Category Archives: Militarization

Neocons and Neolibs: How Dead Ideas Kill

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By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

For centuries hereditary monarchy was the dominant way to select national leaders, evolving into an intricate system that sustained itself through power and propaganda even as its ideological roots shriveled amid the Age of Reason. Yet, as monarchy became a dead idea, it still killed millions in its death throes.

Today, the dangerous “dead ideas” are neoconservatism and its close ally, neoliberalism. These are concepts that have organized American foreign policy and economics, respectively, over the past several decades – and they have failed miserably, at least from the perspective of average Americans and people of the nations on the receiving end of these ideologies.

Neither approach has benefited mankind; both have led to untold death and destruction; yet the twin “neos” have built such a powerful propaganda and political apparatus, especially in Official Washington, that they will surely continue to wreak havoc for years to come. They are zombie ideas and they kill.

Yet, the Democratic Party is poised to nominate an adherent to both “neos” in the person of Hillary Clinton. Rather than move forward from President Barack Obama’s unease with what he calls the Washington “playbook,” the Democrats are retreating into its perceived safety.

After all, the Washington Establishment remains enthralled to both “neos,” favoring the “regime change” interventionism of neoconservatism and the “free trade” globalism of neoliberalism. So, Clinton has emerged as the clear favorite of the elites, at least since the field of alternatives has narrowed to populist billionaire Donald Trump and democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.

Democratic Party insiders appear to be counting on the mainstream news media and prominent opinion-leaders to marginalize Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, and to finish off Sanders, who faces long odds against Clinton’s delegate lead for the Democratic nomination, especially among the party regulars known as “super-delegates.”

But the Democratic hierarchy is placing this bet on Clinton in a year when much of the American electorate has risen up against the twin “neos,” exhausted by the perpetual wars demanded by the neoconservatives and impoverished by the export of decent-paying manufacturing jobs driven by the neoliberals.

Though much of the popular resistance to the “neos” remains poorly defined in the minds of rebellious voters, the common denominator of the contrasting appeals of Trump and Sanders is that millions of Americans are rejecting the “neos” and repudiating the establishment institutions that insist on sustaining these ideologies.

The Pressing Question

Thus, the pressing question for Campaign 2016 is whether America will escape from the zombies of the twin “neos” or spend the next four years surrounded by these undead ideas as the world lurches closer to an existential crisis.

The main thing that the zombie “neos” have going for them is that the vast majority of Very Important People in Official Washington have embraced these concepts and have achieved money and fame as a result. These VIPs are no more likely to renounce their fat salaries and overblown influence than the favored courtiers of a King or Queen would side with the unwashed rabble.

The “neo” adherents are also very skilled at framing issues to their benefit, made easier by the fact that they face almost no opposition or resistance from the mainstream media or the major think tanks.

The neoconservatives have become Washington’s foreign policy establishment, driving the old-time “realists” who favored more judicious use of American power to the sidelines.

Meanwhile, the neoliberals dominate economic policy debates, treating the “markets” as some new-age god and “privatization” of public assets as scripture. They have pushed aside the old New Dealers who called for a robust government role to protect the people from the excesses of capitalism and to build public infrastructure to benefit the nation as a whole.

The absence of any strong resistance to the now dominant “neo” ideologies is why we saw the catastrophic “group think” over Iraq’s WMD in 2003 and why for many years no one of great significance dared question the benefits of “free trade.”

After all, both strategies benefited the elites. Neoconservative warmongering diverted trillions of dollars into the Military-Industrial Complex and neoliberal job outsourcing has made billions of dollars for individual corporate executives and stock investors on Wall Street.

Those interests have, in turn, kicked back a share of the proceeds to fund Washington think tanks, to finance news outlets, and to lavish campaign donations and speaking fees on friendly politicians. So, for the insiders, this game has been a case of win-win.

The Losers

Not so much for the “losers,” those average citizens who have seen the Great American Middle Class hollowed out over the past few decades, watched America’s public infrastructure decay, and worried about their sons and daughters being sent off to fight unnecessary, perpetual and futile wars.

But inundated with clever propaganda – and scrambling to make ends meet – most Americans see the reality as if through a glass darkly. Many of them, as Barack Obama indelicately said during the 2008 campaign, “cling to guns or religion.” They have little else – and many are killing themselves with opiates that dull their pain or with those guns that they see as their last link to “freedom.”

What is clear, however, is that large numbers don’t trust – and don’t want – Hillary Clinton, who had a net 24-point unfavorable rating in one recent poll. It turns out that another indelicate Obama comment from Campaign 2008 may not have been true, when he vouched that “you’re likable enough, Hillary.” For many Americans, that’s not the case (although Trump trumped Clinton with a 41-point net negative).

If the Democrats do nominate Hillary Clinton, they will be hoping that the neocon/neolib establishment can so demonize Donald Trump that a plurality of Americans will vote for the former Secretary of State out of abject fear over what crazy things the narcissistic billionaire might do in the White House.

Trump’s policy prescriptions have been all over the place – and it is hard to know what reflects his actual thinking (or his genuine ignorance) as opposed to what constitutes his skillful showmanship that made him the “survivor” in the real-life reality TV competition for the Republican nomination.

Does Trump really believe that global warming is a hoax or is he just pandering to the know-nothing element of the Republican Party? Does he actually consider Obama’s Iran nuclear deal to be a disaster or is he just playing to the hate-Obama crowd on the Right?

Opposing the ‘Neos’

But Trump is not a fan of the “neos.” He forthrightly takes on the neocons over the Iraq War and excoriates ex-Secretary of State Clinton for her key role in another “regime change” disaster in Libya. Further, Trump calls for cooperation with Russia and China rather than the neocon-preferred escalation of tensions.

In his April 27 foreign policy speech, Trump called for “a new foreign policy direction for our country – one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace. …It’s time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold. …

“My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make. America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”

Such comments – suggesting that “new voices” are needed and that “ideology” should be cast aside – were fighting words for the neocons, since it is their voices that have drowned out all others and their ideology that has dominated U.S. foreign policy in recent years.

To make matters worse, Trump outlined an “America First” strategy in contrast to neocon demands that the U.S. military be dispatched abroad to advance the interests of Israel and other “allies.” Trump is not interested in staging “regime changes” to eliminate leaders who are deemed troublesome to Israel.

The real estate tycoon also has made criticism of “free trade” deals a centerpiece of his campaign, arguing that those agreements have sold out American workers by forcing them to compete with foreign workers receiving a fraction of the pay.

Sen. Sanders has struck similar themes in his insurgent Democratic campaign, criticizing Hillary Clinton’s longtime support for “free trade” and her enthusiasm for “regime change” wars, such as those in Iraq and Libya.

Examining her long record in public life, there can be little doubt that Clinton is a neocon on foreign policy and a neolib on economic strategies. She stands firmly with the consensus of Official Washington’s establishment, which is why she has enjoyed its warm embrace.

She has followed Wall Street’s beloved neoliberal attitude toward “free trade,” which has been very good for multinational corporations as they shipped millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries. (She has only cooled her ardor for trade deals to stanch the flow of Democratic voters to Bernie Sanders.)

Wars and More Wars

On foreign policy, Clinton has consistently supported neoconservative wars, although she might shy from the neocon label per se, preferring its less noxious synonym “liberal interventionist.”

But as arch-neocon Robert Kagan, who has recast himself as a “liberal interventionist,” told The New York Times in 2014, “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Summing up the feeling of thinkers like Kagan, the Times reported that Clinton “remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes.”

In February 2016, distraught over the rise of Trump, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush’s Iraq War, openly threw his support to Clinton, announcing his decision in a Washington Post op-ed.

And Kagan is not mistaken when he views Hillary Clinton as a fellow-traveler. She has often marched in lock step with the neocons as they have implemented their aggressive “regime change” schemes against governments and political movements that don’t toe Washington’s line or that deviate from Israel’s goals in the Middle East.

She has backed coups, such as in Honduras (2009) and Ukraine (2014); invasions, such as Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011); and subversions such as Syria (from 2011 to the present) all with various degrees of disastrous results. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon” and “Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?”]

Seeking ‘Coercion’

A glimpse of what a Clinton-45 presidency might do could be seen in a recent Politico commentary by Dennis Ross, a former special adviser to Secretary of State Clinton now working at the staunchly pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In the article, Ross painted a surreal world in which the problems of the Middle East have been caused by President Obama’s hesitancy to engage militarily more aggressively across the region, not by the neocon-driven decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the similar schemes to overthrow secular governments in Libya and Syria in 2011, leaving those two countries in ruin.

Channeling the desires of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ross called for the United States to yoke itself to the regional interests of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in their rivalry against Shiite-led Iran.

Ross wrote: “Obama believes in the use of force only in circumstances where our security and homeland might be directly threatened. His mindset justifies pre-emptive action against terrorists and doing more to fight the Islamic State. But it frames U.S. interests and the use of force to support them in very narrow terms. …

“The Saudis acted in [invading] Yemen in no small part because they feared the United States would impose no limits on Iranian expansion in the area, and they felt the need to draw their own lines.”

To counter Obama’s hesitancy to apply military force, Ross calls for a reassertion of a muscular U.S. policy in the Middle East, much along the lines that the neocon establishment and Hillary Clinton also favor, including:

–Threatening Iran with “blunt, explicit language on employing force, not sanctions” if Iran deviates from the Obama-negotiated agreement to constrain its nuclear program (the bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran zombie lives!);

–“Contingency planning with GCC states and Israel … to generate specific options for countering Iran’s growing use of Shiite militias to undermine regimes in the region”;

–A readiness to arm Sunni tribes in Iraq if Iraq’s prime minister doesn’t;

–Establish “safe havens with no-fly zones” inside Syria if Russian President Vladimir Putin does not force Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down.

Employing the classic tough talk of the neocons, Ross concludes, “Putin and Middle Eastern leaders understand the logic of coercion. It is time for us to reapply it.”

One might note the many logical inconsistencies of Ross’s arguments, including his failure to note that much of Iran’s supposed meddling in the Middle East has involved aiding the Syrian and Iraqi governments in their battle against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. Or that Russia’s intervention in Syria also has been to support the internationally recognized government in its fight against Sunni extremists and terrorists.

But the significance of Ross’s prescription to “reapply” U.S. “coercion” across the region is that he is outlining what the world can expect from a Clinton-45 presidency.

Clinton made many of the same points in her speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and in debates with Bernie Sanders. If she stays on that track as president, there would be at least a partial U.S. military invasion of Syria, a very strong likelihood of war with Iran, and an escalation of tensions (and possible war) with nuclear-armed Russia.

The logic of how all that is supposed to improve matters is lost amid the classic neocon growling about showing toughness or reapplying “coercion.”

So, the Democratic Party seems to be betting that Hillary Clinton’s flood of ugly TV ads against Trump can frighten the American people enough to give the neocons and the neolibs one more lease on the White House – and four more years to wreak their zombie havoc on the world.

 

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

The MOVE Bombing – When Philly Police Plotted to Exterminate a Family

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(Source: Media Roots)

On May 13, 1985, one of the most shameful, horrific attacks by US police ever took place in West Philadelphia. 11 people, including five children, were killed in a deliberate massacre.

A racist and political attack on a radical community group known as the MOVE Organization, city and police officials were revealed to have intentionally set their home ablaze, let the fire rage, and violently kept escaping men, women and children trapped inside.

Featuring a harrowing first-hand account with the only adult survivor of the atrocity, Ramona Africa, Abby Martin documents an indispensable, but largely unheard of, moment in American history. From MOVE’s formation, to the arrest of the MOVE 9 political prisoners, to the build-up to the infamous bombing, The Empire Files chronicles an act that cannot be forgotten.

Always Attack the Wrong Country

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By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

There are numerous tactics available to those who aim to make problems worse while pretending to solve them, but misdirection is always a favorite. The reason to want to make problems worse is that problems are profitable—for someone. And the reason to pretend to be solving them is that causing problems, then making them worse, makes those who profit from them look bad.

In the international arena, this type of misdirection tends to take on a farcical aspect. The ones profiting from the world’s problems are the members of the US foreign policy and military establishments, the defense contractors and the politicians around the world, and especially in the EU, who have been bought off by them. Their tactic of misdirection is conditioned by a certain quirk of the American public, which is that it doesn’t concern itself too much with the rest of the world. The average member of the American public has no idea where various countries are, can’t tell Sweden from Switzerland, thinks that Iran is full of Arabs and can’t distinguish any of the countries that end in -stan. And so a handy trick has evolved, which amounts to the following dictum: “Always attack the wrong country.”

Need some examples? After 9/11, which, according to the official story (which is probably nonsense) was carried out by “suicide bombers” (some of them, amusingly, still alive today) who were mostly from Saudi Arabia, the US chose to retaliate by attacking Saudi ArabiaAfghanistan and Iraq.

When Arab Spring erupted (because a heat wave in Russia drove up wheat prices) the obvious place to concentrate efforts, to avoid a seriously bad outcome for the region, was Egypt—the most populous Arab country and an anchor for the entire region. And so the US and NATO decided to attack EgyptLibya.

When things went south in the Ukraine, whose vacillating government couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to remain within the Customs Union with Russia, its traditional trading partner, or to gamble on signing an agreement with the EU based on vague (and since then broken) promises of economic cooperation, the obvious place to go and try to fix things was the Ukraine. And so the US and the EU decided fix the UkraineRussia, even though Russia is not particularly broken. Russia was not amused; nor is it a country to be trifled with, and so in response the Russians inflicted some serious pain on the Washington establishmentfarmers within the EU.

Who was at fault exceedingly clear once the Ukrainians that managed to get into power (including some very nasty neo-Nazis) started to violate the rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking majority, including staging some massacres, in turn causing a large chunk of it to hold referendums and vote to secede. (Perhaps you didn’t know this, but the majority of the people in the Ukraine are Russian-speakers, and there is just one city of any size—Lvov—that is mostly Ukrainian-speaking. Mind you, I find Ukrainian to be very cute and it makes me smile whenever I hear it. I don’t bother speaking it, though, because any Ukrainian with an IQ above bathwater temperature understands Russian.) And so the US and the EU decided to fix things by continuing to put pressure on the UkraineRussia.

When Russia started insisting on a political rather than a military resolution to the crisis in the Ukraine, and helped negotiate the Minsk agreements together with the Ukraine, France and Germany, a similar thing happened. These agreements obligated the Ukrainian government to pass constitutional reforms to grant autonomy to its Russian regions in the east. The Ukrainian government refused to abide by these agreements. As a result, the US and the EU decided to put pressure on the UkrainianRussian government.

When a nasty terrorist group calling itself ISIS and composed of Islamic Salafi/Takfiri extremists started to seize power in large parts of Iraq, and then spread to Syria, something had to be done about it. These extremists were being financed by Turkey (which is still buying oil from them and sheltering them on its territory) and Saudi Arabia. And so the US and NATO decided to put some pressure on Turkey and Saudi ArabiaSyria.

In response to all this foolishness, Russia up and decided to actually go and fix something that was broken: Syria. And now Syria is on the mend, and members the misdirectorate in Washington are left scratching their heads.

So far so good. But this method of pretending to be solving problems by making them worse has some definite downsides.

For one thing, eventually even the dimmest, most geographically challenged bulbs in the general population start to get a clue, and then they start refusing to vote for the establishment candidates. Then it becomes hard to continue with the misdirecting because the people doing the misdirecting are voted out, and (horror of horrors!) somebody who might actually try to fix a problem or two might get voted in.

For another, continually making problems worse by attacking the wrong country tends to eventually make the sheer number problems get completely out of hand. Take the recent massive terror attack in Brussels, down the road from NATO headquarters, for which ISIS took credit. Recently, Europe has been experiencing a large-scale influx of people from the Middle East and North Africa, who have been forced to flee their native lands because of all the previous acts of misdirection, and a fair number of these people are ISIS terrorists. And so, to protect itself, NATO is planning to fight ISIS in EuropeSyria. Also, it is well known that the influx into Europe has been orchestrated by Turkey. In response, the EU has decided to put pressure ongive billions of euros to Turkey and tell Turkey that it is welcome to join the EU.

Lastly, this pattern has an overall momentum that, over time, becomes harder and harder to break. It starts out as just one group of plutocrats doing incredibly vile, underhanded but profitable things; later on, an even bigger group of plutocrats is doing equally vile but now completely idiotic, self-defeating, embarrassing things; and right near the end a really huge group of plutocrats is doing things that are absolutely suicidal—but they can’t stop themselves. You should be able to decide for yourselves when that point in time arrives, but I doubt that it is too far in the future.

Hillary’s Neocon Problem

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By Gerald Sussman

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Hillary Clinton has a dark history in foreign policy. Indeed, if the Nuremberg principles were applied evenly, her name would certainly be on the docket, along with her former boss in the White House, who is actually less of a hawk than she. When Donald Trump publicly expressed a willingness to negotiate with Russia over international conflicts, she referred to such an idea as putting “Christmas in the Kremlin.”  She’s red-baited Bernie Sanders for his support for the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions back in the 1980s. Clinton basically backs not “political realism,” but the more imperial tradition of neoconservative “American exceptionalism,” a chauvinist mindset by which the US sets the political, economic, and military priorities of the world and the places and times of its interventions, sometimes with allied support, sometimes without, at its own discretion.

Hillary is a product of her husband’s alignment with Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and the right wing shift of the party, which moved the Democrats away from its moorings in organized labor, the New Deal, civil rights, and the Great Society. Bill Clinton’s successful election undoubtedly inspired the formation of “New” Labour in Britain, which likewise broke with its party history in the labor movement. In the 1990s, then MP Tony Blair, his shadow government chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown, and his chief pollster Philip Gould came to America as apprentices of the Clinton presidential campaigns to study their public relations and other electioneering tactics. This became part of New Labour’s successful “Third Way” victorious strategy in 1997. Back then, Anthony Howard, writing in the Times of London, said that Clinton’s New Democrats “lighted the path” for Blair’s New Labour. Blair partnered with Clinton and the DLC in taking a more militarist stance toward Saddam Hussein, which paved the way for Bush’s and Blair’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Bill Clinton’s and the DLC’s legacy candidate is Hillary. And what better way to prove her cojones, in case anyone thought a woman president might turn out to be a negotiator and peacenik, than to pick on Russia and reignite the Cold War. Despite the Russians’ brilliant mix of negotiation – warding off a US invasion of Iran, getting the US off Assad’s back with the disposal of his chemical weapons stash – and their effective military intervention against ISIS, Obama, Clinton, and now Kerry will not relent in their hostility. The US neocon inner circle cannot countenance a balance of power arrangement with the Kremlin, disregarding Russia’s status as the second most militarily powerful country in the world. Clinton has called Putin a dictator, the favorite term of disgrace in American ruling circles, except when it comes to America’s allies in the Gulf states, Erdogan, and the long list of authoritarian friends the US has backed over the entire course of the postwar era. Indeed, Putin may be a strongman of sorts, and an extremely popular one in his own country, but is far less of an authoritarian than his predecessor, ” Boris Yeltsin, who ruled by decree and whom Hillary’s husband lauded and financed as a genuine, if quite inebriated, democrat.

Was Hillary in on Bill’s political choices? Recently speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Clinton’s secretary of labor Robert Reich said that Bill never made an important decision without consulting the first lady. What are the programs to which Hillary can claim advisory credit during her husband tenure? NAFTA, welfare reform (“ending welfare as we know it,” said Bill), balancing the budget (inflicting austerity measures), the 1994 crime bill (“three strikes and you’re out”), bank deregulation (a sonata for the Great Recession). All of these projects, says author Thomas Frank, were for working Americans and people of color absolute disasters. And one might add to his list the expansion of NATO and the assault on Yugoslavia.

As secretary of state, Hillary backed CIA director Petraeus’ plan to overthrow the Assad government in Syria, from which Obama eventually backed away, thanks to Russia’s intervention and defense of Syria’s sovereignty. As a good neocon soldier for American exceptionalism, Clinton aligns herself with whatever appears at the moment to be the “national interest” center of political gravity (promoting the oil industry, arms sales, the pro-Zionist alliance, divide and rule aid to opponents of secular nationalism, right-to-protect military and economic interventions). The distraction over her emailgate and the Benghazi investigation hides the real crimes of her active support for the bombing of Libya, the overthrow of the government, and the resulting chaos and ISIS organizing in the country, not to mention her backing for the Honduran coup d’etat. Former secretary of defense Robert Gates says that it was Hillary who pushed Obama into the decision on Libya, for which the president now publicly expresses regret, calling the present condition of the country (his words) “a shit show.”

Her champions who cheer her work with women and children ignore the thousands of women and children in Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East, who were slaughtered under her leadership in the State Department. Speaking on regime change, even a right-wing former Pentagon analyst, Michael Maloof, didn’t believe it was appropriate to attack Iraq. “Now with Libya,” he says, “it’s the same. And Hillary Clinton was very much responsible for that.”

If she becomes president, what can be expected of her on domestic policy? She’ll be a good team player – that is, the neocon team – and may even get something accomplished, such as privatizing part of social security and medicare, which was always part of the DLC agenda, and working more closely with the oil companies. Among her other achievements during her years in the State Department, according to investigative journalist, Lee Fang, was her creation of a separate bureau, with more than 60 staff, whose focus was on energy resources. Traveling the world, Clinton used her position, partnered with Chevron, to promote the practice of fracking in developing countries.

With the power couple in the White House, their assets already worth well over $100 million, and with a Congress being mostly a millionaires’ club, no serious tax increase on the rich can be expected. Indeed, the White House will be more of a revolving door for government officials and staff moving back and forth between the corporate world and “public service.” Open Secrets.org found 84 revolving door personnel working for Hillary, more than on any other politician’s staff: “the greatest number of staffers who either came to Capitol Hill after representing private interests or left the member’s staff for a lobbying position.”

Her march to the White House relies on over 400 superdelegates pledged to her – a number of them also wearing the hat of corporate lobbyist – rather than to the democratic voice of the people, Even if nominated and then elected, Hillary, lacking credibility about her authenticity, will not be a popular president. Nearly half of Democrats don’t trust her (56% express trust vs. 81% for Bernie). And a new AP-GfK poll reveals that 55% of all Americans hold a negative opinion of her. Under her presidency, and with the return of the first man, American politics will continue to be business as usual.

 

Gerald Sussman is a Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University

 

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Blood Money: Four More Years of Drug War Horror with HRC

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By Chris Floyd

(Empire Burlesque)

The Drug War, like the Terror War, is essentially a vast machine for profiteering by the purveyors of weapons and tools of repression. Like the Terror War, the Drug War demonstrably exacerbates the problems it purports to address, and has led to widespread chaos, death and state corruption of almost unfathomable levels. And Hillary Clinton, almost certain to be the next president, is deeply complicit in both of these malevolent enterprises.

Clinton’s extensive and eager involvement in the genuinely insane hyper-militarizataion of American policy in the so-called War on Terror is well-attested. Indeed, she boasts of it, trumpeting how she urged a reluctant Obama into destroying Libya, for example: a “great victory” which she famously celebrated by crowing over the rape and murder of Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died!” The neocons who pressed for the war of aggression against Iraq — which Clinton supported — are now flocking to her banner, as are the war profiteers and their Wall Street allies. And why not? Clinton is the most hawkish Democratic candidate since Henry Jackson. The blood money will continue to flow like the Nile in flood under her watch.

But Clinton’s role in the Drug War is perhaps less well-known. Jesse Franzblau remedies this with an excellent article at CounterPunch, noting her instrumental role in the slaughterfest and corruption feast that the Drug War has spawned in Mexico. Franzblau writes of the $2.5 billion Merida Initiative:

Negotiated behind closed doors in the last years of the Bush administration, the plan was originally proposed as a three-year program. Yet Hillary Clinton’s State Department pushed aggressively to extend it, overseeing a drastic increase of the initiative that continues today.

Much of this aid goes to U.S.-based security, information, and technology contracting firms, who make millions peddling everything from helicopter training to communications equipment to night-vision goggles, surveillance aircrafts, and satellites.

This aid comes in addition to the direct sales of arms and other equipment to Mexico authorized by the State Department, as Christy Thorton pointed out in a 2014 New York Times op-ed. Those sales reached $1.2 billion in 2012 alone, the last full year of Clinton’s tenure. Indeed, as the Mérida Initiative has grown, Mexico has become one of the world’s biggest purchasers of U.S. military arms and equipment.

But while sales have boomed for U.S.-based contractors, the situation in Mexico has badly deteriorated. The escalation of U.S. counter-drug assistance in the country has paralleled a drastic increase in violence, fueling a drug war that’s killed more than 100,000 people since 2006.

Turning Mexico into a major fountain of war profits: quite another accomplishment for a secretary of state whose skills have been lavishly praised by no less than Henry Kissinger, her close friend and advisor. Franzblau goes on to lay out, in grim detail, how Clinton’s State Department, openly flouting U.S. law, increased its cooperation with Mexican military and law enforcement units known to be perpetrating horrific human rights abuses:

Human Rights Watch reported in 2011, for example, on widespread cases of torture in Guerrero going back to 1994. The group noted regular abuses by police and military forces, including “cases of homicide, torture, and extortion” overseen by the judicial police chief in the northern part of the state. The same report highlighted strong evidence of the involvement of military officials from Chilpancingo in cases of kidnapping and disappearances in 2010, as the U.S. embassy was clearing officials for training from the same military base.

The payoff for these illegalities has been sweet for the future president:

Notably, several of the contractors that profited from U.S. security assistance in Mexico — such as General Electric, Lockheed Martin, and United Technologies Corporation, which owns Sikorsky — reportedly contributed to the Clinton Foundation. And according to the transparency group Open Secrets, Clinton currently tops the list of all 2016 presidential candidates in campaign contributions from the military contracting industry.

By the end of Clinton’s first term in 2021, we will be in the 20th year of the Terror War — and the 50th year of the Drug War. How many more lives, how many more communities, how many more countries will be laid waste by these inhuman engines of greed and power — and their “progressive” champions — in that time?

Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon

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By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

If there were any doubts that Hillary Clinton favors a neoconservative foreign policy, her performance at Thursday’s debate should have laid them to rest. In every meaningful sense, she is a neocon and – if she becomes President – Americans should expect more global tensions and conflicts in pursuit of the neocons’ signature goal of “regime change” in countries that get in their way.

Beyond sharing this neocon “regime change” obsession, former Secretary of State Clinton also talks like a neocon. One of their trademark skills is to use propaganda or “perception management” to demonize their targets and to romanticize their allies, what is called “gluing white hats” on their side and “gluing black hats” on the other.

So, in defending her role in the Libyan “regime change,” Clinton called the slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi “genocidal” though that is a gross exaggeration of Gaddafi’s efforts to beat back Islamic militants in 2011. But her approach fits with what the neocons do. They realize that almost no one will dare challenge such a characterization because to do so opens you to accusations of being a “Gaddafi apologist.”

Similarly, before the Iraq War, the neocons knew that they could level pretty much any charge against Saddam Hussein no matter how false or absurd, knowing that it would go uncontested in mainstream political and media circles. No one wanted to be a “Saddam apologist.”

Clinton, like the neocons, also shows selective humanitarian outrage. For instance, she laments the suffering of Israelis under crude (almost never lethal) rocket fire from Gaza but shows next to no sympathy for Palestinians being slaughtered by sophisticated (highly lethal) Israeli missiles and bombs.

She talks about the need for “safe zones” or “no-fly zones” for Syrians opposed to another demonized enemy, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, but not for the people of Gaza who face the wrath of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Yes, I do still support a no-fly zone [in Syria] because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIS and have some place that they can be safe,” Clinton said. But she showed no such empathy for Palestinians defenseless against Israel’s “mowing the grass” operations against men, women and children trapped in Gaza.

In Clinton’s (and the neocons’) worldview, the Israelis are the aggrieved victims and the Palestinians the heartless aggressors. Referring to the Gaza rocket fire, she said: “I can tell you right now I have been there with Israeli officials going back more than 25 years that they do not seek this kind of attacks. They do not invite the rockets raining down on their towns and villages. They do not believe that there should be a constant incitement by Hamas aided and abetted by Iran against Israel. …

“So, I don’t know how you run a country when you are under constant threat, terrorist attack, rockets coming at you. You have a right to defend yourself.”

Ignoring History

Clinton ignored the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which dates back to the 1940s when Israeli terrorist organizations engaged in massacres to drive Palestinians from their ancestral lands and murdered British officials who were responsible for governing the territory. Israeli encroachment on Palestinian lands has continued to the present day.

But Clinton framed the conflict entirely along the propaganda lines of the Israeli government: “Remember, Israel left Gaza. They took out all the Israelis. They turned the keys over to the Palestinian people. And what happened? Hamas took over Gaza. So instead of having a thriving economy with the kind of opportunities that the children of the Palestinians deserve, we have a terrorist haven that is getting more and more rockets shipped in from Iran and elsewhere.”

So, Clinton made clear – both at the debate and in her recent AIPAC speech – that she is fully in line with the neocon reverence for Israel and eager to take out any government or group that Israel puts on its enemies list. While waxing rhapsodic about the U.S.-Israeli relationship – promising to take it “to the next level” – Clinton vows to challenge Syria, Iran, Russia and other countries that have resisted or obstructed the neocon/Israeli “wish list” for “regime change.”

In response to Clinton’s Israel-pandering, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who once worked on an Israeli kibbutz as a young man, did the unthinkable in American politics. He called out Clinton for her double standards on Israel-Palestine and suggested that Netanyahu may not be the greatest man on earth.

“You gave a major speech to AIPAC,” Sanders said, “and you barely mentioned the Palestinians. … All that I am saying is we cannot continue to be one-sided. There are two sides to the issue. … There comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”

But in Hillary Clinton’s mind, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is essentially one-sided. During her speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last month, she depicted Israel as entirely an innocent victim in the Mideast conflicts.

“As we gather here, three evolving threats — Iran’s continued aggression, a rising tide of extremism across a wide arc of instability, and the growing effort to de-legitimize Israel on the world stage — are converging to make the U.S.-Israel alliance more indispensable than ever,” she declared.

“The United States and Israel must be closer than ever, stronger than ever and more determined than ever to prevail against our common adversaries and to advance our shared values. … This is especially true at a time when Israel faces brutal terrorist stabbings, shootings and vehicle attacks at home. Parents worry about letting their children walk down the street. Families live in fear.”

Yet, Clinton made no reference to Palestinian parents who worry about their children walking down the street or playing on a beach and facing the possibility of sudden death from an Israeli drone or warplane. Instead, she scolded Palestinian adults. “Palestinian leaders need to stop inciting violence, stop celebrating terrorists as martyrs and stop paying rewards to their families,” she said.

Then, Clinton promised to put her future administration at the service of the Israeli government. Clinton said, “One of the first things I’ll do in office is invite the Israeli prime minister to visit the White House. And I will send a delegation from the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs to Israel for early consultations. Let’s also expand our collaboration beyond security.”

Pleasing Phrases

In selling her neocon policies to the American public, Clinton puts the military aspects in pleasing phrases, like “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.” Yet, what she means by that is that as President she will invade Syria and push “regime change,” following much the same course that she used to persuade a reluctant President Obama to invade Libya in 2011.

The Libyan operation was sold as a “humanitarian” mission to protect innocent civilians though Gaddafi was targeting Islamic militants much as he claimed at the time and was not engaging in any mass slaughter of civilians. Clinton also knew that the European allies, such as France, had less than noble motives in wanting to take out Gaddafi.

As Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal explained to her, the French were concerned that Gaddafi was working to develop a pan-African currency which would have given Francophone African countries greater freedom from their former colonial master and would undermine French economic dominance of those ex-colonies.

In an April 2, 2011 email, Blumenthal informed Clinton that sources close to one of Gaddafi sons reported that Gaddafi’s government had accumulated 143 tons of gold and a similar amount of silver that “was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency” that would be an alternative to the French franc.

Blumenthal added that “this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.” Sarkozy also wanted a greater share of Libya’s oil production and to increase French influence in North Africa, Blumenthal wrote.

But few Americans would rally to a war fought to keep North Africa under France’s thumb. So, the winning approach was to demonize Gaddafi with salacious rumors about him giving Viagra to his troops so they could rape more, a ludicrous allegation that was raised by then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who also claimed that Gaddafi’s snipers were intentionally shooting children.

With Americans fed a steady diet of such crude propaganda, there was little serious debate about the wisdom of Clinton’s Libyan “regime change.” Meanwhile, other emails show that Clinton’s advisers were contemplating how to exploit Gaddafi’s overthrow as the dramatic moment to declare a “Clinton Doctrine” built on using “smart power.”

On Oct. 20, 2011, when U.S.-backed rebels captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him, Secretary of State Clinton couldn’t contain her glee. Paraphrasing a famous Julius Caesar quote, she declared about Gaddafi, “we came, we saw, he died.”

But this U.S.-organized “regime change” quickly turned sour as old tribal rivalries, which Gaddafi had contained, were unleashed. Plus, it turned out that Gaddafi’s warnings that many of the rebels were Islamic militants turned out to be true. On Sept. 11, 2012, one extremist militia overran the U.S. consulate in Benghazi killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Soon, Libya slid into anarchy and Western nations abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. President Obama now terms the Libyan fiasco the biggest mistake of his presidency. But Clinton refuses to be chastened by the debacle, much as she appeared to learn nothing from her support for the Iraq invasion in 2003.

The Libyan Mirage

During Thursday’s debate – instead of joining Obama in recognition of the Libyan failure – Clinton acted as if she had overseen some glowing success: “Well, let me say I think we did a great deal to help the Libyan people after Gaddafi’s demise. … We helped them hold two successful elections, something that is not easy, which they did very well because they had a pent-up desire to try to chart their own future after 42 years of dictatorship. I was very proud of that. …

“We also worked to help them set up their government. We sent a lot of American experts there. We offered to help them secure their borders, to train a new military. They, at the end, when it came to security issues, … did not want troops from any other country, not just us, European or other countries, in Libya.

“And so we were caught in a very difficult position. They could not provide security on their own, which we could see and we told them that, but they didn’t want to have others helping to provide that security. And the result has been a clash between different parts of the country, terrorists taking up some locations in the country.”

But that is exactly the point. Like the earlier neocon-driven “regime change” in Iraq, the “regime change” obsession blinds the neocons from recognizing that not only are these operations violations of basic international law regarding sovereignty of other nations but the invasions unleash powerful internal rivalries that neocons, who know little about the inner workings of these countries, soon find they can’t control.

Yet, America’s neocons are so arrogant and so influential that they simply move from one catastrophe to the next like a swarm of locust spreading chaos and death around the globe. They also adapt readily to changes in the political climate.

That’s why some savvy neocons, such as the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, have endorsed Clinton, who The New York Times reported has become “the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes.”

Kagan told the Times, “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Now with Clinton’s election seemingly within reach, the neocons are even more excited about how they can get back to work achieving Syrian “regime change,” overturning Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and – what is becoming their ultimate goal – destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia and seeking “regime change” in Moscow.

After all, by helping Assad bring some stability to Syria and assisting Obama in securing the Iranian nuclear deal, Russian President Vladimir Putin has become what the neocons view as the linchpin of resistance to their “regime change” goals. Pull Putin down, the thinking goes, and the neocons can resume checking off their to-do list of Israel’s adversaries: Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.

And what could possibly go wrong by destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia and forcing some disruptive “regime change”?

By making Russia’s economy scream and instigating a Maidan-style revolt in Moscow’s Red Square, the neocons see their geopolitical path being cleared, but what they don’t take into account is that the likely successor to Putin would not be some malleable drunk like the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin but, far more likely, a hardline nationalist who might be a lot more careless with the nuclear codes than Putin.

But, hey, when has a neocon “regime change” scheme veered off into a dangerous and unanticipated direction?

A Neocon True-Believer

In Thursday’s debate, Hillary Clinton showed how much she has become a neocon true-believer. Despite the catastrophic “regime changes” in Iraq and Libya, she vowed to invade Syria, although she dresses up that reality in pretty phrases like “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.” She also revived the idea of increasing the flow of weapons to “moderate” rebels although they, in reality, mostly fight under the command umbrella of Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front.

Clinton also suggested that the Syria mess can be blamed on President Obama’s rejection of her recommendations in 2011 to authorize a more direct U.S. military intervention. “Nobody stood up to Assad and removed him,” Clinton said, “and we have had a far greater disaster in Syria than we are currently dealing with right now in Libya.”

In other words, Clinton still harbors the “regime change” goal in Syria. But the problem always was that the anti-Assad forces were penetrated by Al Qaeda and what is now called the Islamic State. The more likely result from Clinton’s goal of removing Assad would be the collapse of the Syrian security forces and a victory for Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and/or the Islamic State.

If that were to happen, the horrific situation in Syria would become cataclysmic. Millions of Syrians – Alawites, Shiites, Christians, secularists and other “infidels” – would have to flee the beheading swords of these terror groups. That might well force a full-scale U.S. and European invasion of Syria with the bloody outcome probably similar to the disastrous Iraq War.

The only reasonable hope for Syria is for the Assad regime and the less radical Sunni oppositionists to work out some power-sharing agreement, stabilize most of the country, neutralize to some degree the jihadists, and then hold elections, letting the Syrian people decide whether “Assad must go!” – not the U.S. government. But that’s not what Clinton wants.

Perhaps even more dangerous, Clinton’s bellicose rhetoric suggests that she would eagerly move into a dangerous Cold War confrontation with Russia under the upside-down propaganda theme blaming tensions in Eastern Europe on “Russian aggression,” not NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 which ousted an elected president and touched off a civil war.

That coup, which followed neocon fury at Putin for his helping Obama avert U.S. bombing campaigns against Syria and Iran, was largely orchestrated by neocons associated with the U.S. government, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife), Sen. John McCain and National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman.

After the violent coup, when the people of Crimea voted by 96 percent to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the U.S. government and Western media deemed that a “Russian invasion” and when ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine rose up in resistance to the new authorities in Kiev that became “Russian aggression.”

NATO on the Move

Though President Obama should know better – and I’m told that he does know better – he has succumbed this time to pressure to go along with what he calls the Washington “playbook” of saber-rattling and militarism. NATO is moving more and more combat troops up to the Russian border while Washington has organized punishing economic sanctions aimed at disrupting the Russian economy.

Hillary Clinton appears fully onboard with the neocon goal of grabbing the Big Enchilada, “regime change” in Moscow. Rather than seeing the world as it is, she continues to look through the wrong end of the telescope in line with all the anti-Russian propaganda and the demonization of Putin, whom Clinton has compared to Hitler.

Supporting NATO’s military buildup on Russia’s border, Clinton said, “With Russia being more aggressive, making all kinds of intimidating moves toward the Baltic countries, we’ve seen what they’ve done in eastern Ukraine, we know how they want to rewrite the map of Europe, it is not in our interests [to reduce U.S. support for NATO]. Think of how much it would cost if Russia’s aggression were not deterred because NATO was there on the front lines making it clear they could not move forward.”

Though Clinton’s anti-Russian delusions are shared by many powerful people in Official Washington, they are no more accurate than the other claims about Iraq’s WMD, Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops, the humanitarian need to invade Syria, the craziness about Iran being the principal source of terrorism (when it is the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks and other Sunni powers that have bred Al Qaeda and the Islamic State), and the notion that the Palestinians are the ones picking on the Israelis, not the other way around.

However, Clinton’s buying into the neocon propaganda about Russia may be the most dangerous – arguably existential – threat that a Clinton presidency would present to the world. Yes, she may launch U.S. military strikes against the Syrian government (which could open the gates of Damascus to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State); yes, she might push Iran into renouncing the nuclear agreement (and putting the Israeli/neocon goal to bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran back on the table); yes, she might make Obama’s progressive critics long for his more temperate presidency.

But Clinton’s potential escalation of the new Cold War with Russia could be both the most costly and conceivably the most suicidal feature of a Clinton-45 presidency. Unlike her times as Secretary of State, when Obama could block her militaristic schemes, there will be no one to stop her if she is elected President, surrounded by likeminded neocon advisers.

 

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?’]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

 

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Fascism, American style

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: Intrepid Report

“If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.”―Henry A. Wallace, 33rd Vice President of the United States

This is an indictment of every politician who has ever sold us out for the sake of money and power, it is a condemnation of every politician who has ever lied to us in order to advance their careers, and it is a denunciation of every political shill who has sacrificed our freedoms on the altar of Corporate America.

They’re all fascists.

If Donald Trump is a fascist—as nearly half of Americans surveyed believe—then so is every other politician in office or running for office in America who has ever prioritized money and power over human beings.

Truly, apart from Trump’s virulently bombastic comments and his metaphorical willingness to spit in the wind in order to garner media coverage and notoriety, how is he any more of a fascist than Hillary Clinton and the millions she has amassed from the financial sector?

How is Trump any more of a fascist than Barack Obama, whose willingness to march in lockstep with the military industrial complex has resulted in endless wars, covert drone strikes that have killed hundreds of civilians abroad, and militarized police who have killed thousands of American citizens here at home?

How is Trump any more of a fascist than Congress, the majority of whom are millionaires and who are more inclined to do the bidding of their corporate sponsors and benefactors, all the while remaining deaf to their less affluent constituents?

For that matter, how is Trump any more of a fascist than the Supreme Court whose decisions in recent years have been characterized most often by an abject deference to government authority, military and corporate interests?

Writing for the New York Times in 1944, Vice President Henry A. Wallace noted that “American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust . . .”

As Wallace concluded, American fascists are not pro-Constitution:

They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead . . . They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

We are being played for fools. Again.

The United States of America, that dream of what a democratic republic ought to be, has become the Fascist States of America. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age. You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.

Whatever label you want to put on it, the end result is the same.

Driven by our fears, we have entered into a corporate-controlled, militaristic state where all citizens are suspects, security trumps freedom, and the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens but instead is ruled by the rich and powerful.

Any semblance of constitutional government that we might still enjoy today is a mere shadow, a mockery of what the founders envisioned. Constitutional government today—much like the farcical circus that purports to be the presidential election—is a sham, a hoax, an elaborate ruse maintained by the powers-that-be to mollify us into believing that we still have a say in the workings of our government. We do not.

Shortly after World War II, historian William L. Shirer predicted that America may be the first country in which fascism comes to power through democratic elections.

Former presidential advisor Bertram Gross also warned that we would not recognize fascism when it took over:

Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism . . . In America, it would be supermodern and multi-ethnic—as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic facade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal.

They were both right.

However, what we failed to realize is that the fascist coup took place long ago. It was that subtle and that incremental.

We are now ruled by the velvet-gloved, technologically savvy, militarized iron fist of what Gross termed “friendly fascism” or fascism with a smile. Having studied Shirer and Gross, tracked the rise of fascism in past regimes, and assimilated the necessary ingredients for a fascist state, I can attest to the fact—as I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People—that the parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.

Under fascism, the government:

  • is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process)
  • assumes it is not restrained in its power (this is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism)
  • ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy
  • emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism through its politicians
  • has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies
  • establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry
  • and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment (this is overcriminalization)
  • becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures
  • uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure
  • and is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.

Compare that to America today where, as economist Jeffrey Tucker rightly observes, “every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized. Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect.”

Fascism thrives by hiding behind the entertainment spectacle that is partisan politics. As Tucker points out, “It’s incorrect to call fascism either right wing or left wing. It is both and neither . . . fascism does not seek to overthrow institutions like commercial establishments, family, religious centers, and civic traditions. It seeks to control them . . . it preserves most of what people hold dear but promises to improve economic, social, and cultural life through unifying their operations under government control.”

In this way, American-style fascism is deceptively appealing.

It appears friendly.

The news media covers the entertainment and political trivia. The basic forms of government remain intact. The legislators remain in session. There are elections.

Consent of the governed, however, no longer applies. Actual control has finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

Yet the most crucial ingredient for fascism to succeed in America is that the majority of the people would have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary for the government to assume greater powers in order to keep them safe and secure, whether it’s by militarizing the police, stripping them of basic constitutional rights, criminalizing virtually every form of behavior, or spying on their communications, movements and transactions.

Sound familiar?

When you really drill down to what the various presidential candidates believe about the issues that will impact the future of our freedoms long-term—war, surveillance, civil liberties—you’ll find that most of them support the government’s position, which, conveniently enough, profits the corporate sector.

This is not freedom.

It is despotism, which Gross refers to as “faceless oligarchs [who] sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades.” Gross explains:

In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion . . .

It is, in Gross’ words, “pretended patriots who desecrate the American flag by waving it while waiving the law”:

I see at present members of the Establishment or people on its fringes who, in the name of Americanism, betray the interests of most Americans by fomenting militarism, applauding rat-race individualism, protecting undeserved privilege, or stirring up nationalistic and ethnic hatreds.

It is, concludes Gross, Big Business and Big Government in bed together:

In this present, many highly intelligent people look with but one eye and see only one part of the emerging Leviathan. From the right, we are warned against the danger of state capitalism or state socialism, in which Big Business is dominated by Big Government. From the left, we hear that the future danger (or present reality) is monopoly capitalism, with finance capitalists dominating the state. I am prepared to offer a cheer and a half for each view; together, they make enough sense for a full three cheers.Big Business and Big Government have been learning how to live in bed together and despite arguments between them, enjoy the cohabitation. Who may be on top at any particular moment is a minor matter—and in any case can be determined only by those with privileged access to a well-positioned keyhole.

When the votes have all been counted, “we the people” will be the losers.

The joke will be on us. Whether we ever realize it not, the enemy is not across party lines, as they would have us believe. It has us surrounded on all sides.

Even so, we’re not yet defeated.

We could still overcome our oppressors if we cared enough to join forces and launch a militant nonviolent revolution—a people’s revolution that starts locally and trickles upwards—but that will take some doing.

It will mean turning our backs on the political jousting contests taking place on the national stage and rejecting their appointed jesters as false prophets. It will mean not allowing ourselves to be corralled like cattle and branded with political labels that have no meaning anymore. It will mean recognizing that all the evils that surround us today—endless wars, drone strikes, invasive surveillance, militarized police, poverty, asset forfeiture schemes, overcriminalization, etc.—were not of our making but came about as a way to control and profit from us.

It will mean “voting with our feet” through sustained, mass civil disobedience. As journalist Chris Hedges points out, “There were once radicals in America, people who held fast to moral imperatives. They fought for the oppressed because it was right, not because it was easy or practical. They were willing to accept the state persecution that comes with open defiance. They had the courage of their convictions. They were not afraid.”

Ultimately, it will mean refusing to be divided, one against each other, as Democrats versus Republicans, and instead uniting behind the only distinction that has ever mattered: “we the people” against tyranny.

 

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book “The Freedom Wars” (TRI Press) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

 

The Control-Matrix is Crashing because the Truth-Seekers are Winning

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By Phillip J. Watt

Source: The Mind Unleashed

The way the masses view the world is a farce. Every single mainstream perspective is either purposely deceptive, or completely misses the point. Even the people in places of influence who we’re meant to trust have either sold out, or are just plain ignorant to the facts. There’s no need to have a heavy heart though; the matrix of control is crashing because the truth-seekers are dealing heavy blows to the false narratives that have for too long shaped the collective mindset of humanity.

Of course the internet can be celebrated for being the primary mechanism which has amplified the sharing of information across location, race, culture and belief systems. In retrospect, the powers-that-will-no-longer-be would be kicking themselves for not trying harder to institute their insidious plan for humanity prior to the birth and growth of the world-wide-web.

Make no mistake though; they have been very successful on many fronts. For example, try to imagine a world where:

      • most journalists don’t report the real news;
      • the majority of doctors don’t truly understand the causes of poor health and how to legitimately resolve it;
      • a high proportion of politicians don’t know how the money supply works and what the agenda is of those who control it;
      • many so-called expert scientists ‘believe’ in a discredited philosophy which resembles a dogmatic religion;
      • the majority of teachers don’t realize they’re teaching a system of indoctrination that nowhere near gets close to the information and critical thinking that should be afforded our kids; and

the masses are not only ill-informed, divided and feverishly fighting against each other over small and irrelevant topics, but they’re also sleepwalking through one of the most majestic and reverent realities that could have ever been conceptualized.

Well, welcome to our world.

As we begin what we call the 21st Century, every system that should be designed to facilitate the health and vitality of the people has been hacked with lies, deception, dysfunction and disharmony. It’s easy to think that this is an embarrassment for our species because it’s beneath our intelligence and ethical capacity, yet there’s no need to lose faith in the inevitable betterment of humanity, including the way in which we organize and economize our societies.

Why? Because all of this dysfunction has been an effective driver of the collective awakening that is rising in the hearts and minds of humanity.

The inspiring fact is that more and more people are slowly waking up and realizing we all have the opportunity to come to our own, informed opinion on the truth, pertaining to both the spiritual and systemic realities. So many more people now understand the mainstream news is not to be taken seriously as its not where we can find information which is aligned with the deeper truths. They’re also acknowledging that we have the choice on what we decide to personally stand and fight for, as well as the legacy we leave for our children and our future generations.

Beware though; once we exit the matrix of control we’re faced with some serious challenges. We have a lot of inner work to do, such as designing a philosophy that ensures we’re at peace, as well as exercising patience in the quest to take back our liberties and design a legitimate and honorable future for humanity.

That’s why we’ve got to feel for those who have been long aware of the many dysfunctions of our world, especially those who have not learned peace and patience. Slowly they’ve watched:

    • the military-industrial-media-politico-banking complex increase their power and continue their pillage across the world;
    • pharmaceutical monopolies amplifying the drugging of society, as well as keeping many of us sick so that they maximize their profits;
    • movements rise up only to be vilified and disassembled, such as the Occupy Movement;
    • science turned into a corporate institution, as well as further hijacked by an inaccurate and small-minded philosophy of reality;
    • wars purposely created with millions of people dying for the whims of the shadow empire;
    • radical extremists massaged into proxy armies to do dirty work for the collapsing power structure;
    • air, medicine, food and water becoming purposely more toxic;
    • governmental policy increasingly being determined by corporate/elite interests;
    • police being militarized all around the globe;
    • the education model struggling to become less of an indoctrination system; and
    • the agenda of global governance becoming closer to fruition.

Some people have known about much of this for decades, so we should commend them for continuing to fight the good fight. They might have witnessed some disheartening developments, yet as much as all this sounds dire, they’ve also seen millions of people disengage from the propaganda narratives and align themselves with the systemic and spiritual pathways that will be the next stage of our evolution.

The point is that even though we need to be patient and persevere, we should recognize and celebrate the achievements that have been made so far. As I discussed in a previous article called “Whilst the Old System Crashes a New One is Being Built”, there are:

    • economists who want to transform the Keynesian model to legitimate alternatives;
    • teachers who understand the massive holes in the indoctrination system called public education;
    • scientists who want to evolve the way energy is created and shared;
    • health practitioners who see the limits of mechanistic and pharmacological medicine and the need for the reintroduction of natural and plant-based therapies;
    • journalists who demand that the media monopolies need to be disassembled;
    • environmentalists who want to transition the way food is grown and distributed;
    • community leaders who aim to reintegrate them to better support its members;
    • politicians who understand the democratic system has been hijacked by big money;
    • activists who campaign for revolutions in our value systems; and
    • futurists who want to change the systemic template for our societal health and well-being.

There are many beautiful souls who are leading the charge by attempting to redesign our society back into alignment with the natural laws of our universe. We should be one of them, regardless of which way we personally decide to contribute.

To do that, we all need to be super clear within ourselves what we believe and what we want to change. There are many ways to do it too, so finding our passions and strengths is critical to playing our own small part in the shift.

It is simply no longer acceptable to keep our heads in the sand; either we’re a minion of the system or we’re not. Of course its difficult to completely disconnect from the way resources flow through the control channels, yet that needn’t stop us from talking about it, sharing information online and somehow contributing, no matter how small, to local and global movements which aim to transition humanity into the new paradigm of abundance.

After all, the truth is what it is, and it is exposing itself to the world by powerfully flowing through all of us.

Ultimately, we needn’t wait for the zombie apocalypse because its already arrived. Most people are good people, yet the masses have been brainwashed into thinking in ways that are absolutely nowhere near aligned to the truth. They might be sleepwalking through a time where the tipping point for the conscious society builds, but that doesn’t mean they’re not salvageable. That’s why we all have a responsibility to help facilitate waking up the collective so that together we’re more empowered and informed to really bring about a future of justice and honor that we can all be proud of.

To do so, let me give you some advice. Don’t get frustrated, don’t be rude, don’t belittle, don’t condemn. We all had to wake up at one stage so its hypocritical if we are. Instead, be calm, be cool, be real, be articulate. Know the information that you advocate like the back of your hand. If we want to be successful in helping others to face the delusions then we need to ensure their defense mechanisms aren’t raised so they’re more likely to be open and receptive to embrace the truth.

And one more thing; hang in there guys and be patient, we’ve still got a long, arduous way to go but we know all the effort will be worth every second.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website.