|
|
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to — The Outer Limits. |
We Begin
Submitted by chumbawamba on 03May2013 03:05 -0400 Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20130506014216/http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-05-03/we-begin The Matrix was a movie released on 33-11-999, or as more commonly formatted (in the USA), 3-31-1999. In the 14 years since it’s debut it has become one of the most influential cultural icons of any generation, not only here in America but throughout much of the globe. Everyone, at least those ones in Western sphere societies, somehow, can readily identify with it. I wonder why?
No, I don’t. I know exactly why. The Matrix was an urgent tap on the shoulder of ones who slumbered for too long. It was Neo’s alarm clock going off after he had spent the night chasing the White Rabbit. It itself was a Red Pill, subliminal and subconsciously delivered, setting us on a collision course towards a wakeful state.
On 9-11-2001, WTC #1 and #2 were offered to Americans as the Red Pill and the Blue Pill. Except there was no choice: we were force-fed the Blue Pill, a concoction of Prozac, Viagra, Extenz, and Meth. A review of our history from that choreographed day to now reveals all too plainly the grotesque tragedy of America the Empire as it played out towards its predictably inevitable demise. Today, America is a mere rumor of what was once upon a time a respected nation of common statesmen and country scholars; the land of the free and home of the brave. Oh, what a sad irony those words now elicit.
So here it is on a 13 date, and it’s 11:55 as I glance at the clock on my computer. This day is a long one in coming. I asked Tyler to let me blog on Zero Hedge over a year ago. I wanted to begin spreading a word, a gospel–the Gospel of Chumba. Perhaps I am an arrogant man. Or perhaps I see what is happening today as Biblical in proportions. The Sequle, as it were, being written before our very eyes. We are witness to the next aeon of history; the year zero. It is begun again.
I know, I know, none of this makes any sense whatsoever. Chumba’s a douche, and Tyler’s a fag for letting him on here to spew this horse shit. My response to you is: patience, brother. Patience. This is a process. First, we need to open your eyes, but it must be done slowly. The first actual rays of real light shining into your pupils are going to be overwhelming and painful. This is normal. You will be dazed and confused, cognitively dissonant. I am going to blow your mind, and you will not like it one bit. But you will thank me for it later. You’re welcome.
To begin this journey, you must awaken within the dream, before you can awaken out of it. So follow the white rabbit. Don’t worry about over-sleeping and being late for work. You’re soon to find out your job or career or whatever is irrelevant anyway, once you come to the realization that modern society is merely the modern day equivalent of the Colonial American slave plantation, just with benefits like a corner office and vacation time. It’s an elaborate stage performance put on to convince you that you’re free, and everyone is a player in the charade, too doped up to realize what they’re watching in the TV is themselves. A caricature for sure, but ourselves nonetheless, a carnival house reflection of what we have become.
But the crazy dream, it ends now. Wakey wakey. There is work to do.
I am Chumbawamba. It’s your choice; The Blue Pill or the Red Pill? You need to make up your mind.
Free Your Mind: It’s time to come home! Nefesh B’Nefesh: Live the Dream 1-866-4-ALIYAH UK 0800 075 7200 Come home to the Land of Emuna“Free Your Mind”Posted 7May2006 Gil Ronen: This is where it really Started! |
|
It’s time to come home! Nefesh B’Nefesh: Live the Dream 1-866-4-ALIYAH |
|
Pompeo Declares BDS Movement Antisemitic, Seeks to Defund Anti-Israel Boycott CampaignersPosted by Vijeta Uniyal Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 3:00pm https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/11/pompeo-declares-bds-movement-antisemitic-seeks-to-defund-anti-israel-boycott-campaigners/ Secretary of State Mike: “We want to join all the other nations that recognize BDS for the cancer that it is.”The State Department “will regard the global anti-Israel BDS campaign as anti-Semitic,” Secretary Pompeo said during a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
The State Department “will immediately take steps to identify organizations that engage in hateful BDS conduct, and withdraw US government support for such groups.” Secretary Pompeo announced on the second day of his Israel trip.
Israeli TV network i24News reported Secretary Pompeo’s remarks:
On Thursday, Secretary Pompeo became the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit Israel’s Judea and Samaria region, often referred to in the mainstream media as the “West Bank.” President Trump last year recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the area. In a symbolic gesture, the Secretary of State visited the Psagot winery in Samaria. The top EU court, the European Court of Justice, in its November 2019 judgment, ruled against the winery, ordering mandatory labeling of products from the Judea and Samaria region as ‘settlement’ goods. Rejecting discriminatory labeling of Israeli products as mandated by the EU, Secretary Pompeo announced on Thursday that products made in areas under Israeli sovereignty, which includes Judea and Samaria, “ will be required to mark goods as “Israel,” “Product of Israel,” or “Made in Israel” when exporting to the United States. ” Secretary Mike Pompeo in Israel, Announces US Action Against BDS movement
|
|
The following brings up an important issue of how misinformation (Fake News) about Israel can interfere with Family gatherings.If I Follow Progressive Leaders’ Guidance In Staying Away From Family For Thanksgiving, I Can’t Berate Relatives For Supporting Israel-http://www.preoccupiedterritory.com/if-i-follow-progressive-leaders-guidance-in-staying-away-from-family-for-thanksgiving-i-cant-berate-relatives-for-supporting-israel/ Philadelphia, November 25 – Tikkun Olam isn’t meant to be easy. Difficult choices await us at every turn. The latest: follow the dictates of vaunted progressive figures such as Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York and refrain from holding or attending large Thanksgiving dinners with loved ones, or risk COVID exposure by participating in just such an event for purposes of accusing Zionist family members of complicity in genocide? The decision weighs heavily on the progressive mind.
On one hand, nothing animates the progressive mind more than justice for Palestinians. On the other hand, progressives only care about Palestinians when their suffering can be cast as Israeli malice, or more accurately Jewish malice that everyone agrees to euphemize as “Israel.” The latter point demonstrates it isn’t really about Palestinians per se, but whatever agenda we can coopt to further the goals of the progressive movement: ideally, equality and empowerment, but in practice, power over every little details of everyone else’s life. Restricting family get-togethers is just too juicy a progressive morsel to let go, even for the sake of Palestine, at least for some.
But oh, the opportunity to drive a wedge between Jews over Israel! How scarce those opportunities have become during COVID. As so many of us disregarded distancing and other restrictions to throng in protest for Black Lives Matter or in triumph at Trump’s electoral defeat, can we not similarly bend those sensibilities for the noble purpose of putting the vast majority of our Jewish relatives on the defensive over the alleged actions of other, totally different Jews thousands of miles away? The latter in fact dovetails with progressive trends of the twenty-first century, assigning people value and responsibility by virtue of their membership in a progressive-imposed identity group.
Perhaps we can eat our pumpkin pie and have it too. Here is what I propose: we adopt the same attitude as we have all along, insisting that everyone else adhere to strict distancing guidelines, and deem those who violate those guidelines, especially anyone to the right of the ACLU, grandma-killers and mass murderers, while maintaining for ourselves the prerogative to get together in whatever size assemblies and celebrations we like, because the virus only attacks right-wingers. That way, if any relatives with politics we abhor show up, we have double the reason to equate their morals with those of Nazi Germany and accuse them of failing to protect the most vulnerable – whether you understand that to mean the elderly or Palestinians. JerusalemCats Comments: This is another reason to make Aliyah. The Jewish relatives that love Israel and the Jewish people will be in Israel and the BDS supporting leftest such as Jewish Voice for Peace won’t be in Israel. Given a 6 – 10 hour time zone difference Zoom calls are “inconvenient” to schedule. |
|
The Following ITEMS are just a reminder to leftIst that WE ARE NOT SLAVES!World Tourism Chief: Mandatory Vaccines Will “Kill” Travel IndustryMonday, December 21, 2020 – 14:40 https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/world-tourism-chief-mandatory-vaccines-will-kill-travel-industry Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News, The head of one of the world’s most prominent tourism lobby groups has warned that if governments embrace “no jab, no fly” polices, it will kill the travel industry.
Gloria Guevara, head of the World Travel and Tourism Council, said Thursday “I don’t think governments will require vaccination next year,” warning that “If they do that they will kill their sector.”
Bloomberg reported on Guevara’s comments, as she added that the first people to get the vaccine “are the last people who will travel,” the elderly and at-risk.
Guevara further noted that the tourism sector, including airlines, is facing combined losses of US$3.8 trillion.
Guevara’s comments come after a World Health Organisation spokesperson said “proof of vaccination for COVID-19 vaccine will be essential for public health purposes,” but added that “It is also important to make a distinction between an ‘immunity passport’—something WHO does not recommend—and such a vaccine requirement for travel.”
A host of airlines have indicated that they will implement the measures regardless of what governments decide, and hotels are the latest sector to indicate they will do the same.
UK based human rights group Privacy International has warned that if “immunity” passports are issued by some governments, it could signal a creep toward “digital identity schemes” and other mandatory ID schemes.
Sweden based human rights group The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) warned last week that 61 per cent of countries have used COVID restrictions “that were concerning from a democracy and human rights perspective.” |
|
About Those Vaccine ID Cards…by Tyler Durden 04December2020 – https://www.zerohedge.com/political/about-those-vaccine-id-cards Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
An idea that’s simple as an abstraction – vaccine ID cards – turns out to be extremely difficult once real-world operational realities must be dealt with.
Authorities around the world have made it clear that they will do “whatever it takes” to vaccinate their citizenry with one of the first available vaccines. Authoritarian states may mandate universal vaccinations while less authoritarian states will favor a “carrot and stick” approach of offering benefits to the vaccinated and exclusions from employment, education, travel and most of everyday life for those who refuse to be vaccinated.
To identify the vaccinated and unvaccinated, many nations are planning to issue ID cards or “vaccine passports.” As an abstraction, this seems straightforward, but if we start digging into the actual operational requirements of this mass ID card issuance and distribution, a number of common-sense issues arise.
Vaccination cards will be issued to everyone getting Covid-19 vaccine, health officials say (CNN) First and foremost, it’s unknown how long the immunity offered by the vaccines will last. It’s still early days, so there is conflicting evidence: some claim the vaccines will be longer-lasting than the natural immunity of those who caught the virus and recovered, while other evidence suggests the immunity might decay after six months. Despite claims that natural immunity is long-lasting, a non-trivial number of people who had Covid have been re-infected.
Nobody knows how long either natural or vaccine immunity will last because not enough time has elapsed to collect sufficient data.
Given these intrinsic unknowns, how long will the ID card be valid? It’s easy to imagine variations in individual responses such that the vaccines’ effectiveness decays more rapidly in 20% of the vaccinated. This variability would introduce tremendous unknowns that no ID card could reflect: is the holder of the card at Month 10 still immune or not?
If the duration of the vaccine’s effectiveness is variable, then an ID card could be misleading. In other words, being vaccinated with a variable-duration vaccine tells us nothing about the individual’s actual immunity down the road.
Given these unknowns, the vaccinated may need booster shots in the future, and the ID cards would have to be re-issued. The task of keeping track of hundreds of millions of vaccination records, identities and then issuing ID cards is a non-trivial task.
To thwart black-market fake-ID cards, the security measures will have to be equivalent to a driver’s license or passport. Have you applied recently for either of these forms of ID? The process is painfully slow. The systems in place to process state drivers’ licenses and U.S. passports are already strained, and which agency is prepared to verify the identity of 280 million adult citizens, confirm the validity of their vaccine and then issue ID cards–and then repeat this process in a year?
If the procedures for issuing vaccine ID cards are slapdash due to time constraints–for example, downloading a digital record from the vaccine distributor or a printed card–these will likely be vulnerable to being duplicated or spoofed. Fake vaccine distributors will pop up issuing bogus digital records, hackers might download and sell digital records from trusted sources, and so on.
Then there’s the extra burdens being placed on the staff of airlines, cruise lines, etc. to scan these documents and deal with rejected cards. Who will have the legal authority to deal with claims that a rejected card is actually valid? How many smaller establishments simply won’t have to staff to do more than glance at the card?
Do authorities have the means to issue hundreds of millions of absolutely secure vaccine ID cards and then monitor all the attempts to find loopholes and weaknesses in the process? If authorities think that strict penalties will limit this activity, they underestimate the difficulty in getting such penalties enforced by overloaded court systems.
In nations with strong traditions of civil liberties, there will be pushback against mandatory vaccinations with essentially untested vaccines and against national databases tying identity to vaccination cards–a situation ripe with potential for abuse.
Authorities don’t seem to grasp that many of those hesitating to get vaccinated are not anti-vaxxers; they simply see the vaccine approval process as deeply flawed for common-sense reasons: for example, there is simply not enough data on safety, duration and real-world efficacy.
Authorities are counting on the “carrot” of air travel, cruises and concerts to persuade skeptics to get vaccinated despite their concerns. What authorities don’t seem to realize is that a great many people value their health, privacy and agency far more than they crave air travel, cruises or concerts. They will gladly forego all these activities until more reliable data is collected, peer-reviewed and distributed for analysis.
The more draconian the measures designed to pressure people into getting the vaccines, the greater the reluctance of skeptics who see the draconian measures as additional evidence the vaccines are half-measures being forced on the populace as a means of imposing a false assurance that all is well and “normal” will return as soon as the skeptics cave in and get vaccinated.
There’s also the possibility that the virus could mutate in ways that moot the vaccines’ effectiveness. While this is widely considered unlikely, it’s not impossible, either. If a mutated virus arises that evades the vaccine, then what value will the vaccine ID card have?
An idea that’s simple as an abstraction–vaccine ID cards–turns out to be extremely difficult once real-world operational realities must be dealt with. The fact is the first vaccines have been rushed to approval with virtually none of the testing demanded of previous vaccines raises common-sense concerns which cannot be dissolved with force or carrots and sticks. |
|
Australians Are Threatening To Boycott Qantas Over Mandatory Covid-19 Vaccination RuleStewart Perrie Loads of people are threatening to boycott Qantas over its controversial decision to not allow passengers to fly if they haven’t been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
The flying kangaroo’s boss, Alan Joyce, said people will have to prove they’ve had the jab, otherwise they can find another airline to fly on. That rule will apply to international routes and will be non-negotiable.
That’s prompted a furious reaction from people in Australia, with many saying they will never fly with Qantas again if the rule is enforced when travel is allowed to resume.
Holiday provider Tradewinds Travel has already announced it will no longer provide customers with deals or flight information for Qantas.
Writing on Twitter, the company said: “We have made a company decision today to not sell any @Qantas flights, even on a code share, following their announcement of no vaccination, no flight. There are far superior airlines with flights to Australia.
“Thank you everyone for your comments and support. We will apply the same criteria across the board for all airlines. We will be reopening fully for reservations from 1st Jan for travel from 1st Apr.”
Others flocked to social media to cry out about the policy.
One woman wrote: “I’ve never used the phrase #boycott but then I’ve never felt so strongly about the current situation, to quantify how I feel I need more letters so I will just leave this here #boycottqantas thanks for helping me to decide never to fly with you.”
Another added: “It’s not everyday you achieve business suicide with making known your intentions to enforce a harmful untested vaccine on those wanting to use your service.”
But these people might be waging a war they won’t be able to win. Alan Joyce believes other airlines will soon announce similar policies and they will also be non-negotiable. He told A Current Affair: “I think that’s going to be a common thing talking to my colleagues in other airlines around the globe.”
If a coronavirus vaccine is successful, Joyce has stated he expects to see international travel return to something approximating normal by the end of 2021, but added that the state of growth of the virus elsewhere makes that difficult right now.
He explained: “Unfortunately with the levels of the virus in the United States and in Europe, we’re not going to see operations to those destinations in any real strength until we see a vaccine being rolled out, which is likely towards the end of 2021,”
Domestic flights have now resumed between Melbourne and Sydney as travel between New South Wales and Victoria has opened up again. That could mean that Qantas can operate at around 60 percent of usual business by Christmas. |
|
Pamela Geller, Breitbart Column: Getting out the Nazi VoteBy Pamela Geller on November 3, 2014 https://gellerreport.com/2014/11/pamela-geller-breitbart-column-getting-out-the-nazi-vote.html/ Obama made a very deliberate decision to make tomorrow’s election about the Jews — very much like Hitler did. In light of the Obama administration’s “chickenshit” attack on Netanyahu last week and today’s contemptible anti-semitic remark from Obama’s ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, clearly Obama is playing to his base.
Getting out the Nazi vote. It’s no accident that Rice and the Netanyahu “chickenshit” bombs were dropped right before the election.
|
|
22 Facts That Prove That The Bottom 90% Of America Is Systematically Getting Poorerby Tyler Durden Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog, The mainstream media is not telling you this, but the truth is that most Americans are steadily getting poorer. The middle class is being absolutely eviscerated, and poverty is soaring to unprecedented heights. The fact that 90 percent of the population is constantly sliding downhill is not good for our society. The United States is supposed to be a land of opportunity with a vibrant free market system that enables average people to make better lives for themselves.
Unfortunately, free enterprise is being strangled to death in the United States today. Entrepreneurs and small business are being pounded into oblivion by rules, regulations, red tape and oppressive levels of taxation. At the same time, millions of jobs have been shipped out of the United States by corporate giants and sent to countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. All of this has happened under both Democrats and Republicans. Meanwhile, wealth and power continue to become even more heavily concentrated in the hands of big government and big corporations.
Our founding fathers warned that we should not allow such large concentrations of wealth and power, because they tend to funnel the rewards of society into the hands of a select few. We need to change the rules of the game so that entrepreneurs, small businesses and average workers can thrive in this country once again. If big government and big corporations continue to gobble up even more wealth and power, the wealth inequality that we see right now will only get even worse.
The following are 22 facts that prove that the bottom 90 percent of America is systematically getting poorer… #1 According to the Pew Research Center, the top 7 percent of all U.S. households own 63 percent of all the wealth in the country. #2 Between 2009 and 2011, the wealth of the bottom 93 percent of all Americans declined by 4 percent, while the wealth of the top 7 percent of all Americans increased by 28 percent. #3 On average, households in the top 7 percent have 24 times as much wealth as households in the bottom 93 percent. #4 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined. #5 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest one percent of all American households have 288 times the amount of wealth that the average middle class American family does on average. #6 According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined. #7 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have as much wealth as the bottom one-third of all Americans combined. #8 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before. #9 In the United States today, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high, but wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low. #10 In 1980, CEOs at S&P 500 companies made 42 times as much as their employees did on average. Today, CEOs at S&P 500 companies make 354 times as much as their employees do on average. In fact, there are many CEOs that make more than 1000 times what the average employees in their companies make. #11 According to a report recently issued by the Pew Research Center, Americans over the age of 65 have 47 times as much wealth as Americans under the age of 35 on average. #12 U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent. #13 Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among “the working poor”. Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering. #14 At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less. #15 Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does. #16 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs. #17 As I mentioned yesterday, the homeownership rate in America is now at its lowest level in nearly 18 years. #18 The United States now ranks 93rd in the world in income inequality. #19 Approximately one out of every five households in the United States is now on food stamps. #20 The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today. #21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income”. #22 At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States. Even if your income just stays the same, you are still getting poorer because inflation is a tax that is constantly chipping away at the value of every single dollar that you own. The cost of everything that we buy on a regular basis (food, gas, health insurance, etc.) is constantly going up, and if your income is not keeping pace that means that you are getting poorer.
That is just one reason why the Federal Reserve system is so insidious. They are killing the middle class with inflation. For much more on the Federal Reserve and why it should be abolished, please see this article: “10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve“.
So if most Americans are getting poorer, then why aren’t our politicians doing something to fix it?
Well, the sad truth of the matter is that the big corporations fund the campaigns of our corrupt politicians. They know that the candidate that raises the most money almost always wins, and so it provides an incentive for our politicians to be very good to those that have the money.
Plus, many of our politicians are way too busy having a good time to be bothered with doing anything for us. Take Barack Obama for example. According to The Telegraph, Barack Obama has spent twice as much time playing golf and vacationing as he has on attending economic meetings…
But this is a problem that is not going away. The bottom 90 percent of the country is systematically getting poorer, and if this continues it will inevitably result in massive social problems. |
|
Free Your Mind: It’s time to come home! Nefesh B’Nefesh:It’s your choice;The Blue Pill or the Red Pill? You need to make up your mind. |
|
|
|
Even Comedians Know “America Is Sliding Very Fast Towards Fascism”by Tyler Durden 03May2014 – https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-03/even-comedians-know-america-sliding-very-fast-towards-fascism The writing on the wall is there for anyone willing to take a look and be honest with themselves. I always try to highlight when public figures have the courage to state what is really happening in this country (such as rapper Lupe Fiasco), rather than cower in a corner from fear of repercussions. Most celebrities are the biggest cowards on earth. They prance around criticizing other nations, never daring to look inward. It is disgraceful. Rob Schneider had a lot to say in his recent interview with Chris Stigall. Here are a few of his most incisive lines:
There’s also the money shot of him discussing America’s decline into fascism, which you can hear in the clip below. |
|
The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street OverworldBy Prof Peter Dale Scott The Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan in Focus 10 March 2014 The concept of the Deep State is at the forefront of today’s news. In this March 2014 article published by Asia Pacific Journal and Global Research, Professor Peter Dale Scott analyses the role of “Deep State”, namely the shadow government integrated by Wall Street, US intelligence, the military industrial complex, the Washington think tanks, etc. This secret government overshadows the official government, including the White House and the US Congress. *** In the last decade it has become more and more obvious that we have in America today what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called:
And in 2013, particularly after the military return to power in Egypt, more and more authors referred to this second level as America’s “deep state.”2 Here for example is the Republican analyst Mike Lofgren:
At the end of 2013 a New York Times Op-Ed noted this trend, and even offered a definition of the term that will work for the purposes of this essay:
The political activities of the deep state are the chief source and milieu of what I have elsewhere called “deep politics:” “all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”5 Others, like Tom Hayden, call the deep state a “state within the state,” and suggest it may be responsible for the failure of the Obama administration to follow the policy guidelines of the president’s speeches:
This development of a two-level or dual state has been paralleled by two other dualities: the increasing resolution of American society into two classes – the “one percent” and the “ninety-nine percent” – and the bifurcation of the U.S. economy into two aspects: the domestic, still subject to some governmental regulation and taxation, and the international, relatively free from governmental controls.7 All three developments have affected and intensified each other – particularly since the Reagan Revolution of 1980, which saw American inequality of wealth cease to diminish and begin to increase.8 Thus for example we shall see how Wall Street – the incarnation of the “one percent” – played a significant role in increasing the deep state after World War Two, and how three decades later the deep state played a significant role in realigning America for the Reagan Revolution.
In earlier books I have given versions of this America-centered account of America’s shift into empire and a deep state. But another factor to be mentioned is the shift of global history towards an increasingly global society dominated by a few emergent superpowers. This trend was accelerated after the Industrial Revolution by new technologies of transport, from the railroad in the 19th century to the jet plane and space travel in the 20th.9
In the fallout from this rearrangement we must include two world wars, as a result of which Britain ceased to act as the dominant superpower it had been since Napoleon. Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union and the United States subsequently competed in a Cold War to fill the gap. It was not however predetermined that the Cold War would be as thuggish and covertly violent as for decades it continued to be. For that we should look to more contingent causes on both sides of the Iron Curtain – starting with the character of Stalin and his party but also including the partly responsive development of the American deep state.
The Deep State, The Shadow Government and the Wall Street OverworldThe “deep state” was defined by the UK newsletter On Religion as “the embedded anti-democratic power structures within a government, something very few democracies can claim to be free from.”10 The term originated in Turkey in 1996, to refer to U.S.-backed elements, primarily in the intelligence services and military, who had repeatedly used violence to interfere with and realign Turkey’s democratic political process. Sometimes the definition is restricted to elements within the government (or “a state-within-the state”), but more often in Turkey the term is expanded, for historical reasons, to include “members of the Turkish underworld.”11 In this essay I shall use “deep state” in the larger sense, to include both the second level of secret government inside Washington and those outsiders powerful enough, in either the underworld or overworld, to give it direction. In short I shall equate the term “deep state” with what in 1993 I termed a “deep political system:” “ one which habitually resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those publicly sanctioned by law and society.”12
Like myself, Lofgren suggests an ambiguous symbiosis between two aspects of the American deep state:
In their words,
I shall argue that in the 1950s Wall Street was a dominating complex. It included not just banks and oil firms but also the oil majors whose cartel arrangements were successfully defended against the U.S. Government by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers. This larger complex is what I mean by the Wall Street overworld.
The Long History of the Wall Street OverworldLofgren’s inclusion of Wall Street is in keeping with Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in 1933 to his friend Col. E.M. House that “The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”14
FDR’s insight is well illustrated by the efficiency with which a group of Wall Street bankers (including Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson Aldrich and Paul Warburg) were able in a highly secret meeting in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve System – a system which in effect reserved oversight of the nation’s currency supply and of all America’s banks in the not impartial hands of its largest.15 The political clout of the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board (where the federal Treasury is represented but does not dominate) was clearly demonstrated in 2008, when Fed leadership secured instant support from the successive administrations of a Texan Republican president, followed by a Midwest Democratic one, for public money to rescue the reckless management of Wall Street banks: banks Too Big To Fail, and of course far Too Big To Jail, but not Too Big To Bail.16
Wall Street and the Launching of the CIATop-level Treasury officials, CIA officers, and Wall Street bankers and lawyers think alike because of the “revolving door” by which they pass easily from private to public service and back. In 1946 General Vandenberg, as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), recruited Allen Dulles, then a Republican lawyer at Sullivan and Cromwell in New York, “to draft proposals for the shape and organization of what was to become the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.” Dulles promptly formed an advisory group of six men, all but one of whom were Wall Street investment bankers or lawyers.17 Dulles and two of the six (William H. Jackson and Frank Wisner) later joined the agency, where Dulles proceeded to orchestrate policies, such as the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala, that he had previously discussed in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations.18
There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director. Although he did not formally join the CIA until November 1950, he was in Berlin before the start of the 1948 Berlin Blockade, “supervising the unleashing of anti-Soviet propaganda across Europe.”19 In the early summer of 1948 he set up the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE), in support of what became by the early 1950s “the largest CIA operation in Western Europe.”20
The Deep State and Funds for CIA Covert Operations
Wall Street was also the inspiration for what eventually became the CIA’s first covert operation: the use of “over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”21 (The fundraising had begun at the wealthy Brook Club in New York; but Allen Dulles, still a Wall Street lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at first had preferred a private funding campaign, to authorize the operation through the National Security Council and the CIA.)22
Dulles’s friend Frank Wisner then left Wall Street to oversee an enlarged covert operations program through the newly created Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC). Dulles, still a lawyer, campaigned successfully to reconstruct Western Europe through what became known as the Marshall Plan.23 Together with George Kennan and James Forrestal, Dulles also “helped devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim millions of dollars from the plan.”24
This created one of the earlier occasions when the CIA, directly or indirectly, recruited local assets involved in drug trafficking. AFL member Irving Brown, the assistant of AFL official Jay Lovestone (a CIA asset), was implicated in drug smuggling activities in Europe, at the same time that he used funds diverted from the Marshall Plan to establish
An analogous funding source for the CIA developed in the Far East: the so-called
For at least two decades the CIA lavishly subsidized right-wing parties in countries including Japan and Indonesia, possibly still using captured Axis funds.27 (One frequently encounters the claim that the source of the M-fund was gold looted by Japan during World War Two (“Yamashita’s gold”).28
As a general rule the CIA, rather than assimilating these funds into its own budget, appears to have left them off the books in the hands of cooperative allied powers – ranging from other U.S. agencies like the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA. set up in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan) to oil companies to powerful drug kingpins.29
The CIA never abandoned its dependency on funds from outside its official budget to conduct its clandestine operations. In Southeast Asia, in particular, its proprietary firm Sea Supply Inc., supplied an infrastructure for a drug traffic supporting a CIA-led paramilitary force, PARU.30 The CIA appears also to have acted in coordination with slush funds from various U.S. government contracts, ranging from the Howard Hughes organization to (as we shall see) the foreign arms sales of U.S. defense corporations like Lockheed and Northrop.31 Lockheed Payoffs and CIA Clients: the Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia Through the 1950s payouts from the M-fund were administered by Kodama Yoshio, “probably the CIA’s chief asset in Japan;” while ”All accounts say that after the end of the occupation, the fund’s American managers came from the CIA.”32 Kodama also received and distributed millions of funds from Lockheed to secure military contracts – an operation the CIA knew about but has never admitted involvement in.33 Lockheed’s system of payoffs was world-wide; and one sees CIA involvement with it in at least four other countries: the Netherlands, Italy, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. (Lockheed, the builder of the U-2, was a major CIA-cleared contractor.)34
The beneficiary in the Netherlands was Prince Bernhard, a close friend of CIA directors Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, and the organizer of the Bilderberg Group.35 In the case of Italy, payments were handled through a contact (“Antelope Cobbler”) who turned out to be whoever was the Italian Prime Minister of the moment (always from one of the parties subsidized earlier by the CIA).36
In the revealing instance of Indonesia, Lockheed payments were shifted in May 1965, over the legal objections of Lockheed’s counsel, to a new contract with a company set up by the firm’s long-time local agent or middleman, August Munir Dasaad.86 This was just six months after a secret U.S. decision to have the CIA covertly assist
Although Dasaad had been a long-time supporter of Sukarno, by May 1965 he was already building connections with Sukarno’s eventual successor, Gen. Suharto, via a family relative, General Alamsjah, who knew Suharto and was the beneficiary of the new Lockheed account.38 After Suharto replaced Sukarno, Alamsjah, who controlled certain considerable funds, at once made funds available to Suharto, earning him the gratitude of the new President.39
While this was happening, Stanvac (a joint venture of the Standard companies known later as Exxon and Mobil) increased payments to the army’s oil company, Permina, headed by an eventual political ally of Suharto, General Ibnu Sutowo. Alamsjah is said to have been allied with Ibnu Sutowo in plotting against Sukarno, along with a well-connected Japanese oilman, Nishijima Shigetada.40 After Suharto’s overthrow of Sukarno, Fortune wrote that “Sutowo’s still small company played a key part in bankrolling those crucial operations, and the army has never forgotten it.”41
We shall deal later with the special case of Lockheed kickbacks to Saudi Arabia, which were far greater than those to Japan. It is important to note, however, the linkage between Middle East oil and arms sales: as U.S. imports of Middle East oil increased, the pressure on the U.S. balance of payments was offset by increased U.S. arms sales to the region. “In the period 1963-1974, arms sales to the Middle East went from 10 per cent of global arms imports to 36 per cent, half of which was supplied by the United States.”42
Iran in 1953: How an Oil Cartel Operation Became a Job for the CIA or]
Wall Street, the Dulles Brothers, and the International Oil Cartel
The international lawyers of Wall Street did not hide from each other their shared belief that they understood better than Washington the requirements for running the world. As John Foster Dulles wrote in the 1930s to a British colleague,
This same mentality also explains why Allen Dulles as an OSS officer in 1945 simply evaded orders from Washington forbidding him to negotiate with SS General Karl Wolff about a conditional surrender of German forces in Italy – an important breach of Roosevelt’s agreement with Stalin at Yalta for unconditional surrender, a breach that is regarded by many as helping lead to the Cold War.44 And it explains why Allen, as CIA Director in 1957, dealt summarily with Eisenhower’s reluctance to authorize more than occasional U-2 overflights of the USSR, by secretly approving a plan with Britain’s MI-6 whereby U-2 flights could be authorized instead by the UK Prime Minister Macmillan.45
This mentality exhibited itself in 1952, when Truman’s Justice Department sought to break up the cartel agreements whereby Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) and four other oil majors controlled global oil distribution. (The other four were Standard Oil Company of New York, Standard Oil of California or Socony, Gulf Oil, and Texaco; together with Royal Dutch Shell and Anglo-Iranian, they comprised the so-called Seven Sisters of the cartel.) Faced with a government order to hand over relevant documents, Exxon’s lawyer Arthur Dean at Sullivan and Cromwell, where Foster was senior partner, refused: “If it were not for the question of national security, we would be perfectly willing to face either a criminal or a civil suit. But this is the kind of information the Kremlin would love to get its hands on.”46
At this time the oil cartel was working closely with the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, later BP) to prevent AIOC’s nationalization by Iran’s Premier Mossadeq, by instituting, in May 1951, a successful boycott of Iranian oil exports.
As a result Iranian oil production fell from 241 million barrels in 1950 to 10.6 million barrels in 1952.
But Truman declined, despite a direct personal appeal from Churchill, to have the CIA participate in efforts to overthrow Mossadeq, and instead dispatched Averell Harriman to Tehran in a failed effort to negotiate a peaceful resolution of Mossadeq’s differences with London.49 All this changed with the election of Eisenhower in November 1952, followed by the appointment of the Dulles brothers to be Secretary of State and head of CIA. The Justice Department’s criminal complaint against the oil cartel was swiftly replaced by a civil suit, from which the oil cartel eventually emerged unscathed.50
Thereafter
Also in November 1952 CIA officials began planning to involve CIA in the efforts of MI6 and the oil companies in Iran53 — although its notorious Operation TP/AJAX to overthrow Mossadeq was not finally approved by Eisenhower until July 22, 1953.54
The events of 1953 strengthened the role of the oil cartel as a structural component of the American deep state, drawing on its powerful connections to both Wall Street and the CIA.55 (Another such component was the Arabian-American Oil Company or ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, which increased oil production in 1951-53 to offset the loss of oil from Iran. Until it was fully nationalized in 1980, ARAMCO maintained undercover CIA personnel like William Eddy among its top advisors.)56 The five American oil majors in particular were also strengthened by the success of AJAX, as Anglo-Iranian (renamed BP) was henceforth forced to share 40 percent of the oil from its Iran refinery with them.
Nearly all recent accounts of Mossadeq’s overthrow treat it as a covert intelligence operation, with the oil cartel (when mentioned at all) playing a subservient role. However the chronology, and above all the belated approval from Eisenhower, suggest that it was CIA that came belatedly in 1953 to assist an earlier oil cartel operation, rather than vice versa. In terms of the deep state, the oil cartel or deep state initiated in 1951 a process that the American public state only authorized two years later. Yet the inevitable bias in academic or archival historiography, working only with those primary sources that are publicly available, is to think of the Mossadeq tragedy as simply a “CIA coup.” The CIA, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the Wall Street OverworldThe “revolving door” also circulates top-level intelligence officials and the chiefs of the cleared contractors referred to by Mike Lofgren as part of the deep state. Tim Shorrock revealed in 2007 that “about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends every year on…intelligence” is outsourced to private intelligence contractors like Booz, Allen & Hamilton (now Booz Allen Hamilton) and SAIC.57 For example Mike McConnell “went from being head of the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to Booz Allen, one of the nation’s largest private intelligence contractors, then became Bush’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then went back to Booz Allen, where he is now Executive Vice President.” Intelligence officers in government write the non-competitive contracts for the private corporations that they may have worked for and may work for again.58 And over the years the “revolving door” has also exchanged personnel between Booz Allen and the international oil companies served by the firm.
The original firm of Booz, Allen, & Hamilton split in 2008 into Booz Allen Hamilton, focused on USG business, and Booz & Company in New York, assuming the old company’s commercial and international portfolio. Booz Allen Hamilton is majority owned by the private equity firm the Carlyle Group, noted for its association with political figures like both presidents Bush.59 Lofgren points to the deep state importance of Booz Allen Hamilton, 99 percent of whose business dependent on the U.S. government.60 Booz Allen has been linked in the media to NSA ever since its employee Edward Snowden decamped with NSA records. But Booz Allen, one of the oldest and largest of the “cleared contractors,” has been intertwined with the CIA’s covert operations since Allen Dulles became CIA Director in 1953.61 In the same year, Booz Allen began “to take on several overseas assignments…: a land-registration system in the Philippines, a restructuring of Egypt’s customs operations and textile industries, and work for Iran’s national oil company.”62 All three assignments overlapped with CIA covert ops in 1953, including the Philippine land distribution program which Edward Lansdale promoted in order to fight a Huk insurrection, and the CIA’s operation TP/AJAX (with Britain’s MI6) to rescue the Anglo-Iranian oil company (later BP).63 But the most important CIA-Booz Allen cooperation may have been in Egypt. In March 1953 Miles Copeland, having resigned from the CIA to join Booz-Allen, “returned to Cairo under what was, for all practical purposes, a joint CIA-BA&H mission.”64 In addition to offering management advice to the Egyptian government in general, and to a private textile mill, Miles also gave Nasser advice on establishing his intelligence service (the Mukhabarat), and “soon became his closest Western advisor” (as well as his top channel to the USG, more important than either the local US ambassador or CIA chief)65
Copeland’s role with Nasser did not make him a shaper of U.S. policy; his pro-Nasser views were largely subordinated to the pro-British anti-Nasserism of the Dulles brothers. But they did establish a bond between Copeland and the Eisenhower White House. By 1967, when Nixon was preparing to run for president, Copeland had taken a leave of absence from Booz Allen to become a prestigious and well-paid consultant for oil companies. The CIA, Miles Copeland, and Adnan KhashoggiIn 1966 Copeland, while technically on leave from Booz Allen, made close contact with Adnan Khashoggi, a young Arab who was in the course of becoming both a “principal foreign agent” of the U.S. and also extremely wealthy on the commissions he earned from Lockheed and other military firms on arms sales to Saudi Arabia.66 (“To give some sense of the size of the business, the company acknowledged in the mid-1970s that it had provided $106 million in commissions to Khashoggi between 1970 and 1975, more than ten times the level of payments made to the next most important connection, Yoshi [sic] Kodama of Japan.”67 By Copeland’s own account in 1989, this encounter with Khashoggi “put the two of us on a ‘Miles-and-Adnan’ basis that has lasted for more than twenty years of business, parties, and a very special kind of political action.”68 Copeland adds that
Copeland almost immediately flew to Cairo and immersed himself in a series of high-level but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to forestall what soon became the 1967 Six Day Egyptian-Israeli Six Day War. By his account, his mission, though unsuccessful, gave a “tremendous boost” to his reputation, enabling him “to accelerate the attempt I had already started to establish a ‘private CIA’ by use of confidential arrangements with politically astute members of the client companies.”70
Copeland’s self-promoting claims are controversial, and a number of establishment writers have described his books as “unreliable.”71 But eyewitness Larry Kolb corroborates that Copeland was close to Khashoggi, and that the two of them
Rewritten with Kolb’s assistance after consultation with the Reagan White House, the plan would be backed by a “Mideast Peace Fund” to which “Adnan was pledging a hundred million dollars of his own money.”72
The proposal failed, partly because of the Middle East’s resistance to negotiated solutions, but also partly because by the 1980s Khashoggi was no longer as rich and influential as he had once been. His function as an agent of influence in the Middle East and elsewhere had been sharply limited after the United States, by the Corrupt Federal Practices Act of 1978, outlawed direct payments by US corporations to foreign individuals. Henceforward the function of bestowing money and sexual favors on client politicians passed primarily from Khashoggi to another CIA connection, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).73 A major shareholder in BCCI was Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham, Khashoggi’s friend and business partner and (according to the Senate BCCI Report) “the CIA’s former principal contact in the Arab Middle East.”74
What the story of the failed “Mideast Peace Fund” reveals is first, that Khashoggi (like BCCI after him) was of interest to Washington because of his ability to negotiate with both Israel and Arab countries; and second, that Copeland and what Copeland called his “private CIA,”75 was in a commanding position as lead adviser to Khashoggi, while still on unpaid leave from Booz Allen Hamilton. Khashoggi, the CIA’s Asset Edward K. Moss, and Political CorruptionA powerful connection was formed by combining Copeland’s political contacts with Khashoggi’s millions. Copeland may have been responsible for Khashoggi’s inspired choice of the under-recognized Edward K. Moss, another man with CIA connections, as his p.r. agent in Washington.76
Back in November 1962, the CIA, as part of its planning to get rid of Castro, decided to use Moss for the Political Action Group of the CIA’s Covert Action (CA) staff.77 This was more than a year after the FBI had advised the CIA that Moss’s mistress Julia Cellini and her brother Dino Cellini were alleged to be procurers, while “the Cellini brothers have long been associated with the narcotics and white slavery rackets in Cuba.”78
This FBI report suggests an important shared interest between Moss and Khashoggi: sexual corruption. Just as his uncle Yussuf Yassin had been a procurer of women for King Abdul-Aziz, so Khashoggi himself was said to have “used sex to win over U.S. executives.” The bill for the madam who supplied girls en masse to his yacht in the Mediterranean ran to hundreds of thousands of dollars.79 Khashoggi made a practice of supplying those he wished to influence with dollars as well as sex. The CIA of course was forbidden to use sex and money in this way in the United States, or to make in the United States the payments to right-wing politicians that characterized its behavior in the rest of the world. But no such prohibition applied to Khashoggi. According to Anthony Summers,
Khashoggi in effect served as a “cutout,” or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to the CIA and the companies he worked with. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting their official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through the bank of Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo.81
(Pierre Salinger heard from Khashoggi that in 1972 he had donated $1 million to Nixon, corroborating the often-heard claim that Khashoggi had brought it in a briefcase to Nixon’s western White House in San Clemente, and then “forgotten” to take it away.)82
Khashoggi of course did not introduce such corruption to American politics; he merely joined a milieu where defense companies had used money and girls for years to win defense contracts in Washington and Las Vegas.83 Prominent in this practice was Howard Hughes, whom Khashoggi soon joined in international investments. (After a Senate investigator on Khashoggi’s trail registered at the Hughes-owned Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, a blonde came unexpectedly to his hotel room, and said, “I’m here for your pleasure.”)84
But Khashoggi’s corruption channels and targets overlapped with those of others with CIA connections. In 1972 it was alleged that funds from the Paradise Island casino in the Bahamas were being secretly carried to Nixon and his friend Bebe Rebozo, by a casino employee. This was Seymour (Sy) Alter, who was both “a friend of Nixon and Rebozo since 1962” and also an associate of Edward Moss’s brother-in-law Eddie Cellini, the casino manager at Paradise Island. 85 The funds came from the Paradise Island Bridge Company, a company partly owned by an officer of Benguet International, a firm represented in America by Paul Helliwell. 86 It is likely that Nixon himself had a hidden interest in the Bridge Company, which might explain the revelation through Operation Tradewinds that a “Richard M. Nixon” (not otherwise identified) had an account at Helliwell’s Castle Bank.87
Three facts point to a deep state interest in what might otherwise seem a matter of personal corruption. The first is that Paul Helliwell had set up two companies for the CIA — CAT Inc. (Later Air America) and SEA Supply Inc. in Bangkok — that became the infrastructure of the CIA’s covert operations with drug-trafficking armies in Southeast Asia.88 The second is that Paul Helliwell’s banking partner, E.P. Barry, had been the postwar head of OSS Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna, which oversaw the recovery of SS gold in Operation Safehaven.89 The third is that for over four decades persons from Booz Allen Hamilton have been among the very small group owning the profitable Paradise Island Bridge Company. (A recent partner in the Paradise Island Bridge Company is Booz Allen Senior Vice-President Robert Riegle.)90 Moss, Khashoggi, the Safari Club, and the International OverworldThe power exerted by Khashoggi and Moss was not limited to Khashoggi’s access to funds and women. By the 1970s, Moss was chairman of the elite Safari Club in Kenya, where he invited Khashoggi in as majority owner.91 The exclusive property became the venue for an alliance between intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms.92
As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni,
Prince Turki’s candid remarks– “your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. …. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together … and established what was called the Safari Club.” – made it clear that the Safari Club, operating at the level of the deep state, was expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions of the public state in Washington.
Obviously the property owned by Khashoggi and Moss in Kenya should not be confused with the intelligence operation of the same name. But it would be wrong also to make a radical separation between the two: the two men Khashoggi and Moss would appear to be part of this supranational intelligence milieu.
Specifically Khashoggi’s activities of corruption by sex and money, after they too were somewhat curtailed by Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms, appear to have been taken up by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a bank where Khashoggi’s friend and business partner Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief and Safari Club member, was a part-owner.94 The Safari Club Milieu: George H.W. Bush, Theodore Shackley, and BCCIThe usual account of this super-agency’s origin is that it was
Joseph Trento adds that “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations,… With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed… the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine.”.96
Trento claims also that the Safari Club then was able to work with some of the controversial CIA operators who were then forced out of the CIA by Turner, and that this was coordinated by perhaps the most controversial of them all: Theodore Shackley.
Kevin Phillips has suggested that Bush on leaving the CIA had dealings with the bank most closely allied with Safari Club operations: the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In Phillips’ words,
Joseph Trento adds that through the London branch of this bank, which Bush chaired, “Adham’s petrodollars and BCCI money flowed for a variety of intelligence operations”99
It is clear moreover that BCCI operations, like Khashoggi’s before them, were marked by the ability to deal behind the scenes with both the Arab countries and also Israel.100
It is clear that for years the American deep state in Washington was both involved with and protected BCCI. Acting CIA director Richard Kerr acknowledged to a Senate Committee “that the CIA had also used BCCI for certain intelligence-gathering operations.”101
Far less clear is the attitude taken by Wall Street banks towards the miscreant BCCI. The Senate report on BCCI charged however that the Bank of England “had withheld information about BCCI’s frauds from public knowledge for 15 months before closing the bank.”103
Of course the scope and influence of BCCI reflected changes in the global superstructure of finance since the oil price hikes of the 1970s. A recent study of the dangerously unstable concentration of ownership in the world showed only four recognizable Wall Street institutions among the top twenty: JPMorgan Chase & Co, the Goldman Sachs Group, Bank of New York Mellon Corp, and Merrill Lynch.104 Of these, Bank of New York, the bank heavily involved in the 1990s looting of Russia, interlocked with BCCI through the Swiss banking activities of the international banker Bruce Rappaport, “thought to have ties to US and Israeli intelligence.” (Alfred Hartmann, a board member of BCCI, was both vice-chairman of Rappaport’s Swiss bank, Bank of New York-Intermaritime, and also head of BCCI’s Swiss subsidiary, the Banque de Commerce et de Placements).105
The collapse of BCCI in 1991 did not see an end to systematic Saudi-financed political corruption in the U.S. and elsewhere. After a proposed major arms sale in the 1980s met enhanced opposition in Congress from the Israeli lobby, Saudi Arabia negotiated a multi-billion pound long-term contract with the United Kingdom – the so-called al-Yamamah deal. It developed much later that overpayments for the purchased weapons were siphoned off into a huge slush fund for political payoffs, including “hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.”106 According to Robert Lacey, the payments to Prince Bandar were said to total one billion pounds over more than a decade, including “a suitcase containing more than $10 million” that went to a Vatican priest for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party.107
As we saw earlier. the CIA had “laundered over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”108 These practices, in other words, survived the legal efforts to end them.
Conclusion: A Supranational Deep StateThe complex milieu of Khashoggi, the BCCI, and the Safari Club can be characterized as a supranational deep state, whose organic links to the CIA may have helped consolidate it. It is clear however that decisions taken at this level by the Safari Club and BCCI were in no way guided by the political determinations of those elected to power in Washington. On the contrary, Prince Turki’s candid remarks revealed that the Safari Club (with the alleged participation of two former CIA Directors, Bush and Helms) was expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions in Washington.
A former Turkish president and prime minister once commented that the Turkish deep state was the real state, and the public state was only a “spare state,” not the real one.109 A better understanding of the American deep state is necessary, if we are to prevent it from assuming permanently the same role. Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here. Notes1 Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52. 2 E.g. Marc Ambinder and D.G. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (New York: Wiley, 2013); cf. John Tirman, “The Quiet Coup: No, Not Egypt. Here,” HuffingtonPost, July 9, 2013: “Now we know: the United States of America is partially governed by a deep state, undemocratic, secret, aligned with intelligence agencies, spying on friend and foe, lawless in almost every respect.” 3 Mike Lofgren, “ A Shadow Government Controls America,” Reader Supported News, February 22, 2014. 4 Grant Barrett, “A Wordnado of Words in 2013,” New York Times, December 21, 2013. 5 Peter Dale Scott, Deep politics and the death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 7. 6 “Tom Hayden discussing the crisis in Venezuela,” Tikkun, February 25, 2014. 7 To take a single telling example, six of Sam Walton’s heirs are now reportedly wealthier than the bottom 30% of Americans, or 94.5 million people (Tim Worstall, “Six Waltons Have More Wealth Than the Bottom 30% of Americans,” Forbes, December 14, 2011). Cf. the devastating picture of a disintegrating America in George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 8 See Kevin Phillips, The politics of rich and poor: wealth and the American electorate in the Reagan aftermath (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). Cf. John T. Stinson, The Reagan Legacy (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009), 146; Timothy Noah, The great divergence: America’s growing inequality crisis and what we can do about it (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). 9 For the impact of railroads on expanded social awareness, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 10 “What is the Deep State?” On Religion [2013]. 11 Gareth Jenkins, “Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War,” Terrorism Monitor, May 1, 2008; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, “9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics,” Global Research, June 11, 2008. For the Susurluk incident, see also Scott, American War Machine, 19-20, etc. 12 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, xi-xii. 13 Lofgren, “ A Shadow Government Controls America.” 14 Quoted in Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, 1. 15 Forbes magazine founder Bertie Charles Forbes wrote six years later: “Picture a party of the nation’s greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily riding hundred[s] of miles South, embarking on a mysterious launch, sneaking onto an island [the appropriately named Jekyll Island] deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned, lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world this strangest, most secret expedition in the history of American finance. I am not romancing; I am giving to the world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was written (B.C. Forbes, Leslie’s Weekly, October 19, 1916; in T. Cushing Daniel, Real money versus false money-bank credits; the most important factor in civilization and least understood by the people. Washington, D.C., The Monetary educational bureau, 1924], 169; cf. B.C. Forbes, Men who are making America [New York: Forbes Publishing Co., 1922], 398; cf. G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve [Westlake Village, CA: American Media, 1994]). Paul Warburg later wrote that “Though eighteen years have since gone by, I do not feel free to give a description of this most interesting conference, concerning which Senator Aldrich pledged all participants to secrecy” (Paul Warburg, The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth [New York, Macmillan, 1930], ZZ). 16 Congress was persuaded to provide perfunctory support of the bailout, under an alleged mysterious threat of martial law. See Peter Dale Scott, “Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and War,” Global Research, January 8, 2009; reprinted in Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, eds., The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century (Montreal, Global Research Publishers. Centre for Research on Globalization, 2010), 219-40; Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “Sen. Inhofe: [Henry] Paulsen [Secretary of the Treasury and former Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs] Threatened Martial Law To Pass Bailout,” LewRockwell.com, November 20, 2008. 17 Richard Helms with William Hood A look over my shoulder: a life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), 82-83. Cf. Scott, American War Machine, 26-28. 18 Laurence H Shoup and William Minter, Imperial brain trust: the Council on Foreign Relations and United States foreign policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). 19 Gordon Thomas, Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6 (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 98. This may have occurred during Dulles’s visit to Europe in the spring of 1947 (James Srodes, Dulles: Master of Spies [Washington: Henry Regnery, 1999], 392). 20 Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War secret intelligence (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2001), 343. Dulles also chaired the executive committee of the companion National Committee for a Free Europe (behind the Iron Curtain), whose legal affairs were handled by Sullivan and Cromwell (Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 204. 21 Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 189; citing Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 172; see also Church Committee, Final Report, Book 4, 28-29. 22 David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Espionage Establishment (New York: Random House, 1967), 166; Scott, Road to 9/11, 13. 23 “In January 1946 Dulles outlined in some detail a reconstruction plan that is one of the earliest notions of what would, a year later, be known as the Marshall Plan” (Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, 374). 24 Tim Weiner, Legacy of ashes: the history of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 28. 25 Douglas Valentine, “The French Connection Revisited: The CIA, Irving Brown, and Drug Smuggling as Political Warfare,” Covert Action. 26 Norbert Schlei, “Japan’s ‘M-Fund’ Memorandum, January 7, 1991,“ JPRI [Japan Policy Research Institute] Working Paper No. 11: July 1995: “Incident to the revision of the Security Treaty [in 1960], Vice President Nixon agreed to turn over exclusive control of the M-Fund to Japan. It has been alleged that this action by Nixon was part of a corrupt political bargain, whereby it was agreed that if Japan would assist him to become President of the United States, Nixon would agree to release control of the Fund to Japan and, if he became President, would return Okinawa to Japan.” 27 “C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50’s and 60’s,” New York Times, October 9, 1994. Cf. Scott, American War Machine, 93-94, 298-99; citing Chalmers Johnson, “The 1955 System and the American Connection: A Bibliographic Introduction,” JPRI [Japan Policy Research Institute] Working Paper No. 11: July 1995. 28 Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave, Gold warriors: America’s secret recovery of Yamashita’s gold (London: Verso, 2003). Cf. Richard Hoyt, Old Soldiers Sometimes Lie (New York: Forge, 2002), 80. 29 Scott, American War Machine, 94, etc. 30 Scott, American War Machine, 31 Norman Mailer, “A Harlot High and Low: Reconnoitering Through the Secret Government,” New York, August 16, 1976 (Hughes); Michael Schaller, Altered states: the United States and Japan since the occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 294 (Lockheed). 32 Johnson, “The 1955 System and the American Connection.” 33 David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 89-90. Cf. Jonathan Marshall, in William O. Walker, III, ed., Drug control policy: essays in historical and comparative perspective (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 108: “Yoshio Kodama’s fortune, built of profits from tungsten and opium, established the party that today rules Japan…. Kodama contributed to the pervasive corruption of Japanese politics by steering huge corporate contributions into the coffers of favored LDP members. This pattern culminated in the Lockheed scandal, which revealed that multi-million-dollar payoff by American aerospace firms had swayed key procurement decisions by Japan’s national airline and defense establishment and raised the possibility that the CIA had used Kodama and corporate funds to influence Japanese politics. The money-laundering channel used for Lockheed’s bribes was favored both by the CIA and international drug traffickers.” 34 Thomas Fensch, ed. The C.I.A. and the U-2 Program: 1954-1974 (The Woodlands, TX: New Century Books, 2001). 35 William D. Hartung, Prophets of war: Lockheed Martin and the making of the military-industrial complex (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 121; David Boulton, The Grease Machine (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 97 (friends). 36 Andrew Feinstein, The shadow world: inside the global arms trade (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 265; Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar (New York: Viking, 1977), 135-36. 37 Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with guns: authoritarian development and U.S.-Indonesian relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 142; quoting from CIA, “Political Action Project,”, November 19, 1964; FRUS, 1964-1968, 26:181-84. 38 In addition there was “a US deal to deliver 200 light aircraft to the Indonesian Army in July 1965.” The aircraft went to the army’s Diponegoro division, which “ as well as supplying the bulk of the [September 30] “coup” personnel in Java, … also provided the bulk of the personnel for its suppression” (Nathaniel Mehr, Constructive bloodbath’ in Indonesia: the United States, Britain and the mass killings of 1965-66 [Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 2009], 36). 39 Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs, 58, Summer 1985,; citing United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations, Multinational corporations and United States foreign policy, hearings before the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations (Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1973-1976). 40 Masashi Nishihara, The Japanese and Sukarno’s Indonesia: Tokyo-Jakarta relations, 1951-1966 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976), 171, 194, 202; Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno.” 41 Fortune, July 1973, 154, cf. Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1967. 42 John Dumbrell and Axel R Schäfer (eds.), America’s ‘special relationships’: foreign and domestic aspects of the politics of alliance (London: Routledge, 2009), 187. 43 John Foster Dulles to Lord McGowan, Chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries; in Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, A law unto itself: the untold story of the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell (New York: Morrow, 1988), 127. 44 Charles T. O’Reilly, Forgotten Battles: Italy’s War of Liberation, 1943-1945 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 288; Peter Dale Scott, “How Allen Dulles and the SS Preserved Each Other,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, 25 (Winter 1986), 4-14. Dulles’s plans to use SS resources in post-war Germany cab be seen as part of a successful plan to frustrate the implementation of Roosevelt’s so-called Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize Germany. 45 Stephen Dorril, MI6, 659-660. 46Ovid Demaris, Dirty Business: The Corporate-Political Money-Power Game (New York: Avon, 1974), 213-14. 47 J.P.D. Dunbabin, International relations since 1945 : a history in two volumes (London: Longman, 1994), Vol 2, 344. The boycott is denied without argumentation in Exxon’s corporate history (Bennett H. Wall et al., Growth in a changing environment: a history of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), Exxon Corporation, 1950-1975 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), Vol. 4, 476: “Despite oft-printed statements to the contrary, the oil majors did not conspire to boycott NIOC oil.” 48 Robert Palmer Smith, Darkest truths of black gold: an oil industry executive breaks the industry’s code of silence (New York: iUniverse, 2007), 256. In July 1952 Mossadeq attempted to break the embargo by contracting to sell oil to a small private Italian oil firm. The manoeuver was frustrated by the British Royal Navy, which in July 1952 intercepted the Italian tanker Rose Mary and redirected it to Aden. The news dissuaded other tankers from trying to reach Abadan (Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950-1954 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1997], 130; Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s men: an American coup and the roots of Middle East terror Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003], 136). 49 Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle: Iran’s Oil Nationalization and Its Aftermath (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 198-99 (Churchill); Robert Moskin, American Statecraft: The Story of the U.S. Foreign Service (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 627-28 (Harriman). 50 Demaris, Dirty Business, 214-25: “The incoming Eisenhower Administration… quickly dropped the criminal case. The civil suit that was instituted alleged that the five American oil companies violated the Sherman Antitrust and the Wilson Tariff Acts by conspiring to divide and control foreign production and distribution…. An inadequate staff was assigned to the case and the action finally petered out a decade later with a couple of meaningless consent decrees.” 51 Robert Sherrill, The oil follies of 1970-1980: how the petroleum industry stole the show (and much more besides) (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 221). 52 William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling, Oil in troubled waters: perceptions, politics, and the battle over offshore drilling (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1994); 17; citing Shukri Mohammed Ghanem, OPEC, the Rise and Fall of an Exclusive Club (London : KPI, 1986); Mira Wilkins, “The Oil Companies in Perspective,” in Raymond Vernon (ed.), The Oil Crisis (New York: Norton, 1976). 53 William Roger Louis, “Britain and the Overthrow of Mossadeq,” in Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne (eds.), Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 coup in Iran (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 168. Cf. William R. Clark, Petrodollar warfare: oil, Iraq and the future of the dollar (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 2005), 125: “[T]he Dulles brothers had already conceived a plot when Eisenhower became president in January 1953.” 54 Scot Macdonald, Rolling the iron dice : historical analogies and decisions to use military force in regional contingencies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 98. Cf. Richard H. Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 67. Allen Dulles played a personal role in TP/AJAX, by flying to Italy and persuading the frightened Shah to return to Tehran. 55 In the past, wishing to dissociate the term “deep state” from organizational connotations, I have written of the American “deep state” as “a milieu both inside and outside government with the power to steer the history of the public state and sometimes redirect it” (“William Pawley, the Kennedy Assassination, and Watergate,” Global Research, November 29, 2012. But because there are extra-governmental structural components to the deep state, it might be better to think of it as not just a milieu, but more analogous to an oligopolistic market. 56 See Chalmers A Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 218-19; Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso Books, 2011), 212. 57 Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 6. 58 Glenn Greenwald, “Mike McConnell, the WashPost & the dangers of sleazy corporatism,” Salon, March 29, 2010. 59 George H. W. Bush was an adviser to Carlyle, which in its early days “backed a management-led buyout of Caterair and appointed George W Bush to the board” (Jamie Doward, “Bush Sr’s Carlyle Group Gets Fat On War And Conflict,” The Observer, March 25, 2003.) 60 Lofgren, “ A Shadow Government Controls America.” 61 Booz Allen Hamilton’s headquarters is now in McLean, Virginia, close to the HQ of the CIA. 62 Art Kleiner, Booz Allen Hamilton: Helping Clients Envision the Future (Old Saybrook, CT: Greenwich Publishing, 2004), 43. 63 John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006.), 139. Cf. Christine N. Halili, Philippine History (Manila: Rex Book Store, 2004), 258 (Philippines land distribution). 64 Miles Copeland, The Game Player: the confessions of the CIA’s original political operative (London: Aurum Press, 1989), 158. 65 Ephraim Kahana and Muhammad Suwaed, Historical dictionary of Middle Eastern intelligence (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 65 {“advisor”); Jack O’Connell, King’s Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 2011), 20 (channel). 66 The BCCI Affair: BCCI, the CIA and Foreign Intelligence, Report to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations by John Kerry and Hank Brown, December 1992; 102nd Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Print 102-140 (“agent”). 67 William D. Hartung, Prophets of war: Lockheed Martin and the making of the military-industrial complex (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 126. 68 Copeland, The Game Player, 231. 69 Copeland, The Game Player, 233. 70 Copeland, The Game Player, 239. 71 E.g. Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 380. 72 Larry J. Kolb, Overworld: The Life and Times of a Reluctant Spy [New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2004], 237-38. Cf. Copeland, The Game Player, 230, 262-63; Ronald Kessler, The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi (New York: Warner Books), 300-01: “[O]n May 17, 1983, [Khashoggi] submitted to President Reagan a confidential ‘yellow paper’ [which] proposed an economic aid program similar to the 1949 Marshall Plan developed by the U.S. for Europe. Called a Peace Fund, it would provide up to $300 billion in regional economic aid from the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to Israel and any Arab country that signed a peace treaty with it.” 73 Peter Dale Scott, “Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection,” 911truth.org, October 12, 2008; American War Machine, 160-65. 74 “The BCCI Affair.” Khashoggi’s status had declined, but by no means vanished. As late as 2003, Khashoggi was negotiating with Richard Perle, a member of the Cheney-Rumsfeld clique who at the time was still Chairman of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, to invest considerable Saudi money in Perle’s company Trireme (Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, 3/17/03). 75 Copeland, Game Player, 239; cf. 2128. 76 Kessler, The Richest Man in the World, 84, 188, etc.; Scott, American War Machine, 158-62. 77 “Moss, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 19 April 1967, NARA #104-10122-10006; CIA Inspector General’s Report on CIA-Mafia Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, NARA # 104-10213-10101, p. 38. Cf. memo of 7 November 1962 in CIA’s Edward K. Moss folder, p. 26, NARA #1994.05.03.10:54:53:780005. 78 “Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI Memorandum of January 16, 1961 to A. H. Belmont, p. 2, 105-76826-20; NARA #124-90055-10139. Cf. “Moss, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 14 May 1973, in Meyer Lansky Security File, p. 9, NARA #1993.08.13.17:42:12:560059; CIA letter of 16 December 1960 to FBI, FBI file 105-76826-18; NARA #124-90055-10133. The CIA itself had notified the FBI on December 16, 1960, that Julia “Cellino” had advised that her brothers “have long been associated in the narcotics and white slavery rackets in Cuba (CIA letter of 16 December 1960 to Director, FBI, FBI File 105-76826-18; NARA #124-90055-10133; apparently no copy of this letter has been released from CIA files). 79 Kessler, Richest Man in the World, 29 (Yassin), 275–78 (Khashoggi). A friend of Khashoggi’s, Larry Kolb, reports that Khashoggi himself essentially corroborated the story that Khashoggi and John Kennedy had a friendship in the 1950s that “evolved primarily out of whoring together” (Larry J. Kolb, Overworld: The Life and Times of a Reluctant Spy [New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2004], 236). The woman who destroyed the presidential aspirations of Senator Gary Hart in 1987 was one of Khashoggi’s many girls. 80 Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000), 283. Cf. Kessler, The Richest Man in the World, 171: Khashoggi told the prosecutors “that he churned millions through the tiny [Rebozo] bank to win favor with the president.” 81 Investigative reporter Jim Hougan reports the incredulity of congressional investigators that Lockheed was the only large corporation not to have made a contribution to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign (Hougan, Spooks, 457–58. 82 Scott, Road to 9/11, 35; citing Summers, Arrogance of Power, 283; Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), 43. (Baer reports the year of the briefcase as 1968, not 1972.) Kolb (“unequivocally, and from personal experience”) denies the briefcase story (Overworld, 299). 83 Scott, Deep politics and the death of JFK, 234-39. 84 Kessler, Richest Man in the World, 129, 160-61. When Hughes flew from Las Vegas to the Paradise Island casino in the Bahamas (where Edward Moss’s brother-in-law Eddie Cellini was casino manager, he did so on a Khashoggi plane. (Kessler, Richest Man, 149-50). 85 Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of Power, 242, 252; Jim Hougan, Spooks, 398. Cf. Denny Walsh, New York Times, January 21, 1974; Gerth, in Government by Gunplay, 137-39. 86 Block, Masters of Paradise, 94-96; Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of Power, 244-45. Benguet Mines have also been associated with Yamashita’s gold (Seagrave, Gold Warriors, 147; Scott, American War Machine, 322n15). 87 Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of Power, 244-45, 253-54. 88 Scott, American War Machine, 71-72. Cf. Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980: “In 1951, Mr. Helliwell helped set up and run Sea Supply Corp., a concern controlled by the CIA as a front. For almost 10 years, Sea Supply was used to supply huge amounts of weapons and equipment to 10,000 Nationalist Chinese [KMT] troops in Burma as well as to Thailand’s police.” 89 In the course of Operation Safehaven, the U.S. Third Army took an SS major “on several trips to Italy and Austria, and, as a result of these preliminary trips, over $500,000 in gold, as well as jewels, were recovered” (Anthony Cave Brown, The Secret War Report of the OSS New York: Berkeley, 1976], 565-66). 90 Who’s who in Finance and Industry, Marquis Who’s Who, 1979, 568. 91 Kessler, Richest Man in the World, 238-41; Scott, American War Machine, 161-62. 92 The operation kept the name “Safari Club” even after moving from Khashoggi’s Club to a permanent headquarters in Cairo. 93 Ibrahim Warde, The price of fear: the truth behind the financial war on terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 133. Cf. Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, 66, 72, 76. 94 Christopher Byron, “The Senate look at BCCI,” New York Magazine, October 28, 1991, 20–21. 95 Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, 66. Cf. John Cooley, Unholy Wars (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 24-27. 96 Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror: the rogue CIA and the legacy of America’s private intelligence network (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 104-05. Kevin Phillips also notes that “Bush cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence” (Kevin Phillips, “The Barrelling Bushes,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2004). 97 Trento, Prelude to terror, 113-14. 98 Phillips, “The Barrelling Bushes,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2004. 99 Trento, Prelude to Terror, 139. 100 There is no published evidence that Copeland was involved in the Safari Club covert operations. But it may be significant that Copeland’s activity of advising the Egyptian Army became after the creation of the Safari Club a franchise of a “private” U.S. firm, J.J. Cappucci and Associates, owned by Theodore Shackley (Trento, Prelude to Terror, 150, 247). 101 Kerry-Brown Report, Part 11, “BCCI, the CIA and Foreign Intelligence.” 102 Dan Bawley, Corporate Governance and Accountability: What Role for the Regulator, Director, and Auditor? (Westport, CT: Quorum, 1999). 37. 103 Bawley, Corporate Governance and Accountability, 37. 104 “Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world.” New Scientist, October 24, 2011. 105 Scott, American War Conspiracy, 163; quoting from Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 384 (“ties”). 106 “Saudi prince ‘received arms cash’,” BBC, June 7, 2007. It is unclear whether payments continued after 2001, when the UK signed the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention, making such overpayments illegal. 107 Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 108. 108 Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 189; citing Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 172; see also Church Committee, Final Report, Book 4, 28-29. 109 Former Turkish President and Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel commented that “In our country… there is one deep state and one other state…. The state that should be real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one” (Jon Gorvett, “Turkey’s ‘Deep State’ Surfaces in Former President’s Words, Deeds in Kurdish Town,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2006);, quoted in Scott, American War Machine, 24. [image sources: |
|
Numbers don’t lieJanuary 3, 2014 Dror Eydar In his data-filled book “How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too),” (In English) which was recently published in Hebrew, David Goldman offers a fresh view on the new historical reality unfolding before our eyes.
A conversation with David Goldman can take you through different worlds and times. It is a real pleasure to speak with an intellectual with his breadth of knowledge. Goldman’s book “How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)” has recently been published in Hebrew by a new publishers, Sela Meir. For years, Goldman was a popular columnist for the Asia Times under the pen-name of Spengler. Oswald Spengler, the author of “Decline of the West,” published after the First World War, was probably the first to claim that modernity would cause a demographic decline which would bring about the demise of Western civilization. In his data-filled book, Goldman offers a fresh view on the new historical reality unfolding before our eyes.
My starting point was from the observation that major countries of the west were disappearing. I then began investigating why that should be the case. During the last few years, some really authoritative research showed the relations between religion and fertility. I don’t think that this is so much a religious issue but a sense of confidence in the future. Religious faith is one expression of confidence in the future.
You surprised me in all that regards Islam. It has been known for some time that Europe is sinking demographically, but that this should be extended to the Muslims, too?
Indeed, Muslim birthrates are falling even in Europe. The single factor that best explains fertility across the whole Muslim world is literacy. Just on a purely statistical basis one can explain 60 percent of the variations of fertility on the base of literacy. And where you have detailed data, for example in Iran or Turkey, you can show a very strong differential in fertility between women with an elementary school education, a high school education and a college education. This is also exactly what is happening in Israel, and in Judea and Samaria. I am aware that convergence of fertility is an enormously controversial issue. Yet it is clear that there has been a convergence.
What about Iran?In the case of Iran, we have something that has literally never been seen in all of world history, astounding demographers. The average Iranian comes from a family of seven children. For the average Iranian today, if you exclude some of the minorities, fertility is 1.6 to 1.7.
The Iranian leadership speaks about this issue publically and warns against a demographic catastrophe. Now, the west has a demographic problem too, but for a rich country and a poor country this is somewhat different. On current trends, by 2040 Iran will have an elderly-dependent ratio of 30%. And this is in a country with a personal income of merely a tenth of the United States! Going from 8% of elderly dependence in 2005 to 30% in 2040 — this is a catastrophe. No poor country in the world can deal with that kind of problem. So at this point it becomes a major strategic factor. From the grim viewpoint of the current Iranian leadership, this encourages adventurism.
I do not view demographics as destiny, but I do think that it is an important factor in Iranian calculations. They are at the peak of their power; they have a big young generation; they feel they have the historic opportunity to establish Shiite dominance in the Middle East. If they lose this opportunity now, they may never have another. So their willingness to take risks, including risks related to developing weapons, supporting terrorism, intervening in Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere, is all the greater.
And this is out of their understanding that they are shrinking?They are indeed shrinking. They are at the maximum of their demographic power now. Look at it from the Iranian standpoint — next door to them is Pakistan, which still has a very high birth rate. The military-age population of Pakistan is three times that of Iran. In another generation it will be even larger. Pakistan has nuclear weapons and is in dispute with Iran over Baluchistan. Iran’s other neighbors, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, will also swamp it demographically within a generation. If Iran does not maximize its power now, it may never have another opportunity to do so. So from an Iranian standpoint, there is a certain element of rational calculation in its conduct.
There is no reason to attribute apocalyptic religious beliefs to the Iranian leadership. However, if they do not establish their Shiite crescent dominance in the next 5 or 10 years, their historical opportunity to do so may have passed forever, and I think that that encourages their adventurous behavior and makes them more dangerous. Accordingly, I suspect that the Iranians want to develop nuclear weapons no matter what they say.
How do you understand the recent negotiations of the five superpowers with Iran?I believe that the Iranians are simply trying to buy time to acquire nuclear weapons. I think they are pursuing a North Korean strategy. Once North Korea got their nuclear weapons, everyone had to be nice to them. Even the Chinese are afraid to tamper with the North Koreans. If, God forbid, Iran gets nuclear weapons, it will be a real disaster and an intractable problem. As an American, my view is that the United States should stop them from getting nuclear weapons by any means we can, including force.
How do you explain the Obama administration’s behavior on this issue?Well, I think Obama has a deeply sentimental attachment to anti-colonialism. There is a passage in his autobiographic book “Dreams of My Father” in which Obama writes that although in Indonesia people were very poor, and might have to carry firewood for hours to cook their dinner, but they had a culture, traditions, and a sense of identity that Americans lacked, and in a sense, were thus better off.
His identification with third world peoples fighting colonialism is something which he talked about quite openly. That is his family background. His father was a Kenyan Marxist Muslim. His stepfather was a Muslim, too, and his mother spent her life defending local Indonesian craftsmen against globalization. So that was how he was brought up.
This is why I think Obama will give the Iranians the benefit of the doubt. He clearly thinks that the west was in the wrong with the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh [Iranian prime minister in the early 1950s]. You know, the CIA actually issued an apology for having overthrown Mossadegh. That is quite unusual. The Obama administration clearly believes that the Iranians have a reason to be suspicious and resentful of the west. As for myself, I believe his sentimentality and ideology overwhelm his good judgment.
In your book you criticize political science and the American attempt to put civilizations, cultures and nations in rationalistic frames of work.
Yes, there has been an underlying consensus in the U.S. between democrats and republicans that the American political system can be exported. That if you establish democratic institutions the democratic forms will transform attitudes. In Marxist terms: being determines consciousness. When the Arab spring came up, this was the mainstream view of both political parties in the U.S. — namely, that if you had Islamic democracy, the democratic elements will outweigh the Islamist elements, and that the natural evolution of the Arab world would come to resemble something like Turkey. As we have seen more recently, Turkey is not a democratic successful story.
At the same time, the so-called Arab spring has collapsed completely. Egypt got the best deal it could possibly get, with the support of Saudi Arabia. This is a country that cannot feed itself, and the Saudis are willing to subsidize Gen. [Abdel-Fattah] el-Sissi but not [Mohammed] Morsi. As you know, both the Obama administration and Republican figures deplored the military takeover on account that it stopped the evolution of Egyptian democracy. That in my view is a characteristically American flaw. This is not a Democratic or Republican view. It is a distorted American view of the world.
In America everybody gets along well. We get on fine with Muslims, Hindus and everybody. Consequently, we assume that if everybody gets along here why shouldn’t everyone get along outside of America? But it must be remembered that America had a very different history. The people who came to America did not care so much about their ethnic identity. In America, your ethnic identity becomes diluted. American Muslims are typically better educated and earn more than native-born Americans. On the other hand, they have less control over their children than they would have in a Muslim country. Yet, although there are some Muslim extremists in America, the American Muslim minority chose to become Americans. The same is not necessarily true for the Muslims who stayed home, in the countries of origin.
American democracy is unique. We created a new kind of ethnicity which is not ethnic at all. This is a country built on a legal philosophical principle. Other countries which are rooted in ethnicity have much greater difficulty putting the emphasis on individual rights, as opposed to collective identity. Collective identity has been the norm for most countries. The idea of individual identity, however, is a rare thing. The idea of covenant as the foundation of western democracy is built into American history and founding, into the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution. This is what makes America a very hospitable place for everyone, particularly for Jews. But this covenantal idea is very hard to export, even perhaps impossible to export.
How do you explain that out of all world problems, the U.S. secretary of state chooses to concentrate mainly on the dispute between ourselves and the Palestinians?Because he thinks he can push Israel around. The U.S. is completely impotent in regards to Iraq, to central Asia. Obama won’t do anything about Iran, but thinks that because Israel is dependent on the United States it can force Israel to be part of their social experiment, their great utopian social experiment. That is what people like [U.S. Secretary of State] John Kerry do — they try to make the world better by forcing people to conform to their ideological inclinations.
This is really a terrible situation for Israel because it clearly is in need of the United States. I don’t get involved in Israeli politics, but as a simple matter of logic, I think it would be very dangerous for Israel to accept what Kerry is talking about. Certainly if there is an imposed settlement that Israel will reject, there will be penalties. Yet, whatever the penalties are, I prefer to accept those penalties than commit suicide. I think it is a real disgrace.
Where is the U.S. Jewry in all this?I am very disappointed in the American Jewish community in the U.S.
What the data shows is that liberal Jews are soon to be former Jews. The rate of intermarriage, assimilation, loss of Jewish identity, is unprecedented. U.S. Jewry is gradually sinking into the general population.
So how do you explain their behavior?You know, I came from a left-wing, secular background myself. I was born in New York City. Like most Jews, my observance consisted merely of a limited number of rituals. Americans have enormous pressure to assimilate and be part of the general mass of America. The idea of identifying with the Jewish people in America looks like an ethnic identification. Thus, among the younger Jewish generation there is a tendency to be embarrassed by Israeli passion, drive, and intensity. Culturally they are very different.
The situation of contemporary American Jews can be compared to German Jewry at the end of the nineteenth century. I see many similarities.I think you are exactly right. And if American Jews are “whoring after strange gods,” this god is [Emanuel] Kant; the idea of universal peace and the thought that rationalism is the solution to all problems. That’s the reigning ideology. Kant was the substitute god of German Jews from Hermann Cohen on. And although most American Jews don’t know who Kant is, they nonetheless have adopted his way of thinking. That is why I wrote this book.
The idea that everyone’s problems can be solved by rational means is the dominant ideology of liberalism. If that’s true, Israel is an anomaly. My argument is that you cannot solve the problems of most people because most people don’t want their problems solved. They’ll cling to their prejudices, their ethnicity, their ideology, and eventually disappear. And the norm for peoples is to disappear. And most peoples disappear because they lose the will to live. That is typical of history. To survive is atypical. In my book I attempted to call attention to the facts that most peoples die because they lose the will to live; not because Emanuel Kant or some other genius did not come up with a solution to their problems. But this is antithetical to liberalism.
Why is this?Because liberalism is a fanatical belief in the human intellect to solve all problems. It is a form of paganism. American culture, except for the 30% or so which is seriously Christian, believes in worship of the self. There are two ways to worship the self. You can worship your body or your brain. You worship your body — you are a narcissist; you worship your brain — you are a rationalist.
In your book, you write about the relationship between religious belief and political regime, differentiating between the Judeo-Christian culture and the Muslim culture.We spoke earlier about the difference between a covenantal society and one based on collective identity. The idea of human individual worth and creativity is fundamental to Judaism. Judaism is based on the concept that the covenant is a partnership between God and man; That God condescends to become partner with man. Man has godlike qualities and in fact can change nature. This idea is somewhat attenuated in Christianity but the idea of covenant is still very much part of it.
The Muslim idea makes God absolutely transcendent, absolutely remote. Man is here below. God is absolutely powerful. God can arbitrarily shift and change laws of physics. God decides what will happen moment to moment. If I fire a bullet and it goes through your head that is Allah’s will. We have no real individual capacity. This religion does not favor the idea of individual freedom, individual self-determination or individual creativity. And for the past nine centuries, Islam has produced very little in the way of science, art, literature, or political innovation, whereas Jewish and Christian societies have done so, with all their flaws.
I am not saying that Muslim democracy is impossible, but we have never seen a real example of it. Turkey was supposed to be that example but failed in this. Democracy is not an easy system to maintain. Democracy means: I vote for someone I don’t know. He’s not a member of my family. Off that person goes to a capital, hundreds of miles away, and sits and bargains with other people chosen in a similar way, and this group of people might come up with a decision that I hate, but because I believe in the process I will be loyal to that decision.
In a Muslim society, where identity is first of all to clan and tribe, nobody trusts people they don’t know. They define their interests according to the interests of their group. The idea of a political process and a legislature is completely abstract. It is very hard to win that kind of loyalty. The idea of putting one’s faith in that kind of abstraction requires either a religious belief or something similar to a religious belief in the dignity and morals of the individual. That is the western idea.
What policy are you proposing to the United States and the west in general?My argument is that it is not our job to fix these countries, but to secure ourselves against the consequences of their decline. Call this a cold-blooded and self-interested policy, if you wish. The west is not capable of fixing these problems as long as those countries are in the grip of an ideology which leads to their decline. Therefore, we should reward our friends and intimidate our enemies. We should make clear to the Iranians that developing nuclear weapons will cause them terrible harm. I think we should have used military force before this to interrupt the Iranian nuclear development.
How do you convince your average American that they have an interest to support Israel?Well, I would ask the average American how they would feel if an Iranian nuclear bomb went off in an American city. Iran is the major state-sponsor for terror, so if Iran gets nuclear weapons, terrorism may get nuclear weapons. Israel is America’s most important ally in combatting terrorism. Just because we haven’t had a mass terror incident since 9/11 it doesn’t mean that we’re safe. So American security interests are served by strategic ties with Israel.
Secondly, I would say that, as a matter of justice, we Americans should be allied with peoples who share our values. And Israel’s thriving and vibrant democracy, founded on the same idea of covenant that is at the foundation of America, is a country we should support by virtue of our own principles. By supporting the peoples who share our principles we show that we take our own principles seriously, which strengthens us.
What do you have to say to the people of Israel, as a visitor to our country?For all your problems, and Israel surely has many problems, by many standards you are the most successful society in the world. Certainly demographically Israel is the most successful society in the industrial world. Also in terms of technological and cultural achievement. Israel should think very deeply about what makes it so successful and cultivate those qualities, and not take to heart the criticism of the rest of the world — I would attribute a great deal of that to jealousy. Be proud of what you have accomplished and stick to your own identity, it is the source of your accomplishments. |
|
America’s Achilles’ HeelSubmitted by Tyler Durden on 12May2015 https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-12/americas-achilles-heel
Submitted by Dmitry Orlov via Club Orlov blog, Last Saturday, a massive Victory Parade was held in Moscow commemorating the 70-year anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Red Army and the erection of the Soviet flag atop the Reichstag in Berlin. There were a few unusual aspects to this parade, which I would like to point out, because they conflict with the western official propaganda narrative.
First, it wasn’t just Russian troops that marched in the parade: the troops of 10 other nations took part in it, including the Chinese honor guard and a contingent of Grenadiers from India. Dignitaries from these nations were present in the stands, and the Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife were seated next to President Vladimir Putin, who, in his speech at the start of the parade, warned against attempts to create a unipolar world—sharp words aimed squarely at the United States and its western allies.
Second, a look at the military hardware that rolled through Red Square or flew over it would indicate that, short of an outright nuclear mutual self-annihilation, there isn’t much that the US military could throw at Russia that Russia couldn’t neutralize.
One small detail about the parade is nevertheless stunning: Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, a Tuvan Buddhist and one of the most respected Russian leaders, who presided over the Emergencies Ministry prior to becoming the Defense Minister, did something none of his predecessors ever did: at the beginning of the ceremony, he made the sign of the cross, in the Russian Orthodox manner. This simple gesture transformed the parade from a display of military pomp to a sacred ritual. Then followed the slow march with two flags side by side: the Russian flag, and the Soviet flag that flew on top of the Reichstag in Berlin on Victory Day 70 years ago. The march was accompanied by a popular World War II song? Its title? “The Sacred War.” The message is clear: the Russian military, and the Russian people, have put themselves in God’s hands, to do God’s work, to once again sacrifice themselves to save the world from the ravages of an evil empire. Russia: Millions take part in Immortal Regiment marches across the countryThe immortal regiment: heroes of the Great Patriotic War have returned into the streets of the heroic cityWWII Victory Day special coverage | Battle of Stalingrad veteran Evgeniy Kuropatkov
Kids in Russia practice their May 9 Victory Day routine & the box is for sending letters to the frontlineIf you try to dismiss any of this as Russian state propaganda, then here is something else you should be aware of. Did you hear of the spontaneously organized procession in which, after the official parade, half a million people marched through Moscow with portraits of their relatives who died in World War II? The event was called “The Eternal Regiment” (??????????? ????). Similar processions took place in many cities throughout Russia, and the total number of participants is estimated at around 4 million. Western press either panned it or billed it as an attempt by Putin to whip up anti-western sentiment. Now that sort of “press coverage,” my fellow space travelers, is pure propaganda! No, it was an enthusiastic, spontaneous outpouring of genuine public sentiment. If you think about it just a tiny bit, nothing on this scale could be contrived artificially, and the thought that millions of people would prostitute their dead for propaganda purposes is, frankly, both cynical and insulting. * * *
Instead of collapsing quietly, the US has decided to pick a fight with Russia. It appears to have already lost the fight, but a question remains: How many more countries will the US manage to destroy before the reality of its inevitable defeat and disintegration finally catches up with it?
As Putin said last summer when speaking at the Seliger youth forum, “I get the feeling that no matter what the Americans touch, they end up with Libya or Iraq.” Indeed, the Americans have been on a tear, destroying one country after another. Iraq has been dismembered, Libya is a no-go zone, Syria is a humanitarian disaster, Egypt is a military dictatorship executing a program of mass imprisonment. The latest fiasco is Yemen, where the pro-American government was recently overthrown, and the American nationals who found themselves trapped there had to wait for the Russians and the Chinese to extract them and send them home. But it was the previous American foreign policy fiasco, in the Ukraine, which prompted the Russians, along with the Chinese, to signal that the US has taken a step too far, and that all further steps will result in automatic escalation.
The Russian plan, along with China, India, and much of the rest of the world, is to prepare for war with the US, but to do everything possible to avoid it. Time is on their side, because with each passing day they become stronger while America grows weaker. But while this process runs its course, America might “touch” a few more countries, turning them into a Libya or an Iraq. Is Greece next on the list? What about throwing under the bus the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), which are now NATO members (i.e., sacrificial lambs)? Estonia is a short drive from Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, it has a large Russian population, it has a majority-Russian capital city, and it has a rabidly anti-Russian government. Of those four facts, just one is incongruous. Is it being set up to self-destruct? Some Central Asian republics, in Russia’s ticklish underbelly, might be ripe for being “touched” too.
There is no question that the Americans will continue to try to create mischief around the world, “touching” vulnerable, exploitable countries, for as long as they can. But there is another question that deserves to be asked: Do the Americans “touch” themselves? Because if they do, then the next candidate for extreme makeover into a bombed-out wasteland might be the United States itself. Let’s consider this option.
As the events in Ferguson, and more recently in Baltimore, have indicated, the tensions between African-Americans and the police have escalated to a point where explosions become likely. The American “war on drugs” has been essentially a war on young black (and Latino) men; about a third of young blacks are behind bars. They also run a high risk of being shot by the police. To be fair, the police also run a high risk of getting shot by young black males, causing them to be jumpy and to overreact. Given the gradually collapsing economy—close to 100 million working-age Americans are unemployed (“outside the labor force,” if you wish to split hairs)—it would seem that for an ever-increasing chunk of the population cooperating with the authorities is no longer a useful strategy: you get locked up or killed anyway, but you get none of the temporary benefits that come from ignoring the law.
There is an interesting asymmetry in the American media’s ability to block out information about civil unrest and insurgency: if it is happening overseas, then news of it can be carefully calibrated or suppressed outright. (Did American television tell you about the recent resumption of shelling of civilian districts by the Ukrainian military? Of course not!) This is possible because Americans are notoriously narcissistic and largely indifferent to the rest of the world, of which most of them know little, and what they think they know is often wrong. But if the unrest is within the US itself, then the various media outlets find themselves competing against each other in who can sensationalize it better, in order to get more viewership, and more advertising revenue. The mainstream media in the US is tightly controlled by a handful of large conglomerates, making it one big monopoly on information, but at the level of selling advertising market principles still prevail.
Thus there is the potential for a positive feedback loop: more civil unrest generates more sensationalized news coverage, which in turn amplifies the civil unrest, which further sensationalizes the news coverage. And there is a second positive feedback loop as well: the more civil unrest there is, the more the police overreact in trying to control the situation, thereby generating more rage, amplifying the civil unrest. These two positive feedback loops can continue to run out of control for a while, but the end result, in all such recent incidents, is the same: the introduction of National Guard troops and the imposition of curfew and martial law.
The swift introduction of the military might seem a bit odd, considering that most police departments, even small-town ones, have been heavily militarized in recent years, and even the security people at some school districts now have military vehicles and machine guns. But the progression is a natural one. On the one hand, when people who habitually resort to brute force find that it isn’t working, they naturally assume that this is because they aren’t using enough of it. On the other hand, if the criminal justice system is already a travesty and a shambles, then why not just cut through the red tape and impose martial law?
There is an awful lot of weapons of all sorts in the US already, and more will come in all the time as the US is forced to close overseas military bases due to lack of funds. And they will probably get used, for the same reason and in the same fashion that red bricks came to be used in Boston. You see, plenty of red bricks kept coming into Boston aboard British ships, where they were used as ballast for the return trip. This created the impetus to do something with them. But putting up brick buildings is a difficult, demanding process, especially if laborers are always drunk. And so the solution was to use the bricks to pave sidewalks—something one can do on one’s hands and knees. Similarly with the military hardware sloshing back into the US from abroad. It will be used, because it’s there; and it will be used in the stupidest way possible: shooting at one’s own people.
But bad things happen to militaries when they are ordered to shoot at their own people. It is one thing to shoot at “towel-heads” in a far-away land; it is quite another to be ordered shoot at somebody who could be your own brother down the street from where you grew up. Such orders result in fragging (shooting your own officers), in refusal to follow orders, and in attempts to stand up for the other side.
And that’s where things get interesting. Because, you see, if you shoot at, imprison, and otherwise abuse a defenseless civilian population long enough, what you get in response is an armed insurgency. The place insurgencies are easiest to organize is in prison. For instance, ISIS, or the Islamic Caliphate, was masterminded by people who had previously worked for Saddam Hussein, while they were imprisoned by the Americans. They took this opportunity to work out an efficient organizational structure and, upon release, found each other and got down to work. Having a third of young American blacks locked up gives them all the opportunity they need to organize an effective insurgency.
To be effective, an insurgency needs lots of weapons. Here, again, there is a procedure for acquiring military technology that has become almost routine. What weapons are being used by ISIS? Why, of course, American ones, which the Americans provided to the regime in Baghdad, and which ISIS took as trophies when the Iraqi army refused to fight and ran away. And what weapons are being used by the Houthi rebels in Yemen? Why, of course, the American ones, which the Americans provided to the now overthrown pro-American regime there. And what are some of the weapons being used by the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad? Why, of course, American ones, sold to them by the Ukrainian government, which got them from the Americans. There is a pattern here: it seems that whenever Americans arm, train and equip an army, that army stands a really big chance of simply melting away, with the weapons falling into the hands of those who want to use them against American interests. It is hard to see why this same pattern wouldn’t hold once the US places much of itself under military occupation.
And that’s where things get really interesting: a well-armed, well-organized insurgency composed of thoroughly radicalized, outraged people who have absolutely nothing to lose and are fighting for their home turf and their families squaring off against a demoralized, defeated US military that has just failed spectacularly in every country it “touched.”
They say that “You can’t fight city hall.” But what if you have a tank battalion that can control four intersections all around city hall, turrets pointed in all directions, firing at anything that moves? And what if you have enough infantry to go around and ring the doorbells of all the key city hall bureaucrats? Wouldn’t that change one’s odds of victory in fighting city hall?
The US might get to “touch” a few more countries before this scenario unfolds, but it seems likely that (excepting the possibility of all-out war) eventually America will “touch” itself, and then all those countries whose troops marched through Red Square last Saturday won’t have America to kick around any more. |
|
I’ve Been Driving Trucks For 20 Years, I’ll Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not Endby Tyler Durden 31October2021 – https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/ive-been-driving-trucks-20-years-ill-tell-you-why-americas-shipping-crisis-will-not-end Authored by Ryan Johnson via Medium.com, I have a simple question for every ‘expert’ who thinks they understand the root causes of the shipping crisis: No ‘expert’ will answer this question.
I’m a Class A truck driver with experience in nearly every aspect of freight. My experience in the trucking industry of 20 years tells me that nothing is going to change in the shipping industry.
Let’s start with understanding some things about ports.
Outside of dedicated port trucking companies, most trucking companies won’t touch shipping containers. There is a reason for that.
Think of going to the port as going to WalMart on Black Friday, but imagine only ONE cashier for thousands of customers. Think about the lines. Except at a port, there are at least THREE lines to get a container in or out. The first line is the ‘in’ gate, where hundreds of trucks daily have to pass through 5–10 available gates. The second line is waiting to pick up your container. The third line is for waiting to get out. For each of these lines the wait time is a minimum of an hour, and I’ve waited up to 8 hours in the first line just to get into the port. Some ports are worse than others, but excessive wait times are not uncommon. It’s a rare day when a driver gets in and out in under two hours. By ‘rare day’, I mean maybe a handful of times a year. Ports don’t even begin to have enough workers to keep the ports fluid, and it doesn’t matter where you are, coastal or inland port, union or non-union port, it’s the same everywhere.
Furthermore, I’m fortunate enough to be a Teamster — a union driver — an employee paid by the hour. Most port drivers are ‘independent contractors’, leased onto a carrier who is paying them by the load. Whether their load takes two hours, fourteen hours, or three days to complete, they get paid the same, and they have to pay 90% of their truck operating expenses (the carrier might pay the other 10%, but usually less.) The rates paid to non-union drivers for shipping container transport are usually extremely low. In a majority of cases, these drivers don’t come close to my union wages. They pay for all their own repairs and fuel, and all truck related expenses. I honestly don’t understand how many of them can even afford to show up for work. There’s no guarantee of ANY wage (not even minimum wage), and in many cases, these drivers make far below minimum wage. In some cases they work 70 hour weeks and still end up owing money to their carrier.
So when the coastal ports started getting clogged up last spring due to the impacts of COVID on business everywhere, drivers started refusing to show up. Congestion got so bad that instead of being able to do three loads a day, they could only do one. They took a 2/3 pay cut and most of these drivers were working 12 hours a day or more. While carriers were charging increased pandemic shipping rates, none of those rate increases went to the driver wages. Many drivers simply quit. However, while the pickup rate for containers severely decreased, they were still being offloaded from the boats. And it’s only gotten worse.
Earlier this summer, both BNSF and Union Pacific Railways shut down their container yards in the Chicago area for a week for inbound containers. These are some of the busiest ports in the country. They had miles upon miles of stack (container) trains waiting to get in to be unloaded. According to BNSF, containers were sitting in the port 1/3 longer than usual, and they simply ran out of space to put them until some of the ones already on the ground had been picked up. Though they did reopen the area ports, they are still over capacity. Stack trains are still sitting loaded, all over the country, waiting to get into a port to unload. And they have to be unloaded, there is a finite number of railcars. Equipment shortages are a large part of this problem.
One of these critical shortages is the container chassis. A container chassis is the trailer the container sits on. Cranes will load these in port. Chassis are typically container company provided, as trucking companies generally don’t have their own chassis units. They are essential for container trucking. While there are some privately owned chassis, there aren’t enough of those to begin to address the backlog of containers today, and now drivers are sitting around for hours, sometimes days, waiting for chassis.
The impact of the container crisis now hitting residencies in proximity to trucking companies. Containers are being pulled out of the port and dropped anywhere the drivers can find because the trucking company lots are full. Ports are desperate to get containers out so they can unload the new containers coming in by boat. When this happens there is no plan to deliver this freight yet, they are literally just making room for the next ship at the port. This won’t last long, as this just compounds the shortage of chassis. Ports will eventually find themselves unable to move containers out of the port until sitting containers are delivered, emptied, returned, or taken to a storage lot (either loaded or empty) and taken off the chassis there so the chassis can be put back into use. The priority is not delivery, the priority is just to clear the port enough to unload the next boat.
What happens when a container does get to a warehouse? A large portion of international containers must be hand unloaded because the products are not on pallets. It takes a working crew a considerable amount of time to do this, and warehouse work is usually low wage. A lot of it is actually only temp staffed. Many full time warehouse workers got laid off when the pandemic started, and didn’t come back. So warehouses, like everybody else, are chronically short staffed.
When the port trucker gets to the warehouse, they have to wait for a door (you’ve probably seen warehouse buildings with a bank of roll-up doors for trucks on one side of the building.) The warehouses are behind schedule, sometimes by weeks. After maybe a 2 hour wait, the driver gets a door and drops the container — but now often has to pick up an empty, and goes back to the port to wait in line all over again to drop off the empty.
At the warehouse, the delivered freight is unloaded, and it is usually separated and bound to pallets, then shipped out in much smaller quantities to final destination. A container that had a couple dozen pallets of goods on it will go out on multiple trailers to multiple different destinations a few pallets at a time. From personal experience, what used to take me 20–30 minutes to pick up at a warehouse can now take three to four hours. This slowdown is warehouse management related: very few warehouses are open 24 hours, and even if they are, many are so short staffed it doesn’t make much difference, they are so far behind schedule. It means that as a freight driver, I cannot pick up as much freight in a day as I used to, and since I can’t get as much freight on my truck, the whole supply chain is backed up. Freight simply isn’t moving.
It’s important to understand what the cost implications are for consumers with this lack of supply in the supply chain. It’s pure supply and demand economics. Consider volume shipping customers who primarily use ‘general freight’, which is the lowest cost shipping and typically travels in a ‘space available’ fashion. They have usually been able to get their freight moved from origination to delivery within two weeks. Think about how you get your packages from Amazon. Even without paying for Prime, you usually get your stuff in a week. The majority of freight travels at this low cost, ‘no guarantee of delivery date’ way, and for the most part it’s been fine for both shippers and consumers. Those days are coming to an end.
People who want their deliveries in a reasonable time are going to have to start paying premium rates. There will be levels of priority, and each increase in rate premium essentially jumps that freight ahead of all the freight with lower or no premium rates. Unless the lack of shipping infrastructure is resolved, things will back up in a cascading effect to the point where if your products are going general freight, you might wait a month or two for delivery. It’s already starting. If you use truck shipping in any way, you’ve no doubt started to see the delays. Think about what’s going to happen to holiday season shipping.
What is going to compel the shippers and carriers to invest in the needed infrastructure? The owners of these companies can theoretically not change anything and their business will still be at full capacity because of the backlog of containers. The backlog of containers doesn’t hurt them. It hurts anyone paying shipping costs — that is, manufacturers selling products and consumers buying products. But it doesn’t hurt the owners of the transportation business — in fact the laws of supply and demand mean that they are actually going to make more money through higher rates, without changing a thing. They don’t have to improve or add infrastructure (because it’s costly), and they don’t have to pay their workers more (warehouse workers, crane operators, truckers).
The ‘experts’ want to say we can do things like open the ports 24/7, and this problem will be over in a couple weeks. They are blowing smoke, and they know it. Getting a container out of the port, as slow and aggravating as it is, is really the easy part, if you can find a truck and chassis to haul it. But every truck driver in America can’t operate 24/7, even if the government suspends Hours Of Service Regulations (federal regulations determining how many hours a week we can work/drive), we still need to sleep sometime. There are also restrictions on which trucks can go into a port. They have to be approved, have RFID tags, port registered, and the drivers have to have at least a TWIC card (Transportation Worker Identification Credential from the federal Transportation Security Administration). Some ports have additional requirements. As I have already said, most trucking companies won’t touch shipping containers with a 100 foot pole. What we have is a system with a limited amount of trucks and qualified drivers, many of whom are already working 14 hours a day (legally, the maximum they can), and now the supposed fix is to have them work 24 hours a day, every day, and not stop until the backlog is cleared. It’s not going to happen. It is not physically possible. There is no “cavalry” coming. No trucking companies are going to pay to register their trucks to haul containers for something that is supposedly so “short term,” because these same companies can get higher rate loads outside the ports. There is no extra capacity to be had, and it makes NO difference anyway, because If you can’t get a container unloaded at a warehouse, having drivers work 24/7/365 solves nothing.
What it will truly take to fix this problem is to run EVERYTHING 24/7: ports (both coastal and domestic), trucks, and warehouses. We need tens of thousands more chassis, and a much greater capacity in trucking.
Before the pandemic, through the pandemic, and really for the whole history of the freight industry at all levels, owners make their money by having low labor costs — that is, low wages and bare minimum staffing. Many supply chain workers are paid minimum wages, no benefits, and there’s a high rate of turnover because the physical conditions can be brutal (there aren’t even bathrooms for truckers waiting hours at ports because the port owners won’t pay for them. The truckers aren’t port employees and port owners are only legally required to pay for bathroom facilities for their employees. This is a nationwide problem). For the whole supply chain to function efficiently every point has to be working at an equal capacity. Any point that fails bottlenecks the whole system. Right now, it’s ALL failing spectacularly TOGETHER, but fixing one piece won’t do anything. It ALL needs to be fixed, and at the same time.
How do you convince truckers to work when their pay isn’t guaranteed, even to the point where they lose money? Nobody is compelling the transportation industries to make the needed changes to their infrastructure. There are no laws compelling them to hire the needed workers, or pay them a living wage, or improve working conditions. And nobody is compelling them to buy more container chassis units, more cranes, or more storage space. This is for an industry that literally every business in the world is reliant on in some way or another.
My prediction is that nothing is going to change and the shipping crisis is only going to get worse. Nobody in the supply chain wants to pay to solve the problem. They literally just won’t pay to solve the problem. At the point we are at now, things are so backed up that the backups THEMSELVES are causing container companies, ports, warehouses, and trucking companies to charge massive rate increases for doing literally NOTHING. Container companies have already decreased the maximum allowable times before containers have to be back to the port, and if the congestion is so bad that you can’t get the container back into the port when it is due, the container company can charge massive late fees. The ports themselves will start charging massive storage fees for not getting containers out on time — storage charges alone can run into thousands of dollars a day. Warehouses can charge massive premiums for their services, and so can trucking companies. Chronic understaffing has led to this problem, but it is allowing these same companies to charge ten times more for regular services. Since they’re not paying the workers any more than they did last year or five years ago, the whole industry sits back and cashes in on the mess it created. In fact, the more things are backed up, the more every point of the supply chain cashes in. There is literally NO incentive to change, even if it means consumers have to do holiday shopping in July and pay triple for shipping. This is the new normal. All brought to you by the ‘experts’ running our supply chains.
|
|
New meme: “WANTED” meme demands CEOs of evil tech giants answer for their crimes against humanityFriday, May 10, 2019 by: Mike Adams https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-05-10-new-meme-wanted-ceos-evil-tech-giants-crimes-against-humanity.html
(Natural News) A new meme has been posted by Online Civil Rights, the non-profit human rights project of the CWC.
The meme, which may be copied and shared everywhere, demands that the CEOs of the evil tech giants answer for “unleashing a real-world Orwellian nightmare” by depriving human beings the right to participate in the dominant speech platforms of modern society.
Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and other tech giants are all run by evil villains who exploit their power to enslave humanity and selectively silence their political enemies or business competitors. They are all engaged in racketeering and fraud, in clear violation of the RICO Act and a multitude of U.S. anti-trust laws.
It’s time to prosecute these evil villains, seize their domain names and dismantle their operations. “Instead of retreating into nothingness or depression, it’s time we all fought back. It is time that we scream and shout,” demands The Gateway Pundit. “Our fundamental rights as Americans are wasting away as the Republicans in DC sit around and do nothing. As our President sits around and tweets about how horrible it is. When are more people going to take meaningful action?”
Imagine a world without the evil of Facebook, Twitter or Google. Imagine a world where everyone can speak freely and internet users aren’t spied on by online tech giants. Join the free email newsletter of OnlineCivilRights.org to help make that world a reality. Also read BigTech.news to stay informed about the evil operations and censorship agendas of these rogue, dangerous corporations that threaten the very future of humanity.
Share this meme everywhere: High-resolution version is available at this link. See more memes at the OnlineCivilRights.org memes page. |
|
10 Promising Signs That The Insidious Mind-Control-Matrix The Elite Have Created Is Starting To Crumbleby Tyler Durden 04August2022 – https://www.zerohedge.com/political/10-promising-signs-insidious-mind-control-matrix-elite-have-created-starting-crumble Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com, Are we witnessing the start of some sort of a mass awakening in the western world? For years, I have been writing about the extremely complex systems that are designed to shape and control what we think. Today, the vast majority of the “news” and “entertainment” that most of us consume is controlled by just a very small handful of immensely powerful corporations. And of course those corporations are ultimately owned and controlled by the elite of the world. To a very large degree, the elite have been able to determine what we focus on, what we think about current events, and how we feel about the world around us. For such a long time, most of the population would take whatever narratives that were pushed upon them by their corporate overlords as the gospel truth, and that always greatly frustrated me. Fortunately, there are indications that times are changing. In order for any society to function effectively, there must be a high level of trust. Unfortunately for the elite, we simply do not trust them anymore. Trust in our politicians has fallen to an all-time low. Trust in the media has fallen to an all-time low. Trust in our corporations has fallen to an all-time low. Trust in our health care system has fallen to an all-time low. Trust in our education system has fallen to an all-time low. Trust in the tech industry has fallen to an all-time low. We no longer are buying into the crap that they keep shoveling our way. And that is a really, really good thing. It is morally wrong for them to try to control what we think. It is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves, because that is the only way that we will ever be truly free. I have been writing about this stuff for years and years, and a number of recent trends have given me hope that people are starting to wake up on a widespread basis. The following are 10 promising signs that the insidious mind control matrix the elite have created is starting to crumble… #1 According to a recent Gallup survey, only 16 percent of U.S. adults have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and only 11 percent of U.S. adults have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in television news. #2 All over the Internet I am seeing article after article speaking out against the World Economic Forum. That is an incredibly hopeful sign. #3 In the Netherlands, a new government plan would “cut fertilizer use and reduce livestock numbers so drastically that it will force many farms out of business”. This plan is deeply evil, but the massive farmer protests that have been sparked as a result are a really beautiful thing. #4 After being arrested, a British man was told this: “Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. And that is why you’re being arrested”. But the good news is that there has been a tremendous backlash on social media and so far the video of his arrest has already been viewed more than 2 million times. #5 As more people on the west coast wake up, the exodus out of the state of California is rapidly becoming a stampede. #6 Despite all of the spin from the Biden administration, 66 percent of Americans say that they believe that we are either in a recession or a depression right now. #7 Joe Biden’s overall approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 36 percent. #8 Joe Biden’s economic approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 30 percent. #9 A recent CNN poll discovered that a whopping 75 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters actually want their party to nominate someone other than Biden in 2024. #10 According to a recent Pew Research survey, only 24 percent of U.S. adults are satisfied with the current state of the country. Almost all of us can see that our society is on the wrong track, and that is the first step in getting back on the right track. As time rolls along, I believe that more and more of us will wake up. And in the end I believe that the current “world order” that the western elite have tried so hard to establish will fall. That process will be incredibly chaotic, but the end result will be worth it. Before I end this article, there is one more thing that I wanted to mention. According to scientists, we just experienced the shortest day ever recorded…
Are the days being shortened? I often tell people that it feels like the days are going by faster than ever, but I thought that it was just my imagination. I have been told that as we get older it can seem like time is passing more quickly, and without a doubt 2022 seems like it is the fastest year yet. It is hard to believe that the beginning of August is already here. 2023 will arrive before we know it, and I believe that 2023 will be a year that changes everything. I know that there are a lot of bad things that are happening right now, and a lot of my articles tend to focus on those bad things. But the truth is that there are a lot of good things happening too. In fact, there is no other time in all of human history that I would have rather lived than right now. It is when times are the darkest that the greatest heroes are needed, and the years ahead will provide plenty of opportunities for you to be the kind of hero that you were always meant to be. * * * |
|
We now return control of your television set to you. Until next week at the same time, when the control voice will take you to — The Outer Limits.It’s time to come home! Nefesh B’Nefesh: Live the Dream 1-866-4-ALIYAH |