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?
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.
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).
“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.
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?
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.
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 . . .
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.
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.
It is well known to Washington political observers that politicians invited to speak at the annual, giant AIPAC convention ask for suggested talking points from this powerful pro-Israeli government lobby. Hillary Clinton’s pandering speech must have registered close to 100% on AIPAC’s checklist.
Of course, both parties pander to AIPAC to such depths of similar obeisance that reporters have little to report as news. But giving big-time coverage to sheer political power is automatic. Compare it to the sparse attention given to the conference a few days earlier at the National Press Club on the Israeli lobby featuring scholars, authors and the well-known Israeli dissenter, Gideon Levy of the respected Ha’aretz newspaper (see israellobbyus.org/).
But Mrs. Clinton’s speech was newsworthy for its moral obtuseness and the way in which it promised unilateral White House belligerence should she become president. A reader would never know that her condemnation of Palestinian terrorism omitted any reference to the fact that Israel is the occupier of what is left of Palestinian lands, colonizing them, seizing their water and land, brutalizing the natives and continuing the selective blockade of Gaza, the world’s largest Gulag ever since Israel closed its last colony there in 2005.
Clinton emphasized her condemnation of Palestinian children being taught “incitement” against their Israeli oppressors and the recent deplorable knife attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians. She neglected to point to massive, daily Israeli incitement backed up by U.S.-supplied deadly weapons that over the last decade have caused 400 times more Palestinian fatalities and serious injuries to innocents than the defenseless Palestinians have caused their Israeli counterparts. One of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition partners, for example, from the Jewish Home Party, called for the slaughter of all Palestinians, the elderly and women in general. “Otherwise,” the partner said (in an English-language translation from the Hebrew), “more little snakes will be raised there.”
Clinton did not mention any of these brutalities, though they are components of what is an illegal occupation under international law and the United Nations charter. The Yale Law graduate simply chooses not to know better. Instead, she told her wildly-applauding audience of her support for increasing the amount of U.S. taxpayer spending for the latest military equipment and technology to over $4 billion a year. For the record, Israel is an economic, technological and military powerhouse that provides Israelis with universal health insurance and other social safety nets that are denied the American people.
In an obvious slap at President Obama, whose name she never mentioned (even Netanyahu thanked Obama in his address to AIPAC), Clinton almost shouted out: “one of the first things I’ll do in office is invite the Israeli Prime Minister to visit the White House.” This was a thinly-veiled reference to Netanyahu’s trip to a joint session of Congress, where he tried to undermine President Obama’s negotiations with Iran in what was an unprecedented interference by a foreign leader. Not surprisingly, Obama did not ask Netanyahu over to visit the White House for a drink before he headed back to Israel.
High on AIPAC’s checklist is to insist that all speakers condemn what Clinton called the “alarming boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as BDS.” She then twice slanderously associated this modest effort (in which many Jews are active participants) to get Israel to lift some oppression from the occupied Palestinian territories, with antisemitism. However, by totally erasing any nod, any mention, any compassion toward the slaughter of Palestinian children, women and men in their homes, schools and hospitals, Hillary Clinton makes a mockery of her touted Methodist upbringing and her declared concern for children everywhere.
For repeated applause at AIPAC’s convention and its associated campaign contributors, she has lost all credibility with the peoples of the Arab world. Moreover, such hostility in her words registers “the other antisemitism,” to cite the title of an address by James Zogby before an Israeli university in 1994.
With all her self-regarded experience in foreign affairs, Mrs. Clinton could pause to ponder why she is backing state terrorism against millions of Arab Palestinians trapped in two enclaves, surrounded by walls, military outposts, and suffering from deep poverty, including widespread diseases and severe anemia among Palestinian infants and children.
Unlimited is her militant animosity toward Iran, bragging about crippling sanctions that she spearheaded (which caused untold harm to the health and care of civilians), and threatening military force “for even the smallest violations of this [nuclear] agreement.” Yet for decades Israel has violated numerous U.N. resolutions to withdraw its occupation and repression of Palestinians without a murmur from Secretary of State Clinton, who as a candidate opposes a role for the U.N. Security Council (over which the U.S. has an often-used veto) in the peace process.
There were some restraints. She repeated her support for a Palestinian state but wondered whether the Palestinian Leadership was up to the negotiations. Also, she resisted going along with recognizing the shift of Israel’s capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Her very oblique reference to illegal, expanding Israeli settlements did not amount to anything more than a wink, foreshadowing no action on her part to stop the expansion of colonies in the occupied territories should she reach the White House.
Near the conclusion of her deferential remarks, she stated “If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. If you see a bully, stand up to him.” Some courageous Israeli human rights groups, such as B’Tselem, who defend Palestinian human rights, might view her words as applicable daily to how they perform their noble work.
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-bewould 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. Wattlives in Australia. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebookor visit his website.
There are many signs pointing to a false flag attack in Brussels on 3-22-16. Independent and alternative media, as usual, has been right on top of the story catching many of the usual oddities, lies and coincidences which are characteristic of false flags and are now piling on top of each other as they always do. And here’s another thing everyone should take note of; something we also observed during the Paris attacks on 11-13-15. As we saw in the Paris attacks, once again we’re seeing a “global” component to the “reaction” phase of the usual problem-reaction-solution dialectic employed by the controllers. Look for it. Problem at point A, subsequent “reaction” to the problem at point B, all the way on the other side of the world. This then leads to a “solution” that applies to both point A and B. This also serves to endorse the illusion that the bogeymen, in this case ISIS of course, involved in the Brussels attack are somehow everywhere at once.
One of the key purposes of this event, among other purposes like maintaining an excuse for U.S. military intervention in Syria, is to reinforce the need for a global police which is being sold as a “global solution” to a “global problem.” This global police state is a very clear agenda of the U.S., NATO and the U.N. This entire event is also designed to push the Authorization for Unlimited Military Force (AUMF) the Pentagon wants so badly and it’s a perfect quick and easy event in NATO’s and the European Union’s home turf to push for all of these goals at once. What am I talking about?
Following the Brussels “attacks,” which were immediately and deliberately linked to “ISIS,” we saw how in the city of Atlanta, Georgia halfway across the world, police were “on edge” and completely evacuated the Atlanta airport because of an unattended “package” they thought could be related or connected to the “ISIS” Brussels attacks. Though the whole thing turned out to be nothing at all, make no mistake this is part of the mass conditioning that comes with the entire quest for global police and perpetuation of the ISIS psyop. Even the officers involved in the airport evacuations I’m sure got caught up in the hysteria simply following protocol. Can you imagine how easy it would be for someone to purposely leave an unattended package just to extract the reaction, fear and hysteria from the masses while at the same time endorsing the idea of “global terrorism” and conditioning the masses to accept the idea of a need for a “global police.” One tiny fake package in Atlanta accomplishes all of this and more. And it wasn’t just Atlanta caught in the psyop, in Denver we saw “evacuations” as well:
Atlanta’s airport was briefly evacuated on Wednesday over a suspicious package while U.S. law enforcement agencies and travelers were on edge a day after deadly suicide bombings by Islamist militants rocked Brussels.
Passengers were ordered out of public areas of the domestic terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the United States’ busiest by passenger volume, but the site was quickly cleared and operations resumed, airport officials said.
Parts of Denver airport were also evacuated on Tuesday, hours after at least 31 people were killed and 271 wounded in attacks on Brussels airport and a rush-hour metro train, as airports across the United States tightened security.
As you can see, the hysteria wasn’t just in Atlanta. Notice the article doesn’t even bother to discuss what exactly happened in Denver. Was it also a “suspicious package” there? Was it a phone call from ISIS? Who cares, right? Because apparently the only thing that matters is that it’s part of the “reaction” phase; and the true answer is, this is part of the mass conditioning for the new world order’s global police state which is now being born with every ISIS “attack.”
Historic Mass Conditioning
So for the first time in human history an event at point A in one side of the world forces a Pavlov-style reaction at point B, on the opposite side of the world; even though the 2 events (in the organic reality) have no association with each other other than the conditioned response. The conditioning of the masses can be compared to Pavlov’s dog experiment. In the Pavlov dog salivation experiment, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was able to demonstrate that dogs can be conditioned to organically react a certain way by simply associating one artificial stimulus enough times with a natural stimulus. Eventually Pavlov demonstrated that you wouldn’t need the natural stimulus (food) to elicit the conditioned response (salivation) if you provide the artificial stimulus (a bell).
If you understand Pavlov’s classical conditioning then you should understand the mass conditioning of the masses going on right now via the mainstream media and politicians. The Brussels attacks is no different from the Paris “attacks” of November of 2015. Isn’t it a coincidence that less than a week ago the mainstream media brought back the Paris attack “story” as if to prepare the masses subconsciously for the upcoming Brussels attacks in Belgium? How about the fact the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan basically subliminally announced the upcoming attacks 4 days prior? Are we surprised given that Erdogan’s Turkey is right now the primary lifeline for ISIS purchasing their oil and supporting fighters with resources in the Turkey-Syrian border while blowing up Russian planes that interfere with that mission? This has all the markings of a mass psychological operation.
First of all, we don’t know who planted those explosives in the Brussels airport or subway system and we don’t know why or who told them to do it. With ISIS being credited, that alone is proof as far as I’m concerned that this is a state crime funded by NATO countries. We must all shed the myth that ISIS fighters are freely doing what they want, independent of the will of the states that created, funded, trained and armed them. Think about this. No one trains fighters only to let them go away and fight for someone else. Whoever trained these guys is still giving the orders or they wouldn’t have wasted their resources training these guys. Just like in the U.S. military, you wouldn’t train a Marine in boot camp, show them how to survive and offer weapons training only to watch them leave the Marines after boot camp and fight elsewhere. Yet this is precisely what Americans are asked to believe every day by the mainstream media. We’re told to believe these fighters just so happened to switch sides AFTER being trained to fight for the “Free Syrian Army.”
If it wasn’t that ISIS is a mercenary group employed by NATO countries, they’d be long gone by now. The only reason ISIS is still “alive” in our consciousness is because nations like Turkey, US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are keeping them alive both literally and figurative using their controlled media. ISIS is therefore alive because they (U.S., NATO and company) want and need them to be alive for political reasons. No ISIS means no Syria, no PNAC Middle East plan completion, no fear, no war on terror, no global police and no stripping away of individual rights, it’s that simple.
Incidentally the location of the explosions in Brussels Belgium is immensely convenient. There’s no question that the headquarters of NATO and the European Union would be a perfect place to execute and control a false flag like this. This is also the perfect false flag to quickly put together during this election year campaign hysteria pause. It likely took very little coordination and effort requiring a couple of explosives and a patsy or 2. Here’s the sequence as I see it: Boom! ISIS did it, lockdown airports in the U.S. due to an unattended package, goals and conditioning reinforced by media, back to election campaign with the candidates calling for “solution” to ISIS.
This is the part where ALL politicians running for president get to offer their “solution” to the same artificially created “problem.” In other words, this is a win-win for the ruling elite. And in this sense the Brussels attack is already part of the election campaign itself. Be on the look out for candidates endorsing ideas “global solutions” to ISIS.
Finally, I call on readers to observe how these false flags are getting easier and easier for them to do. I’m sure there was a time when a false flag attack like this took years to prepare (think 9/11). Now we are seeing quick attacks being strung together with minimal preparation, attacks which nonetheless have long-lasting implications for freedom, the rise of the global police, obtaining their AUMF license to kill, and obtaining all the excuses they need to justify U.S. aggression in Syria in hopes of forcibly removing their democratically elected president.
Remember practice makes perfect. So as they get better and more efficient at pulling these false flag attacks, let us get better and more efficient at diagnosing them and spreading the word. I believe both phenomenons are happening simultaneously. Hopefully, the ability of alternative and independent media to quickly diagnose these attacks by simply observing the process of problem-reaction-solution will help us turn a corner in changing minds at the highest level and thus effect much needed change sooner rather than later.
Editor’s note: Today marks the birthday of artist Mark Lombardi (born in 1951) and is also the day after the 16th anniversary of his suicide or murder. To learn more about Lombardi’s life, art and the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death, please take a moment to listen to the Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast and/or read the transcript.
A story of banking, organized crime, intelligence, petrodollars and politics…all seen through the lens of innovative Art.
Patricia Goldstone’s INTERLOCKis the first biography to explore the life and suspicious death of Mark Lombardi, a controversial artist whose drawings walked the line between art and information — and revealed the incestous connections between banking, organized crime, politicians, the FBI and the CIA.
His work highlighted such subjects as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the Iran-Contra affair, the World Finance Corporation, and the relationship between George W. Bush and Harken Energy Corporation. The mystery of Lombardi’s alleged suicide has yet to be resolved. On March 22, 2000, he was found hanged. Friends find it suspicious because Lombardi was on the the cusp of achieving the recognition that would crown his career.
Goldstone talks to WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about the full scope of Lombardi’s life and work.
For a look at some of Lombardi’s dangerously revealing and possibly fatal work, go here, and here.
JEFF SCHECHTMAN: Welcome back to radio who-what-why. I’m Jeff Schechtman. In March of 2000 the acclaimed conceptual artist, Mark Lombardi, was found hanged in his New York apartment. It was ruled a suicide but Mark Lombardi was no ordinary artist. His work, ‘Interlocks’ as they were called, art was also information shining light on the Vatican, the Mafia, the Bushes, international financiers, and the CIA. In the words of his biographer Patricia Goldstone, his death transformed itself into the ultimate piece of conceptual art. In fact, after his death, Lombardi’s work drew the attention of the most influential art museums in the world as well as the FBI and the CIA. Patricia Goldstone has been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a bureau chief for Cablevision. She has written for the Washington Post, Maclean’s and The Economist Intelligence Unit. She’s an award-winning playwright and she’s just completed Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. It is my pleasure to welcome Patricia Goldstone here to radio who-what-why.
PATRICIA GOLDSTONE: Thank you for having me on the show.
JEFF S.: Great to have you here. First of all, who was Mark Lombardi? It’s not a name that a lot of people instantly recognize.
PATRICIA G.: That’s quite true. Mark was a conceptual artist, as you said, which means he essentially drew ideas and not water lilies. Some people considered him to be the first great artist of the 21st century. He is unique in the art world because he used interlocks to create his art. Now interlocks are basically a form of flowchart tracing overly cozy relationships between boards of directors. And they’re common in accounting and in some forms of litigation, but they’re very, very unusual in the art world. Mark used interlocks to draw what amounts to a continual visual history of the interconnections between intelligence and organized crime and corporations and governments in the shadow banking industry that we’ve heard so much about since 2007. He was particularly fascinated in tracing things like money laundering and tax evasion. He was actually way ahead of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in releasing a very wide swath of extremely uncomfortable information to the public. What he created was a form of visual wiki-leaks. His own life is actually the missing strand and several of the shadowy visual narratives that make up his work. He died, as you said, a very mysterious death.
JEFF S.: Talk little bit about how Mark first got interested in the shadowy world that he would come to depict in all of these interlocks.
PATRICIA G.: Well, Mark’s research skills were well known in the Houston art world which was very progressive in its politics, at least at that time, through major patrons like the de Menils, who were the heirs to the Schlumberger fortune and the owners of the world-famous de Menil collection and the Rothko Chapel where Mark was married. Sissy Farenthold, a very prominent Texas politician who once ran for president of the United States, was on the board of the Rothko Chapel and she met Mark at a gathering around 1986. Farenthold introduced Mark to an informal investigative salon of young people, in her words, who included a number of lawyers and investigative journalists and prosecutors etc. She also introduced him to Bill White who was changing our Bath former business partner. White was engaged in a long-running series of lawsuits at the time so that the group was digging into interconnections of the Texas Savings and Loan scandals and the Iran Contra funding network. So Mark was tasked to draw out these interconnections in a readable way.
JEFF S.: To what extent was Lombardi simply creating this conceptual art, creating these interlocks from what was the assumed knowledge of the time, as opposed to doing additional work, additional research, to try and find connections that didn’t exist out there, in the popular press for example?
PATRICIA G.: That’s a very good question. Mark was actually very methodical and systematic. He worked very much like the way a historian works. He learned about the flow of hot money largely through published material by well-respected academics and journals. His library, which I ran through in the course of researching the book, consisted of hundreds of books on the financial debacle he drew, which he rigorously boiled down to bullet points of essentially academically and dictated information which he compiled in thousands of 3 x 5 index cards. He would arrange these in a narrative design on the floor next to the drawing he was composing, much like a film director uses a storyboard. But as I explained in the book, at that time he was given a very large stash of internal memos and other primary documents by one of the participants in the scandals. These are documents that were never previously published and would be a prize of any serious historian. At the time I discovered that he was taught how to do interlocks by the lawyer who deposed Richard Shelby who was one of the major middlemen in the Iran Contra scandal and in DCI. So his research was quite professionally grounded,
JEFF S.: Who was it that originally recruited Mark to really start doing this political work in Houston?
PATRICIA G.: Well, I would say it was Farenthold. And you know, he was already rather motivated personally to do it according to a note I found in his files which was apparently written by him. He had a personal run in with the Bushes and it was hard to put this story together because nobody really wanted to talk about it, not even Mark. But according to what I pieced together, Mark moved down to Houston straight out of Syracuse University to work as a curator at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, which was a very important job for such a young man. He was hired to do that by Jim Harithas who was the director of the museum and Mark’s college teacher and mentor. And from what I understood from a number of sources under pressure from the board, Harithas terminated him after a famous impromtu bread fight at a major art opening which turned into a major brawl when certain of the eminent guests, who were perhaps inflamed by alcohol, the naughty nature of the proceedings started ripping apart the installation and throwing it around. And a couple of unidentified artists sailed into the melee and started punching up the guests. Now Mark never spoke about this incident again and in fact his ex-wife told me that as the reason for his firing was introduced into a conversation he would actually get up and leave the room. But in his personal files I found this note which looks like it was written by him and it reads “In the late 1970s,” – which is when this incident occurred – “I was working as an organizer of art exhibitions in the Houston area. First International Bank, which was George HW Bush’s bank, barged into the scene at about this time effectively vetoing my participation in a large number of projects.” And Mark said in this note, which is an addendum to the journalism that he was attempting, that he embarked on his research as a form of revenge.
JEFF S.: Was there anybody specifically, a specific individual that he had had a run-in with from the Bush family that really precipitated this?
PATRICIA G.: No, again, this is shared conjecture on my part. From the way the note is put together, from the sounds of this, the Bushes might’ve been present at this gathering.
JEFF S.: What happened to all of Mark’s file cards after his death?
PATRICIA G.: Well, all of them is kind of a subjective number. Because I was told by one major collector of his work that there were as many as 40,000 file cards. And this collector had access to his studio. But what is archived at the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island, the number is about 14,000 cards, a considerably smaller number and when I went to use the cards, all but four on the financial activities of the Bushes, on whom he focused much of his attention, were missing. That really did strike me as extremely odd. I asked the chief archivist if they had archived the Bush material elsewhere, if I had missed it, and she couldn’t answer the question. She referred me to the security department instead.
JEFF S.: To what extent was his interest in these things driven by a desire to continue to uncover new stuff or really to continue to uncover new areas to expand his art and create more interesting interlocks essentially?
PATRICIA G.: I think that Mark was primarily an artist. I think in many ways he can be considered the heir to Marcel Duchamp who was the founder of Dada, one of the most important of the early 20th century art movements. Now Duchamp created his revolutionary art out of ordinary objects like the famous Urinal. Mark took another kind of ordinary object, the interlock, and he used it to pursue that to produce his main track of thought: how the political influence that he was essentially tracing took shape in flows of hot money. And those flows continually expanded and pooled together over the period of years that he was tracing them. So yes, he was constantly expanding his artwork. In fact, he linked all of his drawings together to form one continual drawing he called ‘the one continual drawing in my head’.
JEFF S.: To what degree did accuracy matter to Mark?
PATRICIA G.: A great deal. A great deal, as I said. He worked like a historian and the file cards are amazing because they are very much like what an academic would use in compiling the bibliography and index of a 600- page work. So I think he was very, very scrupulous in his research and he relied on primarily unpublished material but by academics and journalists.
JEFF S.: How was he seen in the art world, his early work, and as his work progressed?
PATRICIA G: He was a late bloomer. He turned out his initial body of work at white-hot speed in the mid 1990s when he was already in his 40s. And he garnered quite a bit of attention with this one body of drawings. He had a solo exhibit in Houston. And the amazing thing about these drawings was that they answered a lot of the questions that John Kerry’s Senate Investigating Committee on BCCI which was winding down at about the same time that Mark was turning out his work, he answered questions that if you read the Kerry committee report they said they didn’t have the time or the resources to pursue. And he was this artist sitting on the floor of a tiny studio in Houston pursuing them.
JEFF S.: How did the subjects of these pieces of art, those that he really reflected in this interlocking aspect of crime and as you say, ‘hot money’, how did they react to what he was doing?
PATRICIA G.: Well, with some discomfort, as you might expect. I was told a story by one of my interviews that one of Neil Bush’s friends came to Mark’s first solo show in Houston and he was looking at a painting on the wall. It was the Silverado painting in which Neil figures and he remarked to someone “Well, I’m going to have to tell Neil that he is represented here.”
JEFF S.: Talk a little bit about the evolution of his work. How did it progress? How were some his later works and later interlocks different from the early ones?
PATRICIA G.: Well, the work became much more complex as he progressed because it all interconnected. So the genesis of his work really was a huge bank called BCCI that some people may not remember. It was a bank that billed itself as Bank of America for the Third World but in fact it was the CIA’s first global money laundry and BCCI was very connected to the subprime crises of the 1970s and 1980s and it was officially closed down in the 1990s. But Mark really developed all of his drawings from his initial two boxes of research into BCCI and ended up in this immense continuum of drawings that makes up his work tracing the genesis of BCCI all the way back to a trove of stolen World War II plunder.
JEFF S.: Talk about the FBI and the CIA and their interest in Mark’s work.
PATRICIA G.: Well, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Research actually all had to study Mark’s work in the wake of 9/11 which wasn’t really made public until my book came out. They were looking for clues for two terrorist social networks. That’s a subject Mark covered in some of his drawings and also for traffic analysis tools which is kind of a funny story because although the NSA, which also studied Mark’s work, may be very good at collecting data on all of us but are not terrific in analyzing it. And when they feed it into a main computer, the visualization tends to come out looking like what they call ‘house of spagetti’. But Mark’s work is actually used in the computer science world to study traffic analysis because he spaced his players in a particular way that makes them very easy to read and sort of aesthetically pleasing and directs the eye in certain ways.
JEFF S.: Tell us a little bit about Mark’s personality . What was he like?
PATRICIA G.: He was a fascinating person. He was a workingclass guy from Syracuse, New York, who had nothing more than a bachelors in fine arts. And he was intensely ambitious, untrained in finance or anything like that but very, very quick intuitively. And his talent as an artist was to be able to apprehend a lot of visual information all at once and to get at the big picture that lies below the surface of things. I suppose many people would call him obsessive. People have tended to use Aspergers as an explanation for his ability to focus very intensely for a very long period of time. I don’t think that that is quite fair or true. Mark was very charming, very funny, exuberant, impish, intensely attractive to women, and very good socially when he wanted to be. And very good verbally. He was a shrewd communicator and a cunning player of the art game who never quite revealed what he was really up to. I mean nobody in the art world, for example, had a clue that he had actually created his work out of interlocks.
JEFF S.: Talk about what happened in March of 2000.
PATRICIA G.: Mark was in the process of opening a very important show at one of the iconic exhibition spaces in New York and everything seemed to be going beautifully for him. He was getting attention, he was getting a great deal of critical acclaim that people were lining up to buy his work, he was making money which had always been an issue for him. His personal life was a bit rocky but that was not unusual. He had recently broken up with a girlfriend depending on whom you talk to and I heard many, many different renditions of this story and in the course of interviewing over 80 people who knew him for over a 50 year period. Depending on whom you talk to he was either happy about that or unhappy about that but he was certainly seeing other women at the time. So he had had a suspicious flood in his studio about three weeks before the show opened. His masterwork, which was the third version of his BCCI series, was very badly water damaged, and this drawing is remarkable because he actually strung all of his previous drawings together on a series of timelines so that you can see exactly how all the scandals from the 1970s onwards sort of add up to this one huge scandal which is BCCI. That painting was almost, almost destroyed but it does remain readable today. So Mark re-created it in a mad workspace. He reconstructed the whole drawing in the space of about four days and some people say that the strain of doing that drove him into a suicidal depression. I don’t quite buy that because he did open the show very successfully with the drawing that he had re-created and people told me that he was quite happy with that drawing. Regardless, about three weeks later he was found hanged in his studio. And the police reports which I got hold of in the beginning of my research, were rather sketchy. A lot of things didn’t ring true. The time of death was never established, for one. Establishing death by hanging is a controversial area of forensic pathology, and the police based their very hasty verdict of death by suicide on the testimony of one witness who appeared increasingly unreliable during the interview process. I actually did track down the two cops who found him , one of whom was a rookie at the time, still very disturbed by the experience. He was a policeman who actually pushed open the transom which is how they got into Mark’s studio and there was Mark staring him straight in the face because he didn’t hang from a sprinkler pipe and he had an open bottle of champagne suspended beside him. Till today I have never really seen anyone take a drink on the way out.
JEFF S.: Talk about the flood. What is it that made it suspicious? What do we know about that?
PATRICIA G.: Well, it was a sprinkler flood. And a lot of rumor and conjecture exist in the art world about Mark’s suicide/death/murder. But one artist told me what sounded like a rather implausible story that he had tried to hang himself earlier, at the time of this flood from one of the sprinkler pipes, and that his weight is what broke the pipe and that’s what caused the flood. That’s actually very difficult for that kind of a factor to trigger a flood. I mean sprinkler pipes go off because of fire or they can go off because of a sharp blow applied to a pipe from an upstairs apartment to the gage, to the gage on the pipe line or to apply heat to that gage, that can trigger a flood in the downstairs apartment but someone hanging himself, no, not very likely.
JEFF S.: Talk a little bit about whether or not there was any history of depression or mental illness or anything else with respect to him.
PATRICIA G.: No, there was no critical history of depression. In retrospect certain members of Mark’s family told me that they felt he was depressed. However, his mother, who was really the closest person to call me before she died – she died in 2012 – she told me that she had talked to him a couple of days before he was found and he said he was absolutely jubilant at the success his work had brought him and at the prospect of moving in with his girlfriend. So, you know, a lot of this doesn’t compute.
JEFF S.: The police report after his death, and all the investigation was, as you talk about it, a bit sketchy. Talk about that and was that normal at the time in terms of police procedure or was that unusual?
PATRICIA G.: Well, the circumstances surrounding his death were really quite strange. He had no clinical history of depression and his mother to whom he was closest and to whom he spoke almost daily, told me that he had told her that he was actually very happy a couple of weeks, a couple of days rather, before he died. And I believe that because Mark was quite single-mindedly ambitious and he was getting the success that he had worked for, for decades by this time, to achieve. He may have been unhappy at the breakup of a relationship but he was extremely attractive to women and extremely attracted to women, and in fact he was seeing somebody else at the time. So I actually began my research by getting hold of the police report through a friend of mine in the homicide division in New York, and there were a lot of things that didn’t ring quite true. A time of death was never established for one thing and that’s very important in this kind of investigation and standard procedure and establishing death by hanging is a controversial area in forensic pathology. That and the fact that the police based their very hasty verdict of death by suicide to close the case today on the testimony of one witness who appeared increasingly unreliable during the interview process. I actually ended up tracking down the two cops who found him. One of them who was a rooky at the time and showed signs of doubt; that and the other pillar, that there are other pillars of evidence which was the absence of signs of struggle and the fact that the door was securely locked from the inside are also questionable as I explained in my book. But the exact nature of what’s in the drawing which can cause any number of people to want him dead.
JEFF S.: Is there anything in the drawings, all of them, that was what we would classify, I suppose, is original material? One of the things you’ve talked about is that in many ways he worked based upon academic reports, in journalism, and in all the material that he could get his hands on, and he was graded at bringing all of this together in these interlocks. But was there anything in this material that was revealing of anything that hadn’t been revealed anywhere else?
PATRICIA G.: Well, I did find in his files a large cache of internal memos and other primary documents from James R Bath Company Highway and some of these connections come up in in the George W. Bush Harken Energy Jackson Stevens drawing which was of interest to the FBI after Mark’s death.
JEFF S.: Did the FBI ever do anything with any of that to your knowledge?
PATRICIA G.: Well, it might be known that the FBI went to the Whitney after Mark died to look at one of his big BCCI drawings but the FBI was really interested in the relationship between how bin Mahfouz was anchored to the Saudi Royals and certain Islamic charities in Virginia that were allegedly funding Al Qaeda and that the FBI ended up raiding in 2002. And there are some clues to those interconnections in the Lombardi and the George W. Bush Harken Energy Jackson Stephens drawing which focuses on Bush’s oil companies. Now bin Mahfouz allegedly bankrolled Arbusto which was one of George W. Bush’s companies through James Bath who represented Saudi business interests in America; and one of the documents I did find in Mark’s files was a copy of the 1976 trust agreement between James Bath and Salem bin Laden who was Osama’s older brother and died in a crash a few years later. bin Mahfouz was also allegedly the real owner of that aircraft leasing company Skyways. Now interestingly, bin Mahfouz himself doesn’t actually appear in this drawing. However, Salem bin Laden and also Abdullah Taka Bakhsh who was a major Harken shareholder and CEO of a Halliburton subsidiary who had close ties to bin Mahfouz does appear as a central hub or connection along with James Bath and so does Fox’s representative on the Harken board, an influential business name, who opened the 2000 Republican national convention with the Muslim benediction on Bush’s behalf and later successfully protested the FBI raid on the Virginia charities in a private meeting with Bush’s treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill.
JEFF S.: If not suicide, where does your speculation, or where can speculation lead in terms of the cause of Mark’s death?
PATRICIA G.: Well, I have to point out that Mark was actually pretty equal opportunity in his finger-pointing. He did focus a lot of attention on the Bushes for the reasons I go into in the book and he did die during the presidential election in which at least one of his drawings might have had an impact. That he did a number of important drawings that focused attention on the Clintons and knowing a little group of Indonesians and the Riady family who were the sources of Chinese influence peddling during the Clinton administration. Also Mark Rich who is famously connected to the Clintons was one of the key middlemen that hooked Mark’s drawings together as is Jackson Stephens who funded both the Bush and the Clinton campaign, so you know overall Mark was really more like a social scientist and political partisan and that I believed his overwhelming interest was in getting this whole financial system done on paper for everyone to see. And in fact, he had reportedly been threatened in the late 1990s. He got a call from someone telling him to back off investigating the five major New York Times families who were the subject of a preparatory sketch he had been working on. He mentioned it to a Williamsburg publication and it was repeated after his death by a German freelance journalist. So there are a lot of names in these drawings. One of them told me that he wouldn’t know a Lombardi drawing from a Mona Lisa.
JEFF S.: In the material that you’ve uncovered since in your investigation and your work on this, does it lead anyplace in particular?
PATRICIA G.: Well, you know I have to be careful to point out that I don’t have anything like the smoking gun, that I don’t have the power to pin people and I have many, many different stories from almost everyone I talked to on this subject. But the heft of circumstantial evidence makes me feel that at the minimum a lot more questions should have been asked at the time of his death.
JEFF S.: And is your conclusion that didn’t really suicide just seem the most unlikely scenario?
PATRICIA G.: Well, it’s not my impression of Mark as a human being. He was tremendously vital and totally committed to his work. They said he was getting where he wanted to go and he was quite ebullient really, as a person, very high energy. Now of course, you know, I didn’t know the man and it’s always possible for certain personality types to be very volatile and from what people told me he was particularly, when he had been drinking, but no, it doesn’t stack up with where he was going in his life at the time. Because he was really on the verge of very major success.
JEFF S.: Is there any evidence that he was on to something or that he had made a connection, or that his research had taken him somewhere that was new and heretofore undiscovered?
PATRICIA G.: Well, that’s an interesting question. One of his drawings, one of his late drawings is called George
Bush Harken Energy Jackson Stephens and the drawing focuses on relationships that apparently – my source for this was a rather particular intelligence newsletter that came out in March of 2000 - said that the Bush campaign might run into trouble over the Bush relationship with Khaled bin Mahfouz who was anchored to the Saudi royals and very much a presence in Houston. This drawing that Mark had done focused on that relationship.
JEFF S.: What was the interest like in his work after his death?
PATRICIA G.: Well, his prices took off, certainly. One of his larger drawings recently went up for sale at one of the most prominent art galleries in the country priced at $450,000. He’s been quite avidly collected. The Whitney has a major holding of his works, the Museum of Modern Art has a major holding of his work. A number of eminent computer scientists collect his works. There’s Robert in Germany who I think owns four of the drawings. Robert, whom I interviewed, is engaged in trying to convert Mark’s drawings into hypertext, stringtext, which means you click on the name and it pulls up the whole history. Through the drawings of the problems he told me he had had in completing this, was that some of the drawings are not available to view because they are in private collections.
JEFF S.: is there any work that disappeared after his death that anybody is aware of?
PATRICIA G.: The George Bush Harken Energy drawing did migrate to Germany for quite a number of years but it’s back in the United States now. Some people that I interviewed said they felt that drawings had disappeared from his studio but his studio was not actually very well secured. But it’s after his death and impossible to substantiate that.
JEFF S.: Patricia Goldstone: the book is Interlock: Art,Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. Patricia, thanks so much for spending time with us here on radio who-what-why.
PATRICIA: Oh, thank you for having me on the show.
JEFF S.: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on radio who-what-why. I hope you’ll join us next week for another radio who-what-why podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share it and help other people find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to who-what-why.org/donate
Critics have long questioned why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton’s recently published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people from a dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty.
The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.
But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times, was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department, “as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.”
US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities; but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence. Today, however, verifiable atrocities are occurring. As Dan Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post, “the human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as ‘thousands of detainees [including children] languish in prisons without proper judicial review,’ and ‘kidnappings and targeted killings are rampant’.”
Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. The country boasted the world’s largest irrigation system, the Great Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to the cities and coastal areas; and Qaddafi was embarking on a program to spread this model throughout Africa.
But that was before US-NATO forces bombed the irrigation system and wreaked havoc on the country. Today the situation is so dire that President Obama has asked his advisors to draw up options including a new military front in Libya, and the Defense Department is reportedly standing ready with “the full spectrum of military operations required.”
The Secretary of State’s victory lap was indeed premature, if what we’re talking about is the officially stated goal of humanitarian intervention. But her newly-released emails reveal another agenda behind the Libyan war; and this one, it seems, was achieved.
Mission Accomplished?
Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late December 2015, nearly a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton aide who gained notoriety when he testified against Monica Lewinsky. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, reads in part:
Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver . . . . This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and wasintended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).
In a “source comment,” the original declassified email adds:
According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:
A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,
Increase French influence in North Africa,
Improve his internal political situation in France,
Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa
Conspicuously absent is any mention of humanitarian concerns. The objectives are money, power and oil.
Other explosive confirmations in the newly-published emails are detailed by investigative journalist Robert Parry. They include admissions of rebel war crimes, of special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, and of Al Qaeda embedded in the US-backed opposition. Key propaganda themes for violent intervention are acknowledged to be mere rumors. Parry suggests they may have originated with Blumenthal himself. They include the bizarre claim that Qaddafi had a “rape policy” involving passing Viagra out to his troops, a charge later raised by UN Ambassador Susan Rice in a UN presentation. Parry asks rhetorically:
So do you think it would it be easier for the Obama administration to rally American support behind this “regime change” by explaining how the French wanted to steal Libya’s wealth and maintain French neocolonial influence over Africa – or would Americans respond better to propaganda themes about Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops so they could rape more women while his snipers targeted innocent children? Bingo!
Toppling the Global Financial Scheme
Qaddafi’s threatened attempt to establish an independent African currency was not taken lightly by Western interests. In 2011, Sarkozy reportedly called the Libyan leader a threat to the financial security of the world. How could this tiny country of six million people pose such a threat? First some background.
It is banks, not governments, that create most of the money in Western economies, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged. This has been going on for centuries, through the process called “fractional reserve” lending. Originally, the reserves were in gold. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt replaced gold domestically with central bank-created reserves, but gold remained the reserve currency internationally.
In 1944, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to unify this bank-created money system globally. An IMF ruling said that no paper money could have gold backing. A money supply created privately as debt at interest requires a continual supply of debtors; and over the next half century, most developing countries wound up in debt to the IMF. The loans came with strings attached, including “structural adjustment” policies involving austerity measures and privatization of public assets.
After 1944, the US dollar traded interchangeably with gold as global reserve currency. When the US was no longer able to maintain the dollar’s gold backing, in the 1970s it made a deal with OPEC to “back” the dollar with oil, creating the “petro-dollar.” Oil would be sold only in US dollars, which would be deposited in Wall Street and other international banks.
In 2001, dissatisfied with the shrinking value of the dollars that OPEC was getting for its oil, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein broke the pact and sold oil in euros. Regime change swiftly followed, accompanied by widespread destruction of the country.
In Libya, Qaddafi also broke the pact; but he did more than just sell his oil in another currency.
For decades, Libya and other African countries had been attempting to create a pan-African gold standard. Libya’s al-Qadhafi and other heads of African States had wanted an independent, pan-African, “hard currency.”
Under al-Qadhafi’s leadership, African nations had convened at least twice for monetary unification. The countries discussed the possibility of using the Libyan dinar and the silver dirham as the only possible money to buy African oil.
Until the recent US/NATO invasion, the gold dinar was issued by the Central Bank of Libya (CBL). The Libyan bank was 100% state owned and independent. Foreigners had to go through the CBL to do business with Libya. The Central Bank of Libya issued the dinar, using the country’s 143.8 tons of gold.
Libya’s Qadhafi (African Union 2009 Chair) conceived and financed a plan to unify the sovereign States of Africa with one gold currency (United States of Africa). In 2004, a pan-African Parliament (53 nations) laid plans for the African Economic Community – with a single gold currency by 2023.
African oil-producing nations were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand gold payment for oil/gas.
Showing What Is Possible
Qaddafi had done more than organize an African monetary coup. He had demonstrated that financial independence could be achieved. His greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank.
That could explain why this critical piece of infrastructure was destroyed in 2011. NATO not only bombed the pipeline but finished off the project by bombing the factory producing the pipes necessary to repair it. Crippling a civilian irrigation system serving up to 70% of the population hardly looks like humanitarian intervention. Rather, as Canadian Professor Maximilian Forte put it in his heavily researched book Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa:
[T]he goal of US military intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US.
Mystery Solved
Hillary Clinton’s emails shed light on another enigma remarked on by early commentators. Why, within weeks of initiating fighting, did the rebels set up their own central bank? Robert Wenzel wrote in The Economic Policy Journal in 2011:
This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences. I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising.
It was all highly suspicious, but as Alex Newman concluded in a November 2011 article:
Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi’s overthrow . . . may never be known for certain – at least not publicly.
There the matter would have remained – suspicious but unverified like so many stories of fraud and corruption – but for the publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails after an FBI probe. They add substantial weight to Newman’s suspicions: violent intervention was not chiefly about the security of the people. It was about the security of global banking, money and oil.
Errata: Sidney Blumenthal is not an attorney, as originally stated in this article. When he earned notoriety as Bill Clinton’s defender against Monica Lewinsky, it was as special adviser for the Clintons.
After the Crash 