US economic growth could not be assured unless the goal were established for total global military domination. This required three things: 1) Great Britain must be saved.; 2) Germany and its principal allies; namely, Italy, and soon, Japan, had to be defeated; and 3) At some time in the future, the Soviet Union also would have to be driven back or even conquered. But obviously, it couldn’t all be done at once.
Council on Foreign Relations Steps In and Takes Control
The studies that were completed and delivered to President Roosevelt and the State and War Departments were carried out by the same Council on Foreign Relations that was established in New York City following World War I with funds supplied by John D. Rockefeller. By now, the Rockefeller dynasty was under the control of the founder’s son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., probably the richest man in the world. The Rockefellers had been intimately involved, personally and by marriage, with the growth of the US banking industry after the creation of the Federal Reserve, with David Rockefeller, one of John D. Jr.’s sons, eventually becoming head of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the figure at the center of the global financial spider’s web until his death at the age of 101 in 2017.
The Council on Foreign Relations was thus an instrument of the Rockefellers’ global ambitions and was intimately linked with the parallel world of imperial and financial interests within Great Britain. These were the people who lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt to adopt policies in the prosecution of World War II that would not only defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan, but that would also set the stage for long-term war against the Soviet Union, and later Russia, and that would eventually transform the US into a gigantic engine of multi-spectrum warfare against any country that would stand in its way.
Once policies of this scope are created, entire bureaucracies, industries, careers, financial investments, and other vested interests are built around them. They become staples of the news media, history books, and academic departments. They are passed on by inheritance from one generation to the next. They are viewed as self-evident, inevitable, “the way things are.” They are almost impossible to change—except by blunt trauma from outside.
It should also be noted that the Anglo-American globalist plan rests on the assumption that economic prosperity rests on military control. Perhaps it seemed that way in the late 1930s and early 1940s when three totalitarian states—Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—seemed on the march to secure vast areas of the world for their own territorial ambitions. For these would-be empires, military conquest certainly seemed to be preludes to their own economic well-being at the expense of the nations they were trying to conquer. It was really age-old European colonialism write large.
But was this the only path to economic success? There had been other examples in history of nations gaining wealth without having to force anyone to bend to their will. An example was the European medieval and Renaissance city-states, such as Florence in Italy, the German cities of the Hanseatic League, or Bruges, Ypres, and other cities of the Low Countries. For these, the path to prosperity came through skill, hard work, development of natural resources, good will, and, sometimes, luck.
Couldn’t a similar path be sought and followed by the modern nations of the 20th century? Was anyone looking for an international system where nations could relate to each other through negotiation, peaceful competition, and mutual respect? The answer is, yes, there were responsible people in all the developing nations looking for such a path. For instance, there were figures in Europe, such as a German named Otto Strasser, looking for a way to create a European Union founded on cooperation among national economies rather than blood hatred and a drive to war. But these voices were drowned out.
After the carnage of World War II, these voices began to speak again. One result was the creation of the United Nations with the noble goal of outlawing wars of aggression. But today, in 2022, the hounds of war are howling again, with the US howling the loudest.
Promise of Perpetual War
And back in the early 1940s, the outlook also was for perpetual war, now and forever, because there would always be dissenters somewhere in the world who would rise up in rebellion, begging to be crushed by US/Rockefeller hegemony, with the UK now reduced to tagging along. Key to this world of power was the control of oil, the substance that would drive the modern world. And permeating it all was that medieval relic, the core practice of fractional reserve banking, through which the entire world would be in debt to the big American banks.
Indeed, the monetary system of the world would itself become the only means by which money could enter into circulation as purchasing power for anything anyone wanted to buy, anywhere on the globe. Every action that individuals and nations wanted to take in the world of daily life would depend on money originally lent at interest by a bank and controlled by the banking industry. At the center of the system stood the Federal Reserve, which, unlike its name, was not a government agency at all. Rather it was a corporation owned and operated by its member commercial banks, even though it was headed by a director nominally appointed by the president of the US. The only exception to the bank-controlled money supply was the relatively minuscule amount stamped out by the Mint as coinage.
No matter what, the banks and their owners would receive as “rent” the interest charged on the original loans that brought the money into existence. The growing interest would create a pyramid, a tower of influence and power, reaching to the heavens, guarded by American firepower. This is what is meant by a “rentier” economy. No one would own anything, because the banks and their government agencies could foreclose at any time, either by debt or taxes.
Much later, David Rockefeller put a nice face on it all by writing in his memoirs:
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
World War II
So the US fought World War II, and in the process, became world leaders in killing their fellow human beings, because it was the only way to meet the objectives of total global control established by the bankers who ran government policy. And Britain could do nothing about it. All they could do was watch their empire go down the drain, as India and other former colonial possessions broke away. They struggled to keep hold of their monetary wealth and investments, including the creation of offshore tax havens at various locations in the Caribbean and elsewhere, but it wouldn’t be too many years before the once-mighty globe-straddling British prime minister became an American poodle.
But the Soviet Union was another matter. After the Soviets turned back the German Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and clawed its way across Eastern Europe, then past Hitler’s smoldering bunker in Berlin to the Elbe, the US and Britain stood in a state of profound concern. It was Britain and the US that had perfected airborne terror bombing by obliterating the cities of Germany, and the US alone that wiped out the power of Japan in the Pacific, culminating in the horrific bombing of the Japanese mainland, including the dropping of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But the Anglo-Saxons were facing their biggest challenge yet in what the Soviets were unleashing in Europe, particularly after Roosevelt turned Eastern Europe over to Stalin at Yalta. Roosevelt is still suspected to have been, after all, a communist sympathizer. And the Soviets did not conquer other nations by raining terror from the skies and obliterating civilian along with military lives. Rather they set up compliant communist governments, run by nationalist left-wing parties and politicians, though overseen by Moscow, with the Red Army always in the wings as the enforcer.
The US, British, and Free French Allies had launched their own belated invasions of France and Italy in 1943-1944, and succeeded in meeting the Soviets at the Elbe River boundary that came to divide East from West Germany. But what if Stalin refused to be satisfied and continued to push toward the Atlantic? Just after the war ended, Churchill warned that along the East European boundary of Soviet-controlled states an “Iron Curtain” had fallen. And what about Asia, where the Chinese communists had taken over the vast mainland expanse and threatened to push further into the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asia?
But wasn’t development of nuclear weapons by the US an obvious game changer? Nuclear blackmail by the US against the world became a real possibility. Yet it is a little known fact that in order to assure some degree of balance in world affairs, British intelligence, including operatives connected to the Rothschilds, passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, allowing them to embark on their own parallel path of nuclear weapons research and development, and leading to Soviet possession of the H-bomb by 1955. The Soviets also took the lead in the space race, launching Sputnik I in 1957 and putting the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961.
Bretton Woods
Before the war ended, the US convened an international conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, where the supremacy of the dollar would be established as the basis for post-war international trade and commerce. Bretton Woods was a big step in the direction of American global hegemony.
Wikipedia: “The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into US dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce of fine gold (or 0.88867 gram fine gold per dollar). It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with balance of payments deficits.”
The IMF would become one of the key instruments of international political control from the end of World War II until today. The IMF has lent to dozens of nations around the world, especially those from the Global South with financial problems. Whenever the IMF would encounter a nation seeking help, it would insist on “free market reforms.” Wow, do those words ever have a positive ring!
But what they meant in practice was that the nation involved would have to abandon all of its projects and institutions with a dirigiste orientation; i.e., anything suggesting a central planning approach to economics or priority given to the raising of living standards for its own population. Instead, the IMF required the borrowing nation to allow Western banks and corporation to take over and exploit that nation’s mining, agriculture, and industry. The reason was that the nation had to earn income from selling its products abroad in order to repay IMF loans. Countries under IMF control gradually lost the ability to create and manage a sustainable economy in lieu of subjugation to world market forces and the profit-seeking whims of Western investors.
The Cold War Begins
Soon the Cold War was on, to be prosecuted mainly by the US and UK against the Soviet Union. While decades of fighting in East Asia now loomed, the answer in Europe was the creation of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) as a military bulwark against Soviet expansion. NATO was originally a British brainchild, but it was the US that would dominate. In the war against Germany, Britain had again fulfilled its aim of defeating its predominant Continental rival, now Germany, but due to the massive growth in Soviet power, the post-World War II situation was more of a standoff than a victory. Britain had spent two generations, and much of its wealth and empire, crushing Germany, and now this. So naturally, it was now the US in charge.
The Cold War was a standoff between two systems, as well as two geographic regions. The Soviet Union and what would become its satellites in Eastern Europe were single party states run by communist parties taking direction from Moscow. Their economic systems were based on central planning, with banking and monetary creation subservient to the approved programs of the technocrats directing the economy. The US, Britain, and Western Europe had multiple political parties, roughly divided along the lines of labor vs. capital, though parties calling themselves communist or socialist were either banned or marginalized, sometimes through violence or stringent legalities. Their economies were controlled by central banks oriented to private enterprise and by networked private banks and other lending institutions, with heavy involvement of the financiers who ran the financial markets, the large manufacturing corporations and the service industries. Governments in the West provided minimal regulation, limited social services, the police, and military operations but gave little or no economic direction. Western nations were also much more prone to infestation by organized crime.
Spelled out like this, these differences might be seen as subject to some kind of future reconciliation, but now they were a matter of life or death conflict. The two systems maintained an extremely uneasy truce within the confines of the newly created United Nations, with the Security Council heavily tilted toward the US and its allies until Communist China took the seat of that country in the 1970s with agreement from the West. Occasionally, a Western nation like France or Italy would attempt dirigiste programs like the ownership of automobile industries or public energy industries. Later, privatization would begin to strip even these away from public control. Gradually a globalist system of financial control along the lines envisioned by David Rockefeller came to dominate.
After World War II, the US conducted only a partial military demobilization. By now the Department of War was the Department of Defense, and the Army Air Corps was the US Air Force. The US population that had fought the war at home and abroad was flush with cash, so that consumer spending for houses, cars, and household products soared. The GI Bill sent a generation of young men to college who would never before have had a hope of higher education. But a resumption of armed conflict would soon break out in Korea, pitting the US against the growing Communist bloc. The Soviet Union also sought to extend its influence in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.
President Harry S Truman
The beginning of the Cold War was presided over by President Harry S Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt when the latter died in office on April 12, 1945. Not many individuals in US history had become president with so few qualifications as Truman, especially with momentous events looming that would set the tone of global affairs for such a long-term future.
Truman was the son of one of those enterprising merchant-farmers who made such a powerful contribution to Democratic Party politics in the first half of the 20th century. After serving as a decorated artillery officer in the American Expeditionary Force in the decisive final months of World War I, Truman dabbled in various branches of business in the growing metropolis of Kansas City, Missouri, where he came to the attention of Tom Pendergast. A man who ran the local concrete works, Pendergast’s primary interest was heading the Democratic Party political machine and providing quasi-official cover for local gangsters in the gambling, liquor, and prostitution rackets. Kansas City was known as a wide-open town with big money to be had by well-connected individuals.
Truman had won election as a Kansas City judge, an office that was more like a modern county commissioner than a jurist. His clean-cut looks, personal probity, and willingness to look the other way when bribes and kickbacks were handed out, made his reputation as a “safe” political bet. When Pendergast needed to put up a candidate for US senator in 1934, his first four candidates declined, so Truman was named, ran, was elected, and went to Washington.
Truman was known as “the senator from Pe ndergast.” After the war started, he earned something of a name for himself by heading a Senate committee to investigate shoddy management of war expenditures that got him on the cover of Time. Pendergast eventually went to prison for income tax evasion, and when he died in 1945, Truman loyally attended the funeral, despite raised eyebrows.
As senator, Truman held the predominating view on Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Two days after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he said: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.” This was still several months before the US entered the war. But his remark aptly defined the prevailing allied grand strategy. It also showed where the Soviets stood on the list of targets.
Truman was nominated for the office of vice-president at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in July 1944. Truman was the pick of the party bosses. That was okay with Roosevelt who wanted either Truman or Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who obviously would have been too feisty and overly inclined to think for himself. With Roosevelt known to all as being worn out and close to kicking the bucket, the party wanted a presidential successor who would not get involved in policy decisions until they reached his desk for signature. At the Chicago convention, Chicago mayor and political boss Ed Kelley arranged a massive “spontaneous” rally for Truman on the convention floor. Truman was their man.
What Truman Did
Roosevelt duly passed on, and the measures put in front of Truman by his staff for his signature were epoch-making. In fairness, no individual could have mastered the details of the massively complex programs now being put forth by what would someday be called the “Deep State.” They included:
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the US dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When Roosevelt had died the previous April, Truman had not even known of the existence of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons. On the other side of the world in Moscow, even Stalin had known what was going on.
In a presidential directive of January 22, 1946, Truman created the Central Intelligence Group under the direction of a Director of Central Intelligence. The National Security Act of 1947 changed the name of the group to the Central Intelligence Agency, and in 1952 Truman approved the National Security Agency for special intelligence gathering. The CIA was the outgrowth of the Office of Strategic Services that ran covert operations in Europe during World War II.
The National Security Act of 1947 also authorized “covert action,” which it defined as: “an activity of the US government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the US government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” The act specified that mass propaganda, paramilitary operations, and lethal force could be carried out against anyone deemed a threat.
At the instigation of Britain, Truman signed into law the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 that established the Marshall Plan, named after Secretary of State George C. Marshall. Funding would eventually rise to over $12 billion for the rebuilding of Western Europe. The main beneficiary of the Marshall Plan was West Germany. The plan overrode the demands by some US policy makers who wanted Germany to be turned into a huge but harmless tract of farmland. But the proponents of the Marshall Plan reasoned that the West needed a strong industrialized bulwark against future Soviet expansion.
All these actions led to the Truman Doctrine:
Wikipedia: “The Truman Doctrine is an American foreign policy that originated with the primary goal of containing Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was announced to Congress by President Harry S Truman on March 12, 1947, and further developed on July 4, 1948, when he pledged to contain the communist uprisings in Greece and Turkey. Direct American military force was usually not involved, but Congress appropriated financial aid to support the economies and militaries of Greece and Turkey. More generally, the Truman Doctrine implied American support for other nations thought to be threatened by Soviet communism. The Truman Doctrine became the foundation of American foreign policy, and led, in 1949, to the formation of NATO, a military alliance that still exists. Historians often use Truman’s speech to date the start of the Cold War.”
At midnight on May 14, 1948, Zionist leaders in Palestine proclaimed a new state of Israel. On the same day, President Truman recognized the provisional Jewish government as the de facto authority of the Jewish state. Formal recognition was extended on January 31, 1949.
Truman brought the US into the Korean War in June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, following clashes along the border. North Korea was supported by China and the Soviet Union, while South Korea was supposedly supported by the United Nations, which really meant the United States. Called a “police action” by the US, the war was never declared by Congress and cost the lives of over two million combatants killed, wounded, and missing and two to three million civilians. The fighting ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953, with the original borders between North and South being confirmed.
Eisenhower is Elected but CIA Covert Operations Begin
The Korean War was increasingly unpopular among the US population who were heartily sick of war and rumors of war. Facing certain defeat, Truman had decided not to run for reelection in 1952, so was replaced by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who ran as a Republican, with Richard Nixon of California his running mate. Eisenhower defeated Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson in a landslide.
The vast majority of Americans hoped that peace had come at last. Instead, war went underground, via the CIA.
Opinions differ, but from my point of view the CIA was, and is, the world’s greatest terrorist agency, the source and propagator of some the worst evil on the planet. But it’s a long story. As we move forward in our narrative, the CIA plays a central role in all the major developments from World War II until today, when the world’s central geopolitical event has become the West’s hybrid war against Russia brought on by the CIA-enabled takeover of Ukraine in the 2014 coup and Russia’s special military operation against Ukraine starting in February 2022.
But the CIA acts, at least much of the time, under orders. Its methods are akin to those of the shakedown enforcers and assassins of organized crime with which it can easily be compared and where the personnel carrying out its actions are often connected with the underworld. For just as Mafia “hit men” have bosses who sit in their plush offices giving the orders while being protected by layers of lawyers, corrupt police, and compliant media, so the CIA has its “dons” and “godfathers”. These are mainly the magnates of big banking and high finance. For it is in the world whereby big money is made through fractional reserve lending involving the gigantic financial powerhouses of modern industry that the “Rulers of the Universe” reside. In the US, at the center of the matrix in a nation that fancied itself Christian, lay the Rockefeller empire.
The CIA as the Prime US Institution of Power
As stated, the CIA grew out of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. Wikipedia: “The Office of Strategic Services was the intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces.”
The head of OSS was an American soldier, World War I hero, and elitist lawyer William “Wild Donovan.” Here we should remember that in the US the legal profession often does not exist in order to promote a nation under the rule of law. Rather it exists to assist its clients in getting around the law by any means possible, or at least any means tolerated by the court system if made known.
Wikipedia: “On the suggestion of William Stephenson, the senior British intelligence officer in the western hemisphere, Roosevelt requested that William J. Donovan draft a plan for an intelligence service based on the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Special Operations Executive (SOE). Donovan envisioned a single agency responsible for foreign intelligence and special operations involving commandos, disinformation, partisan and guerrilla activities. After submitting his work, ‘Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information’, he was appointed ‘coordinator of information’ on July 11, 1941, heading the new organization known as the office of the Coordinator of Information (COI).”
As noted above, the CIA, which supplanted the OSS under orders signed by President Truman, had a close affiliation with the British MI6. As a quasi-military organization, a key element of CIA operations from its origins was killing enemies of the state. Because it was in essence a secret military force, covert operations and assassinations became its stock-in-trade.
Wikipedia: “At Camp X, near Whitby, Ontario, an ‘assassination and elimination’ training program was operated by the British Special Operations Executive, assigning exceptional masters in the art of knife-wielding combat, such as William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes, to instruct trainees. Many members of the Office of Strategic Services also were trained there. It was dubbed ‘the school of mayhem and murder’ by George Hunter White who trained at the facility in the 1950s.”
Under the Truman Doctrine, the enemy that was next-in-line after the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II was the Soviet Union and/or any other country perceived as being influenced by the Soviets or moving in the direction of communism or any other brand of anti-US or leftist politics. Again, the overall official objective of the US government, as defined by the Rockefellers’ Council on Foreign Relations prior to World War II, was global military domination. Bear in mind that this had morphed from Cecil Rhodes’ dream of a worldwide British Empire, whose imperative goes back at least to John Dee, the Elizabethan Faust. These connections must always be kept in mind, as they are doctrines that rule US foreign policy to this day, with its vast number of American Fausts sitting in the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, and, of course, on Wall Street.
Also, because the Axis governments of Germany, Italy, Japan, as well as Axis collaborators in a number of Eastern European countries had also fought against the Soviets at various times during World War II, quite a number of former Nazis and other right-wingers, now became allies and even operatives of the CIA. This led to the formation of the covert “Gladio” movements throughout Europe that worked in favor of US/CIA interests. An example was the neonazis of Ukraine who were a dominant force in the pro-US/UK/NATO coup of 2014 that preceded the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
Allen Dulles
From its founding, the CIA worked behind the scenes. It was years before most Americans even heard of the agency or of the man who became its director: Allen Dulles.
Wikipedia: “Allen Welsh Dulles (April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and its longest-serving director to date. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état, the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program, the Project MKUltra mind control program, and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He was fired by John F. Kennedy over the latter fiasco.
“Dulles was one of the members of the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Between his stints of government service, Dulles was a corporate lawyer and partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, was the Secretary of State during the Eisenhower Administration and is the namesake of Dulles International Airport.”
The CIA and David Rockefeller
Intimate with Dulles was David Rockefeller.
Wikipedia: “Rockefeller was acquainted with Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Allen Dulles and his brother, Eisenhower administration Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—who was an in-law of the family—since his college years. It was in Rockefeller Center that Allen Dulles had set up his WWII operational center after Pearl Harbor, liaising closely with MI6, which also had their principal U.S. operation in the Center. He also knew and associated with the former CIA director Richard Helms as well as Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt Jr., a Chase Bank employee and former CIA agent whose first cousin, CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt Jr., was involved in the Iran coup of 1953. Also in 1953, he had befriended William Bundy, a pivotal CIA analyst for nine years in the 1950s, who became the Agency liaison to the National Security Council, and a subsequent lifelong friend. Moreover, in Cary Reich’s biography of his brother Nelson, a former CIA agent states that David was extensively briefed on covert intelligence operations by himself and other Agency division chiefs, under the direction of David’s ‘friend and confidant’, CIA director Allen Dulles.”
It can accurately be said that the Rockefeller financial empire and the CIA were two sides of the same coin, the same power center—one side operating more or less openly and the other in the shadows. Both were authorized entities that worked under the laws of the US passed by Congress and supposedly overseen by whomever happened to be president. But with respect to who pulled the strings, the president was always the puppet. The latest puppet is Joe Biden.
CIA Wealth
The CIA’s official status gave it access to a vast but incalculable amount of public funding, though a large portion was part of the government’s secret, or “black”, budget. But the CIA had access to private funding as well, again through its partnership with the banking system. It also generated its own sources of income by illicit drug and weapons dealing. And the power of the CIA was multiplied by Congressional legislation requiring the Department of Defense to assist the CIA in any of its activities whenever and wherever the CIA required. So now the power of the entire US military establishment became part of the clandestine power center, with funding having reached today at least a trillion dollars a year.
In fact the CIA had so much cash that it paid it in briefcases-full to both foreign and domestic politicians it wished to influence. Those who didn’t comply were marginalized or assassinated or had their governments overthrown. With this kind of power and reach, could anything now stand in the way of America’s global military dominance?
The Eisenhower Presidency
Yes, the US had breathed a sigh of relief when Eisenhower was elected president. The fact that he was the hero of World War II and head of the pretentiously-named “Operation Overlord” in defeating the Germans promised safety in a dangerous world, but he also seemed to be a kindly old gent whose greatest enjoyments were playing golf with his buddy Senator Prescott Bush—father of George H.W. and grandfather of George W.—and puttering at his farm at Gettysburg. His vice-president, a right-wing California politician named Richard Nixon, was there to appease the McCarthyites and the more radical anti-communist crowd, but generally kept a low profile with little to do. The rest of the 1950s were a time of prosperity, with the nation’s industrial machine humming along, though it spewed out a lot of pollution and did little to help the impoverished underclass. But it did make lots of Fords and Chevys and built millions of houses for families financed by the GI Bill.
But the Soviet bloc, with China now having gone communist as well, remained a formidable adversary, especially after the Soviets began to test nuclear weapons and took the lead in the space race. And in Cuba, Fidel Castro and his left-wing guerrillas shocked the US to the core by his victory over the US-supported dictator Batista. Castro and his forces, after a long civil war, took over Cuba, with Castro now declaring himself a Marxist-Leninist. Communism was now ensconced ninety miles from American shores. Nevertheless, after John F. Kennedy was elected president in the election of 1960, Eisenhower was able to warn the nation against the growing power of the “military-industrial complex.”
The Assassination of President Kennedy
The CIA soon embarked on an attempt to subvert and overthrow Cuba’s communist government, a hostility that continues in one form or another today. In the early 1960s, The CIA also carried out serial failed attempts at Castro’s assassination. A botched attempt by CIA-armed Cuban dissidents to invade the country at the Bay of Pigs resulted in bitter hatred of President Kennedy by the agency for his failure to provide sufficient support. Kennedy’s ire at the CIA for misleading him about the details of the assault caused him to enunciate his wish to have the agency “broken into a thousand pieces.” The fiasco ended with Kennedy’s firing of Allen Dulles, an act that may have sealed his death warrant.
Throughout his short presidency, Kennedy ran afoul of the bankers and the spooks in a multitude of ways, including his opposition to price gouging by US Steel, his announcement of an Alliance for Progress for Latin America, and his intent to withdraw US advisers from Vietnam. Prosecution of gangsters by the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, earned the hatred of organized crime.
The defeat of the French by the Vietnamese at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 had brought an end to French colonial rule in Vietnam. The country was divided into North and South Vietnam, but fighting had resumed along lines similar to Korea, with the Soviet Union and China supporting the North and the US the South. It was shaping up as another world-class confrontation, but Kennedy wanted no part of it. He increasingly was becoming a voice for reason and conciliation in a dangerously divided world.
Then came the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when the Soviet Union began to send offensive missiles with nuclear warheads to Cuba, only to be confronted by President Kennedy with a naval blockade. War was averted when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev backed down. We now know that Kennedy and Khrushchev were engaged in secret back-channel communications, even as US military commanders were lobbying for a full-scale invasion of Cuba and possibly even a nuclear first-strike against the Soviet Union. But Kennedy was firmly opposed.
Somewhere along the way, the US power structure decided to kill him. It was a tough job to assassinate a president in broad daylight, during a highly publicized political motorcade, but the CIA was equal to the task, and the deed was done. They arranged for the fall guy, a CIA operative named Lee Harvey Oswald, to be killed in turn by a Mafia hoodlum named Jack Ruby, and set up the Warren Commission with fired former-CIA director Allen Dulles running the show, to cover it all up. With the Commission putting out the phony conclusion that Oswald was the lone trigger-man, the public interference for this absurd conclusion was run by the Washington Post and figures from the Yale University Law School. By coincidence, Yale was a longstanding recruiting ground for CIA operatives.
President Lyndon Johnson, the Vietnam War, and Societal Collapse
With Lyndon B. Johnson president, the Vietnam War now moved full-speed ahead, lasting a full decade, with the US suffering a humiliating defeat that the military to this day blames on the politicians who refused to give it full reign to annihilate the communist menace, not only in Vietnam but throughout Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, back home, American society was falling to pieces, with the nation’s youth leading a revolt against the violence and materialism of the era. To a considerable extent, this was doubtless due in part to disgust at what the government establishment was doing in its serial assassinations of popular and inspiring political figures—President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, and Robert Kennedy that same year.
Organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers were taking protests to the streets, and university professors around the country were getting on the bandwagon. Coinciding with what seemed like a widespread popular spiritual renewal came a massive outpouring of popular music, emanating particularly from the US and Britain, that captivated the youthful masses around the world. Even prizefighter Mohammed Ali was part of the action by his refusal to be inducted into the military. Prominent in the Antiwar Movement were veterans returning from the horrors and carnage in Vietnam, where the US was engaging in terrorist attacks against civilian populations and carpet-bombing of targets in North Vietnam and later in Cambodia and Laos.
Many of the returning veterans were addicted to heroin supplied by the CIA which now controlled the Southeast Asia drug trade. Through its MKUltra program, the CIA flooded American campuses with LSD containing the toxic substance strychnine. The pharmaceutical industry also began plying patients with entirely new types of untested antipsychotic medications like thorazine that turned disturbed people essentially into vegetables. Such effects were irreversible. Eventually the new-style pharmacopeia saved government billions of dollars by allowing states to close mental hospitals when patients could be kept under sedation at home. The financiers who owned Big Pharma raked in cash with abandon. Another factor that brought down America’s youth was ubiquitous pornography. This was to assume epidemic proportions with the arrival of the internet, along with graphic, violent video games and war movies.
Thus was established the principle that the best way to control a population and keep it from being too concerned with political issues like war vs. peace was to keep them distracted, sedated, and isolated, while the more intelligent were soothed by barrages of propaganda issuing from a corporate press and a takeover of the educational system by professionals beholden to the military-industrial complex for their jobs and stipends. Next came a takeover of Hollywood by the CIA and military, where pro-war propaganda and gratuitous violence came to dominate, continuing to this day.
Charles de Gaulle
As the US imploded during the 1960s, a figure arrived on the scene in Europe whose legacy may yet deter the course of history from its rendezvous with catastrophe. This was French General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French in World War II and liberator of his nation not only from the Germans, but from his British and American “allies” as well. From 1959 to 1969, De Gaulle returned from retirement as president of the Fifth Republic at a time when not only France, but Europe as well, teetered on the verge of economic collapse. He implemented a government-directed—i.e., dirigiste—industrial policy that was highly successful and carried France into prosperity and stability through the rest of the 20th century.
A treatise on de Gaulle’s life and significance would make a very long book, and some have been written, including his own memoirs. In becoming practically the only significant figure in France to stand against the Pétain government that gave in to Germany when the country fell to the Blitzkrieg in 1940, de Gaulle was able to resist pressure from Roosevelt to admit defeat and to win over the support of Churchill in Britain. Near the end of the war, at a time when Roosevelt wanted France to expect to be governed by an American army of occupation, de Gaulle refused and demanded that France establish its own provisional government until elections could be held. He also insisted that the French army be the first to enter Paris when the German garrison surrendered.
De Gaulle perspicaciously perceived the British and Americans as a single unit—”the Anglo-Saxons”—and saw to the core of their intention to dominate Europe and the world following the conflict. De Gaulle insisted that France be part of the force to occupy Germany and that it be given a seat on the Security Council of the newly-formed United Nations. As president, de Gaulle made France a nuclear power to assure against any future attempt by any other nation or combination of nations to subdue it. He saw NATO as an instrument of the Anglo-Saxons to exert control over Europe, so withdrew France from the NATO command structure. He envisioned a unified Europe extending from the Atlantic to Urals, with eventual peace with the Soviet Union in the not-too-distant future. He is regarded by some as the “Father of Modern Europe.” In fact, looking back from today where Europe is nothing more than a pawn in the game the US is playing against Russia over the Ukraine crisis, de Gaulle may be viewed as the last major European figure to be able to stand up to American hegemony.
Nixon and Kissinger
The anti-communist right wing became a fixture in American presidential politics when Republican Barry Goldwater ran against incumbent Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The joke was, “They told me that if I voted for Goldwater, we would have 500,000 soldiers on the ground in Vietnam within two years. I did, and they were right.”
The war ground on under President Richard M. Nixon, who defeated Minnesota Democratic Party Senator Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Nixon’s presidency brought to the fore a man whose influence on US foreign policy has never been equaled. This of course was Henry Kissinger, who was Nixon’s national security adviser through both his terms, then Secretary of State under President Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment in 1974. Kissinger was a protégé of the Rockefeller family, serving as a principal adviser to Nelson Rockefeller throughout the 1960s during Rockefeller’s failed attempts to secure the Republican presidential nomination.
A brilliant student and scholar, born in Germany and educated at Harvard, Kissinger was the archetypical cold warrior who waged the serial wars in Southeast Asia on Nixon’s behalf, was behind the destruction of the leftist movement in Indonesia at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, brought about the bombing of Cambodia, and was the architect of Nixon’s “Opening to China.” Finally, Kissinger was on the scene to negotiate a truce that effectively ended the Vietnam War, though Saigon nevertheless fell to the North Vietnamese. Kissinger then saw Nixon resign the presidency in 1974.
The 1960s and 1970s were a horrendous period in modern history, when rivalry between the US and Soviet Union saw conflicts erupting around the globe. The CIA was active on every continent, overthrowing governments, influencing elections, assassinating foreign leaders, and supporting rightist coups against popular movements. Kissinger was also working behind the scenes and involved in much of this, including the murderous coup against President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, and many extensive volumes have been written about the history of the times. By the early 1970s, similar to the period after the Korean War, the public was sick of the violence and abuses of the government in matters of war and peace. Nixon and Kissinger felt the wind blowing and had begun to move toward rapprochement with the Soviet Union when Nixon was deposed.
Nixon and Kissinger made perhaps their most epochal decision when they moved the US dollar off the international gold standard, making the dollar a floating currency. This measure marked the death knell of the Bretton Woods system that had been in force since 1944. To shore up the dollar, the concept of the Petrodollar was introduced. This meant that all sales of petroleum in the world marketplace would be denominated in dollars, making other nations eager to acquire that currency, because it was the only way they could do business in the energy markets. The dollar as a reserve currency would now assume center stage in world economics. Kissinger accomplished this by making a deal with Saudi Arabia and other oil producers, always working in tandem with American, British, and European oil companies, that they could raise the price of oil significantly as long as they deposited their earnings and profits in American banks and purchased huge quantities of US government debt. Inflation immediately set in worldwide, but consumers were left to absorb the oil price shocks as best they could. Inflation due to the always shaky status of the Petrodollar has been a scourge to world economies ever since.
CIA Abuses Exposed
The CIA hit a speed bump in 1975 with the report of the Church Committee, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Though the committee merely scratched the surface, its work had a major impact on public awareness.
Wikipedia: “The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church (D–ID), the committee was part of a series of investigations into intelligence abuses in 1975, dubbed the ‘Year of Intelligence,’ including its House counterpart, the Pike Committee, and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. The committee’s efforts led to the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
“The most shocking revelations of the committee include Operation MKULTRA involving the drugging and torture of unwitting US citizens as part of human experimentation on mind control; COINTELPRO involving the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil-rights organizations; Family Jewels, a CIA program to covertly assassinate foreign leaders; and Operation Mockingbird, a systematic propaganda campaign with domestic and foreign journalists operating as CIA assets and dozens of US news organizations providing cover for CIA activity.
“It also unearthed Project SHAMROCK in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA (while officially confirming the existence of this signals intelligence agency to the public for the first time).”
A year later, a House Select Committee on Assassinations reported their conclusion, based on acoustic evidence indicating at least two shooters, that President John F. Kennedy had probably been killed as a result of a conspiracy. The committee stated their belief that the conspiracy did not involve the governments of Cuba or the Soviet Union, nor did it involve any organized crime group, anti-Castro group, the FBI, CIA, or Secret Service. Who then did it involve? No one was willing to say. Later, the US Justice Department said they did not believe there was any evidence to support multiple shooters, and no further inquiries took place. So the JFK assassination conspiracy continues to this day, though Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK rattled the official cages a bit.
President Jimmy Carter
The US political establishment scrounged the field in search of a presidential candidate untainted by the horrors and abuses of the Johnson-Nixon-Kissinger era. They settled on Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a political unknown, a graduate of the US Naval Academy, but by profession a Southern peanut farmer, a family man, a churchgoer with an endearing coastal drawl, and a genuinely nice fellow. He also had the benefit of being a rather innocent member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, which made him even more of an establishment safe bet.
Carter was the first president since Herbert Hoover who did not engage directly in an overt shooting war. His first action upon inauguration was to issue a blanket pardon for all Vietnam War draft dodgers. Life in Washington, D.C., now teetered on boredom, with one of the big issues of the time being whether Congress would approve Carter’s proposal for a consumer protection agency. They didn’t.
But the forces of chaos were biding their time, and late in Carter’s single term, things began to fall apart. It was still the overriding objective of the US government to become the global military hegemon, and it was still the Soviet Union that stood in the way. But the approach to dealing with the Soviet Union was about to change, and in the long run, would become much more dangerous.
This was due to the presence of one man: Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Zbigniew Brzezinski Captivates America’s Power Elite
Brzezinski was the Democratic Party’s answer to Henry Kissinger. Like Kissinger, he was born in Europe, in Poland instead of Germany. Brzezinski’s father was a Polish diplomat who was stationed in Canada at the start of World War II when Poland was divided up between Germany and the Soviet Union. With no country to return to, the family lived in Montreal, where “Zbig” began his studies at McGill University. Later, with a doctorate from Harvard, he was passed over for a faculty appointment there in favor of an equally up-and-coming Kissinger, so ended up at Columbia University in New York City. Brilliant and bitterly anti-communist, he became an adviser to President Lyndon Johnson but also grew close to the Rockefeller family. With David Rockefeller, he helped found the Trilateral Commission in 1974 to coordinate the foreign policies of the US, Europe, and Japan.
The Rockefellers had their eyes on Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, who, as stated, was made an early member of the Trilateral Commission. After Carter became president, Brzezinski was practically his alter ego, to the point where Secretary of State Cyrus Vance eventually resigned over what he viewed as Carter’s recklessness in his deference to a man Vance called “evil.” This was particularly the case in Carter and Brzezinski’s dealings with the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-1980. In 1979 the Iranians drove out the US-supported Shah of Iran, declared an Islamic Republic, and took 66 American citizens hostage at the US embassy. Carter and Brzezinski’s plan for a military rescue in the desert failed disastrously.
But Brzezinski had a vision. He was determined to reverse the direction Nixon and Kissinger had taken in moving toward détente with the Soviet Union, and he succeeded in embedding into the US approach to the Soviets, almost as a reflex, that the two had to be opposed at every turn, because communism was inherently inimical to “human rights.” Never mind the miserable record of the US in dealing with human rights during its own bloody history of Native American genocide, black chattel slavery, and CIA and military terrorism during the decades following World War II. If Brzezinski could now pin that label on the Soviet Union, any extreme US action could be justified, as long as the Soviets or their friends were on the receiving end. And so matters stand disastrously today almost a half-century later.
Perhaps if Nixon and Kissinger had succeeded in reaching an arrangement based on mutual respect with the Soviet Union—not just with China through the “opening to China” policy—we might be living in a far different world today. Perhaps Nixon and Kissinger, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the truce in Vietnam, had learned enough through their long partnership, involving the failure of the Vietnam War, that they were ready to turn a new page in 20th century history. Perhaps this was why the CIA and its controllers got rid of Nixon in the staged coup d’etat called “Watergate”, with Kissinger soon following Nixon out the door. Even today, Kissinger as an elder statesman is one of the few voices of semi-sanity in evaluating the Ukraine crisis, while everyone else in the US and Europe seems on a hair-trigger alert to start World War III.
Brzezinski had an opportunity to face the Soviets directly through the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Until the end of his life, Brzezinski and his apologists denied that prior to the Soviet incursion he had been running CIA operatives in that country in a deliberate attempt to goad the Soviets to send in troops. If that was what he was doing, he was risking all that Kissinger had accomplished in normalizing relations with the Soviets, but such scruples likely didn’t matter to someone who saw the dismemberment of the Soviet Union as his primary goal.
Brzezinski later spelled it out in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. In that book, he likened the lives and destiny of billions of people to pawns in board game. Nothing could be more revealing or better designed to thrill and motivate the CIA, the military, and the American politicians who lusted to straddle the globe than Brzezinski’s philosophy. Nothing demonstrates more clearly Cyrus Vance’s characterization of Brzezinski as “evil.” In 1979, an appallingly naïve President Jimmy Carter took the bait, and with a major act of “virtue signaling”, withdrew the US from the Moscow Summer Olympics of 1980.
Meanwhile, Brzezinski worked with the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan to arm the Afghan guerrillas, known as the Mujahedeen, to engage the Soviets in a bitterly-fought conflict that lasted until they withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. By then, the Mujahedeen were morphing into al Qaeda, the Islamic fundamentalist force that in various guises has been terrorizing the Middle East, usually with covert US support, ever since. Along with perpetual war against Russia, Middle Eastern Islamic terrorism is also part of Brzezinski’s legacy.
Brzezinski’s Hatred of Russia
Brzezinski’s hatred was directed above all toward Russia. He had a more conciliatory attitude toward the Muslim world, which he saw as a bulwark against Russian expansion in Asia. He helped to broker the meetings resulting in the Camp David Accords hosted by President Carter at Camp David, Maryland, where Begin of Israel and Sadat of Egypt had met, leading to Egyptian recognition of Israel.
Why was Brzezinski so hate-filled? Because he was Polish? Poland indeed had once been a powerful European nation that the Russian Empire displaced over time. Poland had been carved up in the 18th century by neighboring powers, had been reinstated as the Duchy of Warsaw by Napoleon, had disappeared again, then came back after the Treaty of Versailles, only to be divided once more and swallowed up by Germany and Russia in 1939. After the war Poland again became a separate nation under Russian control. The Poles successfully broke away from the Soviet Union in 1989, and today are a NATO member and the most virulently anti-Russian nation in Europe.
But there is no reason Poland’s hereditary hatred of Russia that Brzezinski exemplified should be a core constituent of US foreign policy toward a nuclear-armed superpower. Under Nixon and Kissinger, the US showed the Soviets a level of civilized respect that paved the way for Mikhail Gorbachev’s future peacemaking initiatives under the twin heading of glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (restructuring). This progression also gave democratic forces in the Soviet Union the breathing room to oppose communism when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s figures in the West gave reassurances to Russia that NATO would not expand eastward, but Brzezinski was among the hawks who defied that logic and pushed President Bill Clinton to carry out the expansion that set the stage for today’s crisis.
Brzezinski was also full of prophecies about Russia. He believed communism would not last for too much longer, and he was right. In fact, the Soviet Union collapsed sooner than he believed it would. But not in the way he foresaw. When the Soviet Union came apart in 1991, it did so along the lines of the separate republics within the overall assemblage of specific entities melded together by the Soviet federal constitution. The largest, of course, was Russia, but there were 15 in total. The USSR consisted of Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
But Brzezinski believed that further breakdowns would take place along the lines of ethnic groups within the separate republics, especially Russia. He believed, in short, that Russia would become “balkanized” and that this would make its resources easy pickings for the West. This nightmarish dream of Brzezinski continues to reign as the basis of US policy toward Russia today. It also set the stage for the takeover of US foreign policy by the “Neocons” that started with Reagan and continues today, with President Joe Biden the ultimate Neocon stooge.
For Americans, it may be difficult to understand the age-old racial and national hatreds and prejudices that continue to afflict Europeans. These arose in the worst possible way in the World War II labor and death camps, largely run by Nazi Germany. But hatred and prejudice existed then and continue today. One of the longstanding fault lines is between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Another that has never been completely healed is between Catholicism and Protestantism. Yet another is between right wing and left wing politics. In the Ukraine crisis the hatreds between groups in western Ukraine, including the various neonazi elements, and ethnic Russians have been on full display. The anti-Russian atrocities in Donbass may actually constitute genocide. Another place where ethnic hatred holds center stage is in Israel between Jews and Palestinians.
Of course America is not immune to these things. We think of the old saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” or the frequent mistreatment of blacks by the police and whites that still goes on today. But we do have the concept of our nation as a “melting pot.” Like it or not, we are a multi-ethnic nation that needs to bear in mind the touching words of Rodney King, “Why can’t we all just get along?”
Ironically another great nation that is also a melting pot is Russia, with its diversity of ethnicity extending from Europe to the Pacific. This multi-ethnicity has been embraced by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Increasingly in the modern world, nations are home to multitudes of people from different cultures with varying countries of origin. The wisdom of Rodney King applies everywhere.
Carter is Shown the Door by the Reagan Revolution
Despite his stance as a tough guy—when Carter gave a campaign speech, the theme song from Rocky blared away—he was clobbered by former actor and governor of California Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. It happened after Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, yet another Rockefeller handyman, plunged the US into a recession by raising interest rates to the twenty percent threshold, without even telling Carter what he was planning to do.
The excuse, of course, was to curb inflation, but the effect was to shatter the US producing economy, a calamity from which it has never recovered. Indeed, when industry began to come back three years later in a shrunken form, it was because huge numbers of American manufacturing concerns, along with their jobs, were now being sent to China and other third world locations. US financiers, of course, raked in the profits from the cheap foreign labor, while Americans were left to compete for jobs in the new financial/service economy. This was the real substance of the “Reagan Revolution.” The Volcker recession was brilliantly explained in William Greider’s landmark book, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country.
This gigantic shift in the US economy coincided with the geopolitical results of Brzezinski’s push to get the US to transfer diplomatic recognition from the Chinese Republic on Taiwan to the mainland People’s Republic of China in 1979. Binding the Chinese economy securely to that of the US was the chosen means of separating the Soviet Union from China in its longstanding Sino-Soviet friendship that now became defunct. Of course, this elevation of China to the main supplier of much of America’s consumer goods also gave that nation a springboard to overtake the US as the world’s leading producing economy. Next time you buy cheap Christmas ornaments that say “Made in China,” think about that.
Reagan’s victory over Carter in 1980 fed on media exploitation and discontent at the continuing Iranian hostage crisis. By making a deal with Iran and promising to supply the new Islamic Republic with various types of weapons, Reagan’s operatives were able to persuade the Revolutionary Guard to wait to release the hostages until January 20, 1981, Reagan’s inauguration day. Always the actor, Reagan feigned delight and surprise. It also helped that during the election campaign Reagan’s operatives stole Jimmy Carter’s debate briefing book, causing Reagan to be well-prepared for the televised debates where he defeated the flustered Carter hands down. I witnessed these events with disgust while working at the Carter White House in 1978-1981. I shook hands with President Carter at the White House Christmas Party in December 1980. Talk about a man who was stressed out.
“Springtime in America”
The Reagan Revolution blasted off when Reagan’s first action was to fire all the federal air traffic controllers who were testing him by going on strike. Their firing thrilled the right wing. The era of deregulation and privatization was underway. And no more coddling of organized labor.
The Reagan Revolution destroyed the savings and loan industry and turned mortgage lending—perhaps the most profitable part of the US financial system—over to the commercial banks. In fact, the power and reach of the banking industry grew more under Reagan than at any time since the 1920s. It was freewheeling bank financing that underwrote the massive shift of American factories and jobs to China and other overseas locations after so many manufacturing entities were forced to close their doors during the Volcker recession. Then lo, the recession began to end in time for Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984. The Fed had lowered interest rates to a manageable level, so that Reagan was able to declare that it was now “springtime in America.”
Contributing to the delight of springtime weather were the largest tax cuts in US history, which radically reduced the top tax rates for middle- and high-income taxpayers and put an end to the Depression-era tax system implemented by Roosevelt. Federal deficits immediately shot up, but this was a small price to pay for the payoff to the people who had put Reagan in the White House. Later, George W. Bush and Donald Trump would do exactly the same thing after they were inaugurated in 2001 and 2017 respectively. Carter, on taking office, pardoned draft dodgers. The Republicans cut taxes for the rich.
The theory was that the extra cash the upper brackets would spend into the economy would “lift all boats” and usher in a new era of prosperity. It was called “supply-side economics.” Another name for it was “Reaganomics.” However, during the Republican primaries, with Reagan speaking of his future plans, his rival George H.W. Bush called it “voodoo economics.” This was before Bush was named as Reagan’s running mate, of course. But his designation was probably the most accurate.
While production of luxury goods like yachts soared, working people suffered as they continued to watch factories shut down and their jobs get shipped overseas. But Harvard-trained economists would point out that even if China got the jobs, they also got the factory pollution! So America could breathe more freely as it was irretrievably set on the road to what it has become today: a hollowed-out service economy, suffocating under layers of financial bureaucracy, limping along between bubbles and recessions, inflation always creeping up, and the only substantial manufacturing industry being armaments sold to the nation’s own bloated military and to corrupt “allies” around the world. High on the list of arms recipients were Israel and Saudi Arabia, the two nations, seemingly so different, which anchored the US presence in the Middle East.
Another key element of the takeover of the US economy by the big money masters was the shift under Reagan away from safe, dedicated retirement systems like the federal government system, state and private sector retirement systems, and Social Security. Now, employee retirement savings started to be channeled into stock and bond funds managed by Wall Street. Easing the transition was legislation allowing tax deferrals on employee savings.
But millions of people gradually saw the new systems taking over to the point where, with an economic downturn and a fall in market value, retirees or those contemplating retirement, could see large portions of their portfolios disappear overnight. Wall Street didn’t care, because fund managers were paid a proportion of fund balances, so would earn money no matter what. When their clients reacted with dismay to loss of their savings, the answer was always not to worry, the stock market always came out ahead in the long run. Besides, a portion of their capital losses on their hard-earned retirement savings were tax deductible!
Fortunately, Social Security has not been converted to this appalling system—yet.
The CIA Branches Out
By the 1980s, the CIA had acquired a very bad name for the horrors it had been perpetrating for a quarter century, where, in the words of Covert Action Magazine’s Abby Martin, “Brutal terrorism was unleashed on entire countries by US backed and trained right-wing death squads that targeted poor people, peasants, farmers, students, all in the name of fighting communism.” Especially with the revelations of the Church Committee fresh in the public’s mind, a change of approach was needed. Too much bad press. So the government decided to use “softer” methods to enforce its subversion abroad.
One of the main chosen methods was a “non-profit” government-funded organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This became the most important of the “non-government organizations” (NGOs) that sprang up like weeds worldwide for covert action against dozens of governments targeted by US foreign policy.
In the words of Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist writing for The Grayzone: “CIA director Willliam Casey was at the heart of NED’s creation. He sought to construct a public mechanism to support opposition groups, activist movements, and media outlets overseas that would engage in propaganda and political activism, destabilize, and ultimately displace ‘enemy’ regimes. Subterfuge with a human face, to coin a phrase. Underlining the NED’s insidious true nature, in a 1991 Washington Post article boasting of its prowess in overthrowing communism in Eastern Europe, senior NED official Allen Weinstein acknowledged, ‘A lot of what we do today was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA.’”
The NED, among other NGOs and the CIA itself, was responsible for producing what came to be called “color revolutions” in countries perceived as friendly to Russia or otherwise targeted for subversion. But the existence of the NED did not mean that the CIA had gone away. To the contrary.
Both were instrumental, for instance, in fomenting the 2014 coup in Ukraine that led directly to the present war. Often working in partnership with the NED and CIA was George Soros, the Hungarian-born American hedge fund owner who set up what he called The Open Society Foundation. Google: “Soros is known as ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank of England’ because of his short sale of US$10 billion worth of pounds sterling, which made him a profit of $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.” Soros boasted that he had poured millions of dollars into Ukraine to help soften it up for the American-sponsored coup.
The Neocons Arrive on the Scene
Perhaps the most far-reaching and ominous trend during Reagan’s presidency as far as future US foreign policy was concerned was not the trillion-dollar military buildup that had actually begun during Carter’s term, but the entry into high-level policy positions of the faction later to be known as the “Neocons.” These were a collection of extreme right-wingers who began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s and are dominant in the Biden administration today.
Their ideological mentors were Ayn Rand, author of the neofascist tome Atlas Shrugged, and Leo Strauss, German-born University of Chicago philosopher. Shadia Drury, in Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999), wrote that Strauss promoted an elitist strain in American political leaders linked to imperialist militarism, neoconservatism, and Christian fundamentalism. Drury wrote that Strauss teaches that “perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for them.”
Later, the Neocons latched onto a book by Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, which argued that the future of war would revolve around major confrontations between cultural regions. Two of these were the West, which comprised the US and Western Europe; the Orthodox, comprising Russia and Eastern Europe; and the world of Islam, encompassing the Middle East and North Africa. My own view is that depicting these regions as natural enemies rather than diversities of culture that could interact with and learn from each other is a horrible concept conceived by a madman. But it has helped drive America’s catastrophic foreign policy in our era.
Despite the debacle in Vietnam, the warmongers had kept their foothold within the U.S. security and military establishments and found a home particularly on the staff of conservative Democratic Party Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, where Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld honed their skills early in their careers. Other future Neocons who worked for Jackson were Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, and Douglas Feith.
Waiting in the wings as Reagan took the stage was an entire battalion of Neocons, some being members of the Committee on the Present Danger, which aimed to restore the US military as the centerpiece of national life. While the big banks took over the American economy with the smash-up of the savings and loan industry, Reagan’s military buildup rolled on, though overt warfare was limited to the attack on the tiny island of Grenada.
A key element of Reagan’s program was the push to weaponize space which reared its head in spectacular fashion with his Strategic Defense Initiative; i.e., “Star Wars” program, which encompassed plans for the X-ray laser, electronic railgun, nuclear battle stations, and powerful laser beams capable of incinerating enemy cities within seconds. An unspoken objective of Reagan’s proposed Star Wars system, that had begun to use the space shuttle as a testing platform, was to protect the US against retaliation should a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union happen to be launched. Some fantasists even had the idea of launching the president into space on the shuttle in time of nuclear war to direct the nation’s military from beyond the clouds.
Similar considerations to Star Wars are doubtless involved in the expansion of space-based military activities in recent years, including the creation of the Space Force under President Donald Trump. I wrote a book based on work I had done and testimony I gave at NASA entitled, Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Disaster of the Space Age. Publishing in 2007, I concluded that compromises with safety due to the ongoing takeover of the space shuttle program by the Air Force as a platform for Star Wars testing was a major underlying cause of the tragedy.
Neither the presidential commission nor the congressional committees investigating the disaster made mention of the military connection in their reports. It was, and is, a taboo subject. When the space shuttle returned to flight almost three years later, military missions slowed down and later ceased. Today we can see how the seven dead Challenger astronauts were martyrs to the criminal subterfuge going on under Reagan to militarize NASA’s manned space program.
There was also the matter of Iran-Contra, where White House operatives ran a scheme that illegally sold weapons to their old buddies in Iran, then sent the money to aid rebel gangs seeking to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua. Of course, the Tower Commission found in its investigation that neither President Reagan nor Vice President George H. W. Bush knew anything about it. But all this underground commotion by the Neocons prepared the ground for George H. W. Bush’s assault on Iraq in the 1990 “Desert Storm” campaign after he had been elected as Reagan’s successor in the election of 1988.
Bush was an experienced Deep State operative, having been the CIA director for a year in 1976, where he was engaged in supporting the rise of right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America. Bush was a member of the two premier Rockefeller lobbying institutions, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
Native American Casinos
One of the themes we have touched on is America’s mistreatment of its Native American population over a period of centuries. But in 1988, while Reagan was still in office, Congress passed legislation that would have a profound impact.
This was the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. The legislation allowed Indian tribes to operate casinos on federally-recognized reservations without interference from state governments. 31 states currently have tribal casinos. The Act regulated tribal gaming, designated tribal gaming as a means of generating revenue, encouraged economic development of the tribes, and protected against negative influences such as organized crime. Some of the tribes provided for regular payments from casino revenues to enrolled tribal members as a regular source of personal and family income. Prominent among these are the Seminole of Florida, who also own the Hard Rock business conglomerate.
One of the major benefits of the program was to help tribes establish colleges in Indian communities. Another was for community health care services. The Act was one of the most positive developments in redressing centuries of genocide and abuse. But there was a broader social impact in that it encouraged gambling addiction among the general population and so has been detrimental to public morality. Also, as many states have loosened previous prohibitions on organized gambling, competition to the tribal casinos has grown. The same has happened from on-line gambling over the internet.
Desert Storm
Iraq was to become the US military’s number one target for the next couple of decades, though not the only one of course. If you were to ask the average “informed” American of why Desert Storm, aka the Gulf War, took place, you would probably get a blank stare, until the name “Saddam Hussein” entered the conversation. America’s two biggest “bad guys” in the past 50 years were certainly Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, both of whom were blamed for 9/11, though in the last few years Vladimir Putin has certainly joined the elite short list. Interestingly, it had been the CIA that helped place Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq in the first place. But stabbing your friends in the back is par for the course for the CIA/Deep State.
The strange thing about George H.W. Bush’s Desert Storm operation, which didn’t even remove Saddam Hussein from power, was that it came right after Iraq had done America’s bidding in launching a huge assault against its neighbor Iran that cost the lives of over a million military and civilian victims on both sides. This war was based on the typical American playbook out of Games People Play known as “Let’s you and him fight.”
Why did the US cease its Desert Storm attacks in Iraq before reaching Bagdad and removing or capturing Saddam Hussein? Whatever may be the official US position on this, it’s a lie. The real reason is that the US military ran out of ammunition when Iraqi ground resistance proved too strong. When the US renewed its attack on Iraq and Saddam more than a decade later, they would solve the problem through saturation bombing.
Unfortunately, Reagan’s “Springtime in America” was turning to autumn by the time the Bush administration finished its Gulf War attacks, when a brief recession set in. The Deep State ran a businessman named Ross Perot as a third-party candidate, who took away enough Republican votes from Bush that the Democratic Party challenger Bill Clinton snuck in as president in the election of 1992. It was the plan.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine
But before Bush left the scene, came publication of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, that brought the decades-old intention by the US for global military domination up-to-date and defined the direction of US foreign policy up to the present day.
It would be instructive to go into detail on who Paul Wolfowitz was, where he came from, who influenced him, what he did while working for the government and later his stint as president of the World Bank, an office he resigned under the cloud of personal scandal. Wolfowitz was the archetypical American Neocon of the late 20th and early 21st century. But I have to leave it to the reader to do the further research. In my opinion, it’s horrifying. But to go to the Wolfowitz Doctrine, this is what Wikipedia says:
“Wolfowitz Doctrine is an unofficial name given to the initial version of the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 fiscal years (dated February 18, 1992) published by US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his deputy Scooter Libby. Not intended for public release, it was leaked to the New York Times on March 7, 1992, and sparked a public controversy about U.S. foreign and defense policy. The document was widely criticized as imperialist, as the document outlined a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action to suppress potential threats from other nations and prevent dictatorships from rising to superpower status.”
Notice that Wikipedia, always with its CIA editing, speaks of preventing “dictatorships”. Whenever the US speaks of a country it wants to criticize or attack, that country is always a “dictatorship,” or “authoritarian,” or something else really bad, while we are always the “city on a hill”, as Reagan put it, or some other term implying pristine, do-no-wrong, “democracy.” The arrogance of US policy makers is cosmic.
To continue: “Such was the outcry that the document was hastily re-written under the close supervision of U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell before being officially released on April 16, 1992. Many of its tenets re-emerged in the Bush Doctrine, which was described by Senator Edward M. Kennedy as ‘a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.’”
Following are the provisions of the original Wolfowitz Doctrine before the Cheney/Powell sanitized version came out:
“The U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations (my italics) to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
“Like the coalition that opposed Iraqi aggression, we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished. Nevertheless, the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S. will be an important stabilizing factor.
“While the U.S. cannot become the world’s policeman, by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.
“We continue to recognize that collectively the conventional forces of the states formerly comprising the Soviet Union retain the most military potential in all of Eurasia; and we do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reincorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly others… We must, however, be mindful that democratic change in Russia is not irreversible, and that despite its current travails, Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States.
“In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil. We also seek to deter further aggression in the region, foster regional stability, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways. As demonstrated by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, it remains fundamentally important to prevent a hegemon or alignment of powers from dominating the region. This pertains especially to the Arabian peninsula. Therefore, we must continue to play a role through enhanced deterrence and improved cooperative security.”
Note that the Wolfowitz Doctrine applied to any nation or group of nations, not only the component parts of the Soviet Union, which by this time had begun to break up. It also included “advanced industrial nations.” While none are specifically named, this had to be a reference to Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy—all NATO allies—and to Japan and, sooner or later, China.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine was the legacy of the Reagan/Bush presidencies which lasted from 1981 to 1993. Extreme as it appeared, there was nothing essentially different in any of it from the days before the US entered into World War II and the intent by the US to establish total global military domination was first adopted. More than forty years had passed, but the basic policy was a continuum, and it was now fully public.
President Bill Clinton
Nobody really knew where Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas had come from. All the public knew was that he was a “centrist” and was associated with a pro-business outfit called the Democratic Leadership Council. He was touted as a “new” type of Democrat, young and fresh, so not-Jimmy Carter. And definitely not New Deal. Clinton also promised to be tough on crime, showing that he was not beholden to Democratic “special interests.” Rather he focused on what people really cared about it. As campaign operative James Carville said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Clinton’s home state of Arkansas fit every description of “backwater.” The state’s main claim to fame was as the home of Walmart, which opened its first store in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962. Arkansas was also the home of the National Center for Toxicological Research, an FDA facility, where millions of white rats were killed and dissected annually for experiments with toxic substances. I happened to have visited there for an inspection when I worked for FDA in 1977. It was far out in the Arkansas pine woods and had been experiencing employee unrest over poor management practices. When our headquarters team arrived at the site, someone had written over the main gate, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But we did get a nice tour of the rodent killing fields, without learning anything about the employee problems.
Bill Clinton’s birth name was William Jefferson Blythe III, but the traveling salesman who was shown as his father on his birth certificate died in an automobile accident before he was born. Clinton’s mother remarried, her son took her new husband’s last name, and Clinton grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which was notorious as the wide-open center of gambling and other rackets, and as the favorite spa and vacation resort of America’s leading gangsters, including Al Capone. Hot Springs was a smaller scale Las Vegas before that city turned into a metropolis of dissipation, and stayed that way into the 1960s. For an excellent description see Stephen Fox’s previously-cited book, Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America,
The young Clinton found his way to a scholarship at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., then on to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, then to Yale for a law degree, where he met his future wife, Hillary Rodham, daughter of a Chicago-area physician. After teaching law at the University of Arkansas, Clinton moved on to political office, first as Arkansas’ attorney-general, then as the youngest governor in Arkansas history in 1979. Clinton lost his bid for reelection, but was returned to office in 1983 and served until 1992, when he ran for president against George H.W. Bush, who failed to pick up a second term.
So who was this man? Was it just a coincidence that an airport in Arkansas located in the small town of Mena was later rumored to be a CIA transit point for arms deliveries to anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua, with return cargoes of cocaine coming out of Columbia? Was it just a rumor that Clinton was told by a CIA operative in a conference room at the Mena airport that he had been designated as a future president? Just conspiracy theories, of course. Similar perhaps to the rumor that Clinton was actually the natural son of one-time Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller. But let’s get back to facts.
Clinton’s Presidency
Clinton did succeed in launching a new War on Crime that was centered on putting large numbers of unemployed black men behind bars for relatively insignificant offenses, including possession of small amounts of marijuana. It was the era of “three strikes and you’re out,” and it was unemployed young black men in particular that the US electorate was taught to hate and fear more than anyone. Electioneering propaganda had been honed to a fine art, and soon the US had more of its citizens locked up than any nation on earth. The mainstream media loved it, the crime rate did fall, and Clinton won a second term, again with the assistance of Ross Perot being brought back from oblivion to take away Republican votes from the challenger, this time Senator Robert Dole.
This dark episode of racially-oriented incarceration under Clinton exposed again the total failure of the US to come to terms in any rational and humane manner with the race of people who lived, toiled, and died on its farms and plantations for two-and-a-half centuries. True, some voting rights legislation had been passed over the years, and enough gerrymandering had been done to create a few safe congressional districts for black candidates beholden to a Democratic Party which relied on the black vote. But overall, the record was—and is—shameful.
The big news at the start of the 1990s had been the collapse of the Soviet Union. This had actually taken place in 1988-1991, before Clinton was elected, following on the policies of glasnost and perestroika introduced by Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Of course the Reaganites took credit, claiming that by standing strong against what Reagan called the “evil empire,” and by spending so much money on the military build-up that the Soviets simply gave up, their policies of toughness against communism had paid off. The US had “won” the Cold War.
Now, under Clinton, that victory was going to pay off. Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations would soon be moving into high gear. The West was on the march.
“End” of the Cold War
The Soviet Union had ceased to exist by 1991, when it broke apart into its constituent republics. The largest was the Russian Federation, with Boris Yeltsin its first elected president. Russia inherited the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, however, so remained a dangerous potential adversary. The Russian economy was shattered overnight, when state monopolies in key industries were privatized and sold for pennies on the dollar to Russian oligarchs with connections to US financial interests. The finagling was abetted by academics from Harvard who had rushed to the scene.
Russian society fell into a precipitous decline in living standards, with the ruble collapsing and unemployment skyrocketing. Russian writer Dmitri Orlov tells of driving around the Soviet Union at this time, with a trunkful of vodka his only means of paying his expenses. By 1998, Russia had defaulted on its public debt. Yeltsin was reelected but won the 1996 election only through assistance from US consultants. His vice president was Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer assigned to East Germany and known only within government and business circles in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad). However, Putin had made the right choice in 1991, when he cast his fate and future with Yeltsin’s government and not the recalcitrant communist hardliners who tried to overthrow Yeltsin in a failed coup.
With the end of the Cold War, people in the US had begun to ask whether there would be a “peace dividend” due to what seemed a likely reduction of military expenditures. The answer was “sort of.” In fact, the Cold War never really ended, but the US still drew down its forces that were stationed in Europe. And there was a general relaxation of training and equipment for US forces worldwide.
What happened was that when the Soviet Union collapsed—and it collapsed from its own internal economic and political failures—the US, particularly the CIA, shifted its efforts to economic infiltration of what by then were Russia and the constituent republics of the USSR. But toward the end of the decade, military action started up again with the 1999 war in Yugoslavia and the bombing of Kosovo, Bosnia, and Serbia. Now Yugoslavia itself broke up as the Soviet Union had done.
Clinton left office in 2001 as the stock market was crashing through deflation of the dot.com bubble, but he had come closer than anyone in decades to balancing the federal budget. But soon an entirely new phase of warfare began with the 9/11 Twin Towers false flag, then the War on Terror. The first big move after 9/11 was the invasion of Afghanistan, long since vacated by the Russia, but always the key to central Asia.
Afghanistan had been the scene of the 19th century “Great Game” between Russia and Britain, with the latter moving up from India but vacating after a couple of failed wars against the indigenous tribes. It was these tribes the Soviet Union had tried but failed to conquer in its own decade-long war ending in 1989. Now the US would step into the vacuum. This was the plan since Brzezinski’s reign, but it could not have been carried out during the heyday of the Soviet Union.
Now, in the 1990s, the problem for the US was that Russia still controlled the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons. Russia could destroy the US at any time and would likely do so if sufficiently provoked. So all the dancing around by the US with Yeltsin in the 1990s had as its ulterior motive to slip in and get hold of Russia’s nukes, along with its vast natural resources of oil, gas, and minerals. Yeltsin knew that and outsmarted everyone when he resigned in 1999 and appointed Vladimir Putin as his successor. Yeltsin assured those around him that Putin was “safe.”
But Yeltsin knew that Putin was a very tough customer. Putin had grown up in the streets of Leningrad and was a tough guy who had become a judo master. And he was KGB with rock solid character. There were incidents described in Putin’s autobiography, First Person, where a couple of times Putin and his friends were jumped by hoodlums and Putin just tossed them around like rag dolls. Putin once fought with the world judo champion. He lost but held his own. And he was Russian to the core, even to the point of practicing Orthodoxy, which he acquired through his mother. Later he paid visits to the Orthodox monasteries on Mt. Athos in Greece and to Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
None of the political machinations of the time was, or is, a joke to Putin and his devoted cadre of followers. His strength was that he believed in public morality, so people always knew where they stood with him. Bad behavior got people shown the door regardless of what a big shot they were. And regardless of what his slanderers said about him and continue to say today, Putin believed in multi-party democracy and a strong private economic sector.
But he also saw at the core of the Russian nation an incorruptible state security apparatus that was always present and doing its duty regardless of the comings and goings of politicians. Everyone acknowledged that Russia had a highly centralized system with a vertical power structure since the days of the first Czar, Ivan the Terrible, who crushed the power of the boyar nobility. This heritage had survived communism and made the Russian system difficult to change. But when change happened, the entire resources of the state could be mobilized quickly. This dynamic would continue under Putin.
Clinton and Albright
Returning, though, to the Clinton years. Now trouble was brewing both in the Middle East and Europe. First came sanctions against Iraq for reasons not one in a million Americans could identify today. Unless, of course, you mentioned Saddam Hussein. He had been American’s friend when the CIA first placed him in power. Now, Saddam was always the ready-made villain, the made-to-order foil for US imperialism. Madeline Albright, a thorough Neocon, was now Clinton’s point woman in this tragicomedy.
From Jacobin.com: “From 1993 to 1997, Albright served as United Nations ambassador. In that capacity, she presided over the brutal post–Gulf War sanctions on Iraq, with the aim of maximizing the misery of Iraqis so as to encourage Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. In a 1996 interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, Albright seemed to suggest that the deaths of other people’s children were simply a cost of doing empire. ‘We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,’ said Stahl. ‘And you know, is the price worth it?’ Albright answered, ‘I think that is a very hard choice, but the price we think, the price is worth it.’”
The sanctions against Iraq were carried out through establishing a “no-fly zone” to disrupt that nation’s international commerce. The idea of brutalizing a nation’s civilian population by military force in order to bring about what came to be called “regime change” became a staple of US foreign policy under Clinton/Albright. It’s what the US is trying to do today by the weapons supplied to Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia. It’s what the US has been trying to do unsuccessfully with sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.
Of course, this practice of “regime change” is an outgrowth of the longstanding policy of the CIA, and later US Army special forces; that is, of using covert means to overthrow or influence governments that have been going on since the subversion of Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s. The difference is that with sanctions, the US has acted in full public view, not just behind the scenes. And sanctions, though deadly, have the benefit of imposing no requirement on the US president to go to Congress for approval. It simply is done. In fact, it’s the primary preoccupation of the US State Department in our era which has become a sanctions machine.
As Clinton’s secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, Albright also presided over the US/NATO war that dismembered Yugoslavia, mainly through the CIA generating a secession movement in Kosovo followed by the 1999 bombing of Serbian civilians and civilian infrastructure in attacks overseen by US General Wesley Clark. Russia had been an ally of Serbia dating back to World War I, but even with a small contingent of forces on the ground, Russia was powerless in the throes of its economic woes to stand up to the US in this conflict. And because China was sympathetic to Serbia, their embassy in Belgrade was “accidentally” bombed. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic became the scapegoat. Hounded from office, he was charged by US proxies with genocide on trumped-up charges and died in prison in 2006.
Emboldened by their success with the destruction of Yugoslavia, Clinton and Albright now took the extremely provocative step of arranging for NATO to admit three former members of the Warsaw Pact—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. This was against the counsel of many experienced diplomatic observers, including the renowned diplomat emeritus George Kennan, who called eastward expansion of NATO “a tragic mistake.” The move not only violated assurances given to Gorbachev more than a decade earlier, but promised future instability between the West and Russia. NATO continued to push the envelope by bringing Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia into NATO in 2004, followed by Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and several of the micro-states from the former Yugoslavia. Having been formed as a “defensive alliance,” NATO was now the spearhead in what would develop in the 21st century into a hybrid US/UK/EU war against Russia itself.
The Russians felt betrayed by Clinton’s actions. But they began to take countermeasures. When Fifth Columnists and foreign agents instigated attacks against Russia via Chechnya and Georgia, the responses by Yeltsin and Putin were brutal and effective. Similar, though non-violent, were Russian actions in support of Belarus when the CIA tried to foment revolution there. But Russia could not stop the CIA’s takeover of Ukraine via regime change in 2014.
The Digital Revolution
World-changing developments were underway during the Clinton years in the field of computerized digital technology. The 1990s saw the development of the Worldwide Web, the rise of global internet communications, and early creation of social media.
The US Treasury Department had been instrumental in the development of electronic funds transfer (EFT) in moving its payment and tax collection traffic across dedicated T-1 communication lines, but by the end of the decade, all this was starting to be done through encrypted data moving through browser-based systems; i.e., the internet. Soon, the entire global financial industry was sending money digitally, which opened up the world of e-commerce when the secure use of credit cards for individual transactions was perfected. People now had their paychecks deposited into their bank accounts through direct deposit, with electronic bill paying, including taxes, becoming the norm.
The internet allowed a tremendous increase in the velocity of money—i.e., the speed of spending—which led to a high rate of growth of personal wealth but also posed dangers of overextension and the creation of lending or spending bubbles. Not only would the internet lead to growth of social media, but also an expansion of vice, particularly gambling and pornography. Also coming into being was the world of cybercrime—fraud, scams, phishing, etc.—that has become an epidemic and a scourge, especially for vulnerable populations like the elderly.
Financial Abuses
The internet also resulted in vast growth in bank lending. This began with the Treasury conversion to EFT, because it allowed them to move all their funds to their Federal Reserve accounts nightly. These billions of dollars then became part of the banking system’s reserve against which they could lend under the rules of fractional reserve banking. Before long, every business began to do the same, so that the ability of banks to lend now skyrocketed. The abundance of money to lend reduced interest rates, but also opened the door to shady practices. This was done through “derivatives,” hitherto illegal.
The legal ban on financial derivatives was lifted by the Clinton administration in 1999. As a result, trading in derivatives, a legalized form of gambling, has totally outstripped not only the value of financial markets, but the GDP of the entire world. Warren Buffett called derivatives, “financial weapons of mass destruction”. He is right, and Clinton is partially responsible. Derivatives include hedge funds, by the way, which make some people rich when your investments tank and which totally remove profit-seeking from any connection to actual productive values and real work. Many of the richest people in the US today are hedge fund operators, including the husband of Chelsea, the Clintons’ daughter. Hedge fund owners are the biggest parasites on the planet, yet due to their wealth, they own politicians, ignite inflation, and corrupt economies at every level. Plus they keep much of their wealth in offshore tax havens, usually run by the masters of financial sleight-of-hand, the British.
The alternative world of economics now being created by Russia, China, and the Global South, does not depend on derivatives, which are effectively being outlawed. This is a major reason why the US is waging hybrid war against Russia. All of the churning of derivatives, fed by fractional reserve lending, will show up at some point as income to the traders and speculators, which can then be taxed by governments that spend the revenues on their bureaucracies and for armaments for their militaries. So the whole system continually feeds itself on digital wealth that has no productive basis. Much of this wealth goes into the housing market, which is the biggest consumer market available, driving up prices and rents and eliminating affordable housing. The net effect is to turn the US and the rest of the collective West into what increasingly resembles a glittering, gigantic, depressed, drug and crime-ridden slum.
Another action of the Clinton administration that opened the doors of financial abuse was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had mandated a separation between commercial banks and investment companies. What the repeal meant in practice was that commercial banks with their fractional reserve privileges could create money out of thin air and lend it for speculation. Often this speculation takes the form of an “investor” being able to borrow vast sums of money for huge stock and bond purchases or options or for the outright purchase of entire companies.
This is one of the many factors that has turned US industry into producers not so much of goods and services but of dividends and capital gains. So the people calling the shots for businesses are no longer their managers or directors, but rather Wall Street investment fund executives. We have been seeing a gigantic change in the character of the fundamental roots of capitalism. Capitalism is no longer based on the productive values of industry, but rather on bets on future profits. It has been a catastrophe, in part because the financiers have been major drivers of the outsourcing of US jobs and factories, but also because of the fundamental dishonesty of the entire system. All this manifested during the Clinton years most particularly with the passage and implementation of NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has been a massive Wall Street windfall.
Clinton Era Weirdness
So many weird and violent things happened during Bill Clinton’s rise to prominence and his two presidential administrations that a brief list may be in order. The reader may pursue these further if desired. They include: The 1987 deaths of two high school boys in Mena, Arkansas, who were later said to be witnesses to illegal drug drops connected with Arkansas police and unnamed politicians; the 1993 government assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas; the 1993 death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster in Washington, D.C., supposedly by suicide; the 1995 massive explosion at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; the 1996 arrest of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski; and the 1998 impeachment and Senate trial of President Clinton on charges related to his illicit affair with a White House intern, said by some to have been a plot to get Clinton to go along with the ongoing foreign policy machinations of the Deep State. I will make no further comment on Clinton’s sex scandals, except to mention one name: Jeffrey Epstein.
Clinton the Worst President in American History?
Finally, we need to mention that it was during Clinton’s presidency that planning for the extremely complex plot resulting in 9/11 surely must have begun, regardless of whom we believe carried out the 9/11 attacks. We also know that employees within the FBI were trying to sound alarms of indications of such plotting going on but were ignored. More on 9/11 shortly. It was surely no coincidence that the Neocons’ Project for a New American Century published in 1997 specified the need for a “New Pearl Harbor” in order to launch their desired campaign for aggression. They knew what was coming.
So let’s face it. Bill Clinton may have been the worst president in American history, a disaster on every level. Under Clinton the US was also on its way to becoming a mega version of Hot Springs, Arkansas, with morality down the drain everywhere. But wait. Matters would get even worse under the next four presidents, leading to the Ukraine debacle of today.
Supreme Court Names George W. Bush President
The 21st century got off to an inauspicious start when in December 2000, the Supreme Court selected George W. Bush to be president after finding that disputed election results in Florida between Bush and Clinton’s vice president Al Gore were too much trouble to sort out, so granted Bush the victory. Gore lost in part because reformer Ralph Nader siphoned off some of the progressive Democratic vote, much the same way that conservative businessman Ross Perot conveniently put Clinton in the White House in 1992 and 1996.
It didn’t start with these characters, of course, but presidential politics had become just another racket, a highly refined form of organized crime. Some call this racket “democracy.”
George W. Bush brought us 9/11, the War on Terror justified by lies told on the floor of the UN, the invasion of Afghanistan, the second invasion of Iraq, the Patriot Act, CIA torture chambers, the further eastward expansion of NATO, the housing bubble, the 2008 financial meltdown, and the start of the Great Recession. But Bush, with his obviously somewhat limited intelligence and absolutely no government experience, didn’t do all this on his own. He had the help of the king of the Neocons, Vice-President Dick Cheney.
9/11
Millions of people believe that 9/11 was an “inside job” carried out by the US government against its own citizens, and, after studying the question for over 20 years, I agree. I believe it also involved the governments of Saudi Arabia and Israel. I believe that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were brought down by some kind of controlled demolition and that the Pentagon was hit by a missile. I don’t wish to speculate further on how it was all done or what actually happened to the passengers on the missing airliners that probably never struck any of their putative targets. The literature on 9/11 is vast, including speculation on the fate of the passengers, and the work done by the 9/11 Truth Movement has been heroic. For further details, I would refer you the archives of the VT website. Here a strong case has been made that the Twin Towers were brought down by nuclear devices.
I would also like to address one point for those who believe that the force behind US militarism/imperialism/aggression is Zionism, by whatever name you wish to call it, or the state of Israel. It is true that the Neocons who dominate US foreign policy are inordinately fond of Israel, but it may be closer to the truth to say that the Israelis are along for the ride with US global ambitions rather than the other way around. I have placed the Rockefeller dynasty at the center of US imperialism, and they are not Jews. I think the British favored Palestine as a Jewish homeland because it established a beachhead for them in conquest of Middle Eastern oil. But it is certainly a complex subject.
When General Wesley Clark stated publicly that the Neocons intended to bring about regime change in seven countries—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran—a mere glance at the map makes it clear that the prime beneficiary in the region would be Israel. But then the US was also a beneficiary in that the War on Terror was a major step toward global dominance. It was also justified by the thesis of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. To help things along, the mainstream media continued its long-standing barrage of hateful propaganda against Muslim “towel heads.”
At the same time, we can ask why Israel has a covert presence in Ukraine as part of the present war. Is it true that Israel has its eyes on a depopulated Ukraine as a new Jewish homeland, possibly even as a replacement for what seems increasingly like a failed state on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean? We might want to consider the contentions of Douglas Reed (1895-1976), a famed British journalist from the mid-20th century, who argued that the entire century of warfare was a Zionist project for world conquest, which would mean that they had essentially infiltrated and taken over what had previously been the Anglo-American Round Table designs for global control. I will leave further speculation on this matter to the reader.
But do peruse Reed’s books, which are readily available. Reed was a London Times reporter who witnessed the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 and boarded the last train out of Vienna for safety in Zurich. His books are classics in their field, especially his last book, The Controversy of Zion.
Full-Spectrum Dominance
Before leaving Bush-Cheney behind, reference should be made to the military doctrine of “Full-Spectrum Dominance” that the Pentagon has promulgated in various formats, as well as their ongoing designation of Russia and China as our two main “adversaries.” I would also ask whether you, if you are a US citizen, ever voted for any of this. The answer is likely to be “No”. Where then is the vaunted “democracy” the US claims to be taking over the world in order to preserve?
Amazon.com gives the following definition of Full-Spectrum Dominance in the overview for the book by William Engdahl entitled: Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, published in 2011: “For the faction that controls the Pentagon, the military industry and the oil industry, the Cold War never ended. It went on ‘below the radar’ creating a global network of bases and conflicts to advance their long-term goal of Full Spectrum Dominance, the total control of the planet: land, sea, air, space, outer space and cyberspace. Their methods included control of propaganda, use of NGOs for regime change, Color Revolutions to advance NATO east, and a vast array of psychological and economic warfare techniques, a Revolution in Military Affairs as they termed it. The events of September 11, 2001, would allow an American President to declare a war on an enemy who was everywhere and nowhere, who justified a Patriot Act that destroyed that very freedom in the name of the new worldwide War on Terror. This book gives a disturbing look at that strategy of Full Spectrum Dominance.”
Engdahl’s book is on the mark. The US Department of Defense in its 2010 Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines Full-Spectrum Dominance as: “The cumulative effect of dominance in the air, land, maritime, and space domains and information environment, which includes cyberspace, that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or prohibitive interference.” Apologists for the doctrine of Full-Spectrum Dominance sometimes associate it with George W. Bush’s declaration of the War on Terror following 9/11 that such open-ended war is a necessary response to a situation where the enemy is unseen, unknown, and could strike anywhere at any time.
For those who would argue that such a philosophy is actually paranoia on an international scale, it would be a cause for any ordinary person to undergo psychiatric evaluation, though it could also be argued that it is rather an attitude of a prudent householder who wishes to protect his property and environment from criminal assault. But if a country defines as his property and environment the entire globe, every country, and all people, then problems obviously arise.
Then we are hearkening back to the Wolfowiz Doctrine and the standard US posture of seeking to gain universal military dominance as our fundamental stance in the world. We then have an obligation to ask what other countries think of our policies and position. Where is the time-honored practice of diplomacy or the search for compromise and respect among nations?
The answer that Russia and some other countries have given is to look at the UN Charter, which Vladimir Putin would cite as his justification for entering Ukraine with the Russian army in 2022. The UN Charter, which outlaws aggressive war and casts a legal cloud over preemptive war, does not support US global military hegemony, the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the War on Terror as defined by George W. Bush—“You are either with us or against us.”—or Full-Spectrum Dominance.
President Barack Hussein Obama
Barack Hussein Obama, a young CIA operative maneuvered into national political office as junior senator from Illinois in 2004, was elected president only four years later. Obama’s public persona was entirely a creation of the controlled mainstream media. Obama purported to bring relief to a nation sickened by the Bush/Cheney disasters. His call for “Change” was the sum and substance of his candidacy. As half African-American, Obama was able to capture the black vote as his core constituency. It was the beginning of “identity politics,” where the Democratic Party expects the electorate to support any idiot they put up for election as long as that person is, or can appeal to, a racial minority, feminism, or support of gay people.
As a candidate, Obama attended a secret White House meeting with George W. Bush and Bushes advisers where he promised, if elected, to bail out the banks from the ongoing financial collapse over subprime mortgages. This was even as the Great Recession was being ushered in. The bailouts were duly provided to the tune of almost a trillion dollars in loans once Obama was in office.
As president, now with Joe Biden his vice president and Hillary Clinton his secretary of state, Obama launched a campaign to kill our “enemies” in Afghanistan and Pakistan with drones operated by CIA personnel located in the US—also frequently killing civilians as “collateral damage.” He oversaw NATO’s bombing of Libya, the overthrow and assassination of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, and the destruction of that nation’s infrastructure and way of life. Obama declined to launch a full-scale assault on Syria, but nevertheless infiltrated US advisers at the same time CIA-backed ISIS terrorists were trying to take down the legitimate democratically-elected government of Bashar al-Assad.
In a major geopolitical move, Russia sent forces into Syria, which so far has prevented that nation from suffering the same fate as Afghanistan or Iraq. Russia’s actions in Syria, and their operation of a major naval base on the Syrian coast, fed the ire of the US establishment against them in the run-up to the hybrid war against Russia over Ukraine.
Obama’s Wars is the title of a 2010 book by Bob Woodward. Also see Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State by Jeremy Kuzmarov and Glen Ford. Obama’s wars took place against the background of the Arab Spring, where the CIA undertook regime change against the nations of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. Subversion was implemented by using Facebook and other social media to foment protests and revolution, especially among young people, always an easy target for exploiting discontent. Obama-instigated violence is still a staple of life in these countries.
Cobell Case
The importance of Native Americans to the past, present, and future of America is essential to understand in any analysis about where the country stands at present and where it is headed in the future.
Previous mention was made of the Dawes Act which, when passed in 1887, broke up the Indian reservations into individual allotments to be held “in trust” by the federal government. Most of these allotments, typically 160 acres, were never settled by the Indians who were supposed to use them to become farmers and ranchers in imitation of white settlers. The government often leased the land and mineral rights to white ranchers and miners at fire sale prices. Often the land was in arid, inhospitable areas, unsuitable for farming. The government allowed non-Indians to purchase the unallotted reservation land as homesteaders, sometimes opening it through one-time events like the land rushes in Oklahoma or through lotteries. Payment for this land went directly to the federal government, as the Indian tribes whose reservations were being subdivided had no ability or administrative mechanisms to handle the funds.
The idea had been essentially to make the Indians into subsistence farmers and, by the way, to destroy “inferior” native cultures. Related to this was the sending of Indian children to white-run schools where they were to be transformed into good Americans.
But by the 1920s and 1930s, the government realized that this policy had failed. The remaining reservation lands gradually began to be returned to tribes as tribal governments were formed under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The principle was established that the tribes held sovereignty, were not under the jurisdiction of state and local law, and were entitled to manage their own affairs, including enforcement of criminal statutes.
Meanwhile, the “Individual Indian Allotments” were passed down from one generation to another, with allotments often being divided among eligible heirs. So they became “fractionated.” In some cases, a single parcel might have over 100 joint owners. This fractionation made it impossible in most cases for the land to be used, sold, or administered. By the late 20th century an estimated 300,000 Indians were the owners of some amount of property, though it continued to be held in trust by the federal government.
The Native Americans finally gained redress for this longstanding historic disaster in 2009 with a $3.4 billion settlement from the federal government, following a 13-year journey through the federal court system in response to a class action suit filed by a heroic Indian woman named Elouise Cobell. She was a member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and had been founder of the first tribally-owned commercial bank.
I became involved in this case while working as an analyst for the US Treasury Department. The Secretary of the Treasury had been cited for contempt of court by the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Treasury had a fiduciary responsibility for the funds that should have been paid to the Indians for more than a century for leases on their land. Unfortunately, Treasury had no records of this money being paid or where it might have gone. At meetings I attended with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we were told that there had once been records but that many of them had been lost in floods, eaten by rodents, or couldn’t be found.
The best I can do at this point is to include a short article about Elouise Cobell written by Emma Rothberg for the website womenshistory.org. I do this in the overall context of the present article because it touches on many of the themes I want to drive home. Among these are the negligence and abuse of our government, but also how one individual took the lead in standing up to it and emerging with a very positive result.
Here is the article:
Elouise Cobell (“Yellow Bird Woman”) 1945-2011
By: Emma Rothberg, NWHM Predoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies I 2020-2022
An entrepreneur, advocate, and member of the Blackfeet Nation, Elouise Pepion Cobell (“Yellow Bird Woman”), fought tirelessly for government accountability and for Native Americans to have control over their own financial future. During her life, she won countless awards, founded the first Native American owned bank, and successfully won a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Government.
Cobell was born on November 5, 1945 on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. The middle of nine children, she was the great, great granddaughter of the respected Mountain Chief of the Blackfeet Nation who refused to compromise with the U.S. Government in the nineteenth century. Cobell grew up without running water or electricity and three of her siblings died during childhood. When she was four, her father successfully got a one-room schoolhouse built on the reservation. She attended that school until high school.
Cobell grew up hearing stories and complaints from family and friends about the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA managed Native American owned land and any proceeds made from its lease in trusts, but Cobell kept hearing stories about missing money. The story that impacted her the most was that of her aunt and uncle—when they sought money to pay for medical care, the BIA agent first refused to see them and then sent a check after a long delay. The delay cost her uncle his life due to the lack of timely medical care. Because of the stories, she started looking into her own trust money at 18 but was told time and again by BIA agents that she did not understand what she was looking at, or for.
After studying accounting at Great Falls Commercial College, Cobell went to the University of Montana to study business. While there, she interned as a clerk at the reservation’s BIA office and saw many people turned away when they came to the office asking for their money.
After graduation, Cobell became the Treasurer for the Blackfeet Nation. In this role, she saw that the numbers just did not add up; for all the product going out of the reservation, money was not coming in. She began attending government meetings and asking questions. Officials told her she did not know how to read an account statement despite the fact she had a degree in business and had studied accounting.
When the only bank on the Blackfeet reservation closed, and no other bank wanted to open a branch, Cobell took matters into her own hands. In 1987, she helped found the Blackfeet National Bank, now the Native American Bank, the first American bank owned by a tribe. After she stepped down as bank director, she served as director of the Native American Community Development Corporation, the bank’s nonprofit affiliate. In recognition of her work, she received a “Genius Grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1997. She joked “about having made the leap from ‘dumb Indian’ to ‘genius’ in one lifetime.” In 2000, the Blackfeet Nation honored her with warrior status. In 2002, she received an Honorary Doctorate from Montana State University.
Cobell also went to court in order to demand accountability from the government for abuse of Native American property and to receive moneys owed. On June 10, 1996, Cobell, along with the Native American Rights Fund, filed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Interior for the mismanagement of the Indian Trust Funds belonging to over 300,000 individual tribal members. Cobell v. Salazar remains one of the largest class-action lawsuits ever filed against the United States government. The lawsuit alleged that the BIA had been mismanaging and abusing the Indian Trust Funds for over a century, leaving Native Americans in poverty and without alternatives.
Cobell was not only the lead plaintiff but raised money for the suit, donating part of the $310,000 from her “Genius Grant” to the cause. After 13 years of contentious court battles, Cobell and her lawyers agreed to a $3.4 billion settlement with the U.S. Government in December 2009. The settlement included $1.5 billion for the members of the lawsuit, $1.9 billion for a Land Consolidation Program, and $60 million for a college scholarship fund for Native American youth. The settlement was given the final stamp of approval in June 21, 2011.
Cobell died after a long battle with cancer on October 16, 2011. Besides her MacArthur grant and status as a warrior, the Montana Trial Lawyers Association gave Cobell its annual Citizens Award in 2011. She posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Freedom in 2016 from President Barack Obama; and Montana Governor Steven Bullock issued a 2015 proclamation recognizing November 5 as Elouise Cobell Day. The Cobell Scholarship, named in her honor, is a merit and need-based scholarship to support students enrolled in U.S. Federally-Recognized tribes who are seeking post-secondary degrees. The University of Montana has an Elouise Cobell Land and Culture Institute, a learning center for students focusing on collaborations with Tribal Colleges and the story-telling traditions in Native American culture.
Protest Movements
From 2009 to 2013, at least five distinct protest movements were active within the US to contest the prevailing direction of governance within the nation.
The Tea Party movement, associated with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, was organized in 2009 and called for reduced taxes, less government spending to lower the national debt, and decreased federal regulation of business activities. The Tea Party movement opposed any suggestion of single-payer government-sponsored health care, but failed to take a stance against runaway military spending. The movement has supported various Republican political candidates, such as Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, and Paul Ryan. With its mix of libertarianism and traditional conservative “small government” attitudes, the main target of Tea Party-supported belt tightening has been welfare and anti-poverty programs.
Occupy Wall Street was a major protest movement that identified with ordinary Americans—the 99%–against the power and political influence of big money and big finance. Occupy Wall Street began with an encampment in Zuccotti Park in New York City’s Wall Street financial district and gave rise to the wider Occupy movement in the US and elsewhere. The protesters were driven out of Zuccotti Park on November 5, 2011. The movement continued, focusing its efforts against banks, corporations, home foreclosures, and university hierarchies. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have conducted extensive surveillance of the Occupy movement. On October 1, 2011, a large group of Occupy protesters set out to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge resulting in 768 arrests.
Antifa refers to a loose collection of groups and individuals who identify themselves as anti-fascist and as opposing the activities of white supremacist organizations. Antifa members show up at white supremacist rallies and have also participated in protests against police violence against racial minorities. Antifa tactics do not exclude threats of violence. Participants usually act anonymously and avoid symbolic arrests. During the riots following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, some commentators picked on Antifa to blame. After the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot in Washington, D.C., some apologists for President Donald Trump claimed it had been instigated by Antifa.
The Black Lives Matter movement began in July 2013, after Florida resident George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of black American teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. Black Lives Matter began conducting street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two black Americans. One was Michael Brown, who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri. The other was Eric Garner, who was suffocated to death by police in New York City.
Armed militias can also be viewed as a protest movement, though they have never been highly organized and tend to come and go with the times. They also tend to be highly infiltrated by the FBI. Militias were said to be part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, including members of the Proud Boys.
There are also a number of antiwar organizations in the US, but their performance has been disappointing as “progressives” and “the left” have frequently given support to the Biden administration in its undeclared hybrid war against Russia. The antiwar movement has also been distracted and stifled by Democratic Party identity politics, where the machinations of politicians of color, like Barack Obama, divert potential protests into “safe” channels. This is probably why the Deep State selected Obama to be president in the first place.
2014 Overthrow of the Government of Ukraine
The most fateful decision made by Obama and his administration was to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and install a pro-US and pro-NATO regime. US designs on Ukraine went back to the break-up of the Soviet Union prior to 1991. After Ukraine became independent, it agreed to transfer nuclear weapons on its soil to the Russian Federation. But the US vultures had begun to circle over what appeared to be Cold War road kill. The CIA immediately began to probe for weaknesses among the states that had spun off the Soviet colossus, including Ukraine, as well as within Russia itself. The next “clash of civilizations” was underway.
Ukraine had never been an independent nation, except for a brief period at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, with the latest piece, the Crimean Peninsula, added as matter of administrative convenience by Khrushchev in 1954. Even after the breakup, the Russian Federation maintained forces in the Crimea to safeguard Sevastopol, headquarters of the Russian naval fleet.
Ukraine was the center of important industries and vast tracts of fertile farmland, particularly along the Black Sea coast and in the eastern region known as the Donbass. The eastern third of Ukraine, including the Donbass and the region around Odessa to the south, was largely populated by ethnic Russians speaking the Russian language, while further west were speakers of the Ukrainian dialect, as well as Hungarians and Poles.
Western Ukraine had been a hotbed of Nazi sympathizers during the German occupation during World War II, as well as the site of atrocities against Jews, Russians, gypsies, and other “undesirables.” Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, had once been the original capital of the Kievan Rus’, from which the modern state of Russia had grown before its focal points had been transferred to Moscow and St. Petersburg. These age-old ethnic divisions made it easy for the Neocons and CIA to sow hatred and foment what became a civil war.
Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard
The leading vulture in the encirclement of Ukraine was Jimmy Carter’s former mentor and national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had long believed in the eventual collapse of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union, and even of Russia itself into a multitude of component parts. Russia, located at the center of Eurasia, where the two continents merged, was fortuitously placed at a strategically critical junction. Brzezinski reasoned that if this junction could be controlled by another actor, such as the US, that actor would rule the world. Or so he argued in his magnum opus, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, published in 1999. But he also reasoned that the epicenter of power was actually in Eastern Europe, specifically Ukraine. He famously wrote that “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
Brzezinski’s theory bore a strong similarity to the ideas in “The Geographical Pivot of History,” an article submitted by Halford John Mackinder in 1904 to the Royal Geographical Society that put forth his Heartland theory. According to Mackinder, the Earth’s land surface was divisible into:
First, the “World-Island,” comprising the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa (Afro-Eurasia), being the largest, most populous, and wealthiest of all possible land combinations; second, “the Offshore Islands,” including most particularly the British Isles and the islands of Japan; and third, “the Outlying Islands,” including the continents of North America, South America, and Oceania.
The “Heartland” lay at the center of the “World Island,” stretching from the Himalaya Mountains to the Arctic Ocean. Mackinder’s Heartland was ruled at that time by the Russian Empire, which, more or less due to historical accident, was sitting therefore at the top of the geopolitical heap. And as we have seen, control of the heap had been a life-or-death British, and lately American, imperative since Queen Elizabeth I and John Dee.
Later, in 1919, Mackinder wrote in Democratic Ideals and Reality:
“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
“Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
“Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”
So there you have it: World conquest in a nutshell. At the heart of Eastern Europe, of course, was no other than Brzezinski’s native Poland. Unlike the Russians, of course, Brzezinski’s superior Polish compatriots had every right to be there. And just to the east of Poland was Ukraine. So to the brighter minds engaged in guiding and carrying out US foreign policy, Ukraine was IT, because Zbig had said so. And Zbig, plus Samuel P. Huntington, plus Leo Strauss, plus Ayn Rand—well, what more can I say?
Obama’s Greatest Project: The Maidan Coup
Wikipedia: “Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine regained independence and declared itself neutral, forming a limited military partnership with post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States, while also joining the Partnership for Peace with NATO in 1994. In 2013, a series of mass demonstrations known as the Euromaidan erupted across Ukraine, eventually escalating into the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, which led to the establishment of a new government and pro-Russian unrest.”
According to journalist Eric Zuesse, writing in “How the War Started,” “The US regime under Barack Obama had been planning, ever since June 2011, a takeover of Ukraine.” The purpose was to control Russia’s key naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea. (europereloaded.com, November 4, 2019)
Zuesse wrote: “The active operation to take over Ukraine had started actually on March 1, 2013, inside the US embassy in Kiev, which was almost nine months before Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych on November 20, 2013, rejected the EU’s demand that Ukraine must bear the full $160 billion cost of abandoning its existing trading relationships with Russia and its allies in order to join the EU.”
Zuesse further stated that near the start of Obama’s presidency, Obama had called then-presidential candidate Yanukovych to sound him out—if Yanukovych won the election, would Ukraine then join NATO? Zuesse wrote: “This is what everything was really about. On January 7, 2010, the Kiev Post bannered, ‘Yanukovych: Ukraine will remain a neutral state’ and this is what actually sealed his fate. Yanukovych, with that now in his platform, won the presidential election on February 7, 2010. So he was in Obama’s gunsights even at the very moment when he won the presidency.”
The so-called Revolution of Dignity in 2014 was in reality an illegal coup d’etat engineered by the US, along with figures from right-wing groups that were funded by anti-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs, who immediately installed a provisional government in place of the democratically-elected president Victor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia.
Working behind the scenes in Ukraine were the National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros’ Foundation for an Open Society. Kit Klarenberg of Grayzone writes: “On February 3, 2014, less than three weeks before police withdrew from Kiev, effectively handing the city to armed protesters and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country, NED convened an event, ‘Ukraine’s lessons learned: from the Orange Revolution to the Euromaidan.’” The Orange Revolution was a failed CIA 2004-2005 coup attempt in Ukraine. Now, the NED pre-2014 coup event “was led by Ukrainian journalist Sergii Leshchenko, who at the time was finishing up an NED-sponsored Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellowship in Washington, D.C.”
With the police undermanned, the mass of demonstrators in Maidan Square was fired on by still-unidentified snipers. About 90 people were killed over several days, including some police. Yanukovych was blamed, though later reporting found links with right-wing Ukrainian groups such as the Svoboda Party and, possibly, terrorists brought in from Georgia. In any case, the shootings had been organized for their political impact.
Klarenberg: “Then-State Department official Victoria Nuland, now [in 2022] Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, was also present, notoriously handing out motivational cookies to attendees.” As an aside, Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan had been a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century that helped lay the groundwork for 9/11.
Klarenbeg: “On February 4th 2014, one day after Leshchenko’s NED presentation, an intercepted recording of a telephone call between Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked, in which the pair discussed how Washington was ‘midwifing’ Yanukovych’s ouster, and named several individuals to head the post-coup government.” During this conversation, in a discussion indicating that there were divisions within Europe on whether Russia should be provoked by the coup, Nuland famously said, “F**k the EU.”
Klarenberg writes that besides NED and Soros, funds for the coup were also provided by the US Agency for International Development, the US embassy, and American oligarchs and “philanthropists.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov provided a description of the coup in an article published in Izvestia that was translated on the Saker website on July 18, 2022:
“February 2014, Ukraine—The West, represented by the German, French, and Polish foreign ministers, de facto forced President Viktor Yanukovich into signing an agreement with the opposition to end the confrontation and promote a peaceful resolution of the intra-Ukrainian crisis by establishing a transitional national unity government and calling a snap election, to be held within a few months. This too turned out to be a fraud. The next morning, the opposition staged a coup guided as it was by anti-Russia, racist slogans. However, the Western guarantors did not even try to bring the opposition back to its senses. Furthermore, they switched immediately to encouraging the coup perpetrators in their policies against Russia and everything Russian, unleashing the war against their own people and bombing entire cities in the Donbass region just because people there refused to recognize the unconstitutional coup. For that, they labelled the people in the Donbass terrorists, and once again the West was there to encourage them.”
As to whether the coup was actually supported by Ukrainians, Klarenberg cites a Washington Post op-ed by academics Keith Darden and Lucan Way. “The pair forensically exposed how less than 20 percent of protesters professed to be driven by ‘violations of democracy or the threat of dictatorship,’ only 40-45 percent of Ukrainians were in favor of European integration, Yanukovych remained ‘the most popular political figure in the country,’ and no poll conducted to date had ever indicated majority support for the uprising.
“In fact, ‘quite large majorities oppose the takeover of regional governments by the opposition,’ and the population remained bitterly divided on the future of Ukraine.’ Such hostility stemmed from ‘anti-Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism,’ rife among the demonstrators, ‘not [playing] well among the Ukrainian majority.’
“Over 50 percent of Ukraine’s population residing in regions that had ‘strongly identified with Russia’ for over two centuries, ‘nearly all [were] alienated by anti-Russian rhetoric and symbols. Anti-Russian forms of Ukrainian nationalism expressed on the Maidan are certainly not representative of the general view of Ukrainians. Electoral support for these views and for the political parties who espouse them has always been limited. Their presence and influence in the protest movement far outstrip their role in Ukrainian politics and their support barely extends geographically beyond a few Western provinces.’”
Opposition to the coup broke out in western and southern Ukraine in the Russian-speaking oblasts. On May 2 in Odessa, “Some 1,000 Ukrainian rightists, led by the notorious Right Sector, surrounded, stormed, and burned the House of Trade Unions in Odessa last Friday, killing 39 pro-Russia demonstrators in the building. On their way to attacking the union hall, which was occupied by anti-Kiev government demonstrators fearing for their lives, the rightists recruited members of a Ukrainian football club, the Chernomorets, according to numerous reports in the European press and on line. Many of those who attacked and burned the building wore swastikas and other fascist insignia, according to observers. Eye witnesses said that the fascists were armed with bats, shields, and metal chains and that the people inside the union hall had run there for protection from them. After the attack by the rightists, streets around the trade union headquarters were reportedly stained with the blood of those who had jumped from windows to escape the flames.” www.peoplesworld.org
Russia did not accept the results of the coup against Yanukovych. Wikipedia: “During this period, unmarked Russian troops invaded the Crimean Peninsula, which was later annexed by Russia; and pro-Russia unrest in Ukraine’s Donbas culminated in Russia-backed separatists seizing territory throughout the region, sparking the War in Donbass.”
After Russia took control of Crimea, a referendum was held in which at least 86 percent of voters approved Russian annexation. The Donbass separatists declared two independent republics: the Donetsk Peoples Republic and the Lugansk Peoples Republic. The Ukrainian government immediately launched military operations against Donbass but suffered a major defeat that led to meetings at Minsk in Belarus and the signing of two agreements: Minsk I and II, under which Donetsk and Lugansk were promised autonomy in an accord guaranteed by the governments of France and Germany. The Minsk Agreements also guaranteed the continued official status of the Russian language in schools and public life, as the Kiev government had begun to outlaw its use.
The government of Ukraine, however, failed to honor the Minsk Agreements and proceeded to carry out artillery bombardments in the Donbass that resulted in what the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated to be more than 3,000 civilian deaths and 12,800-13,000 total deaths, including militia members. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, elected in 2014, said on June 17, 2022, that Ukraine never intended to honor the Minsk Agreements. He said: “The Minsk Agreements did not mean anything to us, and we had no intention to carry them out…Our goal was to remove the threat we faced…and win time in order to restore economic growth and rebuild the armed forces. We achieved this goal. Mission accomplished for the Minsk Agreements.” (Saker, July 18, 2022) Since then, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has stated that NATO worked with Ukraine during this period in bringing the Ukrainian military up to NATO standards.
Also during the period 2014-2022, the Ukrainian army constructed heavy fortifications in Donbass in preparation for undertaking an offensive there. At the same time, the US military had been engaged since 2005 in equipping and operating over 40 biological labs in Ukraine that the Russia Ministry of Defense later said were actually bioweapons labs. The labs were run by the US’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The Russians have presented captured documents to the US government and the UN Security Council but have received no response. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov states that the documents “clearly indicate direct violations of the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons.” He adds, “In fact, the Pentagon’s military-biological activities around the world, especially in the post-Soviet countries, require the closest attention in light of the multiplying evidence of criminal experiments with the most dangerous pathogens in order to create biological weapons conducted under the guise of peaceful research.” (Saker, July 18, 2022)
All this was wrought by the Obama administration. Ironically, Obama had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. The Nobel Committee praised Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. Emphasis was also given to his vision of a world free from nuclear weapons. Obama, who famously called the US “the indispensable nation,” had overseen what literally was a terrorist plot to take over Ukraine. The lead action officer for the Obama administration in execution of the Ukraine project was Vice President Joe Biden, who conducted numerous visits to Ukraine to oversee affairs. Both Obama and Biden could easily face charges of war crimes if they were ever brought to account.
The “Deplorables” Elect Donald Trump President
After Obama, came the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, who defeated Obama’s former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, wife of former President Bill Clinton, in one of the most bizarre electoral events in US history. Trump, a New York real estate magnate, had conceived the idea of someday running for president rather early in his career, and succeeded at his first try after winning the Republican Party nomination in a series of primaries with a crowded field of 17 candidates. Trump was supported by a brilliant campaign manager, Steve Bannon, who had honed political slogans and catch-phrases to a fine art. The best of all was, “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), while, in a series of campaign rallies, Trump strode the stage in his best Lion King imitation, pausing to kiss and hug the American flag.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign exhibited arrogance, lies, and incompetence. Clinton tried to pin Trump’s popularity on unproven meddling by Russian President Vladimir Putin and insulted Trump’s massive popular base as “a basket of deplorables.” Why would a presidential candidate say such a thing about millions of voters? Clinton lost, and seems to be blaming Putin to this day. Later, her Russia stories were proved to be completely made-up. But it was likely her nauseating aura of entitlement, even as she raked in millions of dollars for speech engagements on Wall Street, that brought her down. Trump was a polarizing figure, to be sure. Those who loved him stood by him no matter what, and those who hated him—well, they loved to hate him. But Hillary Clinton? No thanks.
And who, really, were Trump’s “deplorables”? For the most part they were ordinary hard-working Americans who had been abused for at least the last two or three generations by big finance, the Deep State, and the political controllers, most recently by the alliance between the Democratic Party’s identity-politics elite liberal core, and the Russia-hating Neocons. The deplorables were people who in the 1950s and 1960s would have been working at decent-paying factory jobs. Now, with those jobs having been shipped overseas, they were adrift. Back when I was growing up in Michigan, young men growing up in that state would go to work for Ford or General Motors. I recently asked someone from Michigan what they do today, and he answered, “They make meth.” Our government and our system have totally failed these people.
Trump has also been excoriated for his support by Christian Evangelicals. People who believe in God have to vote for someone, I guess.
But how many in the US don’t even vote? A quick calculation shows that around 15% of persons who are eligible to register and vote actually elect any particular individual to be president. This is not an exaggeration, and it is not “democracy.” But it is Reagan’s “city on a hill” and Obama’s “indispensable nation.”
Trump’s Foreign Policy Actions
Trump made waves by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords that pledged the signatory nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions according to a rather loose non-binding timetable. But Trump’s withdrawal played to the Republican Party’s refusal to pin climate change on what they say is the unproven proposition that the cause of global warming is manmade CO2 pollution.
My own view is that global warming is a part of a natural cycle and that what we are seeing today may really be the end stage of the Little Ice Age. This would indicate that the “Green New Deal” and other renewable energy initiatives exist mainly to promote business initiatives in the energy field that should only be evaluated through strict cost-benefit analysis. Is it really possible to run a modern industrial nation on solar panels and windmills? And what fuel can be used for the electricity to power millions of electric vehicles?
Trump also moved to please Israel by declaring that the US embassy was to be relocated to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and by withdrawing from the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action which was signed with the nation of Iran in 2015. Under the JCPOA, Iran committed itself not to develop nuclear weapons in return for a go-ahead to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The agreement was signed by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—plus Germany—and the EU. Trump claimed he was seeking a better deal with Iran and that he would renegotiate the agreement later, but he never did.
Trump also sent US forces into Syria, claiming that he was helping keep ISIS at bay, but he also admitted that the US was “guarding” Syrian oil that they actually appeared to be confiscating. In fact, the CIA had been working in Syria to undermine the elected government there for many years. This included false flag events where intelligence operatives—the “White Helmets”—staged gassing incidents that were blamed on President Assad, who allegedly was “gassing his own people.” Again, the mainstream media were in the forefront of spreading these lies. Finally, Trump did nothing to stop Ukraine’s steady bombardment of the Donbass or require that Ukraine live up to the Minsk Agreements.
Does Trump deserve credit for not starting any new wars, as he claimed, or for making statements that appeared to be conciliatory to North Korea and Russia, even as the Deep State kept busy with its global efforts to undermine countries perceived as unfriendly to the US, including behind the scenes work in Ukraine? I somehow doubt it. And nothing had changed at the CIA. Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated in a speech at Texas A&M University that when he was Trump’s CIA director, “We lied, we cheated, we stole.” Pompeo, though now out of office, is going around openly advocating a hot war by the US against Russia and China, presumably so his lying, cheating, and stealing can become universal values. It has also been suggested that Pompeo’s recent speech at the Hudson Institute advocating what would certainly be World War III was actually his first salvo in a 2024 presidential bid. What a guy.
The Covid Pandemic
But the big event of Trump’s presidency was the Coronovirus pandemic. As of July 2022, an estimated 6.3 million people have died worldwide from Covid-19. Economic disruption from lockdowns and disruption of supply chains has been massive. And the pandemic may not be over.
President Joe Biden later directed US intelligence agencies to investigate the source of Covid, but it has never been proven where the pandemic came from. Early on it was claimed that the virus jumped in the wild from bats to humans or from a live animal market in China. President Trump called it “the China virus.” But it has begun to be asked whether the virus was created deliberately in a laboratory.
The Russians have noted that the US biolabs in Ukraine they found when they invaded were working with coronavirus, and there have been allegations that Covid was a US false flag directed at China and Iran that simply got out of hand. I do have a research physician friend who says it’s self-evident that Covid-19 is manmade. If so, where, why, and how was it released into the world?
Most recently, allegations of a manmade origin have heated up. An article in RT states: “Speaking in Madrid last month, economist Jeffrey Sachs called the current situation ‘a mess’ and blamed diminishing American leadership for it, identifying the pandemic as one of the US failures. He said he was convinced that the virus ‘came out of US lab biotechnology’ as opposed to evolving naturally.”
RT continued: “The US may owe the world huge compensation for the damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian State Duma said on Wednesday. He cited remarks made by the chair of the Lancet commission on the disease [i.e., Jeffrey Sachs], who suggested the SARS CoV-2 virus may have originated from an American research program.”
Suggestions of man-made origin are derided, of course, as conspiracy theories, but no one knows. Investigation of the possible creation of pathogens in bioweapons labs is an extremely murky field smothered in prohibitions on releasing classified information.
It is notable that President Joe Biden recently asked Congress for research funding because, he said, “A second pandemic is coming.” How does Biden know this?
There is a line of thinking that denies the existence of Covid-19 and/or claims that Covid-19 vaccines are harmful, untested, or are even intended to harm people. I personally have been in close touch with many medical professionals, including some who work in emergency rooms or Covid units, including close relatives. I can tell you that Covid-19 is real, and for the first year-and-a-half or so, was a deadly disease affecting tens of millions of people worldwide. Many healthy people died quickly from lung failure similar in its action to pulmonary edema. Others died of rapid-onset internal bleeding. For a while, the VT website published a feature on notable Covid deniers who refused to be vaccinated, then died.
The vaccines have been very effective, though as with any vaccine, there have been adverse effects, some serious or even deadly. But not many. The vaccines in fact utilize technology that has been known for a long time. They are not truly experimental. In recent months, Covid infections have been far less severe as the virus loses potency. This is to be expected. In fact, the most recent boosters are useless in dealing with the most recent mutations. However, the symptoms of infection with these mutations are relatively mild compared to what we were seeing just a couple of years ago.
There are good reasons, however, to suspect that pandemics are in fact a chosen means of the social controllers at places like the World Economic Forum to reduce what they consider to be overpopulation. There is a long history of the ruling class in the US and Europe promoting eugenics and railing against the world’s having too many people, especially people they don’t like or who are the wrong color. Whatever the reasons, there has been a massive growth in world population in the last half-century. The UN says that by November 2022 world population will surpass eight billion. The population has doubled since 1974. Currently population growth seems to be slowing, and some say it will cease by 2100.
No one knows what the maximum carrying capacity of planet earth really is or how to deal with population growth. But it can’t be mass murder.
Financial Distress
Many people lost their jobs during the pandemic, while others found relief by being allowed by their employers to work at home through remote computer access. Throughout the past two decades, financial pressure on individuals and families had already been growing, especially since minimum wage laws were not even close to keeping up with inflation. Financial distress had peaked through the millions of home foreclosures during the crash of 2007-2008 and the Great Recession that followed. Combined with continued high housing costs, even families with two breadwinners had difficulty in finding and keeping affordable housing. College graduates also were carrying enormous quantities of student loan debt, a situation made worse by the fact that bankruptcy laws exempted from write-off student loans, tax debt, and alimony.
Many people turned to credit cards simply to pay the bills, but anti-usury laws were ineffective in preventing ultra-high rates on credit card balances that grow with compound interest. Delaware became the favored home base for credit card companies, with Joe Biden, when he was a senator, being viewed as particularly friendly to these most predatory of all financial institutions. Medical debt was also soaring, even after passage of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Medical debt, even for people with health insurance, had become the leading cause of bankruptcy, affecting even people on Medicare. During his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, Senator Bernie Sanders argued for “Medicare for All”, but the proposal never gained traction with the Democratic Party establishment. Both in 2016 and 2020, Sanders was maneuvered out of the Democratic Party nomination for president against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden respectively by that same establishment. Calls for “Medicare for All” were ignored and simply went away.
During the pandemic, the US government began to issue relief checks to all individuals in the amount of $2,000, along with additional payments to families with children. The checks were issued by IRS so were part of the tax system in a much expanded version of the earned income tax credit that had been in effect since Nixon days. There were three incremental payments over a two-year period, two under Trump and one under Biden.
The relief payments generated a great deal of discussion of ideas for a guaranteed basic income that had been around since the 1960s. Even with the payments now having stopped, small-scale programs of basic income continued to appear, especially in California. More recently, when cost inflation began to surge, starting with gasoline and food, economic scrooges began to complain that the relief payments had poured so much excess cash into the system that inflation was ignited. In reality, no link between the relief payments and inflation has been demonstrated. An exception might be that people now able to work from home drove up housing costs in more remote areas.
Social Agony
Over the last couple of decades, probably since the collapse of the dot.com bubble at the end of the Clinton administration and the start of the Bush/Cheney War on Terror, the US has become afflicted with a deep sense of social malaise. The Covid pandemic only added to this.
Drug Addiction
Growing levels of drug addiction have been an indicator of the malaise, including not only illegal drugs like heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, but legally-prescribed prescription drugs such as the opioids. Changes are underway, with drug companies who applied massive pressure to physicians to prescribe opioids being charged and fined, and marijuana becoming increasingly legalized for therapeutic or recreational purposes. But deaths from drug overdoses, particularly from fentanyl, continue to climb, and purchase and use of illegal drugs is still a massive source of revenue and corruption due to organized crime. I would say that the lack of meaningful employment in traditional manufacturing jobs cited previously is also a factor that leads to drug abuse.
Mass Shootings
One of the biggest indicators of social agony is the growing number of mass shootings in the US. The epidemic began with the shootings at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, in 1999, where 15 people died. In 2007, the worst mass shooting to date took place at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate student at the university and a U.S. resident from South Korea, killed 32 people and wounded 17. Six others were injured jumping out of windows to escape. My own son was one of those who jumped from a second story window while his teacher Liviu Librescu was shot and killed when barring the door so some of his students could get out.
Recently the Marshall Project reported:
“On the morning of July 4, President Joe Biden hailed the day as one to ‘celebrate the goodness of our nation.’ Shortly after his tweet, a gunman on a rooftop opened fire into a crowd of spectators who gathered to enjoy a Fourth of July parade in a Chicago suburb. He killed seven people and injured dozens. Monday’s mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, brought fresh anguish to a nation already shaken this year by the murders of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, and black shoppers in Buffalo, New York. If it feels like mass shootings have become more frequent, that intuition is correct, according to data analysis by The Marshall Project.
“Under one of the most conservative definitions of ‘mass shootings,’ in which a gunman slaughters four or more strangers in a public place, the number of these crimes has indeed been climbing in the last few years — and they have higher death tolls, as well. Mass shootings account for just a fraction of the daily toll of firearm deaths in the U.S., where about 124 people die every day in other acts of gun violence.
“Our analysis is based on data from The Violence Project, a nonprofit research group that uses a narrow definition of mass shootings adopted from the Congressional Research Service, which advises federal lawmakers. There were more mass shootings in the past five years than in any other half-decade going back to 1966 …
“The Violence Project defines mass shootings as single incidents in which four or more people are killed (not including the shooter), in public locations, such as schools, stores, or workplaces. It excludes murders that occur because of domestic violence, or in the course of another crime, such as armed robbery or gang violence. Under this definition, there have been four mass shootings so far in 2022: Highland Park, Uvalde, Buffalo and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a gunman stormed a doctor’s office at a hospital complex, killing four people before taking his own life. The count puts 2022 on pace with last year, when there were a total of six mass shootings.
“Mass shootings have become increasingly more deadly. As mass shootings in the U.S. reached a record high, so did the number of deaths and injuries. From 2017 to 2021, perpetrators killed 299 people — about a third more than the 221 fatalities in the five-year period that ended in 2016. The number of people injured was five times higher….
“The mass shooting on July 4 was the fourth in fewer than three months. In all four, the gunmen used high-powered weapons, law enforcement authorities said. President Biden last month signed the most significant gun safety measure in decades, though the new law does not include a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, a provision Biden and Democrats had wanted. Our analysis shows that in the past five years, assault-style weapons have been used in nearly half of mass shootings, compared to a third of them in the previous five years.” (themarshallproject.org July 6, 2022)
Police Violence
On June 27, 2022, 25-year-old black man Jayland Walker was shot and killed after a routine traffic stop by Akron, Ohio, police. Walker had gotten out of his car and was fleeing on foot. Eight Akron policemen fired their guns at Walker, striking him at least 60 times. He was unarmed when shot, though police claimed he had a handgun inside the car. The horror of this incident shocked the world. Demonstrations in Akron followed, which turned violent. The eight officers were placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.
Policeviolencereport.org states: “Mapping Police Violence collected data on over 1,100 killings by police in 2021. We compiled this information from media reports, obituaries, public records, and databases like Fatal Encounters and the Washington Post. Despite the federal government’s efforts to create a national database on this issue, their Use of Force Data Collection program is expected to shut down this year because fewer than 60% of the nation’s law enforcement reported data to the program. As such, this report represents the most comprehensive public accounting of deadly police violence in 2021. Our analysis suggests the majority of killings by police in 2021 could have been prevented and that specific policies and practices might prevent police killings in the future.”
In 2022 to date, police have killed 568 people in locations across the US. There are strong suspicions that police killings are racially-influenced, though it is difficult to be precise about the circumstances involved. But racial-profiling in police traffic stops and other police actions has been demonstrated. The conclusion is obvious: police violence against minorities is a major US problem.
The issue was highlighted in May 2020 when black man George Floyd was killed on a Minneapolis street corner. The New York Times reported: “The death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, in May 2020 drew widespread outrage after a video circulated online showing Officer Derek Chauvin holding his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck on a Minneapolis street corner as he gasped for breath. Mr. Floyd’s death spurred nationwide protests against police brutality and a reckoning over everything from public monuments to sports team names.” Chauvin was later convicted of murder with a 22-1/2 year sentence.
The protests in Minneapolis turned to rioting in that city, with protests also becoming violent in Portland, Oregon. The incident polarized the nation politically, with massive condemnation of police brutality across the nation. But others seized on the protests as a means of attacking organization like Black Lives Matter and Antifa. For example, right-wing commentator Sager Enjeti claimed on The Hill that the protesters were “burning down our cities.”
The situation has been enflamed by what some are calling the “militarization” of the nation’s police forces. This encompasses the actions of the US Department of Defense in providing military-style riot gear to local police forces, including armored vehicles, and training in forceful suppression of suspects and demonstrators by contractors from Israel. Even the peaceful village of Boonsboro, Maryland, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, has what looks like a battle tank that it rolls out for town festivals.
Police violence against blacks in particular highlights once more the failure of American society in promoting fairness and decency in the treatment of its former slave population.
Causes of the Societal Crisis
It is difficult to argue against the perception that US society is in the throes of a breakdown. We can again mention the shipping of millions of manufacturing jobs overseas, financial distress affecting large segments of the population—but especially young people without decent job prospects and high student loan debt— gun violence, especially police violence against blacks, and the epidemic of drug use and deaths from overdoses.
I lay all this at the feet of America’s ruling class, sometimes called the One Percent. These people are seeing their wealth skyrocket through the abundance of riches called forth by an economy based on the moving of international capital, inequities in the tax code, use of overseas tax shelters, advanced technologies that benefit corporations but not workers, and the dominance of the mass media by a handful of corporations devoted to the status quo. Add to this a political system that favors wealthy donors without accountability in the election of officials at the federal, state, and local levels, and we truly have a prescription for today’s mounting catastrophe.
On top of everything else, we have a bloated military with its tentacles in every country on the planet, a military industrial complex that enriches only themselves, and a CIA that hands out briefcases of $100 bills to compliant foreign politicians—and marginalizes or assassinates them when they don’t go along. Look at the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins.
This is the system run by the Deep State that makes life and death decisions affecting the entire world, including instigating the current war in Ukraine. They may even be creating current and future pandemics as a means of terrorizing humanity. And sitting on top internationally are groups like the World Economic Forum at Davos, dominated by people like Bill Gates, and the Bilderberg Group. No wonder the majority of nations of the world, now being led by Russia and China, but increasingly involving many other nations on every continent, want out. So do many of our own citizens and many more in Canada and Europe.
It almost seems as though the ruling class is deliberately trying to anesthetize the masses to make us easier to control. I’ve already mentioned drugs, which the CIA and Big Pharma seem to be using to afflict the entire world population. But there is also the matter of computer technology and the internet, where literally billions of people are glued to their computer or smartphone screens for hours every day watching a totally fictitious world of images and advertisements, including ubiquitous pornography and violence.
Add to this the gratuitous violence produced by Hollywood and on-line producers like Amazon and Netflix, and we have a social collapse in our midst. We also know that much of this is produced with the help of the CIA and the Department of Defense with the aim of glorifying their own glamorous achievements and corrupt deeds. An example is the latest Tom Cruise trash, Top Gun Maverick. I would be willing to bet that virtually every mass murderer of modern times has been spending much of his time watching this internet garbage, and likely also taking both legal and illegal drugs, while purchasing high-powered weapons with ease.
The government has overseen a massive shift of all communications, all financial transactions, and all social interactions to the internet. This means that the government can also access everything for its own totalitarian purposes. Total societal surveillance can readily be implemented. In fact, such systems have been built. Edward Snowden, whose family lived in Maryland since the Revolution, had to flee to Russia after releasing proof that this was being done by the CIA and the National Security Agency. With all financial business on the internet, the government can also decide who is or is not allowed to exist economically, and, if they so desire, freeze a person’s funds or assets, as has been done with dissenters in Canada, or even strip them away.
On top of all this is the massive amount of internet crime. Anyone with a phone is on the receiving end of such crime every day. The government appears to have little or no interest or ability in policing these abuses. Often the cybercriminals are located in foreign countries. The fact that nations can’t get together to create effective treaties to control internet crime is yet another sign of international anarchy. Perhaps it’s all just another means of terrorism intended to create fear among the population.
Again, I say to the American ruling class: I accuse. This is the world you have created. You are carrying a heavy burden of guilt for what you have done and failed to do.
The 2020 Election
I don’t have anything to say about the two Trump impeachments, except that they both seemed rather trumped-up. The Democratic Party and its Deep State controllers seem to have a deadly fear of a politician with populist appeal and his “deplorable” supporters. What if a Republican politician came along with the intelligence and experience Trump lacks? Obviously, the current House of Representative “hearings” on the January 6 Capitol riot are a spectacle meant to destroy the Republicans and keep the Democrats in power. We’ll see if Nancy Pelosi’s power game works.
Did Trump really lose to Biden in a fair election in 2020? We’ll never know. In fact, I question whether we will ever know who is the actual winner of a presidential election in the US. One thing we do know is that without the votes of African-Americans, owing largely to Democratic Party patronage to black politicians, Biden wouldn’t have won either the party’s nomination or the general election. Will Trump run for reelection in 2024? Sure, why not? Can either party offer anything better? Does either party really have anything to give except more obscene wealth for the money masters, and war and further windfall profits for the military-industrial complex? And more shootings, drug addiction, overdose deaths, and pandemics?
President Joe Biden
Joe Biden became president due to the machinations of one man: Barack Obama, who is the epitome of the backstage Deep State manipulator. Obama plays the black vote like his personal fiddle. When Biden was about to lose the Democratic nomination to Senator Bernie Sanders on the weekend before Super Tuesday, which are the primaries most heavily oriented toward voting by blacks in the Southern states, Obama pressured Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg to drop out while black South Carolina congressmen Jim Clyburn chimed in with a Biden endorsement. According to the Washington Post, Clyburn “saved Biden’s candidacy.” But it was the Deep State mastermind Obama who pulled the strings.
Biden had bullied, bluffed, and bungled his way through the primaries, with his wife Jill Biden telling voters that it didn’t matter if they favored Bernie Sanders’ proposals to help working people, they had to vote for her husband for the sole reason of getting rid of big bad Trump. So the Deep State got their man, and we got their World War III against Russia. Because all they care about is power, war, and money, with world conquest their vehicle.
Suffice it to say that nothing of what Biden promised regarding economic recovery following the disastrous disruptions of the Covid pandemic have been implemented. The one thing Biden accomplished was to provide Americans with $600 relief payments early in his term. As stated earlier, both Trump and Biden have been criticized for expanding the money supply to the point of igniting inflation, but this connection is far from having been proven. The payments did in fact increase the federal deficit, but the shoring up of the economy also saw an increase in total federal tax revenues. It is much more likely that the inflation resulted from higher costs to producers and middlemen due to disruptions in the supply chain, particularly in products imported from China. Most recently, energy costs have increased worldwide following Western sanctions against Russia.
This all shows the folly once again of the US government in allowing the transfer of so much of our manufacturing base to China and other foreign nations. Biden did offer early in his term a proposal for a $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, but it failed to secure enough support in the Senate, including his own party’s conservative wing, to pass. This was tragic. It was reminiscent of the New Deal, but back then the country knew how to use dirigiste spending to create jobs. That knowledge has been forgotten. All we know how to do anymore is make weapons, and even those have proved in Ukraine not to work very well. Our bloated military still knows how to terrorize small countries, but even in war-making we haven’t faced an adversary on equal footing since World War II. Even there we tangled with Germany only after the Soviets had smashed Hitler’s legions on the eastern front.
But Russia is still good for taking the blame for inflation. It can be understood that when Biden decries inflation, or blames it on Putin, he is doing it in order not to lose your votes, especially in advance of the November 2022 midterm congressional elections, where the Democrats fear losing control of both houses. Actually, as a former policy analyst who worked for the US Treasury Department, I can tell you that governments love inflation, because it helps them pay down their debts with a devalued currency and allows them to garner more tax revenues, since taxes are based on percentages of economic activity.
I also can tell you, as someone who worked at the heart of the federal government for 32 years and who has been writing about it since then, the US political class no longer knows how to run a country.
Biden and Ukraine
This brings us to Biden and Ukraine.
As vice-president, Joe Biden was charged by President Barack Obama with oversight over Ukraine well before the Maidan coup of 2014. Hillary Clinton had been secretary of state under Obama from January 21, 2009 to February 1, 2013, while the coup in Ukraine took place a year later from February 18-23, 2014. By then, John Kerry was secretary of state, while the principal state department official overseeing the coup was Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.
But the planning for the coup was overseen by the CIA acting from Poland, with involvement of right-wing figures from Ukraine associated with Ukrainian oligarchs such as Igor Kolomoyskyi, cited in Wikipedia as “a Ukrainian–Israeli–Cypriot billionaire, business magnate, and politician. He has been rated as the second or third richest person in Ukraine and is seen as one of the most influential oligarchs.”
As discussed previously, the coup was carried out against the democratically-elected president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych at a time when Yanukovych was close to signing an agreement with Russia for closer economic cooperation. The turning point was the riots in Maidan Square in Kiev when snipers shot and killed a number of demonstrators and police. The killings were blamed on Yanukovych but were likely carried out by provocateurs brought in by the coup plotters from Georgia and other locations.
Also as discussed previously, the new government under Petro Poroshenko moved quickly to attack the two provinces in the Russian-speaking Donbass region of eastern Ukraine after they had declared independence and refused to accept the results of the coup. These were the Donetsk Peoples Republic and Lugansk Peoples Republic. The Ukrainian army, moving to suppress the rebellion, was defeated in a pitched battle which brought Poroshenko to the negotiating table in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. There resulted Minsk I and II, which Poroshenko later admitted that his government sought merely to gain time by agreeing to terms they never intended to fulfill. The aim was to create a military force that could crush the Donbass rebellion. In the meantime, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula.
But Ukraine also had big economic problems. Despite having been an agricultural and industrial powerhouse when part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, over the previous 25 years, had collapsed economically to the point of becoming one of the poorest nations in Europe. This decline has been attributed to corruption and looting by Ukrainian and foreign oligarchs. Among the looters was Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. In 2022, NBC News reported that: “From 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees.”
While direct involvement by President Joe Biden has not yet been proven, while vice president he did pressure the government of Ukraine to fire the government prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, the energy company on whose board Hunter Biden was seated.
Also, when information and records were described by the Russian Ministry of Defense on the more than 40 biolabs in Ukraine that were being overseen by the Pentagon, a company run by Hunter Biden was identified as being one of the funders of these biolabs. Most recently, congressional Republicans have been demanding an investigation of President Biden’s sale of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China via a company in which Hunter Biden had or has an ownership share.
The Conflict Begins
Despite Minsk I and II, the Ukrainian military began a systematic campaign of artillery shelling of the Donbass republics which the UN reported killed up to 13,000 people during the years 2014-2022. Alex Christoforou is one of the few commentators to point out that the Ukrainian shelling of the Donbass had as one of its purposes to allow the US and the West to eventually control the immense natural resources of eastern Ukraine. In fact, around a million Donbass residents had fled to Russia for safety before the war began. Russia called the Ukrainian assault on Donbass an act of genocide.
Corruption within Ukraine, particularly among the oligarchs, had become notorious. Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president in 2019, running on a campaign platform of economic reform. Zelensky had been an actor and entertainer in which he starred in a popular TV series named Servant of the People, where he played the president of Ukraine.
Zelensky’s primary source of funding was the aforementioned Igor Kolomoyskyi. It is said that any attempt Zelensky might have made in actual reform was terminated by the right-wing militias such as the Right Sector and Azov Battalion, which also demanded that they be made part of the regular Ukrainian army. By this time, planning was well underway for the military build-up that Ukraine planned to unleash against the Donbass when the time was ripe.
We now know that the CIA and NATO, utilizing special forces from the US, UK, and most likely Poland, were heavily engaged in training and planning for the Ukrainian military. That the Ukrainian military was to be trained by NATO advisers to the best NATO standard has been admitted by NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg of Norway. These forces combined in making the Ukrainian army among the largest and most powerful in Europe. Of course, Ukraine was not a member of NATO, though it wished for membership at some future date. Zelensky also said he hoped that Ukraine would become a nuclear power.
It is obvious today that planning by the US for the war between Ukraine and Russia had been underway for a very long time. I would like to suggest that it had probably been going on within the US military, the CIA, and the rest of the US foreign policy establishment all the way back to the Clinton administration. We will have to wait for the research and assessments from future historians to make that determination. But planning within the US security establishment is extensive, long-range, and involves literally generations of well-paid analysts. Given Brzezinski’s views on the importance of Ukraine to Russia within the context of the World Island/Heartland mythology, it couldn’t be otherwise.
I believe that Ukraine had likely been the future target when Yugoslavia was dismembered at the end of Clinton’s presidency. Meanwhile, under Vladimir Putin, Russia was returning to superpower status. In the East, China would soon surpass the US in economic production, and the ever-present danger was looming of Russia and China mending their fences and forming a long-term military alliance. Rebellion against US geopolitical hegemony has been going on around the world, including, most ominously in America’s Latin American backyard. Already, Russia and China and the central Asian republics formerly part of the Soviet Union had come together with India and Pakistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). BRICS was formed as a trading bloc, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Finally, Russia had successfully prevented the US, Israel and their terrorist clients from subverting Syria, at least so far, and Russia as protector of Iran likely seemed too much to bear. Iran is now an applicant for SCO membership.
If I were a warmongering member of the US policy-making elite, I would reason that if the US were ever going to act to protect its long-term goal of Full-Spectrum Dominance as a means toward total global economic and political control, the time to act was now and the place to act was Ukraine. I would also be careful not to provoke a war with Russia or a direct nuclear exchange. So I would use Ukraine as a proxy to attack Russia, and I would use my allies in NATO to join the US in providing on-the-ground support with weapons and military equipment. In a 2019 study by the Rand Corporation, this military-funded think tank wrote that “Providing lethal aid to Ukraine” was a prime means of weakening Russia. A proxy war might do this, though Rand cautioned that there would be a danger of the US being drawn into a larger conflict.
I would also prepare a meticulous array of economic sanctions to take down Russia once the conflict had been ignited. The 2019 Rand study also identified sanctions as a prime means of attack, though it cautioned that “their effectiveness will depend on the willingness of other countries to join in such a process.” It also noted that “sanctions come with costs and, depending on their severity, considerable risks.” However, I am a brave man with a long history of blowing away opposition, so I would tell my staff to “Damn the torpedoes—full speed ahead!” I also have long experience going back to World War II of bombing civilians and civilian infrastructure to promote desired regime change.
I would also use my covert operatives within Russia to groom personalities to replace Putin after the “Russian people” had overthrown his regime. In enforcing sanctions against Russia, I would expect the active participation of the nations of the EU and would alert all my diplomatic personnel worldwide to bring pressure to bear against any other nation that refused to go along. This would include not only China, but countries in central Asia like Pakistan and India. Also included in enforcing sanctions would be Japan.
By the winter of 2021-2022, the US had its multitude of pieces in place as the Ukrainian army dug into their carefully-prepared fortifications in western Donbass. On February 16, 2022, heavy bombardment began.
The war in Ukraine now had started even as Russian troops stood watching at the border. The trap against Russia had been laid. Three decades of hard work by the US Deep State and its wholly-owned military and political subsidiaries would now pay off. And who gave the orders to the Deep State? It could only have been the Western financial empire which started with the Rothschilds and Rockefellers but had branched out since then. And where was the real control being exercised within that empire? Who really had his hands on the steering wheel? I’ll let the reader speculate about that.
Even though the Russians had moved their military forces to the borders of Ukraine over the weeks preceding the start of the war, they had refused to take immediate action when the heavy bombardment of the Donbass began on February 16, 2022. According to Swiss military analyst Jacques Baud, a former colonel of the Swiss general staff, intelligence officer, and UN official on the rule of law and security, this date actually marks the start of the war. Colonel Baud states that US President Biden knew of this bombardment which preceded the Russians crossing the border eight days later. Baud also says that if Germany and France had honored their commitment to guarantee the Minsk Agreements, the war never would have happened. (Jacques Baud, “The Military Situation in the Ukraine: Update,” Labour Heartlands, April 15, 2022)
The US Started This War
Russia launched its “Special Military Operation” on February 24, 2022. It must be emphasized that even though Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the order for the Russian military to cross the border and move into Ukraine, Ukraine started the active phase of what was from the start a US proxy war by commencing bombardment of the Donbass. But going back further, I will say again that the US acted to start the war by working behind the scenes to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014. The coup itself could not have taken place without US planning and support. So when the Russians crossed the border, the war was already almost eight years old.
So to the fools who speak of Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion, I say that the US started this war, with NATO and the EU having long been prepped to go along. The US and its allies also planned and implemented the sanctions that were supposed to bring Russia to its knees, certainly with the direct knowledge and involvement of NATO and EU leaders in Brussels.
But it was the US that directed what quickly became a hybrid war against Russia. Even though US and NATO military personnel did not send troops across the border into Ukraine, or try to establish a no-fly zone to keep Russian aircraft out, they are providing on-site direction and support from within that country today. Personnel from NATO countries have been captured inside Ukraine by Russian forces. There have also been reports that there are personnel from Israel and ISIS inside Ukraine supporting the Ukrainian military.
But NATO has never activated its Ready-Response Force within Europe nor its command and control structure to confront Russia directly. So its active support of Ukraine was practically non-existent. Why? Was it because Biden and the West seemed to have hoped that someone in Russia would rise up against Putin, either the populace, the oligarchs, or, forces within the government, without their having to become active participants? But Putin has stayed in charge, along with his key officials—the Medvedevs, the Shoigus, the Lavrovs. Nor have the sanctions succeeded in taking down the Russian economy or forcing Putin’s ouster. In fact, the sanctions have backfired, with the UK and EU nations now facing potentially disastrous energy price increases and shortages.
Note also that the US intends to keep the war in Ukraine going as long as possible. As of this writing, the US is starting to supply ever-heavier weapon systems to Ukraine, including portable mission launch systems—HIMARS. There are also indications that designation of targets by these systems is being done by US personnel and that firing of the systems on the ground is also being carried out by US operators. So far, the rockets appear to be aimed at not just military targets, but also civilian areas. Attacks on civilians is central to the American way of carrying out warfare. This has been so since World War II, with bombing attacks on the cities of Germany and Japan and continuing through Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.
Within Russia, Putin’s popularity has soared in excess of 80 percent. On the ground, the Russian army and the Donbass militias have ground away at a Ukrainian army vastly overpowered in artillery, weaponry, and air support. Russia has also waged a careful campaign to limit civilian casualties, even as the Ukrainians continue to bombard civilian areas in the Donbass and even in bordering Russia. Ukraine also has used civilians as human shields in cities they were trying to defend. A significant portion of the Ukrainian army consisted of foreign mercenaries, many of whom fled the country in the face of the fierce fighting by Russian professionals. But the Ukrainian army is losing the war, badly, and Russia is winning. And it will doubtless end soon. The US and the West have also lost the economic war. Where that will end, no one knows.
To summarize, the US has been using Ukraine to try to weaken Russia. The US cares nothing for the lives of ordinary Ukrainians. Again, Ukraine actually triggered the war by beginning heavy bombing of Donbass on February 16, 2022. Biden knew about this. Russia responded according to UN provisions by sending in troops on February 24. It was to protect the Russian ethnic population of Ukraine that was being subjected to genocide which actually began in 2014, and as an act of self-defense, lawful under the UN Charter, by the Russian Federation. Putin expressed Russia’s war aims explicitly: “demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”
If the US, the CIA, and its minions in the UK, the EU, and NATO really thought through their strategy of enticing Putin into a ground war, then bringing his government down with sanctions, the war in Ukraine may someday stand as the greatest US military, political, and economic defeat in American history, much greater than the debacle in Vietnam, the hasty retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, or the drawn-out impasse in Iraq. In short, Ukraine is a huge disaster for the US, and we are from seeing the consequences on the world geopolitical stage. The debacle may mark the end of NATO, which has been proven impotent, and more than likely the EU, which is on the verge of committing economic suicide by cutting off Russian energy imports to serve Joe Biden’s whims.
One thing that is truly puzzling about the Ukraine crisis is how willingly and how vehemently the leaders of the European nations have gone along with the US in the hybrid war against Russia, particularly in terms of the economic sanctions. These sanctions, particularly in cutting off Europe from Russian energy supplies, have begun to cause an economic crisis. Inflation is soaring both in Europe and the US. Britain and Germany in particular, and maybe France, are facing possible shutdowns of major parts of their economies. When next winter comes, fuel rationing is likely to take place, with the possibility of individuals going hungry or even freezing to death.
Europe indeed is committing economic suicide. In fact, economist Michael Hudson writes that the real enemy of the US in this affair is not Russia, but Germany. There is a saying that the purpose of NATO is to “keep the US in, Russia out, and Germany down.” This appears to be not far from the truth.
You can also read that the US’s greatest fear is an economic merger of Russia and Germany, as this would involve a major reorientation of the European balance of power away from the US/UK. A major upcoming event in this drama was to be the opening of the Russia-to-Germany pipeline Nord Stream 2. This would have been a major step forward in the cementing of German industrial reliance on cheap Russian natural gas.
Michael Hudson wrote on February 7, 2022, “The only way left for US diplomats to block European purchases [of natural gas] is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27, ‘If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.’” According to Reuters, writing on February 7, “U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday warned that if Russia invades Ukraine, there would be no Nord Stream 2.”
On what basis did Nuland and Biden speak with such assurance about an economic project of two other sovereign nations, Germany and Russia? The answer is clear: that while Russia may be a sovereign nation, Germany is not. From this incident, we can see clearly and dramatically what the US means when it speaks of the “rules-based international order.”
With France, President Macron’s compliance with US policies and demands is a far cry from the independence once shown by President Charles de Gaulle at a time that now seems like ancient history.
But it is Great Britain that presents the oddest case of twisted compliance through the actions of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who resigned his position on July 7, 2022. Prior to the Ukraine debacle, Johnson was elected Prime Minister in order to push Brexit through the British system, at which he succeeded handsomely. But what happened next is bizarre.
In a livestream the day Johnson resigned, Alexander Mercouris, commentator for The Doran, reporting on Johnson’s announcement that morning, relates that throughout his career, Johnson was generally in favor of improving relations with Russia. But early in the Ukraine crisis, he attended a meeting with British intelligence and came out of that meeting breathing fire against Putin and Russia and soon became the strongest advocate in Europe for the hardline approach to sanctions aimed at bringing down the Russian economy and toppling Putin himself. Johnson seems to have been instrumental in preventing Zelensky from entering into negotiations with Russia to end the war as early as March-April 2022.
Why this sudden reversal by Boris Johnson after this meeting with the British Deep State? Was he coerced? Was he blackmailed? And what about the leaders of the other European nations? How about German chancellor Olaf Scholtz? How about Macron of France? How about Draghi of Italy? Were they all so enamored of Ukraine and so opposed to Russia that they simultaneously began to speak in one voice to approve the obviously premeditated sanctions dreamed up by the US and the EU? Or were they too coerced and/or blackmailed by the powerful forces of the CIA, MI6, and their own intelligence agencies lurking in the shadows? I think the answer to these questions is obvious.
In a sequel, the White House said that the resignation of Boris Johnson would not alter the historic relationship between the United States and the U.K. According to The Hill: “’Our alliance with the United Kingdom continues to be strong,’ White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at a briefing Thursday afternoon. ‘Our special relationship with the people in the country will continue to endure. None of that changes.’” If this statement does not send shivers down your spine, you have not been paying attention. Shades of Cecil Rhodes turned on his head.
Biden’s Game
There is one other point. Joe Biden, his Neocon advisers, Boris Johnson, and some of the other EU leaders, have been making a game out of the Ukraine crisis, in a vein similar to Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.” They don’t seem to understand that human beings are involved. They even go so far as to mock Vladimir Putin and Russia, like John McCain did when he called Russia “a gas station masquerading as a country.” The arrogance and shallowness of Americans can be mind-boggling in its crassness and stupidity.
In his classic War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy wrote that the great Napoleon was treating the invasion of Russia as a game. Through his attitude, wrote Tolstoy, Napoleon in his flippancy was cutting himself off forever from any experience of goodness, beauty, or truth. But Russia never, ever treats war and the lives of its people as a game. For Russia, it’s a matter of profound earnestness. Russia sees itself as fighting for its very existence, as engaged in an existential war against the West that they have no intention of losing. That is why Russia is simply blowing away Ukraine, the US, the UK, NATO, and the EU.
I’ll go further than that. What the US has been doing with Ukraine has been evil—diabolical, of the devil. In a perverted way, it has been the apt culmination of Anglo-American world conquest that began with John Dee’s Faustian fantasies in 1595 and has now gone on after more than 400 years. Perhaps the game will end soon. We can only hope.
Conclusion: We Now Need a Truly American Foreign Policy
Here I want to say that what the US is now involved in through its increasingly catastrophic foreign policy, going back to our entrance into World War I, has little to do with what I believe is the real destiny of our country. In historical terms, the US is a young nation. People have arrived on our shores from everywhere in the world, including the first Americans who have been here the longest—the Native Americans. The black Africans who were brought as slaves or are still arriving from Africa as free people are part of our heritage, along with all the Europeans who have come as immigrants, plus those from Asia and the Middle East who arrived mainly as a result of our failed wars post-World War II. When the US was “recovered” for the British Empire by Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table, political influence merged with Rothschild/Rockefeller big money to bring about the Federal Reserve System as a clone of the Bank of England. This was a distraction from the nation we were meant to be and established a system of piracy and profiteering that has deeply harmed the earth and humanity.
The distraction got us mixed up in the latest phase of the European civil wars. By the time of World War I, Europe had been shattered by more than a thousand years of internecine warfare, leaving in its wake a legacy of hatred that pitted nation against nation, ethnic groups against each other, and conflict among social and economic castes frozen into age-old prejudices, all as a kind of overlay obscuring its astonishing history of art, inventiveness, spirituality, and culture.
In World War I, Americans were propagandized against the Germans, even though the average American had nothing against Germany, with Germans making up our largest ethnic group. This anti-German sentiment continued through World War II, except now we were also expected to hate the Japanese, though we had a history of positive relations with them going back to the opening of Japan by American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. After World War II, we were now supposed to hate the Russians, a nation with which we’d had friendly relations starting early in the 19th century, lasting through the Civil War, when Russian warships came to America to show their support, and with whom we were allied against Hitler. Not to mention our profound level of scientific cooperation with Russia in the sharing of scientific discovery and projects like the International Space Station.
Why should our entire nation entertain hatred for a great and talented nation like Russia, because of the poisonous ego-driven fantasies of a disgruntled Polish aristocrat, Zbigniew Brzezinski?
Then there are the Neocons. The Neocons who came to power in the US in the 1970s and have controlled our foreign policy of terrorism and aggression ever since have been predominately Jews, though not entirely. The Jews have had an axe to grind based on persecution in Europe over the centuries, but the Jews have always been welcome on American shores. So why should we have absorbed and embodied their ethnic issues with their perceived European and Middle Eastern enemies? Why should Americans have allowed themselves to be turned against the entire Islamic world by the political manipulations and false flags of Israel and its American acolytes/enablers?
And why now, in 2022, should we become big-time Russia haters once again, after President Joe Biden and his demented crowd of warmongers started a war between Ukraine and Russia, then expected us to blame Putin for his economic failings, even as Biden’s own son raked in a fortune in Ukraine in graft?
Joe Biden is a crime boss. He should be removed from office as soon as possible, so America can make a fresh start.
Then let Europe sort out their own history of warfare, hatred, and mutual recrimination. They don’t need any help from us for that.
Attack the Deep State at its Core: Abolish the CIA
And by the way, let’s make life simpler and fairer for all concerned by abolishing the CIA. This has been advocated by many people, including President John F. Kennedy, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Bernie Sanders, and others, and was presented to Congress in the “Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1995.” It’s the main proposal of Geoffrey Young, who is running for Congress as a Democrat in Kentucky. Covert Action Magazine revolves around reporting on the crimes of the CIA and may be found at https://covertactionmagazine.com.
Among other things, abolishing the CIA would allow us to reestablish a free media instead of the CIA-controlled propaganda that permeates the system today, including control of internet facilities like YouTube and Wikipedia. (Out of necessity I have cautiously quoted from Wikipedia at times in writing this article in order to provide concise summaries of factual material.)
With the CIA dead and buried, the US government could then establish a legitimate intelligence service that reports to the officials it should be serving in the executive branch of government.
Transforming the US Monetary System
We also need to transform the US monetary system. This system is based on massive interlocking speculation and debt that causes inexorable inflation, particularly in housing values. People stretch to buy a home, and as housing prices inflate, so do property taxes, to the point where individuals and families are routinely priced out of their dwelling places. Even if they are able to sell their home at an inflated price, where are they going to live, with everything else going up in price? If they are lucky and can relocate or retire, they can move to an area with cheaper housing. But this is not always possible. What has happened to housing is just another example of how government-induced or tolerated inflation is in fact a brand of economic terrorism.
An effective method of reforming the monetary system was put forth by Congressman Dennis Kucinich in his National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act of 2011. Kucinich drafted this legislation with the help of the American Monetary Institute headed by the late Stephen Zarlenga, author of The Lost Science of Money. The NEED Act is the most advanced piece of monetary legislation in US history and would restore the nation’s monetary system to a Constitutionally-conformable status. The NEED Act has also been included as part of the platform of the Green Party. The website of the American Monetary Institute is at www.monetary.org.
However you look at it, as Zarlenga pointed out, fractional reserve lending and charging of interest as “rent” on money are both awesome powers of nature. For these powers to have been usurped by private business for their own profit is a travesty of modern life. Nevertheless, every bank operates under a public charter, because credit is, at bottom, a public utility. So these privileges can be revoked and reallocated to serve the public good.
Another book to consult is my own We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, based in part on policy briefings I gave to Kucinich when he was running for president in 2004. Another valuable resource is books and articles by Ellen Brown, head of the Public Banking Institute. The website of the Public Banking Institute is at: https://publicbankinginstitute.org/ The newsletter of the Green Party’s Banking and Monetary Reform Committee may be found at http://greensformonetaryreform.org/
Conclusion: A Path to a New and Better World
Restoring the US manufacturing base and adopting far-reaching measures of monetary and financial reform would allow us to turn a new leaf and find our way in the multipolar world that is rapidly forming. We can be friends, not enemies, of other major countries like Russia and China, as well as the multitude of smaller states with which we share the planet. Of course, we will finally have to give up the British-derived desire for global military domination that has led us so far astray. We also need to turn our attention to a much more self-sufficient economy based on dirigiste principles.
To achieve this I am well aware that I am talking about a Second American Revolution, but one that would be much more comprehensive and inclusive than the rather simplistic and doctrinaire proposals of libertarian Ron Paul on the right and socialist Bernie Sanders on the left. This Revolution would acknowledge the utter impossibility of ever “Making America Great Again,” unless we remove the Deep State, the Neocons, and the financial oligarchy from power. All of these forces are deeply and profoundly anti-democratic and anti-American.
What we need is not an extremist ideology that ignores the underlying issue of what is the real purpose of governance today. The last century has seen the failure of both capitalism and communism. What is needed is a synthesis of collectivist and individualistic action, a third way that encompasses the best elements of both. This would mean dynamic but flexible solutions revolving around a strong center whose guiding principle is public and private morality.
The public and private sectors can flourish in tandem, but not one at the expense of each other. A multipolar world of nations existing in cooperation while still enjoying healthy competition can eventually lead to a world without war. The UN Charter is there and can be utilized. Problems that arise are ones to be solved, not as triggers for hatred. International tensions should be sources of creative action, not paroxysms of fear and violence. Nations should help one another, not attempt to subvert and conquer. The universe helps those who help themselves and each other.
We can look to the 2022 mid-term elections for the Second American Revolution to begin, because nothing can change while the Neocon-controlled Democratic Party stays in control. If the Republicans win control of Congress in 2022, impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris should begin immediately. The charge: waging an illegal and unconstitutional hybrid war of aggression against Russia and against humanity.
With a new Congress, the following twenty-three specific steps should be taken at a minimum. If necessary, we should convene a constitutional convention for rapid and effective action.
- Adopt a Constitutional amendment to change the US to a government model that would abolish the present system based on a monopoly of power held by the Democratic and Republican parties. A president would be chosen by direct ballot for a five-year term, abolishing the Electoral College. Congress would consist of a Senate, elected as present, with a House with proportional representation for any political party receiving five percent or more of the vote. Voting would be mandatory for all adult citizens, including felons, and all campaign expenses for national elections would be paid for by public funds. Media advertising would be free of charge and available equally to candidates.
- Replace the Supreme Court and federal district courts with an elective system.
- Abolish the Federal Reserve System, replacing it with a national central bank reporting to the president, and restructure the existing federal deficit using bankruptcy principles.
- Prohibit deficit financing for federal government expenditures, replacing the system with direct government financing, like Greenbacks, as authorized by the NEED Act.
- Authorize a system of public banks for each state operating under regulations issued by the national central bank.
- Transition up to 80 percent of the Department of Defense budget to new programs of energy research and development, infrastructure, restoration of the US civilian industrial base, environmental protection, and debt reduction.
- Renounce the doctrine of Full-Spectrum Dominance in favor of international treaties, gradually close down overseas military bases, and cease all covert special forces and CIA activities abroad.
- Participate in new international programs to reduce nuclear weapons, including demilitarization of space.
- Abolish NATO and encourage the formation of new security and fair trade architectures for Europe, East and Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America under the auspices of the UN Charter.
- Replace the International Monetary Fund with a system based on a reserve of representative world currencies.
- Convene a new Alliance for Progress for sustainable development in the Western Hemisphere.
- Abolish the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy and establish a Truth Commission to open all CIA/NED files to public scrutiny, including all files pertaining to US and overseas assassinations. Establish a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute CIA crimes.
- Reopen the 9/11 commission and create a new national commission to investigate the origins of Covid-19 and to reevaluate the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
- Abolish all US programs and stockpiles of chemical weapons and bioweapons.
- Reinstate Glass-Steagall and abolish all trading in derivatives that do not have a demonstrably beneficial purpose for the financial markets as authorized by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
- Abolish all retirement systems based on stock market speculation and replace with an expanded social security system that also includes basic income for families and caregivers.
- Revise the tax code to include fair rates of taxation for high income earners.
- Abolish internet pornography and gambling. Abolish depiction of gratuitous violence in all media.
18.5 Prohibit Department of Defense and all other government participation in public entertainment programming.
- Fully participate in new international programs to eliminate cybercrime and human trafficking.
- Adopt programs to reduce prescription drug abuse and misuse, including unfair pricing practices by pharmaceutical companies.
- Establish new programs of medical research in stress reduction and treatment methodologies.
- Establish a single-payer medical insurance system for the US.
- Adopt reasonable measures of dealing with climate change, and establish a system of national food self-sufficiency.
Richard C. Cook is a retired federal government policy analyst. He is author of “Challenger Revealed: How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age” and “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform,” as well as numerous print and internet articles on public policy topics. He acknowledges his indebtedness to his spiritual mentor, German spiritual master Bô Yin Râ. See www.kober.com. Inquiries on this article may be directed to Richard C. Cook at monetaryreform@gmail.com.
Copyright 2022 by Richard C. Cook. Authorized under Fair Use for reproduction with author attribution.
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.
He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard-driving weekly radio show funded by listener subscriptions at Substack and the weekly news roundup FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN).
He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.
Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.
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Great article. Lots of info. Thank you for taking the time to write it up. I don’t see any of the changes you suggest happening at this time. IMO the US will gradually slide into chaos as it loses its hegemony. As you pointed out, corruption, incompetence, and greed are endemic in our society. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the next 20-30 years the US becomes balkanized.
Yesterdays news…..
“Ghislaine Maxwell has been moved to FCI Tallahassee,
a low-security prison in Florida.
There are still no photos of Ghislaine Maxwell. ……..
And you actually pretend your list of 23 will …..etc….I laugh.
Richard …seemingly u come with a wheelbarrow full of credentials…
The idea that there is a voting system in existence….is the problem.
The idea that there isa judicial system in existence isa problem.
The idea that there isa fair arm of enforcement for the judicial system isa problem.
The idea that the penal system actually contains the person indicted for X-period isa problem.
So fine ..talk all you want about changing “Laws…the System”…etc…
But while individuals have incredible amounts of money to spend to bribe/buy/pay the “enforcement arm”
Do you actually think that the person incarcerated is the same individual..?
Ghislane maxwell isa perfect example…is it really ghislane in the cell..? A replacement can be found overnight and infiltrated…and of-course that “replacement” will be substituted after two yrs with another..etc..etc..
…If it costs ghislane halfa million to disappear…lol…supercheap
And of course this is what israel finances….
So…fly to saudi arabia and enjoy kiddy currency..or adrenochrome fixes…or kidney replacement from harvested indonesian kids…
In saudi…the super- rich don’t pay in in gold/silver…dollars etc…they pay in children.
They are the new currency.
Put that in your list of 23 richard.
Now having finished the article, I can say, the whole thing, though highly idealistic, was one of the better ones I’ve read here.
The sad thing, I think we all, including Mr. Cook, recognize is that relying on the current ballot box and two-party political system, to begin the initiation of change to something like what the author suggested, is utterly and totally futile.
Yes, I agree totally. When I am able to turn the article into a book I plan to elaborate on that point. The US two-party system has completely drowned in corruption. Just a plaything of the financial syndicate.
2014-2022, the Ukrainian army constructed heavy fortifications in Donbass in preparation for undertaking an offensive there. “”””””””””””””At the same time, the US military had been engaged since 2005″”””””””””””””” in equipping and operating over 40 biological labs in Ukraine that the Russia Ministry of Defense later said were actually bioweapons labs
“””””All this was wrought by the Obama administration. Ironically, Obama had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.”””””
ALL THIS???
???????????????????????????????????????
“””””But it was the Deep State mastermind Obama who pulled the strings.”””””
Oh, that’s a good one.
No political puppet from either party pulls anyone’s strings!
They don’t even have the fortitude to pull back on the strings being pulled on them.
Not only do the politicians not pull back against their puppet-master’s strings, they eagerly and voluntarily tied the strings on.
“””””Hunter Biden was identified as being one of the funders of these biolabs.””””
That’s what political-puppets and their hangers-on are used for; to take the blame when things go wrong, or hidden things become known.
Suggested reading, for sure! Thank you 1st Amendment.
With regards to the former presidents:
CARTER: His legacy gave up the Panama Canal, after having been built in the turn of the century 1900’s, by the Army Corps of Engineers. Result, Manual Noriega, ’nuff said? (One dictator in the Banana Republic of Panama controlled the levies as a result of the peanut farmer’s coercion to cough up that lock mess monster. Hmmmmm . . . whatever could go wrong with that?)
REAGAN: The take over of the Savings and Loans, with an honorable mention of the Keating Five scandal. Once again, pensioners lost billions, and Senators were “made” men. I remember Lincoln Savings and Loan’s take down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five
I believe one of the bank heisters was a sponsor of an enacted bill, after the wake. I read it online, and can’t find it now. The weak-wristed legislation that was written per usual, by the same perps, err, people that done the deed. In order to ensure that these types of bank heists “will never happen again” there was some junk legislation passed.
Fall out, and bail out of the same ‘ol same ‘ol, patterned and practiced off the Keating Five’s trump card and the “how to” method of bank robbery: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-aug-10-la-na-maxine-waters-20100810-story.html
The Reagan legacy, replete with Miss Nancy and her tarot card readers and Star Wars.
continued . . .
BUSH – the sitting duck president. Sat at the elementary school for nearly 10 minutes, while Cunt’olezza Rice*, the then U.S. Secretary of State was on the phone, making arrangements for a flight out of Maralago, to get the perps into safe havens. By the time the Pentagon was hit, by a nuclear cruise missile from a Tomahawk, there was a lock down of air space. Planes landed. Not a commercial airplane in the sky. A practiced run, ask a pilot.
The Pentagon had investigators that were emulsified during that crop dusting. Their investigation was dubbed “Able Danger.” All investigators were murdered. The Pentagon’s meeting room, where they were conducting their Able Danger investigation on 9/11, had just been refortified with, supposedly, impenetrable reinforcements on the building’s construction. That’s why they had to use a nuclear missile.
Some reports have been tossed out that all the investigatory information was blown up that day, and nothing remained of the files, dossiers, reports the Able Danger investigators were amassing. Personally, I doubt that. These dedicated souls, may they rest in peace, were intelligent. They only had the original files with them that day, and no back-ups?!? PLEASE! After 20 years post 9/11, the dust is, finally, settling from that bitch slap. Let the investigations begin! Although, in that 20-year span of dead space, more people were added to the fray, unfortunately. Talk about expansion files.
*Miss Rice A’Roni: An unforgettable, and regrettable page in history. I read somewhere, that after she left politics in D.C., she had $70,000,000 to play around with. Now, I can’t find that on the Wikipedia page. Some security, private sector 501(c)(3). She’s on so many boards, and has such accolades she’s an honorable token. She has, just recently, paid into the Denver Broncos, and became “minority” owner, July 2022.
This is an interesting read regarding her involvement with Blackwater. https://www.casey.senate.gov/news/releases/kerry-and-casey-question-rice-on-future-of-private-security-contractors
Did they ever get a reply?
Richard…
Your reply kinda reminds me of asking who made the bullets when ur diving for cover…
Of course asa scientist u might not have experienced the event.
Has it ever occurred to you that the event precedes discovery and punishment,….
and that the downstream timetable of evaluating the culprits and logic is irrelevant by the time u arrive there.
If u need to peg yourself to history and proof …kindly be my guest.
Enjoy, in your library, that I may have missed something.
Richard…
Patents for Weather Modification have Existed for over 100 Years.. who the duck owns them?
programs that are spraying dangerous nanoparticles into our atmosphere every day, and then activated by EMF radiation like 5G…
engineered droughts in the West will affect 40 million people next year….and of-course the water-board didnt notice..
Nanoparticles in Food and Our Environment the New Health Epidemic……Health..isan income stream!!
Dr. Klinghardt explains how the nano-aluminum poisoning affects our health, especially when combined with other toxins in our environment, such as the herbicide glyphosate, which is in most of our food, and with microwave radiation from smart meters, cell phones, Wi-Fi routers, and cell towers…….
That’s not to mentiom that the military industrial complex has a life of its own and is virtually unstoppable…
Or that the injections in the latest “vaccine” experiments contain a mishmash of graphene oxide and other electrical facilitators to coagulate and extract other metals from the human circulation system.
And of course its now reasonably established that the bio-chem labs scattered around the world are creating ethnic poisons to deliberately target areas of humanity deemed to be a nuisance to the rich resources beneath their feet.
So good luck with your 23 list….I,m sure the heebies are falling apart laughing
I think I am a pretty good conspiracy theorist myself, but I am also a scientist. I need proof. So please please document your sources and/or evidence for what you are saying. Peer-reviewed articles would help.
Richard
Richard…
Dual Nationality ?
Corporation Law ?
Should not “international corporations” be broken up to serve their country of origin and a proper tax base ?
Should not personal wealth be limited to a multiple of the basic income ?
Should not private armies be banned ?
And should not pariah states like israel have physical movement restrictions…ie…No international travel be it people or cargo.
I think beppe is correct….voting should be physical and in person.
Organisations like chabad lubavitch, freemasonry, jesuitism, etc ….should be forced to declare intention and finance.
And….the sick argument of “national security” and the 100 year burial of files such as Dunblane, oklahoma etc completely overturned……personally i would like to see Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, harvard, georgia centrs of “education” turned into open museums.
Unless you limit personal wealth and force personal attendance, you will never prevent focus groups secretly forming and buying avoidance techniques to enhance their power.
“private islands”…yeah…getta life !!
So Plenty more to add to the list of 23.
Interesting ideas. Thank you.
We love these 23 points Dr. Barrett, discussed it all morning, you should mentor this guy Cook, he may be our Gotfried Feder.
Doubtful Jack…he,s got the Nyquist syndrome…refuses to believe the jews are involved…
Interesting and long-view article. There are several things to say. I start with the proposals and the one, in my opinion, more interesting is on the elections. Just as J. Simon has said, the problem of elections is the problem of US democracy. That said, how do you vote in Italy.
If in the USA the citizen must register on the lists, in Italy upon reaching the age of 18 all those entitled receive an electoral card (migrants sent to us by Soros do not have this right). The card has 18 boxes that correspond to 18 votes. In practice, the voter presents himself at the designated polling station, shows the electoral card, and an identity document that is noted on a register and on which the voter signs. While on the electoral card is affixed the stamp of the polling station, a stamp that is different for as many as there are polling stations in Italy.
This says that the voter will no longer be able to vote anywhere else. There is no such thing as postal and electronic voting. Either you go in person and vote or there is no other way to vote. For this reason, voting is only on Sunday and, if necessary, half the day of the following Monday. But the most important implication it is: one man one vote as against Apartheid in S. Africa. Only the electoral card makes the tycoon, the President and the last on earth equal, and it is the level of democracy. In Italy not everyone knows this, even less that participation is more important.
Part I
For me, where it is not possible to cancel (NATO, UN, IMF, WHO… etc.) in the medieval Italian cities there was rotation, which in Florence was every two months. The rotation in the judicial offices and in all other institutions… rotation that would avoid the formation of potentates (which would also be in contrast to the Deep State).
Thank you Kevin.
The Democratic party was mortally wounded and became a shell shocked victim with PTSD since 1963. NeoCons did infiltrated and control with a question mark during Carters blip on the scene. Republicans suffered greatly after Lincolns assassination. These are two Great American parties that have been totally destroyed and infiltrated. The ‘Fronts’ always take the hit while the deceptive virus villain vacates the scene of the crime. “By deception we rule”. If what is written in this history lesson was taught in our schools your plan may have a slight chance. Unfortunately we are stuck with the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Or you may jizzz over the Mayflower. Why did the world ever want an American education?
“If what is written in this history lesson was taught in our schools your plan may have a slight chance.” Any high school history teacher out there who wants to use this article/book as a supplement to the regular textbook? It’s a pretty good summary of our real history. Well done, Richard.
Any high school history who uses this as a supplement to the approved pap will be executed by a firing squad of school board stooges. Right now, only politically correct nonsense related to sexual orientation can be added.
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