Truthdig: The Collapse of Globalization

The Collapse of Globalization

By Chris Hedges

The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.

AP / Jacques Brinon

Demonstrators carry an effigy of Ronald McDonald

We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.

Adequate food, clean water and basic security are already beyond the reach of perhaps half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of 5 percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be inevitable. But it will not necessarily mean more democracy.

The refusal by all of our liberal institutions, including the press, universities, labor and the Democratic Party, to challenge the utopian assumptions that the marketplace should determine human behavior permits corporations and investment firms to continue their assault, including speculating on commodities to drive up food prices. It permits coal, oil and natural gas corporations to stymie alternative energy and emit deadly levels of greenhouse gases. It permits agribusinesses to divert corn and soybeans to ethanol production and crush systems of local, sustainable agriculture. It permits the war industry to drain half of all state expenditures, generate trillions in deficits, and profit from conflicts in the Middle East we have no chance of winning. It permits corporations to evade the most basic controls and regulations to cement into place a global neo-feudalism. The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the Democratic Party, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear—fear of secular humanism or fear of Christian fascists—to turn the population into passive accomplices. As long as we remain afraid nothing will change.

Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, two of the major architects for unregulated capitalism, should never have been taken seriously. But the wonders of corporate propaganda and corporate funding turned these fringe figures into revered prophets in our universities, think tanks, the press, legislative bodies, courts and corporate boardrooms. We still endure the cant of their discredited economic theories even as Wall Street sucks the U.S. Treasury dry and engages once again in the speculation that has to date evaporated some $40 trillion in global wealth. We are taught by all systems of information to chant the mantra that the market knows best.

It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s  promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has became concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent—from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—are banished as heretics.
 
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
 
The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.

The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations. But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs. This idea comes from a former hedge fund manager whose personal fortune was amassed largely by firing workers, and only illustrates how rational political discourse has descended into mindless sound bites.

We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.


The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore.”

The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.

The propagandists for globalism are the natural outgrowth of this image-based and culturally illiterate world. They speak about economic and political theory in empty clichés. They cater to our subliminal and irrational desires. They select a few facts and isolated data and use them to dismiss historical, economic, political and cultural realities. They tell us what we want to believe about ourselves. They assure us that we are exceptional as individuals and as a nation. They champion our ignorance as knowledge. They tell us that there is no reason to investigate other ways of organizing and governing our society. Our way of life is the best. Capitalism has made us great. They peddle the self-delusional dream of inevitable human progress. They assure us we will be saved by science, technology and rationality and that humanity is moving inexorably forward.

None of this is true. It is a message that defies human nature and human history. But it is what many desperately want to believe. And until we awake from our collective self-delusion, until we carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the corporate state and sever ourselves from the liberal institutions that serve the corporate juggernaut—especially the Democratic Party—we will continue to be rocketed toward a global catastrophe.


Chris Hedges’ column appears every Monday at Truthdig. Hedges, a fellow at The Nation Institute and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of “Death of the Liberal Class.”

Foreign Policy Journal: A Rothschild Plan for World Government

A Rothschild Plan for World Government

by Dr. K R Bolton

Crisis scenarios are the means by which dictators justify control. The most often cited example is Hitler’s “Enabling Act” in the wake of the Reichstag Fire. Another example is the “Patriot Act” in the aftermath of 9/11. Globalist organizations, behind the usual façade of the most idealistic intentions, such as the Club of Rome, have for decades warned of impending planetary doom unless a world control system of inaugurated. While many of the problems addressed by global control enthusiasts are real, attention is deflected away from the fact of those who are making the suggestions for extensive global controls to deal with problems also happen to be those who created the problems in the first place. These are the plutocrats who run a de facto globalist control system, whose aim is to turn it into a de jure system.

Hence, one should raise questions when the oligarchs who run the world financial system draw up world improvement schemes.

One of those in the forefront of exposing such schemes has been Lord Christopher Monckton[1] who has focused on the climate change scenario as part of a world state agenda. Only after threatening a diplomatic incident, Lord Christopher obtained the draft of the Copenhagen treaty that would have imposed an international 2% tax on all financial transactions, a 2% tax on the GDP, and established 700 new United Nations bureaucracies, with the international tax revenue going to the World Bank. However, the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Change Conference ended in disarray without the formal imposition of international taxation and bureaucracy. Lord Monckton stated of the agenda at Copenhagen: “Once again they are desperately trying to conceal from everybody here the magnitude of what they’re attempting to do – they really are attempting to set up a world government.”[2]

Several decades ago, the oligarchs were pushing a similar scheme of United Nations world government and international taxation on the pretext of ending the debt and other economic disparities between the so-called “North and South,” of the developed and developing worlds, never minding the fact that it is their economic and financial system that causes this disparity. It was aimed at concentrating more power into the hand of the international financial system on the pretext of economic and social justice. The scheme was called the “New International Economic Order,” but like other efforts, was abortive.

Is this World State global warming agenda warned of by Lord Monckton, et al, merely speculation, subjective interpretation, a paranoid conspiracy theory? Or is there very specific evidence as to the oligarchic agenda? Indeed, in 2008, Simon Linnett wrote a policy document on the issue, published by The Social Market Foundation.[3] Linnett is Executive Vice Chairman of N M Rothschild, London.[4] In the Linnett manifesto, he defines “greenhouse emissions” as the new form of “social market;” a speculative new global currency. Linnett states that while it must be market forces and free trade that operate in defining the value of the carbon emission exchange, what is required is a world government. Market forces plus an “international institution” with a constitution equals a World State under oligarchic control. He writes: “That such a market has to be established on a world basis coordinated by an international institution with a constitution to match.”[5]

Linnett is open in his belief that this façade of “saving the planet” is actually a method of establishing a “new world order” – as he calls it – where nations cede their sovereignty to the “international institution.” What can be plainer than this?

That, perhaps, it might be regarded as having wider benefits than merely ‘saving the planet’ – perhaps it might be the basis of a new world order, one that is not based on trade and/or conflict resolution.

Perhaps one can see a way to achieve this goal through leadership, vision and some marginal and manageable renunciation of national sovereignty, how the world might just get there.

The repercussions of addressing climate change may extend well beyond that single but critical issue.[6]

Linnett is here overtly stating that “climate change” is merely a step along the way of something more wide-ranging that “may well extend beyond that single but critical issue.” In a word, it is for the plutocrats another ruse, like so many of the past and present.

Of various methods suggested to limit carbon emissions, carbon trading is held by Linnet to be the most effective.[7] Implicit in the various measures of Linnett, including funding new technology[8] and changing the consumption habits of individuals is, “that nations have to be prepared to subordinate, to a certain extent, some of their sovereignty to this world initiative.”[9]

The reluctance to cede sovereignty to an international authority, Linnett argues, must be overcome in order to get India and China into the international system by showing them that all nations are willing to sacrifice their independence for the greater good. Linnett is specific as to what he had previously called “some marginal and manageable renunciation of national sovereignty”: “When countries are already foregoing the right of direct control over monetary policy through the creation of independent central banks, this could be a relatively small price to pay for such inclusion.”[10]

This must be one of the most candid and revealing statements ever made from the “inside” regarding the true aims of the global oligarchy. Here Linnett is affirming that the “central banks”, whether nationalized or not, are merely agencies for the private financial system of credit creation, which provide the international banking system with the means by which the oligarchy controls the monetary policies of nations. Any notion of sovereignty, as well as any party political promises about “full employment” etc. are so much rhetoric because a state is not sovereign when it does not have control over its own monetary policy, which in turn is predicated on control over the issue of a state’s credit.[11]

One is reminded of the statement of eminent Harvard historian and globalist Carroll Quigley, who described the aim of the international bankers as being to create “an international system of control”:

In time they brought into their financial network the provisional banking centers, organized as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this… aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers….The greatest of these dynasties, of course, were the descendents of Meyer Amschel Rothschild…”[12]

Linnett is stating that the mainspring of the international system is the creation of central banks, privately owned by the international bankers such as Rothschild, his employer, which dictate the economic and financial policies of every nation in the world, through “direct control of monetary policy”.[13] The system being proposed by Linnett, in the cause of “saving the planet,” is the consolidation of the international banking system under a central authority.

Linnett states that the European nations have already ceded their sovereignty to the EU; the next step being: “to yield sovereignty to a bigger world body on carbon trading.”[14]

A “world body is unlikely to start off as such”, states Linnett, but a constitution would allow it to expand.[15] That is to say, it is the old strategy of Fabian-socialism,[16] centralization of control by gradual stages; or one might say, slowly boiling the frog so that he is unaware as to what’s happening until it’s too late to jump out of the pot. Linnett believes that the lead can be shown by the EU, because of the willingness of European states already to yield their sovereignty to a supranational body, with a “senior politician prepared to lead this new initiative. If such a route map could be found, then perhaps we might be at the beginning of a new world constitution and a new world order.”[17]


“City of London” – Capital of the World State?

The world government that Linnett proposes he calls the World Environment Authority (WEA). This should be based in what Linnett calls a “world city.” [18] Linnett suggests that this “world city” or what one might term a “world capital” be London. However, I feel that one can be more precise and state that what Linnett has in mind is not “London” as most people understand the name, but what is called The City, a certain part of London which comprises the headquarters of international finance, which is a sovereign entity like Vatican City, in-so-far that should the British Monarch desire to enter s/he must seek to have her authority confirmed at the gates of The City by the “Lord Mayor of The City.” That Linnett is meaning The City can be inferred by his description: “London is a world financial centre (possibly ‘the’ world financial centre).”[19] This description does not fit London per se, but the so-called City of London.[20]

The actual name of this “London” is The City of London Corporation. Its oligarchic citizens call The City “the world’s leading financial centre,” exactly as Linnett describes the “London” he wants as the world capital. This City of London is described as “the financial and commercial heart of Britain, the ‘Square Mile’.”[21] Again exactly in accord with the requirements listed by Linnett as needed for the ‘world capital,” it is stated:

The City of London is at the heart of the world’s financial markets. It is a unique concentration of international expertise and capital, with a supportive legal and regulatory system, an advanced communications and information technology infrastructure and an unrivalled concentration of professional services…[22]

The Lord Mayor of the City of London is “not the Mayor of (Greater) London.” Hence, it should be readily seen that The City or the “Square Mile” is something quite different from the London known to the general public throughout the world. This Lord Mayor is elected for one year, and acts as a global ambassador for the international financial institutions situated there, and is “treated overseas as a Cabinet level Minister.”[23] He lives in the palatial 250-year-old “Mansion House.” On state visits the British Monarch waits at the Gate of The City to seek permission to enter and is presented with the sword of The City by the Lord Mayor.[24]

This at least would appear to be the Rothschild plan: to create an international authority on the pretext of saving the world from global warming, this salvation being somehow achievable by creating a “carbon exchange” as another source of speculative profit for the Rothschilds, et al. The international authority leading towards a “new world order” would have The City of London as its world capital.

One should not mistake this for any type of patriotic or nationalistic sentiment on the part of a CEO employed by Rothschild, who just happens at this stage in his career to be resident in England. The City is not a part of England; it is a sovereign financial state. Its leading functionaries are no more loyal to England than their counterparts are loyal to Germany, France or the USA or whatever other part of the world at which they happen to reside at any given time. Their citizenship is interchangeable according to the requirements of profit maximization. Hence, when someone such as Linnett advocates making The City the capital of a world control system, he does so not as a patriotic Briton (and not, I think, as part of a “British conspiracy” headed up by the House of Windsor) but as an employee of the oldest of the international bankers, the House of Rothschild, whose loyalty, like other such banking dynasties, is not to any nation other than when that nation might serve their interests or provide the weaponry against a recalcitrant state.



Notes:

[1] Lord Christopher Monckton, British politician, business consultant, policy adviser, author, columnist, inventor, and hereditary peer; served as an advisor to Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit during 1982-1986.

[2] “Monckton: Secretive Copenhagen Treaty Creates Larcenous Global Government Tax,” http://www.prisonplanet.com/monckton-secretive-copenhagen-treaty-creates-larcenous-global-government-tax.html

[3] Simon Linnett, Trading Emissions: Full Global Potential (London: The Social Market Foundation, January 2008). Online at: http://www.smf.co.uk/assets/files/publications/SMF_Trading_Emissions.pdf

[4] For the past decade Linnett has been in negotiation with UK and EU Administrations regarding carbon trading. Linnet, ibid., p. 21.

[5] Ibid., p. 4.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 8.

[8] Of course the funding for all such initiatives would come from the international banks such as Rothschild.

[9] Linnett, op.cit., p. 12.

[10] Ibid.

[11] K R Bolton, “State Credit and Reconstruction: The First NZ Labour Government,” International Journal of Social Economics, Issue 1, Volume 38, 2011.

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0306-8293&show=latest

[12] C Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 51.

[13] The public is generally hoodwinked into believing that central banks such as the Federal Reserve in the USA or the Bank of England are “state banks” that issue the state’s credit under government direction. The state banks are conduits for credit created by the international banking system. The public is hoodwinked into thinking that there is something magical about money creation that only the wizards of international finance can conjure. Few now recall that in New Zealand, as one of several examples during the 1930s, the 1935 Labour Government not only nationalized the Reserve Bank but issued 1% state credit for funding the famous State housing program, albeit only under immense pressure from the maverick Labour MP John A Lee, who insisted that the Fabian-dominated Government implement its election promises on state credit. Lee however was soon relegated to the margins of politics, despite his popularity. See: John A Lee, Money Power for the People, 1937; This Debt Slavery, 1940 Budget speeches by Lee and Harry Atmore MP. Also: K R Bolton, “State Credit and Reconstruction: The First NZ Labour Government,” op. cit.

[14] Linnett, op.cit., p. 12.

[15] Ibid., p. 14.

[16] As an aside, it might be interesting to note that the Rothschilds and other international bankers funded the Fabian Society’s London School of Economics (LSE). In her autobiography Our Partnership, Mrs Beatrice Webb describes how she and her husband Sidney, founders of the Fabian Society, were provided with funds by the Rothschilds, Sir Julius Wernher and Sir Ernest Cassel to established the LSE. Funding was also received corm the Rockefeller Foundation. The funding is confirmed by the LSE archives: “British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics and Political Science Archives, 1894-2000, Administrative/Biographical history [description],” http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:N_NBx6kWeJkJ:www.aim25.ac.uk/cats/1/3261.htm

Sir Ernest Cassel established the LSE’s chair of “economic geography.” Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild served as a Governor of the LSE. This is one of many examples throughout modern history of how socialism and plutocracy have marched hand-in-hand.

[17] Linnett, op. cit., p. 18.

[18] Ibid., p. 15.

[19] Ibid., p. 19.

[20] The London branch of the Rothschild international banking dynasty, N M Rothschild, was founded in 1811 at The City.

[21] City of London, “What is the City of London?,” http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGNL_Services/Council_and_democracy/Council_departments/whatis.htm

[22] Ibid., “Business”, http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGNL_Services/Business/

[23] Ibid., “The Lord Mayor of the City of London”, http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGNL_Services/Council_and_democracy/Councillors_democracy_and_elections/The_Lord_Mayor/



History of Temple Bar, http://www.thetemplebar.info/history:
…This tradition has been preserved for more than 400 years, and the ceremony now is carried out on major state occasions where the Queen halts at Temple Bar to request permission to enter the City of London and is offered the Lord Mayor’s Sword of State as a sign of loyalty.

No matter how one rationalises the ceremony as a mark of “loyalty” by The City toward the Monarch, it is nonetheless the Monarch who is placed in a subordinate position in seeking permission for entry and waiting for a symbolic affirmation of loyalty from The City on each occasion.

Un foarte mic Dictionar bilingv de arheologisme

Capitalism de cumetrie: sintagmă defăimată de ciocoii vechi (şi nu numai!), eterni câştigători ai tranziţiilor către realitate; actualii „cumetrii“, auto-împroprietăriţi peste bunurile publice al căror uzufruct l-au înstrăinat, „privatizându-l“ în scopuri extrem de înguste şi personale, nu sunt alţii decât foştii tătuci ai Erei Socialiste (sic!), transformaţi peste noapte în moşierii arivişti care au tupeul să ne dea astăzi lecţii despre neologismele limbii de lemn pe care au vorbit-o mereu şi continuă şi astăzi să o vorbească. Până când le vom permite să ne batjocorească?


Crony capitalism: anally retentive freaks-come-agents, sitting pretty on a master-narrative soap box topping a cesspit of selfish conservatism, enabling them to turn civil society citizens into corporatist human resources whilst profiting from their subaltern, cowardly nature. Is this the corporatist End of History which Hegel’s wilful interpreters had in mind?

Democracy Now, with Amy Goodman & Carlos Dada for Elfaro.net

As Obama Completes First Latin America Tour, [the] Anniversary of Slain Salvadoran Archbishop Romero Evokes Legacy of U.S.-Backed Crimes

President Obama has returned from his first trip to South America since taking office. Obama faced protests in Brazil, Chile and El Salvador as he sought to boost regional trade and improve security ties. In El Salvador, hundreds of demonstrators called for Obama to renegotiate or dismiss the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which has devastated El Salvador’s agricultural sector. Obama was also confronted with the legacy of U.S.-backed repression in Chile and El Salvador. Today marks the 31st year anniversary of the slaying of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was killed by members of a U.S.-backed death squad. We speak with investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who has reported extensively from Latin America since the 1980s.

Allan Nairn, investigative journalist who has reported extensively on U.S.-backed death squads in Latin America.



see also: How we killed Archbishop Romero

by Carlos Dada/El Faro

elfaro.net / Publicado el 25 de Marzo de 2010
 
Major Roberto D´Aubuisson participated in the conspiracy to assassinate Archbishop Romero, although a son of former president Molina provided the sniper, asserts Captain Álvaro Saravia. Thirty years later, he and some of the other people implicated in the crime reconstruct those days of arms trafficking, cocaine and kidnapping. Reduced to ignominy, Saravia has been a pizza delivery man, a used car salesman and a drug money launderer. Now he is burning in the hell he helped create during a time when killing “communists” was a sport.

Did Britain try to assassinate Lenin?

By Mike Thomson
Presenter, Document, Radio 4


Nearly a century ago, Britain was accused of masterminding a failed plot to kill Lenin and overthrow his fledgling Bolshevik regime. The British government dismissed the story as mere Soviet propaganda - but new evidence suggests it might be true.

Lenin survived an assassination attempt in 1918 although he was badly wounded

For decades what became known as the "Lockhart plot" has been etched in the annals of the Soviet archives, taught in schools and even illustrated in films.

In early 1918, in the final months of World War I, Russia's new Bolshevik government was negotiating a peace deal with Germany and withdrawing its exhausted troops from the front.

This did not please London. The move would enable Berlin - which had been fighting a war on two fronts - to reinforce its forces in the West.

Determined to get the Russians back into the war on the Allied side, the British despatched a young man in his 30s to be London's representative in Moscow.

His name was Robert Bruce Lockhart.


Supporting anti-Bolsheviks

Lockhart, a Scot, was a colourful character. Known for his love of wine, women and sports, he also prided himself on his alleged ability to read five books at the same time.

At first, the well-read Lockhart seemed to be making progress on the issue but, in March that year, the Soviets signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, so ending hope of them rejoining the war with the Allies.

Robert Bruce Lockhart in 1955

Lockhart, it seems, had no intention of giving up.

Instead, the suggestion is, his attention was now turning to overthrowing the Bolshevik regime and replacing it with another government that would be willing to re-enter the war against Germany.

Documents show that, in June, Lockhart asked London for money to fund various anti-Bolshevik organisations in Moscow.

This letter, marked "urgent", was sent from the Foreign Office to the Treasury. It sums up the Foreign Secretary's attitude to the Moscow's representative's request:

"Mr. Balfour is of the opinion that the moment has arrived when it has become necessary to take this action, and I am to request that you will move the Lords Committee to give the necessary sanction for the expenditure of such funds as Mr. Lockhart can collect for this purpose."


Counter-revolution

In late May, the British decided to send a small military force to Archangel in northern Russia.

The official line was that the troops were going to prevent thousands of tonnes of British military equipment, supplied to the Russians, from falling into German hands.

However, documents from the day suggest that plans were later drawn up for these 5,000 British troops to join forces with 20,000 crack Latvian troops who were guarding the Kremlin but could, it was thought, be turned against the Bolsheviks.

Timeline:

• 1914 outbreak of World War I between the Allies (France, Russia, Great Britain) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey)
• 1917 A popular revolution led by the Bolsheviks leads to the abdication of the tsar and the overthrow of his government
• 1918 WWI ends; Tsar Nicholas is killed; civil war breaks out in which Lenin's Red Army eventually defeats the White Russians (or anti-communists) who are aided by many foreign powers

In the summer of 1918, Lockhart sent a telegram to London following a meeting with a local opponent of the Bolsheviks called Savinkov.

It read: "Savinkov's proposals for counter-revolution. Plan is how, on Allied intervention, Bolshevik barons will be murdered and military dictatorship formed."

Underneath that telegram is a note bearing the signed initials of Lord Curzon, who was then a member of the British War Cabinet.

It says: "Savinkoff's methods are drastic, though if successful probably effective, but we cannot say or do anything until intervention has been definitely decided upon."


'Ace of Spies'

Meanwhile Lockhart had teamed up in Moscow with another highly colourful character.
 
Sidney Reilly, a Russian who had earlier changed his name from Rosenbloom, was a flamboyant, high-rolling entrepreneur who had recently begun working for the British Secret Services.

He became known as the Ace of Spies, made famous in books of derring-do, and was even credited as being the inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond.

Sidney Reilly's passport photograph from 1918

But both were soon in for a shock.

In the late summer of 1918, an attempt was made in Moscow to assassinate Lenin. He was shot twice from close range by a young Russian woman.

The Bolshevik's secret police, the Cheka, arrested Bruce Lockhart a few hours later and he was taken to the Kremlin for questioning.

Reilly escaped the Cheka's clutches on that occasion but was shot dead several years later after being lured back into Russia.

According to Cheka records, Lockhart confessed to being part of a plot proposed by London to kill Lenin and overthrow the Bolshevik government. But in early October 1918, Britain's representative to Moscow was freed in an exchange for his Russian counterpart in London.



'Economical with the truth'

In his best selling book, Memoirs of a British Agent published in the 1930s, Lockhart insisted that he had played no part either in attempts to kill Lenin or overthrow the Bolshevik government.

Read the full letter from Lockhart's son

Instead, he insisted that the maverick "Ace of Spies" Sidney Reilly was the man behind plans for a coup.

Lockhart added that he had little to do with Reilly who some claimed was out of control.

However, a letter written by Lockhart's son, Robin, has been discovered in archives in America. It suggests that his father was being rather economical with the truth:

"If the question of my father's relationship with Reilly still exercises anyone's mind in the F.O., it is clear from his book Memoirs of a British Agent that once intervention in Russia had been decided on in 1918, he gave his active support to the counter-revolutionary movement with which, of course, Reilly was actively working.

"My father has himself made it clear to me that he worked much more closely with Reilly than he had publicly indicated…"



Whitehall 'pretence'

The man who found that letter, Professor Robert Service, believes the only way to be sure of the truth would be to gain access to the rest of the files from the day.

But, more than 90 years later, the British government continues to keep many of them secret. All, in Robert Service's view, to maintain the myth that Lockhart-style plots have not - nor ever would be - countenanced by London.

"Britain today has a policy for its intelligence services that is openly averse to subverting foreign governments or assassinating foreign political leaders," he says.

"My guess is that the thinking in Whitehall is that the pretence ought to be that this has always been the case. That the British have always been clean.

"The British haven't always been clean. They have been as dirty as anyone else."


Document: The Lockhart Plot will be broadcast on Monday 21 March at 2000 GMT on BBC Radio 4 and will also be available on the BBC iPlayer.

Collaboration against Democracy

US Chamber of Commerce and US Supreme Court

by Paul A. Moore / March 19th, 2011

A few days over a year ago, or to be more precise on January 21, 2010, the US Supreme Court handed over what little was left of this nation’s pretensions to democracy on a silver platter to the Big Banks and the US Chamber of Commerce. The case was titled Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission and the Court’s decision removed all limits on corporate campaign contributions. Elections are now a sham proceeding at every level US government. The vast majority of the American people who no longer participate in the electoral charade are the smartest among us. The willfully ignorant and delusional still cling desperately to their faux-alternative Democratic politician or their Tea Party Republican politician with the tin-foil hat.

The Big Banks are running the show. Not the banks, there are 956 of those operating in the US and 950 of them lost money last year. Its the Big Banks headed by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and the six of those made so much money last year that the banking industry as a whole turned a handsome profit. Goldman Sachs, the top campaign contributor to Barack Obama, decided that he rather than John McCain would take over for George W. Bush in January 2009 and also dictated that there would be essentially no changes in the direction of the United States. And the transformation has been seamless.

The Big Banks count on their partners in the US Chamber of Commerce to share the load of governance. The Chamber’s far-right wing embodied by the Koch brothers has generated the Tea Party, the working class shock troops that are necessary if fascism, a term that describes the corporate-state, is to actually function in the US. And the Chamber launders the money of the Chinese, German, Japanese, Indian, Saudi and other foreign corporate entities seeking to advance their interests in the US political arena. After demonstrating the extent of their control in the elections of 2010, Chamber President Thomas Donohue assured a nervous and shellacked-feeling Barack Obama that he would be allowed a second term in the role he enjoys so, President of the United States. “The chamber has not, does not and will not participate in presidential politics,” Donohue told reporters. “And it is not our intention to participate in any activity to weaken the president for his re-election. We are not seeking any activity that would limit the president’s ability to advance his own re-election.” Obama then genuflected to the bosses, bringing JP Morgan Chase’s William J. Daley and General Electric’s Jeff Immelt into his Administration.

Just who are the corporate “people” whose free speech rights the US Supreme Court established in the Citizens United Decision and who are now unleashed to do as they please. Let’s look at some snapshots from the Chamber’s Annual Picnic last year.

Over there in pavilion eight, why it’s the murders of Nataline Sarkisyan and thousands of other Americans who must go without basic life-saving medical care for the sake of CIGNA HealthCare profits. And look in the next pavilion over the murders of 29 mineworkers at the Upper Big Branch Mine in southern West Virginia, Massey Energy Co., when basic safety concerns were set aside for profits sake. There in three pavilions in close proximity, the criminal corporate syndicate of BP, Halliburton and Transocean that executed the crime of the century beginning with the murders of 11 oil workers on the Deepwater Horizon and ending with the poisoning death of the Gulf of Mexico. Not far away, the five corporate media giants, Newscorp (Fox), Time Warner (CNN), General Electric and Comcast (NBC, MSNBC), Disney (ABC) and Viacom (CBS and MTV), that helped the Obama Administration bury the crime in a massive PR blitz.

And there were the Chambers foreign guests in happier times, like the fellows from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), who were happily operating their General Electric designed nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi despite warnings, according to Wikileaks, from the International Atomic Energy Commission and even US diplomats that the flaunting of safety concerns invited catastrophe. But ignoring the warnings was good for business so the catastrophe is upon us all multiplied to the tenth power. The world’s third largest economy is mortally wounded and it is not out of the question that Japan is now destroyed and will have to be evacuated. The only hope for Japan rests on the shoulders of TEPCO workers who are volunteering for suicide missions against the ongoing nuclear reactor meltdowns to give their working class brothers and sisters the chance to survive into a civilized future, the chance to deal with those corporate ghouls who profited from cutting corners and falsifying reports.

Then Saudi Aramco was there too. The state owned national oil company of Saudi Arabia stands watch over the heart of global capitalism. Who knew then that in a few months they would send their troops in the guise of the Gulf Cooperation Council into neighboring Bahrain in a vain attempt to hold back the revolutionary human tsunami sweeping across the Middle East. Soon Saudi oil will be as difficult to extract as Libyan oil is now and then?

Well then, the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission will be placed where it belongs in history–on the compost heap of American’s backyard food gardens.



Paul A. Moore is a teacher at Miami Carol City Senior High School. He can be contacted at: Pmoore1953@aol.com. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

The Real Turin Shroud

Single molecule's stunning image

By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Even the bonds to the hydrogen atoms at the pentacene's periphery can be seen

The detailed chemical structure of a single molecule has been imaged for the first time, say researchers.

The physical shape of single carbon nanotubes has been outlined before, using similar techniques - but the new method even shows up chemical bonds.

Understanding structure on this scale could help in the design of many things on the molecular scale, particularly electronics or even drugs.

The IBM researchers report their findings in the journal Science.

It is the same group that in July reported the feat of measuring the charge on a single atom.


Fine tuning

In both cases, a team from IBM Research Zurich used what is known as an atomic force microscope or AFM.

Their version of the device acts like a tiny tuning fork, with one of the prongs of the fork passing incredibly close to the sample and the other farther away.

When the fork is set vibrating, the prong nearest the sample will experience a minuscule shift in the frequency of its vibration, simply because it is getting close to the molecule.

Comparing the frequencies of the two prongs gives a measure of just how close the nearer prong is, effectively mapping out the molecule's structure.

The measurement requires extremes of precision. In order to avoid the effects of stray gas molecules bounding around, or the general atomic-scale jiggling that room-temperature objects experience, the whole setup has to be kept under high vacuum and at blisteringly cold temperatures.

"Michaelangelo" at the microscope, which must be kept under high vacuum and exceptionally cold
However, the tip of the AFM's prong is not well-defined and isn't necessarily sharp on the scale of single atoms. The effect of this bluntness is to blur the instrument's images.

The researchers have now hit on the idea of deliberately picking up just one small molecule - made of one atom of carbon and one of oxygen - with the AFM tip, forming the sharpest, most well-defined tip possible.

Their measurement of a pentacene molecule using this carbon monoxide tip shows the bonds between the carbon atoms in five linked rings, and even suggests the bonds to the hydrogen atoms at the molecule's periphery.


Tip of the iceberg

Lead author of the research Leo Gross told BBC News that the group is aiming to combine their ability to measure individual charges with the new technique, characterising molecules at a truly unprecedented level of detail.

That will help in particular in the field of "molecular electronics", a potential future for electronics in which individual molecules serve as switches and transistors.

Although the approach can trace out the ethereal bonds that connect atoms, it cannot distinguish between atoms of different types.

The team aims to use the new technique in tandem with a similar one known as scanning tunnelling microscopy - in which a tiny voltage is applied across the sample - to determine if the two methods in combination can deduce the nature of each atom in the AFM images.

That would help the entire field of chemistry, in particular the synthetic chemistry used for drug design.

The results are of wide interest to others who study the nano-world with similar instruments. For them, implementing the same approach is as simple as picking up one of these carbon monoxide molecules with their AFM before taking a measurement.

Britain’s Nazi King

In the wake of the "King's (George the VI) stuttering stammering Speech" cleaning up at the Oscars, lest we remember his brother's penchant for the Nazis...


by Simon Korner
21st Century Socialism

Last month's Channel 5 documentary about Edward VIII sought to portray him as an isolated figure. But support for Hitler and the Nazis was widespread among the British ruling class during the 1930s.

Channel 5’s documentary (Britain’s Nazi King Revealed, July 16th) on Edward VIII’s Nazi links was based on newly declassified FBI files. The playboy prince was roundly condemned by the programme’s voiceover, and Wallace Simpson, the twice divorced American he married, was depicted as a convenient pretext for forcing him into abdicating when, we were told, the real reason had been deep establishment suspicion of his pro-German views. The programme clearly wanted to present the British elite as having been anti-fascist from the start. That this was not so, that the British establishment was extremely forgiving towards Edward and deeply sympathetic to fascism, was airbrushed out of the story.

The facts presented were nonetheless remarkable. Simpson had been the lover of German Ambassador von Ribbentrop, (who went on to become Hitler’s foreign minister); and as Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, Edward was earmarked by Hitler as a potential puppet king after the Nazi victory.

Edward, the handsome “Prince William times 10” of his day, according to historian Andrew Roberts, had close family ties to Germany, spoke German often at home and considered the language his ‘muttersprache’. The House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha (previously the surname of our royal family) hit on the name Windsor – an arbitrary choice, based on one of their many castles – in an attempt to anglicise themselves. Edward became the “face of the British crown abroad” and was an early media celebrity.

The programme argued convincingly that there were doubts in ruling circles about Edward’s suitability for the throne because of his indolent, decadent lifestyle, his many affairs and his devotion to the gold-digging American. A philistine, who found Jane Eyre too dull to read, he became king on George V’s death in January 1936. Germany’s faith in his usefulness proved well-founded. He talked frequently to the German ambassador about political issues, bypassing Baldwin’s government. As a result, Hitler was confident that the King of England would not oppose the German annexation of the Rhineland.

After the abdication in December 1936, Edward and Wallace Simpson sailed in a Nazi ship, the Bremen, to Germany, where they were feted – in a great propaganda coup for the Nazis. “It’s a shame he’s no longer king,” said Goebbels, though the Nazis realised he could still be effective as a legitimising figurehead for a future British fascist government. In May 1939, only 4 months before the war began, Edward pleaded publicly for peace with Germany. According to the voiceover the BBC refused to broadcast this, but no evidence was given for this assertion.

When Hitler’s written invasion plans for France were intercepted after the plane carrying the papers crashed, Edward informed the Germans of the fact, and Hitler promptly changed his battleplans from a movement through the lowlands to a sweep through the Ardennes, taking the allies by surprise. Edward decided not to evacuate from France with his beleaguered former regiment, the Middlesex, but instead scuttled south to Biarritz, immediately contacting Ribbentrop from there and requesting of the Gestapo – even as the Dunkirk evacuation was taking place – that they collect his belongings from Paris. Then he and Simpson went on to Franco’s Spain, hobnobbing with fascist banker Ricardo Silva there.

Churchill sent them on to Portugal. In Estoril, a hotbed of Nazi spies, Edward advised the Germans in July 1940 that “continued heavy bombing would make England ready for peace.”

Even after committing such a clearly treasonable act, Edward was not arrested and executed, but was taken from Lisbon to the British Bahamas, where he continued his Nazi propaganda from his new position of governor-general. In an interview with an American journalist, he called Hitler a great man and advised the journalist to tell this to Mr Roosevelt – in an effort to persuade the USA not to enter the war. The narration described his posting to the Bahamas as ‘exile’, to imply that the British ruling class had taken a tough line with him. That was clearly not the case.

Such a gloss was typical of the Channel 5 programme, covering up the extent of British collaboration with Hitler, which was considerable. Support for fascism was endemic in the UK's ruling class, with both the British press barons, Rothermere and Beaverbrook, sympathetic to fascism – the former directly funding Oswald Mosley, the Leader of the British Union of Fascists. Rothermere proclaimed in 1933: “The sturdy young Nazis of Germany are Europe’s guardians against the communist danger.” Churchill had praised Mussolini’s fascism for similar reasons, and just three days before the Nazis marched into Poland, Britain’s ambassador to Berlin, Henderson, pledged an alliance with Germany.

Well into 1940, Britain was still exporting goods to Italy and supplying crude oil to Japan. When Adolf Hitler's deputy, Rudolph Hess, landed in Scotland seeking an audience with the sympathetic Duke of Hamilton, he had good reason to believe that sections of the British ruling class would support him. The Anglo-German Fellowship, whose big business members boasted the directors of the Bank of England and all the major banks and insurance firms, plus Shell, Unilever, ICI, Tate and Lyle and more, invited Himmler to address it.

Far from being in a thorn in the side of a staunchly anti-fascist establishment, what King Edward VIII actually represented, then, was a powerful current within the British ruling elite. Similar fifth columnists existed everywhere – in France, Pierre Laval, who became the head of the Vichy regime in France and was executed after the war, had been French Prime Minister twice, in 1931-2 and 1935-6. In Russia, the Moscow trials uncovered plotting among the highest echelons of the ruling Communist Party, a fact verified by Churchill in his diaries, who noted that the then Czech president Benes, “became aware that communications were passing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between important personages in Russia and the German Government. This was part of the so-called military and Old-Guard-Communist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin and introduce a new regime based on a pro-German policy. President Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless, but perhaps not needless, military and political purge in Soviet Russia, and the series of trials in January 1937… The Russian army was purged of its pro-German elements…”

After the war, many British establishment figures continued to visit the fascist royals in Paris. Frank Giles, for instance, who edited the Sunday Times and had known them personally before the war, dined with the couple in Paris. Giles, interviewed on the programme, recounted his shock at Edward blaming Roosevelt and the Jews for having brought on the war. His response? He “thought about leaving the room”.

After Edward’s death in 1972, the unrepentant Nazi was brought back from Paris to be buried in Windsor Castle, and his wife was buried beside him in 1986. This posthumous rehabilitation provides a far truer measure of enduring British ruling class attitudes to fascism than the makers of the Channel 5 documentary would have us believe.