Tag Archives: paul craig roberts

Feb 8 2013

It Has Happened Here

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

The Bush regime’s response to 9/11 and the Obama regime’s validation of this response have destroyed accountable democratic government in the United States. So much unaccountable power has been concentrated in the executive branch that the US Constitution is no longer an operable document.

Whether a person believes the official story of 9/11 which rests on unproven government assertions or believes the documented evidence provided by a large number of scientists, first responders, and structural engineers and architects, the result is the same. 9/11 was used to create an open-ended “war on terror” and a police state. It is extraordinary that so many Americans believe that “it can’t happen here” when it already has.

We have had a decade of highly visible evidence of the construction of a police state: the PATRIOT Act, illegal spying on Americans in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the initiation of wars of aggression–war crimes under the Nuremberg Standard–based on intentional lies, the Justice Department’s concocted legal memos justifying the executive branch’s violation of domestic and international laws against torture, the indefinite detention of US citizens in violation of the constitutionally protected rights of habeas corpus and due process, the use of secret evidence and secret “expert witnesses” who cannot be cross-examined against defendants in trials, the creation of military tribunals in order to evade federal courts, secret legal memos giving the president authority to launch preemptive cyber attacks on any country without providing evidence that the country constitutes a threat, and the Obama regime’s murder of US citizens without evidence or due process.

As if this were not enough, the Obama regime now creates new presidential powers by crafting secret laws, refusing to disclose the legal reasoning on which the asserted power rests. In other words, laws now originate in secret executive branch memos and not in acts of Congress. Congress? We don’t need no stinking Congress.

Despite laws protecting whistleblowers and the media and the US Military Code which requires soldiers to report war crimes, whistleblowers such as CIA agent John Kiriakou, media such as Julian Assange, and soldiers such as Bradley Manning are persecuted and prosecuted for revealing US government crimes. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33804.htm The criminals go free, and those who report the crimes are punished.

The justification for the American police state is the “war on terror,” a hoax kept alive by the FBI’s “sting operations.” Normally speaking, a sting operation is when a policewoman poses as a prostitute in order to ensnare a “John,” or a police officer poses as a drug dealer or user in order to ensnare drug users or dealers. The FBI’s “sting operation” goes beyond these victimless crimes that fill up US prisons.

The FBI’s sting operations are different. They are just as victimless as no plot ever happens, but the FBI doesn’t pose as bomb makers for terrorists who have a plot but lack the weapon. Instead, the FBI has the plot and looks for a hapless or demented person or group, or for a Muslim enraged over the latest Washington insult to him and/or his religion. When the FBI locates its victim, its agents approach the selected perpetrator pretending to be Al-Qaeda or some such and ply the selected perpetrator with money, the promise of fame, or threats until the victim signs on to the FBI’s plot and is arrested.

Trevor Aaronson in his book, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s War on Terrorism, documents that the FBI has so far concocted 150 “terrorist plots” and that almost all of the other “terrorist cases” are cases unrelated to terrorism, such as immigration, with a terror charge tacked on.http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LpTOrNQ3G9Q#! The presstitute American media doesn’t ask why, if there is so much real terrorism requiring an American war against it, the FBI has to invent and solicit terrorist plots.

Neither does the media inquire how the Taliban, which resists the US invasion and attempted occupation of Afghanistan, fighting the US superpower to a standstill after 11 years, came to be designated as terrorists. Nor does the US presstitute media want to know how tribesmen in remote regions of Pakistan came to be designated as “terrorists” deserving of US drone attacks on the citizens, schools and medical clinics of a country with which the US is not at war.

Instead the media protects and perpetrates the hoax that has given America the police state. The American media has become Leni Riefenstahl, as has Hollywood with the anti-Muslim propaganda film, Zero Dark Thirty. This propaganda film is a hate crime that spreads Islamophobia. Nevertheless, the film is likely to win awards and to sink Americans into both tyranny and a hundred-year war in the name of fighting the Muslim threat.

What I learned many years ago as a professor is that movies are important molders of Americans‘ attitudes. Once, after giving a thorough explanation of the Russian Revolution that led to communist rule, a student raised his hand and said: “That’s not the way it happened in the movie.”

At first I thought he was making a witty joke, but then I realized that he thought that the truth resided in the movie, not in the professor who was well versed in the subject. Ever since I have been puzzled how the US has survived for so long, considering the ignorance of its population. Americans have lived in the power of the US economy. Now that this power is waning, sooner or later Americans will have to come to terms with reality.

It is a reality that will be unfamiliar to them.

Some Americans claim that we have had police states during other wartimes and that once the war on terror is won, the police state will be dismantled. Others claim that government will be judicious in its use of the power and that if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.

These are reassurances from the deluded. The Bush/Obama police state is far more comprehensive than Lincoln’s, Wilson’s, or Roosevelt’s, and the war on terror is open-ended and is already three times longer than World War II. The Police State is acquiring “squatter’s rights.”

Moreover, the government needs the police state in order to protect itself from accountability for its crimes, lies, and squandering of taxpayers‘ money. New precedents for executive power have been created in conjunction with the Federalist Society which, independent of the war on terror, advocates the “unitary executive” theory, which claims the president has powers not subject to check by Congress and the Judiciary. In other words, the president is a dictator if he prefers to be.

The Obama regime is taking advantage of this Republican theory. The regime has used the Republican desire for a strong executive outside the traditional checks and balances together with the fear factor to complete the creation of the Bush/Cheney police state.

As Lawrence M. Stratton and I documented in our book, The Tyranny Of Good Intentions, prior to 9/11 law as a shield of the people was already losing ground to law as a weapon in the hands of the government. If the government wanted to get you, there were few if any barriers to a defendant being framed and convicted, least of all a brainwashed jury fearful of crime.

I cannot say whether the US justice system has ever served justice better than it has served the ambition of prosecutors. Already in the 1930s and 1940s US Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland and US Attorney General Robert Jackson were warning against prosecutors who sacrifice “fair dealing to build up statistics of success.” Certainly it is difficult to find in the ranks of federal prosecutors today Jackson’s “prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.”

Just consider the wrongful conviction of Alabama’s Democratic governor, Don Siegelman by what apparently was a Karl Rove plot to rid the South of Democratic governors. The “Democratic” Obama regime has not investigated this false prosecution or given clemency to its innocent own. Remember how quickly Bush removed the prison sentence of Cheney’s operative who revealed the name of a CIA undercover agent? The Democrats are a cowed and cowardly political party, fearful of justice, and as much a part of the corrupt police state as the Republicans.

Today the purpose of a prosecution is to serve the prosecutor’s career and that of the party that appoints him or her. A prosecutor’s career is served by high conviction rates, which require plea bargains in which the evidence against a defendant is never tested in court or before a jury, and by high profile cases, which can launch a prosecutor into a political career, as Rudy Giuliana achieved with his frame-up of Michael Milken.

Glenn Greenwald explained how Internet freedom advocate Aaron Swartz was driven to his death by the ambition of two federal prosecutors, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann, who had no aversion to destroying an innocent person with ridiculous and trumped-up charges in order to advance their careers.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/ortiz-heymann-swartz-accountability-abuse

It is rare for a prosecutor to suffer any consequence for bringing false charges, for consciously using and even paying for false evidence, and for lying to judge and jury. As prosecutors are rarely held accountable, they employ illegal and unethical methods and routinely abuse their power. As judges are mainly concerned with clearing their court dockets, justice is rarely served in America, which explains why the US has not only a larger percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country on earth, but also the largest absolute number of prisoners. The US actually has more of its citizens in prison than “authoritarian” China which has a population four times larger than the US. The US, possibly the greatest human rights abuser in history, is constantly bringing human rights charges against China. Where are the human rights charges against Washington?

In America the collapse of law has gone beyond corrupt prosecutors and their concocted false prosecutions. Unless it needs or desires a show trial, a police state does not need prosecutors and courts. By producing legal memos that the president can both throw people into prison without a trial and execute them without a trial simply by stating that some official in the executive branch thinks the person has a possible or potential connection to terrorism, tyranny’s friends in the Justice (sic) Department have dispensed with the need for courts, prosecutors and trials.The Bush/Obama regime has made the executive branch judge, juror, and executioner. All that is needed is an unproven assertion by some executive branch official. Here we have the epitome of evil.

Evidence is no longer required for the president of the US to imprison people for life or to deprive them of their life. A secret Justice Department memo has been leaked to NBC News that reveals the tyrannical reasoning that authorizes the executive branch to execute American citizens on the basis of belief alone without the requirement of evidence that they are terrorists or associated with terrorists. http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-exclusive-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans?lite

In “freedom and democracy” America, innocent until proven guilty is no longer the operative legal principle. If the government says you are guilty, you are. Period. No evidence required for your termination. Even Stalin pretended to have evidence.

The United States government is working its way step by step toward the determination that any and every critic of the government is guilty of providing “aid and comfort” to Washington’s “terrorist enemies,” which includes the elected Hamas government in Gaza. The only critics exempted from this rule-in-the-making are the neoconservatives who criticize the US government for being too slow to throttle both its critics and “anti-semites,” such as former US President Jimmy Carter, who criticize the Israeli government’s illegal appropriation of Palestinian lands. Most of Palestine has been stolen by Israel with Washington acquiesce and aid. Therefore, nothing is left for a “two-state solution.”

There is no doubt whatsoever that the Israeli government’s theft of Palestine is illegal; yet, Washington, on which Israel is totally dependent, does nothing about law. Law, we don’t need no stinking law.” Washington has might. Might is right. Get used to it.

Not only for Palestinians has law ceased to exist, but also for Americans, and for Washington’s NATO puppets in the UK and Europe, pitiful remnants of once great nations now complicit in Washington’s crimes against humanity. The Open Society Justice Initiative, a NGO based in New York, has issued a report that documents that 54 governments are involved in Washington’s rendition and torture program. Twenty-five of the governments that help Washington to kidnap, disappear, and torture people are European. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/cia-rendition-report-uk-court

The opening decade of the 21st century has seen the destruction of all the law that was devised to protect the innocent and the vulnerable since the rise of the now defunct moral conscience of the West. The West’s moral conscience never applied outside of itself. What happened to people in Europe’s colonies and to native inhabitants of the US and Australia is a very different story.

Nevertheless, despite its lack of coverage to the powerless, the principle of the rule of law was a promising principle. Now America under Bush and Obama, two peas of the same pod, has abandoned the principle itself.

The Obama police state will be worse than the Bush/Cheney police state. Unlike conservatives who in times past were suspicious of government power, Obamabots believe that government power is a force for good if it is in the right hands. As Obama’s supporters see him as a member of an oppressed minority, they are confident that Obama will not misuse his power. This belief is akin to the belief that, as Jews suffered so much at the hands of Hitler, Israel would be fair to the Palestinians.

Glenn Greenwald writes that “the most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33847.htm

This is the power of a dictator. That Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were said to have this power was part of their demonization as “brutal dictators,” a justification for overthrowing their governments and murdering the dictators and their supporters.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the president of the United States now murders his political opponents just as Saddam Hussein murdered his. How long before critics move from the no-fly list to the extermination list?

Additional reading: The legal analysis in the URL below written by seasoned attorneys shows that Obama is a tyrant. The point made by the attorneys is too clear to be debatable.http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/assassin_in_chief.html

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously the editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.

Dec 9 2012

More Phony Employment Numbers

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) calls the government’s latest jobs and unemployment reports “nonsense numbers.”

There are a number of ongoing problems with the released numbers. For example, the concurrent-seasonal factor adjustments are unstable. The birth-death model adds non-existent jobs each month that are then taken out in the annual downward benchmark revisions. Williams calculates that the job overstatement through November averages 45,000 monthly. In other words, employment gains during 2012 have been overstated by about 500,000 jobs. Another problem is that each month’s jobs number is boosted by downside revision of the previous month’s jobs number. Williams reports that the 146,000 new jobs reported for November “was after a significant downside revision to October’s reporting. Net of prior-period revisions, November’s seasonally-adjusted monthly gain was 97,000.”

Even if we believe the government that 146,000 new jobs materialized during November, that is the amount necessary to stay even with population growth and therefore could not be responsible for reducing the unemployment rate from 7.9% to 7.7%. The reduction is due to how the unemployed are counted.

The 7.7% rate is known as the “headline rate.” It is the rate you hear in the news. Its official designation is U.3.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has another official unemployment rate known as U.6.
The difference is that U.3 does not include discouraged workers who are not currently actively seeking a job. (A discouraged worker is a person who has given up looking for a job because there are no jobs to be found.) The U.6 measure includes workers who have been discouraged for less than one year. The U.6 rate of unemployment is 14.4%, about double the headline rate.

The U.6 rate does not include long-term discouraged workers, those who have been discouraged for more than one year. John Williams estimates this rate and reports the actual rate of unemployment (known as SGS) in November to be 22.9%.

In other words, the headline rate of unemployment is one-third the actual rate.

  • A D V E R T I S E M E N T

The drop in the November headline rate of unemployment from 7.9 to 7.7 is due to a 20.4% increase in the number of short-term discouraged workers in November. In other words, unemployed people rolled out of the U.3 measure into the U.6 measure.
Similarly, a number of short-term discouraged workers roll out of the U.6 measure into John Williams’ measure that includes all of the unemployed. Williams reports that “with the continual rollover, the flow of headline workers continues into the short-term discouraged workers (U.6), and from U.6 into long term discouraged worker status (a ShadowStats.com measure), at what has been an accelerating pace. The aggregate November data show an increasing rate of individuals dropping out of the headline (U.3) labor force.” In other words, the headline rate of unemployment can drop even though the unemployed are having a harder time finding jobs.

The U.S. government simply lowers the unemployment rate by not counting all of the unemployed. We owe this innovation to the Clinton administration. In 1994 the Clinton administration redefined “discouraged workers” and limited this group to those who are discouraged for less than one year. Those discouraged for more than one year are no longer considered to be in the labor force and ceased to be counted as unemployed.

If the U.S. government will mislead the public about unemployment, it will also
mislead about Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, Russia, China, and 9/11. The government fits its story to its agenda.

A government that wants to cut the social safety net doesn’t want you to know that the unemployment rate is 22.9%. A government that wants to cut the social safety net when between one-fifth and one-fourth of the work force is out of work looks hard-hearted, mean-spirited, and foolish. But if the government reports only one-third of the unemployed and presents that rate as falling, then the government can present its cuts as prudent to avoid falling over a “fiscal cliff.”

If the “free and democratic” Americans cannot even find out what the unemployment rate is, how do they expect to find out about anything?

Nov 3 2012

U.S. Elections: Will the Dead Vote and Voting Machines be Hacked?

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

“He who casts a vote decides nothing. He who counts the vote decides everything.”
-Joseph Stalin

Whether or not he said it, Stalin’s quote has entered into folklore. For a vote to mean anything, those counting the ballots must have a greater respect for the integrity of democracy than they have lust for power.

Since Stalin’s time, the technology has changed. With electronic voting machines, which leave no paper trail and are programmed with proprietary software, the count can be decided before the vote. Those who control the electronics can simply program voting machines to elect the candidate they want to win. Electronic voting is not transparent. When you vote electronically, you do not know for whom you are voting. Only the machine knows.

According to most polls, the race for the White House is too-close-to-call. History has shown that when an election is close and there’s no expectation for a clear winner, these are the easiest ones to steal. Even more important, the divergence between exit polls, perhaps indicating the real winner, and the stolen result, if not overdone, can be very small. Those who stole the election can easily put on TV enough experts to explain that the divergence between the exit polls and the vote count is not statistically significant or is because women or racial minorities or members of one party were disproportionately questioned in exit polls.

There have been recent reports that, because of costs, exit polls in the 2012 presidential election will no longer be conducted on the usual comprehensive basis in order to save money. If the reports are correct, no check remains on election theft.

Digital Votes

In a fascinating article in Harper’s Magazine (October 26, 2012) Victoria Collier notes that in the old technology, election theft depended on the power of machine politicians, such as Louisiana Senator Huey Long, to prevent exposure.

  • A D V E R T I S E M E N T

With the advent of modern technology, Collier writes that “a brave new world of election rigging emerged.” The brave new world of election theft was created by “the mass adoption of computerized voting technology and the outsourcing of our elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little oversight or accountability. This privatization of our elections has occurred without public knowledge or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and least understood crisis in the history of American democracy. We have actually lost the ability to verify election results.”

The old ballot-box fraud was localized and limited in its reach. Electronic voting allows elections to be rigged on a statewide and national scale. Moreover, with electronic voting there are no missing ballot boxes to recover from the Louisiana bayous. Using proprietary corporate software, the vote count is what the software specifies.

The first two presidential elections in the 21st century are infamous. George W. Bush’s win over Al Gore was decided by the Republicans on the US Supreme Court who stopped the Florida vote recount.

In 2004, George W. Bush won the vote count although exit polls indicated that he had been defeated by John Kerry. Collier reports:

“Late on Election Day, John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit polling, and many considered his victory all but certified. Yet the final vote tallies in thirty states deviated widely from exit polls, with discrepancies favoring George W. Bush in all but nine. The greatest disparities were concentrated in battleground states – particularly Ohio. In one Ohio precinct, exit polls indicated that Kerry should have received 67 percent of the vote, but the certified tally gave him only 38 percent. The odds of such an unexpected outcome occurring only as a result of sampling error are 1 in 867,205,553. To quote Lou Harris, who has long been regarded as the father of modern political polling: ‘Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.’”

The electronic vote theft era, Collier reports, “was inaugurated by Chuck Hagel, an unknown millionaire who ran for one of Nebraska’s U.S. Senate seats in 1996. Initially Hagel trailed the popular Democratic governor, Ben Nelson, who had been elected in a landslide two years earlier. Three days before the election, however, a poll conducted by the Omaha World-Herald showed a dead heat, with 47 percent of respondents favoring each candidate. David Moore, who was then managing editor of the Gallup Poll, told the paper, ‘We can’t predict the outcome.’”

“Hagel’s victory in the general election, invariably referred to as an ‘upset,’ handed the seat to the G.O.P. for the first time in eighteen years. Hagel trounced Nelson by fifteen points. Even for those who had factored in the governor’s deteriorating numbers and a last-minute barrage of negative ads, this divergence from pre-election polling was enough to raise eyebrows across the nation.”

“Few Americans knew that until shortly before the election, Hagel had been chairman of the company whose computerized voting machines would soon count his own votes: Election Systems & Software (then called American Information Systems). Hagel stepped down from his post just two weeks before announcing his candidacy. Yet he retained millions of dollars in stock in the McCarthy Group, which owned ES&S. And Michael McCarthy, the parent company’s founder, was Hagel’s campaign treasurer.”

Vote theft might also explain the defeat of Max Cleland, a Democratic Senator from Georgia. As Collier documents:

“In Georgia, for example, Diebold’s voting machines reported the defeat of Democratic senator Max Cleland. Early polls had given the highly popular Cleland a solid lead over his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, a favorite of the Christian right, the NRA, and George W. Bush (who made several campaign appearances on his behalf). As Election Day drew near, the contest narrowed. Chambliss, who had avoided military service, ran attack ads denouncing Cleland – a Silver Star recipient who lost three limbs in Vietnam – as a traitor for voting against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Two days before the election, a Zogby poll gave Chambliss a one-point lead among likely voters, while the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cleland maintained a three-point advantage with the same group.”

Rigged Game

“Cleland lost by seven points. In his 2009 autobiography, he accused computerized voting machines of being ‘ripe for fraud.’ Patched for fraud might have been more apt. In the month leading up to the election, Diebold employees, led by Bob Urosevich, applied a mysterious, uncertified software patch to 5,000 voting machines that Georgia had purchased in May.”

“We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do,” Diebold consultant and whistle-blower Chris Hood recounted in a 2006 Rolling Stone article. “The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done. . . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state. . . . We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [Bob] Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level.”

When the Republican Supreme Court prevented the Florida recount in the deciding state between George W. Bush and Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, the Democrats’ response was to acquiesce in order not to shake the confidence of Americans in democracy. Similarly, John Kerry acquiesced in 2004 despite the large disparity between exit polls and vote counts. But how can Americans have confidence in democracy when voting is not transparent?

For now Republicans seem to have the technological advantage with their ownership of companies that produce electronic voting machines programmed by proprietary software, but in the future the advantage could shift to Democrats. Early voting aids electronic election theft. Successful and noncontroversial theft depends on knowing how to program the machines. The victory needs to be within the range of plausibility. Too big a victory raises eyebrows, but if the guess is wrong in the other direction theft fails. Early voting helps the voting machine programmers decide how to set the machines.

Voting 2.0

The absence of transparency is a threat to whatever remains of American democracy. In the Summer 2011 issue of The Trends Journal, Gerald Celente made the point that “if we can bank online, we can vote online.”

Think about it! Across the globe, trillions of dollars of bank transactions are made each day, and rarely are they compromised. If we can accurately count money online, we can certainly count votes accurately online. The only obstacles blocking online voting are entrenched political interests intent upon controlling the ballot box.

The lack of transparency has given rise to election litigation. On October 29, The Washington Post reported that “thousands of attorneys, representing the two major presidential candidates, their parties, unions, civil rights groups and voter-fraud watchdogs, are in place across the country, poised to challenge election results that may be called into question by machine failures, voter suppression or other allegations of illegal activity.”

Voting online, if property arranged, can provide the transparency that the current system lacks. While the GOP might remain active in voter suppression, the Democrats could no longer vote graveyards, and the count of those who do manage to vote would not be subject to secret proprietary software.

In 2005 the nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded that the integrity of elections was compromised by those who controlled the programming. Proprietary private ownership of voting technology is simply incompatible with transparent elections. A country without a transparent vote is a country without democracy.

Sep 30 2012

How The Government’s Lies Become Truth

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

In my last column, “A Culture of Delusion,” I wrote that “Americans live in a matrix of lies. Lies dominate every policy discussion, every political decision.” This column will use two top news stories, Iranian nukes and Julian Assange, to illustrate how lies become “truth.”

The western Presstitute media uses every lie to demonize the Iranian government. On September 28 in a fit of unmitigated ignorance, the UK rag, Mail Online, called the president of Iran a “dictator.” The Iranian presidency is an office filled by popular election, and the authority of the office is subordinate to the ayatollahs. Assange is demonized alternatively as a rapist and a spy.

The western media and the US Congress comprise the two largest whore houses in human history. One of their favorite lies is that the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, wants to kill all the Jews. Watch this 6 minute, 42 second video of Ahmadinejad’s meeting with Jewish religious leaders. Don’t be put off by the title. Washington Blog is making a joke. http://www.globalresearch.ca/horrifying-graphic-video-of-iranian-leader-savagely-abusing-jews/

Last week the news was dominated by the non-existent but virtually real Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, blatantly intervened in the US presidential election, demanding that Obama specify the “red line” for attacking Iran.

Netanyahu believes his maximum leverage over Obama, the president of the “world’s only superpower,” is just prior to the election. Israel cannot attack Iran on its own without the risk of Israel’s destruction. But Netanyahu reasons that if he attacks Iran the week before the US election, Obama will have to join in or lose the Jewish vote for not supporting Israel in states such as Florida, which has a large Jewish population and many electoral votes. If the election is close, Netanyahu, a person consumed by arrogance and hubris, might exercise his threat and attack Iran, despite the opposition of former chiefs of Israeli intelligence and military, the opposition party, and a majority of the Israeli people.

In other words, the outcome of the “superpower’s” presidential election might depend upon whether the sitting president of the “superpower” is sufficiently obedient to the crazed Israeli prime minister.

That the outcome of the US presidential election could depend upon the agenda of the prime minister of a tiny country that exists only because of US financial, military, and diplomatic support, especially the UN veto, should disturb those Americans who think that they are the “indispensable people.” How indispensable are you when you have to do what the Israeli prime minister wants?

The US media makes certain that this question never enters american minds. Americans have been told that if Iran doesn’t have nukes, it has a nuke weapons program. This is what the politicians of both parties, the media, and the Israel Lobby tell them. Americans are told this despite the facts that the CIA and the National Intelligence Estimate stick to the conclusion that Iran abandoned its flirtation with a nuclear weapon in 2003 and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground in Iran report no evidence of a nuclear weapons program and no evidence of any diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program.

Moreover, what could Iran do with a nuclear weapon, other than use it against an aggressor? Any offensive use would result in Iran’s destruction.

Why do Americans believe Iran has nukes or is making nukes when the CIA says they are not? The answer is that Netanyahu says so, and the elected members of the US government in the House, Senate, and White House are afraid to contradict the Israeli prime minister, as are the American print and TV media. Some “superpower” we are! The “indispensable people” have to grovel in the dirt before Netanyahu. Americans are not even aware of their shame.

Iran, unlike Israel, signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Signatories to the treaty have the right to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy requires a low level of enrichment, 5% or less. The minute Iran announced a nuclear energy program, the Israeli government and its prostitutes in Washington lied that Iran was building a bomb. For exercising its legal rights under the treaty, Iran has been painted as a rouge criminal state and demonized.

A nuclear weapon requires 95% enrichment. To get to 5% from scratch and then to 95% is a long drawn out process. I think I first started hearing Israeli government claims of an Iranian nuke back in he 1990s of last century.

When Iran announced that, in view of the sanctions imposed by the US, sanctions that affect medical supplies, Iran was going to enrich uranium to 20% in order to supply itself with medical isotopes, the Israeli allegations that this would lead to a bomb resulted in Iran saying that the Iranian government was content for France or some other country to supply their medical isotopes and would not pursue enrichment beyond energy requirements. The US and Russia were also mentioned as suppliers.

According to the NY Times on September 29, 2011, “the Iranian president told the Washington Post and later, in basically the same terms, the New York Times: ‘if you [the United States and Europe] give us uranium grade 20 percent now, we will stop production.’”http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/30iht-edvaez30.html?_r=0

On Israel’s orders Washington vetoed the Iranian concession. Solving the problem is not what the Israeli government wants. The problem has to be kept alive so that it can be used to foment an attack on Iran.

The Iranian nuke is one of those grand hoaxes, a lie designed to hide the real agenda.

What is the real agenda?

The real agenda hiding behind the hysterical concern about an Iranian nuke, is the rightwing Israeli government’s design on the water resources of southern Lebanon.

Twice the Israeli government sent the Israeli army into southern Lebanon to occupy and eventually annex the territory. And twice Hizbollah defeated and drove out the vaunted Israeli army.

The few thousand Hizbollah fighters were able to defeat the Israeli army, which is equipped and supplied by US taxpayers’ dollars while Americans are foreclosed out of their homes and left unemployed as Washington applauds the offshoring of their jobs, because Syria and Iran provide Hizbollah with financial support and weapons that destroy Israeli tanks.

Syria, of course, is currently resisting its destruction by Israel and its american puppet state. The overthrow of Syria hasn’t gone well, because the Russians and Chinese didn’t go along with it, like they stupidly did in Libya. But the far rightwing Israeli government has concluded that with american prestige involved in the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria, the deed will be done.

That leaves Iran. The Israeli government knows that it cannot be forthright and say that it wants Americans to go to war with Iran so that Israel can steal southern Lebanon. But if fear over nonexistent nukes can muster the Western populations to support an attack on Iran, Iran can be eliminated as Hizbollah’s supplier, and Israel can steal the water from Lebanon.

There is no discussion whatsoever of the real agenda anywhere in the US print and TV media. I doubt there is any discussion anywhere in Europe, which is a collection of american puppet states.

Will we get World War III for Christmas? Possibly, if the US election is close as it approaches. If the election is too close to call, Netanyahu might throw the dice and rely on Obama following his lead. Iran will be attacked, and the consequences are unknowable.

Let’s turn to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Like Iran, Assange has been demonized, not on the basis of facts but on the basis of lies.

Washington, which poses as a purveyor of human rights, has been mistreating if not torturing Bradley Manning since May 2010 without bringing him to trial in an effort to make Manning say that he and Assange constitute a spy team working against the US.

Assange is a celebrity, because Wikileaks publishes the news leaked to the organization that the Presstitute media suppresses. While in Sweden, Assange was picked up by two celebrity-hungry women who took him home to their beds. The women later bragged of their conquests on social media, but apparently when they found out that they were rivals, they turned on the “two-timer” Assange and made charges. One claimed that he had not used a condom as per her request, and the other claimed that she had offered one helping but he had taken two.

Whatever the accusations, the Swedish prosecutorial office investigated and dismissed the case.

Despite this known fact, the Western Presstitute media reports that Assange is a fugitive evading rape charges by hiding in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. Even RT, an alternative media voice, has fallen for this disinformation.

After Assange was cleared in Sweden, a female prosecutor has tried to reopen the case. There is no evidence for her to bring charges, so she demanded that England arrest Assange and extradite him to Sweden to be questioned.

Normally, people are not subject to extradition for questioning. Only people who have been formally charged are extradited. But this detail wasn’t of interest to the Presstitute media or to the British courts which ruled as Washington desired.

Opinions vary as to whether the female prosecutor who wants Assange for questioning is an ideological feminist who believes no heterosexual sex is legitimate or whether she is in the pay of Washington. But experts agree that once Assange is in Sweden he is certain to be turned over to Washington, which will demand his extradition on trumped up charges. Extradition on trumped up charges is difficult in England but easy in Sweden.

Assange offered to be questioned in London, but the female prosecutor refused. Now the Ecuadoran Embassy is offering to send Assange to the Ecuadoran Embassy in Sweden to be questioned, but Washington, London, and the Swedish prosecutor have refused. They want Assange without the protection of the asylum that Ecuador has granted him.

Washington has how made this obvious. John Glaser writing in Antiwar.com, September 26, 2012, reports: “Newly declassified documents have revealed that the US military designated WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange an enemy of the state, who can be killed or detained without trial.”http://news.antiwar.com/2012/09/26/declassified-documents-reveal-us-military-designated-assange-enemy-of-state/ See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/27/wikileaks-investigation-enemy

Assange is Washington’s enemy, because he let the truth get out. WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise, not a spy enterprise. It publishes information, some of which is leaked to it by whistleblowers, just as the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times. The information leaked to WikiLeaks has embarrassed Washington, because it shows Washington to be two-faced, a manipulator of other countries’ governments and medias, and overflowing with mendacity.

In other words, Washington is not the light upon the hill but the gates of Hell or Mordor.

Assange had best be careful. If he again speaks to supportive crowds from a balcony of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, he is likely to be shot down by a CIA sniper.

Approved by Obama, of course. Or his successor.

Sep 8 2012

Spinning Bad Financial News Into Good

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Friday’s payroll jobs report says that 96,000 new jobs were created in August and that the unemployment rate (U.3) fell from 8.3% to 8.1%. As 96,000 new jobs are not enough to keep up with population growth, the decline in the U.3 unemployment rate was caused by 368,000 discouraged job seekers giving up on finding employment and dropping out of the work force as measured by U.3. Discouraged workers are not included in the U.3 measure of unemployment, which makes the measure useless. The only purpose of U.3 is to keep bad news out of the news. the U.3 unemployment rate only measures those who have not been discouraged by the inability to find a job and are still actively seeking employment.

The government produces another unemployment measure, U.6, which includes people who have been discouraged by the inability to find a job and have been out of the work force for less than a year. This measure of unemployment is 14.7%, a number that would get attention if reported.

When the long-term (more than one year) discouraged workers are included, the US unemployment rate is about 22%. In other words, the real US rate of unemployment is almost three times higher than the reported–headline rate–of 8.1%.

What is the purpose of reporting an unemployment rate that is about one-third the real unemployment rate? The only answer is deception through Happy News.

Let’s have a look at those 96,000 jobs. What kind of high-tech, high-income super jobs is “the world’s only superpower, the indispensable nation, the world’s greatest economy and capitalist heaven” creating? The answer is lowly paid third world jobs, which is why there is not and cannot be an economic recovery. All the good jobs have been moved offshore in order to maximize the incomes of the rich.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 28,300 of the 96,000 jobs or 29% are waitresses and bartenders. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm

Health care and social services, primarily ambulatory health care services and home health care services, provided 21,700 jobs or 22.6% of the jobs.

So, 52% of the new jobs created by the American superpower are lowly paid waitresses, bartenders, practical nurses, and hospital orderlies.

Highly paid manufacturing jobs declined by 15,000. The incomes lost by these jobs most likely exceed the income gains from the waitresses, bartenders, and hospital orderlies jobs.

Where did the other 46,000 jobs come from?

Formerly, in hard times government employment would expand, but, despite Republican propaganda, not today in today’s mean times. Government (federal, state and local) lost 7,000 jobs.

Professional and business services gained 28,000 jobs, primarily in computer systems design and related services (mainly Indians on H-1B work visas) and management and technical consulting services (mainly former corporate professional employees who now eke out a living by consulting, without pension or health benefits, with their former employers; in other words, they are working the same for less).

These three categories account for 81% of the new jobs.

Where are the remainder?

A few thousand jobs in finance and insurance, jobs that absorb consumer incomes but produce no product. Telephone, cable, water, electricity, and heating produced 8,800 jobs. Transportation and warehousing to store unsold goods produced 5,700 jobs. Retail trade, primarily food and beverage stores (alcohol), produced 6,100 jobs.

And there you have it. The “powerful American economy” is an economy that cannot produce its own clothes and shoes, or the manufactured products, including high technology products, that it consumes, or its own energy, all of which it imports by issuing more debt.

The “great hegemonic American economy” is on the verge of total collapse, because the only way it can pay for the imports that sustain it is by issuing more debt and printing more money. Once the debt and money creation undermine the dollar as world reserve currency, the US will become overnight a third world country, much to the relief of the rest of the world.

Last week Mr. Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, announced for propaganda purposes that the ECB would buy up the sovereign debt of the troubled EU member governments if, and only if, the assisted member governments agreed to the conditionality that would be imposed.

In other words, Draghi told Greece, Spain, and italy that the ECB will buy your bonds if you do what we tell you. Draghi’s conditions are a combination of austerity on the countries’ populations and the surrender of the countries’ financial sovereignty. Since the troubled debtor countries already had that option, Draghi’s scheme doesn’t change anything. However, the NY StockExchange used Draghi’s announcement to gin up day-trading profits.

Draghi says that the money that the ECB will pour into purchasing Greek, Italian and Spanish bonds will be offset by draining reserves from the European banking system, hardly a helpful operation to stressed banks and European recession.

It is difficult to image worse news than Draghi’s. Yet, stock markets rose. This result is more evidence that financial markets are not to be trusted.

But you will never, ever, hear this fact from the financial press.

A financial system based on lies and deceptions cannot forever last.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously the editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.

Aug 20 2012

Amerika’s Future is Death

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

“The day we see truth and do not speak is the day we begin to die.”
- Martin Luther King

Conspiracy theories have now blossomed into what the smug presstitute media calls a “conspiracy culture.” According to the presstitutes, Americans have to find some explanation for their frustrations and failings, so Americans shift the blame to the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the New World Order and so forth and so on.

Readers will not be surprised that I disagree with the presstitutes. Indeed, the conspiracy culture is the product of the presstitute media’s failure to investigate and to report truthfully. I am certain that the Western media is worse than the Soviet media was. The Soviet media devised ways for helping the public to read between the lines, whereas the Western media is so proud to be confidants of the government that they deliver the propaganda without any clues to the readers that it is propaganda.

Americans have been fed lies by “their” government and the government’s presstitute media for so long that it is not surprising that Americans increasingly believe that there is a conspiracy operating against them. Millions of Americans have been evicted from their jobs, careers, and homes while the crooks who stole from them run free and bankroll the presidential candidates. The world as millions of Americans knew it has come to an end, and no one has been held accountable. The explanation that Americans get from the media is that it is their own fault. They bought houses they shouldn’t have bought, and they didn’t train for the right jobs. It is not unreasonable for Americans to conclude that a conspiracy is operating against them.

Americans are told that “their” government cannot afford to help them because of the budget deficit and the burden on our grandchildren. But Americans see the trillions of dollars that are lavished on banksters, on wars, and on Homeland Security. Why is a police state and another attack on another Muslim country more important than keeping Americans in their jobs and in their homes?

The 11th anniversary of 9/11 is less than a month away. Will the presstitute media remind Americans that the government has spent $6 trillion of Americans’ money in out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs as the expense of invading and trying to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, all to no effect except to enrich the managements and shareholders of the military security complex at the cost of destroying the reputation of the United States and putting Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block?

No, of course not. The spiel will be about our brave troops who are fighting and dying to make the world safe for democracy and women’s rights. Washington will wrap itself in the flag and exhort Americans to “support our troops” in the orchestrated war of the day. Hitlery Clinton still gets on the moral high horse and rails at China and Russia, but all the world sees is hypocrisy. No one, not even Washington’s puppet governments, any longer takes Washington’s moralizing as anything more than a mask for domination by force alone. Democracy, Washington declares, comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Today moralizing is all about money, but not for the 99%. The 99% cannot find good jobs or earn anything on their savings, because the economy is run for the 1%. University graduates cannot get jobs and pay off their student loans. Retraining for the millions of Americans whose jobs were shipped offshore or filled by foreigners brought in on H1-B visas has proved to be a fraud, as there are no jobs for the retrained displaced long-term discouraged American work force. The official jobs projection by the US government is that few university graduates are needed in the work force, so the old mantra that “education is the answer” is just another lie from the Ivy League economic departments who sell the establishment’s lies for money.

Any American citizen accustomed to travel America’s “wide open spaces” prior to 9/11 must be astonished by the sudden rise of the intrusive Homeland Security, a gestapo-sounding name if there ever was one. Porno-scans and genital feel-ups have spread from airports to bus and train stations and to the public highways, despite the absence of terrorist events. No one in their right mind could possibly think that a 90-year old grandmother in a wheel chair is a terrorist whose diaper needs to be checked or that blond and blue-eyed parents would have strapped a bomb around their 5-year old daughter’s waist. No one except the gestapo Department of Homeland Security.

Even some of the gullible flag-waving patriotic conservatives are beginning to wonder about all the security. The reports that the Department of Homeland Security has ordered 750 million rounds of people-killing ammunition are puzzling even those conservatives who have been taking vicarious pleasure in the slaughter of “towelheads.”

Why does the Department of Homeland Security need enough ammunition to shoot every American 2.5 times? Why is Homeland Security equipping itself with full-body armor? Why is Homeland Security acquiring new laser technology that can “instantly know everything about you from 164 feet away?” A new army manual for “Civil Disturbance Operations” describes how the military is to be used domestically within the US to put down protests, confiscate firearms and kill citizens.

The police state that is being constructed in “freedom and democracy” America is without parallel in history. When the only terrorists are dupes organized by the FBI, it is clear that the purpose of the police state is not to protect Americans from Muslim terrorists. The purpose of the police state is to terrorize US citizens.

It is not only Homeland Security that is being militarized. The government reported that a large ammunition order was made by the National Weather Service, later updated to have been the Fisheries Office. If you are surprised at this, why has the Social Security Administration ordered 174,000 rounds of hollow-point bullets?

Lists of Homeland Security’s ammunition order are available online. Clearly, it is not ammunition for target practice. It is ammunition for killing people: hollow-point bullets for the military rifle, the M-16. Match grade bullets for .308 sniper rifles. 12 gauge shotgun buckshot and slug ammunition. Hollow-point bullets for .357 magnum and .40 caliber pistols.

As there have been no terrorist attacks in the US since the 9/11 attack (itself suspect by experts), except for those organized by the FBI, this massive purchase of firepower is obviously not to protect Americans from Muslim terrorists. So what is it for?

Perhaps this film explains what is in store for the American people who trusted “their” government. War protestors and critics of the government are being redefined as “domestic extremists” who can be arrested for aiding and abetting the enemies of the United States. If Americans wake up to the fact that they are being dispossessed economically, politically, and socially, while Washington is leading them into World War III, and take to the streets in protest, they will encounter extreme military force.

The liberal-left is even more delusional than the flag-waving conservatives. No matter what the government does, conservatives will come down on the government’s side. This is because conservatives confuse patriotism with support for the government, not with defense of the Constitution, a suspect document that coddles criminals, terrorists, and war protesters who cause America to lose wars. The liberal-left regards Obama with his half-black origin as a member of the oppressed class, personages endowed by the liberal-left with higher morality. The liberal-left continues to regard Obama as the redeemer even as Obama sits in the Oval Office approving lists of American citizens to be executed without due process of law. Not even Naomi Wolf can wake up the liberal-left.

Do not expect Congress or the presstitutes to do anything about the rapid concentration of power in the police state that Bush and Obama have created. Do not expect to be rescued by federal courts. Even if some judges are inclined to defend the Constitution from its domestic enemy, the courts are powerless if the executive branch does not respect the rule of law. Currently, the executive branch is ignoring a federal judge’s injunction against the indefinite detention of US citizens. The Department of Justice (sic) lawyers will not even answer the judge’s questions.

A gullible population is helpless if government decides to enslave the people. It is child’s play for government to discredit a people’s natural leaders and those who provide the people with accurate information. Most Americans have a very small knowledge base and very large ideological preconceptions. Consequently, they cannot tell fiction from fact.

Consider the case of Julian Assange. When the US government, angry that WikiLeaks had published leaked documents that revealed the mendacity and deceit of Washington, first struck out at Assange, support for Assange was almost universal. Then Washington put out the story on the Internet that Assange was an intelligence agent working for the CIA or the even more hateful Mossad. Both leftwing and rightwing Internet sites fell for the obvious lie. Here we have gullibility on the level with those who believed Stalin’s charge that Bukharin was a capitalist agent.

Once the libel of Assange began, it over-rode his clearance by the Swedish prosecutor’s office of sexual complaints made by the two women who seduced him. Seeing Assange on the ropes, a female prosecutor reopened the closed case, many believe at Washington’s urging. Feminists jumped in, demanding that Assange be punished for his seduction by women as he had obviously tricked or coerced them in some way.

It was like Dominique Strauss-Kahn all over again. Falsely accused of sexually assaulting a New York hotel maid, the Director of the International Monetary Fund, chased on two continents by celebrity-hunting women, was knocked out of the race for the French presidency and had to resign his IMF position. The New York police, trained by decades of feminist propaganda to regard every sex charge brought by a women as the absolute truth, were made to look foolish and incompetent when clear evidence emerged that the charge was fabricated in order to extract money from Strauss-Kahn and possibly in order to knock him out of contention for the French presidency.

Many websites and normally reliable commentators were taken in by the false story. The Washington hegemons and their presstitute media have been even more successful in fooling Americans about terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, and Iran. What is astonishing is the fact that there have not been any attacks on America, despite the enormous provocations Washington has provided by murdering as many as one million Muslims, destroying three Muslim countries, conducting military operations against seven Muslim countries and preparing an attack on an eighth–Iran.

The President of Russia, whose thermo-nuclear ballistic missiles can remove the US from the face of the earth, stated for all the world to hear that Washington has the entire world in fear of its hegemonic drive. “No one feels safe,” said Putin. And certainly not the Russians with American missile bases on their borders and a Washington-funded disloyal and traitorous political “opposition” which serves as Washington’s fifth column inside Russia.

America, Putin acknowledged, wants to rule the world. But Washington is not going to rule Russia and China. If the current White House moron keeps his promise to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu that the US will attack Iran next June if Iran does not close down its nuclear energy program (a non-weapons program permitted to Iran as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty), the White House will have opened the door to World War III. In such a war the US would not be immune from attack as it was in WW I and WW II. This time America could disappear in nuclear holocaust. If any of the world survives, people will be thankful for Washington’s removal from the scene.

Death is what “your” government in Washington, both Republicans and Democrats, are bringing you. Both parties are driven by the neoconservatives who believe that American hegemony over the world is worth nuclear war to accomplish. If these dangerous ideologues continue to prevail, life on earth has a very short-run prospect.

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts’ new website Institute For Political Economy. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

Jul 8 2012

The Collapsing US Economy and the End of the World

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

In a recent column, “Can The World Survive Washington’s Hubris,” I promised to examine whether the US economy will collapse before Washington in its pursuit of world hegemony brings us into military confrontation with Russia and China. This is likely to be an ongoing subject on this site, so this column will not be the final word.


Washington has been at war since October, 2001, when President George W. Bush concocted an excuse to order the US invasion of Afghanistan. This war took a back seat when Bush concocted another excuse to order the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that went on without significant success for 8 years and has left Iraq in chaos with dozens more killed and wounded every day, a new strong man in place of the illegally executed former strongman, and the likelihood of the ongoing violence becoming civil war.

Upon his election, President Obama foolishly sent more troops to Afghanistan and renewed the intensity of that war, now in its eleventh year, to no successful effect.

These two wars have been expensive. According to estimates by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, when all costs are counted the Iraq invasion cost US taxpayers $3 trillion dollars. Ditto for the Afghan war. In other words, the two gratuitous wars doubled the US public debt. This is the reason there is no money for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the environment, and the social safety net.

Americans got nothing out of the wars, but as the war debt will never be paid off, US citizens and their descendants will have to pay interest on $6,000 billion of war debt in perpetuity.

Not content with these wars, the Bush/Obama regime is conducting military operations in violation of international law in Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa, organized the overthrow by armed conflict of the government in Libya, is currently working to overthrow the Syrian government, and continues to marshall military forces against Iran.

Finding the Muslim adversaries Washington created insufficient for its energies and budget, Washington has encircled Russia with military bases and has begun the encirclement of China. Washington has announced that the bulk of its naval forces will be shifted to the Pacific over the next few years, and Washington is working to re-establish its naval base in the Philippines, construct a new one on a South Korean island, acquire a naval base in Viet Nam, and air and troop bases elsewhere in Asia.

In Thailand Washington is attempting to purchase with the usual bribes an air base used in the Vietnam war. There is opposition as the country does not wish to be drawn into Washington’s orchestrated conflict with China. Downplaying the real reason for the airbase, Washington, according to Thai newspapers, told the Thai government that the base was needed for “humanitarian missions.” This didn’t fly, so Washington had NASA ask for the air base in order to conduct “weather experiments.” Whether this ruse is sufficient cover remains to be seen.

US Marines have been sent to Australia and elsewhere in Asia.

To corral China and Russia (and Iran) is a massive undertaking for a country that is financially busted. With wars and bankster bailouts, Bush and Obama have doubled the US national debt while failing to address the disintegration of the US economy and rising hardships of US citizens.

The charts below are courtesy of www.shadowstats.com

The annual US budget deficit is adding to the accumulated debt at about $1.5 trillion per
year with no prospect of declining. The financial system is broken and requires ongoing bailouts. The economy is busted and has been unable to create high-paying jobs, indeed any jobs. Despite years of population growth, payroll employment as of mid-2012 is the same as in 2005 and substantially below 2008. Yet, the government and financial presstitute media tell us that we have a recovery.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in 2011 was only 1 million more than in 2002. As it takes about 150,000 new jobs each month to stay even with population growth, that leaves a decade long job deficit of 15 million jobs.

The US unemployment and inflation rates are far higher than reported. In previous columns I have explained, based on statistician John Williams’ work (shadowstats.com), the reasons that the government’s headline numbers are serious understatements. The headline (U3) unemployment rate of 8.2% counts no discouraged workers who have given up on finding a job. The government has a second unemployment rate (U6), seldom reported, which includes short-term discouraged workers. That rate is 15%. When the long-term discouraged workers are added in, the current US unemployment rate is 22%, a number closer to the unemployment rate of the Great Depression than to the unemployment rates of postwar recessions.

Changes in the way inflation is measured have destroyed the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as a measure of the cost of living. The new methodology is substitution based. If the price of an item in the index rises, a lower priced alternative takes its place. In addition, some price rises are labeled quality improvements whether they are or not and thus do not show up in the CPI. People still have to pay the higher price, but it is not counted as inflation.

Currently, the substitution-based rate of inflation is about 2%. However, when inflation is measured as the actual cost of living, the rate of inflation is 5%.

The Misery Index is the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates. The level of the current Misery Index depends on whether the new rigged measures are used, which understate the misery, or the former methodology that accurately measures it.

Prior to the November 1980 election, the Misery Index hit 22%, which was one reason for Reagan’s victory over President Carter. Today if we use previous methodology, the Misery Index stands at 27%. But if we use the new rigged methodology, the Misery Index is 10%.

The understatement of inflation serves to boost Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is calculated in current dollars. To be able to determine whether GDP rose because of price rises or because of increases in real output, GDP is deflated by the CPI. The higher the inflation rate, the less the growth in real output and vice versa. When the substitution based methodology is used to measure inflation, the US economy experienced real growth in the 21st century except for the sharp dip during 2008-2010. However, if the cost-of-living based methodology is used, except for a short period during 2004, the US economy has experienced no real growth since 2000.

In the chart above,the lower measure (blue) of real GDP is deflated with the inflation methodology that measured cost-of-living. The higher GDP measure (red) deflates GDP with the new substitution based methodology.

The lack of employment and real GDP growth go together with the decline in real household median income. The growth in consumer debt substituted for the lack of income growth and kept the economy going until consumers exhausted their ability to take on more debt. With the consumer dead in the water, the outlook for economic recovery is poor.

Politicians and the Federal Reserve are making the outlook even worse. At a time of high unemployment and debt-stressed households, politicians at local, state, and federal levels are cutting back on government provision of health care, pensions, food stamps, housing subsidies and every other element of the social safety net. These cutbacks, of course, further reduce aggregate demand and the ability of income-stressed Americans to survive.

The Federal Reserve has interest rates so low that retirees and others living on their savings can earn nothing on their money. The interest rates paid on bank CDs and government and corporate bonds are lower than the rate of inflation. To live on interest income, a person has to purchase Greek, Spanish, or Italian bonds and run the risk of capital loss. The Federal Reserve’s policy of negative interest rates forces retirees to spend down their capital in order to live. In other words, the Fed’s policy is destroying personal savings as people are forced to spend their capital in order to cover living expenses.

In June the Federal Reserve announced that it was going to continue its policy of driving nominal interest rates even lower, this time focusing on long-term Treasury bonds. The Fed said it would be purchasing $400 billion of the Treasury’s 30-year bonds.

Driving interest rates down means driving bond prices up. With 5-year Treasury bonds paying only seven-tenths of one percent and 10-year Treasuries paying only 1.6%, below even the official rate of inflation, Americans desperate for yield move into 30-year bonds currently paying 2.7%. However, the the high bond prices mean that the risk of capital loss is very high.

The Fed’s debt monetization, or a drop in the exchange value of the dollar as other countries move away from its use to settle their balance of payments, could set off inflation that would take interest rates out of the Fed’s control. As interest rates rise, bond prices fall.

In other words, bonds are now the bubble that real estate, stocks, and derivatives were. When this bubble pops, Americans will take another big hit to their remaining wealth.

It makes no sense to invest in long-term bonds at negative interest rates when the federal government is piling up debt that the Federal Reserve is monetizing and when other countries are moving away from the flood of dollars. The potential for a rising rate of inflation is high from debt monetization and from a drop in the dollar’s exchange value. Yet, bond fund portfolio managers have to follow the herd into longer term maturities or see their performance relative to their peers drop to the bottom of the rankings.

Some individual investors and foreign central banks, anticipating the dollar’s loss of value, are accumulating gold and silver bullion. Realizing the danger to the dollar and its policy from the rapid rise in the price of bullion during 2011, the Federal Reserve has arranged offsetting action. When the demand for physical bullion drives up the price, short sales of bullion in the paper market are used to drive the price back down.

Similarly, when investors begin to flee Treasuries, thus causing interest rates to rise, J.P. Morgan and other dependencies of the Federal Reserve sell interest-rate swaps, thus offsetting the effect on interest rates of the bond sales. (Keep in mind that interest rates rise when bond prices fall and vice versa.)

The point of all this information is to establish that except for the 1 percent, the incomes and wealth of Americans are being cut back across the board. From 2002 through 2011 the economy lost 3.5 million manufacturing jobs. These jobs were replaced with lower-paying waitress and bartender jobs (1,189,000), ambulatory health care service jobs (1,512,000) and social assistance jobs (578,000).

These replacement jobs in domestic services mean that on a net basis US consumer income was moved out of the country. Potential aggregate demand in the US dropped by the differences in pay in the job categories. Clearly and unambiguously, jobs offshoring lowered US disposable income and US GDP and, thereby, employment.

Despite the lack of an economic base, Washington’s hegemonic aspirations continue unabated. Other countries are amused at Washington’s unawareness. Russia, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa are forming an agreement to abandon the US dollar as the currency for international settlement between themselves.

On July 4 the China Daily reported: “Japanese politicians and prominent academics from China and Japan urged Tokyo on Tuesday to abandon its outdated foreign policy of leaning on the West and accept China as a key partner as important as the United States. The Tokyo Consensus, a joint statement issued at the end of the Beijing-Tokyo Forum, also called on both countries to expand trade and promote a free-trade agreement for China, Japan and South Korea.”

This means that Japan is in play.

The Chinese government, more intelligent than Washington, is responding to Washington’s military threats by enticing away Washington’s two key Asian allies. As the Chinese economy is now as large as the US and on far firmer footing, and as Japan now has more trade with China than with the US, the enticement is appealing. Moreover, China is next door, and Washington is distant and drowning in its hubris.

Washington, which flicked its middle finger to international law and to its own law and Constitution with its arrogance and gratuitous and illegal wars and with its assertion of the right to murder its own citizens and those of its allies, such as Pakistan, has made the United States a pariah state.

Washington still controls its bought-and-paid-for NATO puppets, but these puppet states are overwhelmed with derivative debt problems brought to them by Wall Street and by sovereign debt problems, some of which were covered up by Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs.

Europe is on the ropes and has no money with which to subsidize Washington’s wars of hegemony.

Washington is becoming an isolated and despised element of the world community. Washington has purchased Europe, Canada, Australia, the former Soviet state of Georgia (and almost Ukraine), and Columbia, and continues its effort to purchase the entire world, but sentiment is turning against the rising Gestapo state that has shown itself to be lawless, ruthless, and indifferent, even hostile, to human life and human rights.

A government, whose military was unable with the help of the UK to occupy Iraq after eight years and was forced to end the conflict by putting the “insurgents” on the US military payroll and to pay them to stop killing American troops, and a government whose military has been unable to subdue a few thousand lightly armed Taliban after 11 years, is over the top when it organizes war against Iran, Russia, and China.

The only prospect Washington has of prevailing in such an undertaking is first use of nuclear weapons, of catching its demonized opponents off guard by nuking them out of the blue. In other words, by the elimination of life on earth.

Is this Washington’s program revealed by the neoconservative warmonger, Bill Kristol, who had no shame to ask publicly: “What’s the good of nuclear weapons if you can’t use them?”

Jul 4 2012

Can Americans Escape the Deception?

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Hot Air Day is upon us. On July 4 hot air will spew forth all over the country as dignitaries deliver homilies to our “freedom and democracy” and praise “our brave troops” who are protecting our freedom by “killing them over there before they come over here.”


Not a single one of these speeches will contain one word of truth. No speaker will lament the death of the US Constitution or urge his audience to action to restore the only document that protects their liberty. No speaker will acknowledge that in the 21st century the Bush/Obama Regime, with the complicity of the Department of Justice, federal courts, Congress, presstitute media, law schools, bar associations, and an insouciant public have murdered the Constitution in the name of the “war on terror.”

As in medieval times, American citizens can be thrown into dungeons and never accounted for. No evidence or charges need be presented to a court. No trial is required, and no conviction.

As in tyrannies, US citizens can be executed at the sole discretion of the despot in the Oval Office, who sits there drawing up lists of people to be murdered.

Protestors exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech and freedom of association are attacked by armed police, beaten, tasered, tear-gassed, pepper sprayed, and arrested.

Whistleblowers who report the government’s crimes are prosecuted despite the statute that protects them.

US soldier Bradley Manning, who allegedly gave Wikileaks the documents revealing US war crimes, including the video of US soldiers in a helicopter gunship enjoying themselves murdering civilians walking along the street as if the soldiers were playing a video game, has been arrested and held in conditions of torture while the government tries to invent a case against him.

According to the US Military Code, US soldiers are required to make war crimes known. However, the law on the books provided no protection to Bradley Manning, and conservative Republicans whom I know are foaming at the mouth for Manning to be executed for letting out the truth. The truth, what is mere truth compared to the “exceptionalism of the great american people”? America has carte blanche to do whatever it wishes to the unexceptional peoples. Manning deserves to die, they say, because he took the side of the oppressed and not the side of the amerikan oppressors.

After the Swedish prosecutorial office dropped the case against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, ruling that the charges of rape had no foundation, another prosecutor, many believe at the urging of the US government, demanded Assange be extradited from England in order to be questioned. Normally, extradition only applies to those who have been charged with a crime and for whom a warrant has been issued, which is most certainly not the case with Assange. But, of course, if Washington wants Assange, Washington will be sure every law is broken or bent until they get him. The Swedish puppet will do the exceptional country’s will and be paid well for its service.

Peace activists in several states had their homes invaded by FBI, computers and personal records taken, and a grand jury was convened in an attempt to indict them for supporting terrorism by their protests of Washington’s illegal wars, wars that are war crimes under the Nuremberg standard established by the US government itself.

None of this will be mentioned in July 4 patriotic speeches. The inebriated masses will be wrapped in the flag and return home full of the hubris that despises lesser foreigners, such as Muslims, Arabs, Chinese, and the French.

And no dignitary will mention that those that “we are killing over there” are mainly women, children, village elders, and aid workers. The US troops seem to specialize in soft targets like weddings, funerals, kids’ soccer games, farm houses, and schools.

Recently Washington reduced the “collateral damage” count by declaring every murdered male of military age to have been a Taliban fighter or terrorist. Obviously, Washington has no way of knowing whether they were or not, but Washington’s declaration is intended as a green light to murder Afghan males of military age.

Currently, Washington has wars underway, or occupations, or is violating the sovereignty of countries with drones and/or troops in seven Muslim countries, and is arming rebels in Syria. All of this is being done without the constitutionally-required authorization by Congress, allegedly the people’s representatives. What a joke!

In short, in “freedom and democracy” america, the people have no voice and no rights and no representatives. 

Yet, this huge deficit of democracy and liberty will pass unmentioned by July 4th orators.

The crimes against humanity, the dismantling of the US Constitution and the lawlessness both domestic and international that define 21st century amerika are the results of September 11, 2001.

Washington’s account of 9/11 is the wildest conspiracy theory known to mankind. The absurdity of Washington’s account is as follows: A few Saudi Arabians without any government’s backing or that of any intelligence service outwitted not only the CIA and the FBI but all 16 US intelligence agencies, even the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, together with the intelligence agencies of all of Washington’s NATO allies and Israel’s Mossad, which has infiltrated every radical Muslim group.

These humble Saudis of no known distinction or powers also simultaneously outwitted the National Security Council, NORAD, the Pentagon, Air Traffic Control, and caused Airport Security to fail four times in one hour on the same morning.

In other words, every part of America’s defenses failed at the same moment.

Think about that for a minute. If such a thing had actually happened, the President, Vice President, Congress, and media would have been demanding to know how such universal failure of every aspect of the national security state was possible. An investigation would have started immediately, not over a year later as a result of pressure from 9/11 families who could not be bought off with monetary payments. Such complete and total failure of every aspect of US security would mean that americans were not safe one single minute during the 40-year stand-off with the Soviet Union. At any moment the Soviets could have utterly destroyed the US and we would never have known what hit us.

In a real investigation, the 9/11 evidence would not have been illegally destroyed, and the investigation would have been conducted by experts, not by government agencies assigned a cover-up and by political hacks. The NIST report is abject nonsense. It explains nothing. It is a fabricated computer simulation of a non-event. The co-chairmen and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission later wrote books in which they stated that information was withheld from the commission, the military lied to the commission, and the commission “was set up to fail.” Yet, these astounding admissions by the leaders of the 9/11 Commission had no impact on Congress, the presstitute media, or the public. All heads were in the sand. Please, whatever you do, don’t make us emotional weaklings face the facts.

More than one hundred firefighters, police, first responders, and building maintenance personnel report hearing and experiencing scores of explosions in the twin towers, including powerful explosions in the sub-basements prior to the collapse of the towers.

Distinguished scientists, authors of many peer-reviewed scientific papers, report finding unreacted nano-thermite in the dust from the towers, tested it for its explosive and high-heat producing ability, and reported the unequivocal results.

Seventeen hundred architects and engineers have testified in a petition to Congress that the three World Trade Center buildings were not brought down by fire and airplanes and have demanded a real scientific investigation of the cause of the buildings’ destruction.

Yet, we are left with the paradox that scientific opinion based on careful examination of the remaining evidence has been designated by the ignorant and unwashed as a “conspiracy theory,” while Washington’s absurd conspiracy theory stands as the truth of the event.

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth headed by high-rise architect Richard Gage has driven the final nail in the coffin of Washington’s concocted conspiracy theory with its new film: “9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out,” and they do speak out. Scores of top level demolition experts and experts on the design, engineering, and construction of high rise steel structures provide the scientific, architectural, and engineering reasons that the three World Trade Center buildings came down only with the assistance of explosives that were placed and timed to remove the powerful structural support and permit the sudden collapse of the buildings. As the buildings were engineered and constructed according to known and tested principles that absolutely prevent rapid collapse, fire and structural damage that two of the three skyscrapers suffered from airliners could not possibly have caused the sudden disintegration of the three buildings.

I saw the film in Atlanta on July 2. Atlanta was a stop on the 32-city premier of the film. The film was shown at the 7 Stages Theater on Euclid Avenue, the former Euclid Theater to which 65 years ago we kids used to ride our bikes to see Tarzan battle giant reptiles and ride elephants to victory over evil black tribesmen or evil white hunters, or to watch Randolph Scott bring justice with his six-shooter to a town ruled by black hats, or to witness the brave American soldiers liberate Europe from the Nazis. We never dreamed that we, residents of the “land of the free” would be menaced by a gestapo police state.

America’s descent into a gestapo police state could be arrested, perhaps, if americans were not so ignorant of science or were capable of even realizing that what they see with their own eyes when they watch videos of the twin towers’ destruction is buildings blowing up, not buildings falling down from structural damage. Building 7’s destruction is the total and complete picture of controlled demolition.

At the end of the powerful film, psychologists explain why the majority of a population lacks the mental and emotional strength to confront highly disturbing facts. A government that so thoroughly spies on its population as Washington does obviously knows its population’s profile and sees nothing but weakness and fear that can be manipulated.

What fact is more disturbing than the likely fact that 9/11 was a false flag event designed to provide the neoconservatives with their “new Pearl Harbor” in order to launch Washington’s Wars of Hegemony in the Middle East, and from there to Iran and to the nuclear powers: Russia and China, which are being encircled, as Iran has been, with US military bases?

What we are experiencing is a replay of the French Revolution, this time on a world stage. Napoleon, the inheritor of the French Revolution, conquered Europe several times in the effort to expand the New Order in France to all of Europe. The French Revolution was the first claim of a New World Order, but at that time the world
was Europe.

Washington’s “wars of liberation” are wars of world hegemony and wars of massive profits for the military/security complex. The combination of power and money that are the motives for Washington’s concocted wars are hidden motives, wrapped in the flag, patriotic sentiments, and fear of dark-skinned demonized Muslims.

Can Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth or any truth break through and liberate americans from the artificial reality created by government liars and a corrupt presstitute media, or are americans doomed to expire in the Matrix that has been created for them?

Perhaps the hope is that the economy will collapse under the would-be hegemons, and people who will not fight for principles and their liberty will fight for their economic survival.

May 24 2012

Black Op Down: Hollywood Jazzes Up Fake Osama Raid For The Children

Source: Saman Mohammadi

“But there’s one type of leak of classified information that the White House not only approves of but itself routinely exploits: the type that glorifies the President for propagandistic ends. The transparency group Judicial Watch brought FOIA lawsuits against the administration seeking information regarding the Osama bin Laden raid, but the administration insisted in federal court that the operation is secret and thus not subject to disclosure (even as they were leaking details about the raid to the press).

At the same time, Judicial Watch has also sued the White House seeking documents showing the administration’s collaboration with Hollywood filmmakers — The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal – who have been planning a big-budget, studio film from Sony recounting the raid that killed bin Laden, oh-so-coincidentally scheduled for release in October, 2012, just before the election (that’s clearly a coincidence because Democrats, unlike those Bush/Cheney monsters, do not exploit national security for political gain).
.
.

So let’s review the Obama administration’s rules: leaking classified information is a grave crime — espionage! — when done to blow the whistle on serious government corruption, deceit and illegality, and it merits decades in prison. But when it’s done to enable Hollywood to produce a propaganda film glorifying the great and “gutsy” Commander-in-Chief, then it is a noble and patriotic act.” – Glenn Greenwald, “WH leaks for propaganda film,” May 23, 2012.

“OBL’s death will remain one of those many “truths” that rest on nothing but the government’s word.” – Paul Craig Roberts,“Pakistan TV Report Contradicts US Claim of Bin Laden’s Death,”August 8, 2011.

“When I put a mask on my face, it instantly changes the relationship between you and me. Whereas, only moments ago, there was you a three dimensional human being troubled by various difficulties and me a similar type of entity also with similar kinds of problems now there is you and it, a third thing, a new entity that has entered into the relationship. This third entity, more often than not, evokes some type of strange, otherworldly being: a monster or a demon or an evil spirit, or else, if it is a mask of another human being, tends to evoke a cliche, such as, say, Richard Nixon. In either case, the I that was me only moments before has temporarily one hopes disappeared into another realm entirely, namely, the world of ritual, dream, myth, superstition, stereotypes and even cliches. It is, in other words, a flatter world, simpler than ours, more iconic, two-dimensional rather than three dimensional, in which beings tend to exist as eternal icons.” – John David Ebert,“Watchmen: A Movie Review,” March 11, 2009.

Do you love fantasy and action?

Do you worship President Obama as a war hero because you think he killed the symbol of evil?

Are political thrillers your favourite films?

If you said yes to all three questions, then get ready to be amazed and entertained. Hollywood is rolling up its sleeves to turn a juicy original screenplay from the White House into a highly dramatic and suspenseful thriller. The film will revolve around the last days of Osama Bin Laden and the night of the mythical raid on his compound in Pakistan by U.S. Navy SEALs.

The film will be war on terror propaganda on steroids. The magicians in Hollywood and their masters at the Pentagon are inventing reality for the big screen and transforming President Obama into a postmodern war hero. The mythology of the Osama Bin Laden raid will be given new life thanks to the aid of cinematic tricks. President Obama will be portrayed as an assertive, resolute, and courageous leader, everything he’s not in real life.

After watching the movie, people will go away thinking not that the raid never happened but even more brainwashed into buying the official story of Bin Laden’s death. Walking out of the theatre, Obama’s brain dead followers will say: “Wow, dude, Obama is such a bad ass, he’s like America’s greatest leader since George Washington. Seriously, dude. Washington didn’t kill Osama, okay, but Obama did. That puts Obama at the top, he should be the fifth, sixth, and seventh face on Mt. Rushmore.”

Glenn Greenwald says in his article, “WH leaks for propaganda film,”that the Pentagon, the White House, and the filmmakers are coordinating with each other in this monumental mythic and political project. No doubt, they will make the best propaganda product thus far in the farce that is the war on terror. Greenwald writes:

“The DoD officials meeting with the filmmakers were given the White House talking points from the night of the raid, which including hailing the President’s actions as “gutsy” and stressing the heavy involvement of the White House in the raid.”

Hollywood is a natural ally in Washington’s propaganda war on reality and history. Both Hollywood and Washington do a wonderful job of entertaining, distracting, and hypnotizing the American people, and pushing them into the land of myths and fairytales.

A film about the most hyped non-event in history, the so-called assassination of Osama Bin Laden, is exemplary of all that is good and bad with the Washington-Hollywood partnership, depending on your perspective.

Claims that President Obama has failed to persuade the world that Osama Bin Laden was alive in Pakistan in May 2011 and that he heroically ordered his assassination from inside the White House are being addressed not by giving evidence to the press and public, like real documentary footage of the raid, but with a movie.

It is obvious that the White House does not have any evidence to give to the press and the public of the raid because the entire “Obama killed Osama” drama is made up. In court, the Obama administration said that it cannot disclose information about the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan because it was a “secret” operation. That’s like me telling my parents that I got straight A’s in school, but then add that the report card is a secret.

The details of the raid that have been given to specific filmmakers and journalists by the White House are completely fabricated. The White House’s case is garbage. It is a pile of shit, (excuse the language).

White House, CIA, and Pentagon officials love Hollywood so much because they love mixing fantasy with reality. The image conscious military and political leaders in the National Security-Propaganda State see nothing wrong in manipulating the global public mind and world history by pitching a movie to a Hollywood studio about something that never happened.

What was the conversation like in the White House huddle? I’m guessing it went something like this: “Mr. President. The message has not been sent that you ordered the raid that killed Bin Laden because you’re just not persuasive enough, so we’re going to reach out to our film contacts in Hollywood and tell them to make a convincing movie about your war heroics. We are confident that a motion picture will quell all the rumors and solidify your place in history as well as in the memory of the American people and humanity. We promise you that you will be shown in a very positive light, almost like a presidential super-hero, but without the cape, of course. It will be professionally made, very dramatic, very suspenseful. Audiences will be on the edge of their seats through the whole thing.”

What can we conclude from this big fiasco? That the PR State in Washington is running amok. It is inventing enemies, events, and history itself. It is playing with fire.

We have entered the territory of myth and there is no going back. This is a wilderness that we cannot get out of anytime soon. As we blindly march forward the tracks behind us are disappearing and there are no road signs to follow. Darkness surrounds us now. Who is our guide? What is our destination? Lucifer? Hell?

Or are we already in hell?

Where will the world end up twenty or fifty years from now?

If we don’t recover the facts of history and reconnect to reality, then we will be led by the criminal myth makers who are in absolute power to a very dark place.

May God help us all.

Related:
It’s All A Sick Joke, Osama Bin Laden Did Not Commit 9/11 Crime
Top Government Insider: Bin Laden Died In 2001, 9/11 A False Flag
Pakistan TV Report Contradicts US Claim of Bin Laden’s Death
The Myth of Osama Bin Laden Is Dead, But The CIA’s Raid Against Reality Goes On
Bullshit Is The Middle Name of Both Obama And Osama 
Inside The Dream State: Why The CIA Loves Mass Hypnosis And Mind Control So Much

May 19 2012

Are Americans Catching On, Waking Up, Unplugging?

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

In response to the question in the title I can report that most of my readers are. Almost everyone got the point of the last column. They see the absurdity of the government’s claim that the identity of the tough, macho Navy Seals, who allegedly murdered Osama bin Laden, has to be kept secret in order to protect our fierce warriors from reprisals from Muslim terrorists, while those government officials responsible for the torture and deaths of large numbers of Muslims can walk around, identity known, unprotected and safe.

A few members of Congress are also awake, but not very many. Indeed, we are losing two of the most aware – Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Kucinich was redistricted in order to get rid of his independent voice. He carried 75% of the votes from that part of his old district that was included in his new one, but the new voters lacked the intelligence to vote for him. Ron Paul, in our time of tribulation, tried for the Republican presidential nomination on a platform of saving the US Constitution, but those who voted in Republican primaries weren’t interested in saving the US Constitution.

Now we are down to US Rep. Walter Jones.

Initially, Jones was a member of the warmonger crowd. He was angered when the French government cast doubt on the George W. Bush regime’s reasons for the need for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jones said at that time that he was renaming French Fries “Freedom Fries.”

Jones unplugged from the Matrix and has been sentient for some time. Recently the tyrant Obama and the government operative Panetta, a political whore who has been in a variety of government positions and is currently Secretary of Warmongering, announced publicly that, the US Constitution notwithstanding, the executive branch no longer needed the authority of Congress to go to war. In our globalist existence, the authority for the US to initiate hostilities against another country comes from the UN, declared Obama and Panetta. If the executive branch can persuade or bribe the UN to give a war OK, Congress is no longer relevant.

This was too much for the awakened US Rep. Walter Jones. He has introduced House Congressional Resolution 107, which clearly states that the president’s use of US military in an act of aggression without the consent of Congress is an impeachable offense.

There is absolutely no question whatsoever that Rep. Jones is correct. However, you can bet that the Obama regime already has a John Yoo-type hireling busy at work in the Department of Justice (sic) writing a legal memo that the US Constitution gives no authority to Congress to declare war.

A person would think that members of Congress would flock to Rep. Jones’ resolution.

After all, it is Congress’ own power that is on the line. Normally, organizations defend their own power. Strangely, the US Congress has not defended its power since Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s. Because of the crisis of the Great Depression, Congress gave up its law-making powers to the executive agencies created by Roosevelt to run the country.

Congress pretends to still be in control by having “oversight” over the ruling executive cabinet departments and agencies. Cabinet secretaries, assistant sectaries, and CIA directors have to go testify and be questioned before congressional committees and all that, like the Federal Reserve chairman who has unaccountable power over interest rates and inflation, but the laws are made by the executive branch.

Ever since the 1930s, when Congress passes a law it is merely an authorization for some executive branch agency to define the law by writing the regulations. As the executive agency also enforces the regulations, we have the beginnings of tyranny as the same agency both makes the law and enforces it. (See, for example, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Ch. 11, “Abdicating Legislative Power.”)

The roots of tyranny in america go back to the 1930s and even further back to President Lincoln. The decline of Congress, which was created by the Founding Fathers to be a powerful political institution, has been a long term process. However, in recent years the decline of Congress’ power and relevance has accelerated. The Democrats are as responsible for this as Republicans. If US law had been enforced, and Democrats could have enforced the law, George W. Bush and essentially the entirety of his appointees would be in federal prison.

But the Democrats sacrificed the people’s power over government in order that the executive branch could protect us from a terrorism for which no evidence exists. No terrorist events have occurred since September 11, 2001, except for FBI orchestrated plots that “never endangered the public.” As for the government’s 9/11 story, thousands of experts have their doubts.

So, the US Constitution has simply been discarded on the basis of fear. First, the fear of the Great Depression, and secondly, the fear of Muslim Terrorism.

The United States of America is the Constitution. If the Constitution no longer exists as an enforceable document taken seriously by political elites, the United States no longer exists. Some other entity has taken its place.

Think about that. Describe to yourself the characteristics of this new entity. This will be easier for older people than for the young, who have been born into the new tyranny.

For the young, tyranny is all they know. For the young, tyranny is normal.

How old does a person have to be to remember when you boarded an airliner without any security? In previous columns I have pointed out the tiny, essentially insignificant infractions, that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in order to avoid impeachment. Compared to Bush or Obama, Nixon was flawless in his observation of US law and the US Constitution. No one of my generation can possibly imagine Nixon saying that the UN could replace Congress’ authority to initiate war, or that he could strip US citizens of their liberty and lives on suspicion alone without evidence or due process of law, simply on the basis of executive decree. All Nixon did was to lie about when he learned of a burglary of which he had no prior knowledge and no involvement.

The loss of our liberty is where we are today. Rep. Jones wants to retrieve Congress’ war-making power. He says that those americans who wish to support this goal should inform their Senators and Representative and local newspaper of this fact. He provides the telephone number of the congressional switchboard which can connect you to the three offices that, allegedly, represent you. The number is 202 224-3121.

As you know, I keep trying, and so must we all. If we don’t keep trying, it means we accept our loss of our liberty and accountable government. If we give in now, what was the point of resisting the Soviet threat, other than profits and power for the military/security complex?

The US government and its media whores, presstitutes as Gerald Celente calls them, show increasing contempt for the intelligence, or lack thereof, of the american public. Even americans spaced out on alcohol, drugs, junk food, television and sports events remember the name Osama bin Laden. This person, formerly an operative of the US government against the Soviet Union, was, we were told, the embodiment of total evil. He was responsible for 9/11.

President George W. Bush declared that Afghanistan’s refusal (apparently another Bush regime lie) to deliver Osama, the alleged (no proof) perpetrator of 9/11, to US authorities was the justification for attacking Afghanistan, a country at that time, as now, with two separate governments at war with one another. Shortly thereafter, Osama became, magically, the reason to invade Iraq, an old US ally who had attacked the government of the Iranian Revolution at Washington’s behest.

Suddenly america’s Iraqi ally had nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened american cities, in the words of Bush’s moronic National Security Advisor, with “mushroom clouds.”

How did all this absurdity occur? Yes, what Gerald Celente aptly designates as “the presstitute media” played a role. However, the whores were serving their customers, which are the government and private interests that benefit from war. The American public could have rejected the spin, but they put yellow ribbon decals on their SUVs and supported the troops.

If americans were puzzled when the US government abandoned its position that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 and announced a new “mastermind,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the presstitutes didn’t mention it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was designated the “mastermind of 9/11” because the US government had in custody this hapless individual, perhaps sold to them by warlords for the bounty paid for “terrorists.” There’s no good in having a mastermind of 9/11 whom you cannot catch. So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed became the Mastermind of 9/11.

Once designated the Mastermind, the CIA torturers went to work on him, illegally, of course, but who cares, here was the Mastermind of 9/11.

After Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was water-boarded 183 times with the only evidence against him being coerced self-incrimination, both the former chief US prosecutor at Guantanamo, Colonel Morris Davis, and Admiral Donald Guter, Judge Advocate General of the US Navy, dismissed the Guantanamo military tribunal trials as show trials or “circuses.”

Indeed, the american trials of alleged “terrorists” are even less lawful than Stalin’s show trials of the Bolsheviks, who created the Russian Revolution in 1917, and Hitler’s trials of the German military who attempted to assassinate him in order to save Germany from destruction.

When america’s own chief military prosecutors denounce trials of alleged “terrorists,” the media and the public should take notice. But not in america where the government believes its own lies as fervently as the brainwashed public believes the presstitute media.

Astonishingly, before a show trial could dispatch Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the Mastermind of 9/11, the US government has produced a new culprit. It was not Osama bin Laden nor Sheikh Mohammed, but Iran that is responsible for 9/11. In a US federal court judgment issued in December 2011, Iran was found guilty of the 9/11 attacks (ref).

So who is responsible for 9/11? If not bin Laden, why did the Navy Seals allegedly murder him? If not Sheikh Mohammed, why is he being put on trial after being tortured for years?

The answer is that the criminals in Washington, who control our lives, no longer care about any of their previous propaganda. They now want to attack another country on totally false pretenses, as does the extreme right-wing Israeli government, the cancer of the Middle East.

Some of the Israeli military brass and much of the Israeli security/intelligence brass oppose an attack on Iran as an act of insanity. Yet, little, if any of the Israeli opposition to war has been reported in the US presstitute media. In order to negate internal opposition, the Israeli prime minister has formed a unity government with the main opposition party, as AIPAC stampedes the US Congress into voting for war with Iran (ref).

If the unaware american population can be programmed to believe that Iran is the 9/11 culprit, then Washington can initiate yet another war that enriches the military/security complex with money and power.

Will bin Laden’s family now sue Washington for blaming Osama for an offense which Washington now acknowledges he was not guilty? Will Sheikh Mohammed be found guiltless, because a US federal court now says it was Iran that was responsible for 9/11?

These would be the results if america had a justice system that was independent of the needs of the political elites and the private interests that they serve. But today in america the ruling interests produce by hook or crook justifications for war that serve the power and profit of the military/security complex. Whatever the mainstream media tells you serves this interest.

So, how do we rescue America from its government and from the corrupt media that serves as a Ministry of Truth for a corrupt government?