THIRD WORLD TRAVELER
is an archive of articles and book excerpts
that seek to tell the truth
about American democracy, media, and foreign policy,
and about the impact of the actions of
the United States government, global financial and trade institutions,
transnational corporations, and the corporate media,
on democracy, social and economic justice, human rights, and war
and peace,
in the Third World, and in the developed world.
THIRD WORLD TRAVELER also provides
information and links to aid international travelers.
Visitors are encouraged
to buy the books and subscribe to the magazines,
to ask their libraries to put them on the shelves and their bookstores
to stock them, to visit the websites,
and to tell others about the wealth of information that these
independent news sources provide.
For, without public awareness of and support for independent authors,
publications, and websites,
this much-needed information may not continue to be available.
"Believe nothing, no matter
where you read it, or who said it, unless your own reason and
your own common sense agree."
Gautama Buddha
(quotation is a paraphrase
of the original)
Napalm-Vietnam (1960s-70s) / Agent
Orange-Laos (1960s-70s) / Depleted Uranium-Fallujah, Iraq (2003)
/ Gaza, Palestine (2014) / Yemen (2017)
"They have pillaged the
world. When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything,
they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he
is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their
appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and
poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish,
and call it by the lying name of 'empire'. They make a desert
and call it 'peace'."
Publius Cornelius Tacitus - a
historian of the Roman Empire
"Why, of course, the people
don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk
his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to
come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people
don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America,
nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after
all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy
and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether
it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or
a Communist dictatorship.
... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to
tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists
for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It
works the same way in any country."
Hermann Goering - Nazi leader -
from Gustave Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary (1947)
"Do you begin to see, then,
what kind of world we are creating?... A world of fear and treachery
and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world
which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself."
from George Orwell's 1949 novel
"1984"
TRUTH-TELLERS / WHISTLEBLOWERS
(A PARTIAL LIST)
Philip Agee-CIA / John Stockwell-CIA
/ Julian Assange-Wikileaks / Edward Snowden-CIA
"To oppose the policies
of a government does not mean you are against the country or the
people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition
should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent,
or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing.
Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of
these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer,
do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever
he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and
look where it got them."
Michael Parenti
"The further a society
drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak
it."
George Orwell
"The men the American people
admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they
detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
H. L. Mencken
"We Americans are the ultimate
innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time
the government is telling us the truth."
Sydney Schanberg
"If you think any American
official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid."
Arthur Sylvester, assistant secretary
of defense for public affairs, to American journalists, 1965
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth
becomes a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
"There is no such thing,
at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent
press. You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions,
and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear
in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of
the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar
salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish
as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking
for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in
one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation
would be gone.
The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie
outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon,
and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You
know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent
press?
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We
are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our
talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property
of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
John Swinton, preeminent New York
journalist, at a press banquet,1880
"The master planners devised
the strategy of a merger - a Great Merger - among nations.
But before such a merger can be consummated, and the United States
becomes just another province in a New World Order, there must
at least be the semblance of parity among the senior partners
in the deal. How does one make the nations of the world more nearly
equal? The Insiders determined that a two-prong approach was needed;
use American money and know-how to build up your competitors,
while at the same time use every devious strategy you can devise
to weaken and impoverish this country. The goal is not to bankrupt
the United States. Rather, it is to reduce our productive might,
and therefore our standard of living, to the meager subsistence
level of the socialized nations of the world.
The plan is not to bring the standard of living in less developed
countries up to our level, but to bring ours down to meet theirs
coming up... It is your standard of living which must be sacrificed
on the altar of the New World Order."
Gary Allen in his book "The
Rockefeller File"
"There is a transnational
ruling class, a "Superclass", that agrees on establishing
a world government. The middle class is targeted for elimination,
because most of the world has no middle class, and to fully integrate
and internationalize a middle class, would require industrialization
and development in Africa, and certain places in Asia and Latin
America. The goal of the Superclass is not to lose their wealth
and power to a transnational middle class, but rather to extinguish
the notion of a middle class, and transnationalize a lower, uneducated,
labor oriented class, through which they will secure ultimate
wealth and power.
The global economic crisis serves these ends, as whatever remaining
wealth the middle class holds is in the process of being eliminated,
and as the crisis progresses, the middle classes of the world
will suffer, while a great percentage of lower classes of the
world, poverty-stricken even prior to the crisis, will suffer
the greatest, most probably leading to a massive reduction in
population levels, particularly in the "underdeveloped"
or "Third World" states."
Andrew Gavin Marshall
WEBSITES TO VISIT
"Some believe we are part
of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United
States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists"
and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more
integrated global political and economic structure - one world,
if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud
of it."
David Rockefeller in his "Memoirs"
"The corporate-dominated
economy and the transnational corporate state had consolidated
its power over almost every aspect of public and private life,
and under a formal globalization movement the transnational corporations
were extending their tentacles all over the planet.
Footsoldiers like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the ever-dutiful
Bush family, Helmut Kohl, and a list of Japanese leaders had diligently
kept the faith. Working with the timeworn International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the World Bank and ultimately with the new engine
of globalization, the World Trade Organization, they ensured that
the interests of capital were nowhere endangered by the needs
of the world's three billion poor to eat, have shelter, clothing,
sanitation, medical care, and education."
William F. Pepper in his book "An
Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King"
"The war against a foreign
country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going
to profit from it."
George Orwell
"As news organizations
are increasingly driven by a bottom-line mentality, the news we
get becomes more and more sensational. What is the difference
between Time and Newsweek? Between ABC, NBC, and CBS News? Between
the Washington Post and the New York Times? For all practical
purposes, none. The concentration of media power means that Americans
increasingly get their information from a few sources who decide
what is "news."
Oliver Stone
"Because the United States
does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans
to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States
is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that
the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment."
Tom Engelhardt
"During the past two centuries
when the peoples of the world were gradually winning their political
freedom from the dynastic monarchies, the major banking families
of Europe and America were actually reversing the trend by setting
up new dynasties of political control through the formation of
international financial combines. These banking dynasties had
learned that all governments must have sources of revenue from
which to borrow in times of emergency. They had also learned that
by providing such funds from their own private resources, they
could make both kings and democratic leaders tremendously subservient
to their will."
Carroll Quigley in his
book "Tragedy and Hope"
"Today Americans would
be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order;
tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they
were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real
or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then
that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to
deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is
the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights
will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well
being granted to them by their world government."
Henry Kissinger speaking at the
annual Bilderberger meeting, May 21, 1992
"Ever since the days of
Henry Ford, the Economic Elite have needed a thriving US middle
class to increase growth and profits, but now, in the global economy,
they view the US middle class as obsolete. They increasingly look
globally for profits and they would rather pay cheap labor in
countries like China and India."
David DeGraw
"If we have to use force,
it is because we are America; we are the indispensible nation."
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright (1998)
"Since World War Two the
United States has attempted to overthrow more than fifty foreign
governments, it has dropped bombs on the people of around thirty
countries, has attempted to assassinate some sixty foreign leaders,
helped to suppress dozens of populist or nationalist movements,
has tortured many thousands, and seriously and illegally intervened
in one way or another in virtually every country on the planet,
in the process of which the U.S. has caused the end of life for
several million people, and condemned many millions more to a
life of agony and despair."
William Blum, in a speech at the
University of Vermont, 2007
"Coming to grips with U.S./CIA
activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have
been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is
very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up
with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum
figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two
million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia,
one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000
killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S.
tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions,
finance covert political and military activities and destabilize
societies."
John Stockwell, CIA official in
the 1960s and 1970s
"We are ruled, though it
may be difficult to imagine, by a small dynastic power structure,
largely consisting of powerful banking families, such as the Rothschilds,
Rockefellers, and others. They emerged in controlling the financial
system, extended their influence over the political system, the
educational system, and, through the major foundations, have become
the dominant social powers of our world, creating think tanks
and other institutions which shape and change the course of society
and modern human history."
Andrew Gavin Marshall
"The general public are
viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered
herd. And it's the responsible men who have to make decisions
and to protect society from the trampling and rage of the bewildered
herd. Now since it's a democracy they - the herd, that is - are
permitted occasionally to lend their weight to one or another
member of the responsible class. That's called an election."
Noam Chomsky
"The powers of financial
capitalism had a far-reaching aim - nothing less than to create
a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate
the political system of each country and the economy of the world
as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion
by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret
agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.
The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements
[BIS] in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled
by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations
... Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its
ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges,
to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and
to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards
in the business world."
Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy
and Hope"
"People, governments and
economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational
banks and corporations."
Zbigniew Brzezinski
"Americans are too broadly
underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict
what they know of the world. Instead, news channels prefer to
feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all
of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have
to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or
further investigations... Politicians and the media have conspired
to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians
don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the
news media, especially television news, basically agrees."
Tom Fenton
"I spent thirty-three years
in the Marines, most of my time being a hlgh class muscle man
for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I
was a racketeer for capitalism.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house
of Brown Brothers in 1910-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially
Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City
[Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half
a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
In China in 1927 l helped to see to it that Standard Oil went
its way unmolested.
I had a swell racket. l was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions.
l might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do
was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated
on three continents."
General Smedley Butler, former
US Marine Corps Commandant, 1935
"Americans are wonderfully
courteous to strangers, yet indiscriminately shoot kids in schools.
They believe they are masters of the world, yet know nothing about
what goes on outside their shores. They are people who believe
the world stretches from California to Boston and everything outside
is the bit they have to bomb to keep the price of oil down. Only
one in five Americans hold a passport and the only foreign stories
that make their news are floods, famine, and wars, because it
makes them feel good to be an American. Feeling good to be American
is what they live for. "
Brian Reade, London columnist
"The American government
could already be described as authoritarian... Due process of
law and the right of habeas corpus, which for centuries have characterized
the rule of law in democratic states, have been eliminated. At
the discretion of the president, non-citizens and citizens alike
may be classified as enemy combatants, picked up and held for
an indeterminate period of time without access to counsel. A network
of secret prisons and camps is being established both inside and
outside of the United States. Paramilitary forces or private mercenary
armies are being developed to make up for the inadequate numbers
of the existing volunteer army. This is effectively resulting
in the privatization of the US military."
William F. Pepper in his book "An
Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King"
"Powerful private families
decide who controls the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England,
the Bank of Japan and even the European Central Bank. Money is
in their hands to destroy or create. Their aim is the ultimate
control over future life on this planet, a supremacy earlier dictators
and despots only ever dreamt of."
F. William Engdahl in his book
"Seeds of Destuction"
"This world is not run
by Presidents or Prime Ministers, it is run by the global corporations
and the banks. For it is these entities that control the money
supply and it is these entities that decide which country lives
or falls."
The Daily Bell, 2012
"The war on terror as seen
by Washington and a complaisant US media is the ultimate money
and power machine, requiring a huge military and intelligence
commitment that is endless and not confined to any part of the
world. As terror has no capital city or national identity the
war against it cannot end through capture and surrender. As it
is a secret war, it can be waged using unconventional methods,
without regard for the deaths of civilians who are seen as "sheltering"
the terrorists, guaranteeing that the blood of the innocent will
produce new generations raised hating America. The bleeding will
continue forever and everywhere as long as there are terrorists,
justifying government intrusion into the lives of the citizens
at home and huge and unsustainable budgets to wage the war worldwide.
It is George Orwell's dark vision of 1984 turned into reality.
Tyranny and bankruptcy will be the war on terror's legacy."
Philip Giraldi, 2009
"The easiest way to gain
control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. The public
will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened."
Josef Stalin
"The question is not
how to get good people to rule; the question is how to stop the
powerful from doing as much damage as they can to us."
Karl Popper
THE WAR RACKET
"Governments don't want
well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking,
That is against their interests. They want obedient workers, people
who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork,
and just dumb enough to passively accept it."
George Carlin
"The drug "industry"
is run as a single integrated world operation, from the opium
poppy to the nickel bag of heroin sold on an inner-city street
corner. Not only is illegal drug traffic under the control of
a single world network, but opiates traffic in particular is without
doubt the best-controlled production and distribution system of
any commodity in international trade, illegal or legal."
www.bibliotecapleyades.net "How
the Drug Empire Works"
"War means blind obedience,
unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction,
and irresponsible murder."
Alexander Berkman
William Blum / John Pilger
"Most Americans have no
idea that what we are fed by the news media is nothing more than
a portrayal of what powerful corporations want us to believe,
that what happens to pass as education is as often as not mere
propaganda, that what we learn in church may have very little
or nothing to do with the truth, that what our parents teach us
may be nothing more than an accumulation of their own personal
biases, no doubt a rather subtle modification of what they were
taught by their parents. And through such a process, governments
and nations around the world wield control as to what their citizens,
believe, value, and do."
Doug Soderstrom
"In America, we grew up
thinking that the people that we see on the nightly news are journalists.
But, there is no journalism happening there, only script reading.
That is understood by anyone with a sliver of common sense, and
the objectivity to realize that their newsperson is basically
an actor."
Charlie Robinson, in his book "The
Octopus of Global Control", 2017
"The New York Times is
the house organ of the Establishment. It is committed, both editorially
and in its presentation of the news, to the interests of an Establishment:
continuity, security and legitimacy. Therefore they generally
support business and finance, the American version of empire,
the government and the president, until, and unless, some excess
is so egregious that it poses a threat to continuity, security
or legitimacy."
Larry Beinhart
"What the press do is they
tell you lies, lies they already know you want to hear. The press
can figure out what its readers or viewers believe, and make a
hell of a living pandering to their egos and telling them that
they're smart. They lie and tell the audience they are right,
and they never have to change your mind about anything. And the
audience rewards them, lauding them and paying them money to keep
hearing those sweet, self-serving lies."
Allan Uthman
"The major news media serve
at the pleasure of a commercial oligarchy that pays them, and
pays them handsomely, for their pretense of speaking truth to
power... The prominent figures in our contemporary Washington
press corps regard themselves as government functionaries, enabling
and codependent."
Lewis H. Lapham
"Most newspapers are part
of huge conglomerates, and the policy that comes down is that
you don't rock any boats. You can't make the government upset
because the value of the company is the broadcast licenses, and
the government will not renew them, and we can't make our corporate
owners mad because they will fire us, and we can't make the advertisers
mad or they will pull their advertising. So the media can't say
anything that will upset the power structure. And that's what
has happened to the press."
Paul Craig Roberts
"The main media bias is
in favor of the thieves who stole our country and economy, and
own the mainstream media companies. The omnipresent mainstream
media is the greatest weapon of oppression humanity has ever known."
David DeGraw
"More than fifty years
ago the J.P. Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political
movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do,
since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice
to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was
not to destroy ... or take over but was really threefold: (1)
to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups;
(2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could "blow
off steam," and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity
and possibly on their actions, if they ever went "radical".
Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy
and Hope"
"Communism and socialism
are themselves forms of monopoly. The only difference is that
in this case, the monopoly is operated by the government. But
what if an international banker, through loans to the state, manipulation
of a central bank, campaign contributions, or bribes, is able
to achieve dominion over a government? In that case, he would
find socialism welcome, for it would serve him as an instrument
to control society."
James Perloff
"CEOs of most of the
world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy
the lives of many other human beings. Only about 1 to 3 percent
of us are sociopaths - people who don't have normal human feelings
and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific
things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably
only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of
that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands
how business works, particularly within any specific industry.
Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic,
destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions
to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the
money without any thought to its social consequences."
Thom Hartman
"The total result of the
manipulation of society by the Establishment elite has been four
major wars in sixty years, a crippling national debt, abandonment
of the Constitution, suppression of freedom and opportunity, and
creation of a vast credibility gulf between the man in the street
and Washington, D.C.. While the transparent device of two major
parties trumpeting artificial differences, circus-like conventions,
and the cliché of "bipartisan foreign policy"
no longer carries credibility, and the financial elite itself
recognizes that its policies lack public acceptance, it is obviously
prepared to go it alone without even nominal public support."
Antony C. Sutton in his book "Wall
Street and the Rise of Hitler", 1976
"Why, of course, the people
don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk
his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to
come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people
don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America,
nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after
all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy
and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether
it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or
a Communist dictatorship."
Hermann Goering - Nazi leader
"Since the anticommunism
hysteria in the years following the Second World War, a bipartisan
consensus has existed on foreign policy. Meaningful political
discourse has been almost absent about foreign policy issues.
So many foreign policy decisions have been placed beyond public
scrutiny, that almost all of what passes as official information
about foreign policy is manufactured by government agencies for
its propaganda effect."
Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R.
Judd
"Those whom the gods wish
to destroy they first make mad."
Euripides (485-406 BC)
"There is nothing puzzling
about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy. What an
aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees, a state
of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight war kills reform, overnight
it transforms insurgents into traitors and the Republic into an
imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts
and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts public hope."
Walter Karp
"Terrorism has become a
sort of screen created since the end of the Cold War by policymakers
in Washington. It is fabricated to keep the population afraid
and insecure, and to justify what the United States wishes to
do globally."
Edward Said
"The modern pantheon of
enemies are the banking consortium; the global Elite born and
bred from mega-wealth; the academics and economists who disconnect
ideas from reality; and the scientific and military minds who
are so compartmentalized by design that they rarely know what
sort of dictatorship to which they are making their contributions."
Michael Edwards
"The Defense Authorization
Act [2007] gives the Executive the power to move National Guard
units anywhere in the country, without regard for the wishes of
the state governors, and to declare martial law. This declaration
would authorize the detention of dissenting citizens who could
then be picked up and held incommunicado for an indefinite period,
without access to counsel or the courts. This is nothing short
of a militarization of the Republic.
Enabled by the Defense Authorization Act, the president can now
declare martial law, transfer military technology to militarized
domestic police forces, and detain dissenting citizens virtually
at will. These detainees could be held in camps that are now being
constructed and refurbished by Kellogg Brown and Root, ostensibly
for illegal immigrants.
... The unitary presidency has been granted the authority to order
kidnapping, detention, and torture abroad under the Military Commissions
Act of 2006. This act authorizes extraordinary rendition, which
inevitably means foreign detention and torture of anyone the President
determines to be an unlawful combatant."
William F. Pepper in his book "An
Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King"
"The theories offered by
economists rationalize the self-interest of big business and the
wealthy. Such theories claim to benefit society and the public's
well-being. But they do just the opposite: they make the great
mass of people poorer while making the rich fabulously richer."
Ravi Batra
"The world order doesn't
allow for any frontal attack aimed at destroying narco-trafficking
because that business, which moves $400 billion annually, is far
too important for the leading nations of world power to eliminate.
The US punishes those countries which don't do enough to fight
against drugs, whereas their CIA boys have built paradises of
corruption throughout the world with the drug profits."
Ecuadorian Presidential Candidate
Manuel Salgado
"Americans don't understand
that terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights,
or the Constitution. Terrorists are not anything like the threat
that we face to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution from our
own government in the name of fighting terrorism."
Paul Craig Roberts
"American leaders are perhaps
not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take
pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they
just don't care. The same that could be said about a sociopath.
As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire,
as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth
and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and
suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them, then
they just don't care about it happening to other people, including
the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home
- the ones who make it back alive - with Agent Orange or Gulf
War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would
not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such
things."
William Blum
DICTATORS AND AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS
THAT THE UNITED STATES HELPED PUT IN POWER OR SUPPORTED, MOST
OFTEN BY OVERTHROWING DEMOCRATICALLY-ELECTED GOVERNMENTS OR SUPPRESSING
POPULIST MOVEMENTS
Rafael Trujillo-Dominican Republic
/ Paul Kagame-Rwanda / Antonio Salazar-Portugal
George Papadopoulos-Greece / Sani
Abacha-Nigeria / Anastasio Somoza-Nicaragua
Yoweri Moseveni-Uganda / Francisco
Franco-Spain / Hugo Banzer-Bolivia
Humberto Branco-Brazil / Mobuto
Sese Seko-Zaire / Jorge Videla-Argentina
Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq-Pakistan /
Alfred Stroessner-Paraguay / Ferdinand Marcos-Philippines
Shah Pahlevi-Iran / General Suharto-Indonesia
/ "Papa Doc" Duvalier-Haiti
"The greatest myth concerning
American foreign policies is the deeply-held belief that no matter
what the United States does abroad, no matter how bad it may look,
no matter what horror may result, the American government means
well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they
may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they
do mean well. Their intentions are always honorable. Of that Americans
are certain. They genuinely wonder why the rest of the world can't
see how kind and generous and self-sacrificing America has been."
William Blum
"I spent thirty-three years
in the Marines, most of my time being a hlgh class muscle man
for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I
was a racketeer for capitalism.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house
of Brown Brothers in 1910-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially
Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City
[Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half
a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
In China in 1927 l helped to see to it that Standard Oil went
its way unmolested.
I had a swell racket. l was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions.
l might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do
was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated
on three continents."
General Smedley Butler, former
US Marine Corps Commandant, 1935
"After World War II, in
the name of containing Communism, the United States, mostly through
the actions of local allies, executed or encouraged coups in,
among other places, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina
and patronized a brutal mercenary war in Nicaragua ... By the
end of the Cold War, Latin American security forces trained, funded,
equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody
terror - hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured,
millions driven into exile-from which the region has yet to fully
recover."
Greg Grandin in his book "Empire's
Workshop"
UNITED STATES INTERVENTIONS
SINCE 1945
(A PARTIAL LIST)
ASSASSINATIONS, REGIME CHANGE,
MILITARY INTERVENTIONS, COVERT OPERATIONS,
COUPS AND ATTEMPTED COUPS, ELECTION INTERFERENCE, COLOR REVOLUTIONS
Philippines, South Korea, Lebanon,
Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Rep. Congo (Zaire), Brazil, Greece, Russia,
Poland, Turkey, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia,
Chile, Angola, East Timor, Nicaragua,
Grenada, Panama, Kyrgyzstan, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine,
Argentina, Ghana, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hondoras,
Paraguay, Mexico, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia,
Pakistan, Yemen, Tunesia, Egypt, Libya, Syria
Jean-Bertrand Aristide-Haiti /
Jacobo Arbenz-Guatemala
Kwame Nkrumah-Ghana / Fidel Castro-Cuba / Salvador Allende-Chile
General Sukarno-Indonesia / Joao
Goulart-Brazil
Mohammad Mossadegh-Iran / Hugo
Chavez-Venezuela / Patrice Lumumba-DRCongo (Zaire)
"American foreign-policy
makers are exquisitely attuned to the rise of a government, or
a movement that might take power, that will not lie down and happily
become an American client state, that will not look upon the free
market or the privatization of the world known as "globalization"
as summum bonum [the highest good], that will not change its laws
to favor foreign investment, that will not be unconcerned about
the effects of foreign investment upon the welfare of its own
people, that will not produce primarily for export, that will
not easily tolerate the International Monetary Fund or the World
Trade Organization inflicting a scorched-earth policy upon the
country's social services or standard of living, that will not
allow an American or NATO military installation upon its soil.
Given the proper pretext, such bad examples have to be reduced
to basket cases, or, where feasible, simply overthrown."
William Blum
"The result of neo-colonialism
is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than
for the development of the less developed parts of the world.
Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases,
the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.
The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding
the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed
countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the
developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish
the less developed."
Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana
1957-1966
"We are going to have a
war on terror which you can never win, and so you can always keep
taking people's liberties away. The media is going to convince
everybody that the war on terror is real. The ultimate goal is
to get everybody in the world chipped with an RFID chip, and have
all money be on the chips, and if anyone wants to protest what
we do, we turn off the chip."
Nicholas Rockefeller to producer
Aaron Russo - eleven months before the 9/11 World Trade Center
attacks
"Condelleza Rice and Colin
Powell are both dangerous people. What they did in Haiti [2004
U.S.-backed coup that ousted democratically elected President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide] is a good measure of it. They destroyed
a democracy. They squelched loans that had been approved by the
Inter-American Development Bank. They did everything behind the
scenes, including arming the thugs that came to overrun the country.
They're frauds."
Randall Robinson
"Drug profits are secured
through the ability of the drug cartels to launder and transfer
billions of dollars through the US banking system. The scale and
scope of the US banking-drug cartel alliance surpasses any other
economic activity of the US private banking system."
James Petras
"We are on the
verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major
crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."
David Rockefeller - statement to
the United Nations Business Council, 1994
"Money laundering, according
to IMF estimates for the 1990s, was between 590 billion and 1.5
trillion dollars a year. The proceeds of the drug trade are deposited
in the banking system. Drug money is laundered in the numerous
offshore banking havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British
Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands and some 50 other locations
around the globe. It is here that criminal syndicates involved
in the drug trade and the representatives of the world's largest
commercial banks interact. Dirty money is deposited in these offshore
havens, which are controlled by major Western banks and financial
institutions which have a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining
the drug trade."
Michel Chossudovsky in his book
"America's War on Terrorism"
"The Bilderberg group is
an organization of political leaders and international financiers
that meets secretly every spring to make global policy. There
are about 110 regulars - Rockefellers, Rothschilds, bankers, heads
of international corporations and high government officials from
Europe and North America. Each year, a few new people are invited
and, if found useful, they return to future meetings. If not,
they are discarded. Decisions reached at these secret meetings
affect every American and much of the world."
Jim Tucker
"We are grateful to the
Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other
great publications whose directors have attended our meetings
and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years.
It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the
world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during
those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared
to march towards a world government. The supra-national sovereignty
of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable
to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
David Rockefeller - Council on
Foreign Relations, June 1991
"Some of the character
traits exhibited by serial killers or criminals may be observed
in many within the political arena. They share the traits of psychopaths
who are not sensitive to altruistic appeals, such as sympathy
for their victims or remorse or guilt over their crimes. They
possess the personality traits of lying, narcissism, selfishness,
and vanity. These are the people to whom we have entrusted our
fate. Is it any wonder that America is failing at home and world-wide?"
Jim Kouri
"Money laundering is simply
everywhere. On the grand scale, it's endemic to banking... Money
laundering is not some distant fantasy. It's actually how you
handle the profits of extortion, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy
and huge quantities of drug money, how you get that into the white
sector... We pay vast sums of money to agencies that are supposed
to stop money laundering. It doesn't happen."
author John le Carre
"Our leaders are cruel
because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless
can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment.
People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion
and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president
of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state,
or national security adviser."
William Blum
"For the world as a whole,
the CIA has now become the bogey that communism has been for America.
Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest
of us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it. Our phobia
about the CIA is, no doubt, as fantastically excessive as America's
phobia about world communism; but in this case, too, there is
just enough convincing guidance to make the phobia genuine. In
fact, the roles of America and Russia have been reversed in the
world's eyes. Today America has become the nightmare."
Arnold Toynbee, the British historian,
quoted in the New York Times of May 7, 1971
"American policymakers,
setting themselves up as guardians of the world system, are more
inclined than ever to simply disregard international laws and
conventions if they get in the way of unrivaled military supremacy.
Every instance of U.S. armed intervention during the 1980s and
1990s represents a flagrant violation of regional treaties and
laws, not to mention the UN Charter itself, which explicitly prohibits
military attacks against sovereign nations - for example, Grenada,
Nicaragua, Haiti, Panama, Serbia, and Iraq. In any event, the
U.S. has consistently shown its contempt for international bodies,
agreements, and procedures that might conflict with its hegemonic
aspirations."
Carl Boggs
"In the absence of a coherent
alternative, the transnational corporations carry on inexorably.
Increasingly flagless and stateless, they weave global webs of
production, commerce, culture and finance virtually unopposed.
They expand, invest and grow, concentrating ever more wealth in
a limited number of hands. They work in coalition to influence
local, national and international institutions and laws. And together
with the governments of their home countries in Europe, North
America and Japan, as well as international institutions such
as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund and increasingly, the United Nations, they are molding
an international system in which they can trade and invest even
more freely - a world where they are less and less accountable
to the cultures, communities and nation-states in which they operate.
Underpinning this effort is not the historical inevitability of
an evolving, enlightened civilization, but rather the unavoidable
reality of the overriding corporate purpose: the maximization
of profits."
Sierra Club
"If you wanted a national
monopoly, you must control a national socialist government. If
you want a worldwide monopoly, you must control a world socialist
government. That is what the game is all about. "Communism"
is not a movement of the downtrodden masses but is a movement
created, manipulated and used by power-seeking billionaires in
order to gain control over the world, first by establishing socialist
governments in the various nations and then consolidating them
all through a "Great Merger," into an all-powerful world,
socialist super-state."
Gary Allen
"The media are a pitiful
lot. They don't give us any history, they don't give us any analysis,
they don't tell us anything. They don't raise the most basic questions:
Who has the most weapons of mass destruction in the world by far?
Who has used weapons of mass destruction more than any other nation?
Who has killed more people in this world with weapons of mass
destruction than any other nation? The answer: the United States."
Howard Zinn
"Since the late 1940s,
the United States has been deliberately engaged in an imperial
project, and anyone who would hold the office of the presidency
has to be willing to serve that end. All presidents have to promote
the national security state, both domestically and in American
foreign policy, if they wish to attain and hold on to power."
Morris Berman
"The technetronic era involves
the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society
would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.
Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance
over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing
even the most personal information about the citizen. These files
will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities."
Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1970
book "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic
Era"
Frederick Douglass / William O.
Douglas / Martin Luther King. Jr
"Why should they ask me
to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs
and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people
in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?
No I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn
another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white
slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the
day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that
to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I
have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my
people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or
myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for
their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war
was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people
they wouldn't have to draft me, I'd join tomorrow. I have nothing
to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail, so
what? We've been in jail for 400 years."
Muhammad Ali
"I wouldn't call it fascism
exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible,
dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical,
controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt
political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either"
columnist Edward Zehr
"I never saw a foreign
intervention that the New York Times did not support, never saw
a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase
that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in
a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers.
And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social
Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
New York Times reporter John Hess
"The easiest way to gain
control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. The public
will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened."
Josef Stalin
"If Nuremberg were applied,
then every post-war American president would have been hanged."
Noam Chomsky
"The United States has
entered the ranks of the failed states. One of the most remarkable
manifestations of a failed state is that the criminals are all
inside the government operating against the people, whereas in
a normal state, the criminals are on the outside of the government,
operating against it. So, we now have every manifestation of being
a failed state, with the government in the hands of a few Wall
Street gangsters."
Paul Craig Roberts
"A global financial cabal
engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble [2008], illegally
shifted vast amounts of capital out of the US; and used 'privatization'
as a form of piracy - a pretext to move government assets to private
investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities
back to government at no cost to the private liability holder.
Clearly, there was a global financial coup d'etat underway."
Catherine Austin Fitts
"The U.S. military
acts in the interests of the corporate and financial elite, as
those countries that do not submit to American economic hegemony
are deemed enemies, and the military is ultimately sent in to
implement 'regime change'. "
Andrew Gavin Marshall
Dick Cheney
"When fascism comes to
America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
Sinclair Lewis
"When and if fascism finally
takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain...
Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in
session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue
to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the
governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have
finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government
behind the scenes."
John W. Whitehead
"Every time weaker nations
have attempted to reallocate their resources and undertake land
reform to feed starving populations, powerful interests emanating
from the rich world and its multilateral bodies have thwarted
their efforts."
Susan George
"We first fought in the
name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs
and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change."
Serj Tankian
" I think this a very hard
choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
- about US sanctions killing more than 500,000 Iraqi children
"The corporate grip on
opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western
world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so
entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent."
Gore Vidal
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
HAITI PAGE
"When the full and true
story of Jean-Bertrand Aristide is finally told, it will portray
a noble and humble man who gave of himself honorably to serve
the interests of all the people of Haiti. His only failure was
his inability to overcome the brutal and corrupt power of the
U.S. and its determination to see him fail. "
Stephen Lendman
"Africa is extremely rich
in many resources, from agriculture to oil, minerals, and a huge
variety of other resources used all around the world. If African
nations were able to develop their own economies, use their own
resources, and create their own industries and businesses, they
could become self-sufficient at first, and then may become a force
of great competition for the established industries and elites
around the world. After all, Europe does not have much to offer
in terms of resources, as the continent's wealth has largely come
from plundering the resources of regions like Africa, and in becoming
captains of monetary manipulation. A revitalized, vibrant, economically
independent and successful Africa could spell the end of Western
financial dominance. "
Andrew Gavin Marshall
"The war against a foreign
country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going
to profit from it."
George Orwell
"They have pillaged the world.
When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything,
they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he
is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their
appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and
poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish,
and call it by the lying name of 'empire'. They make a desert
and call it 'peace'."
Publius Cornelius Tacitus - a historian
of the Roman Empire
"Since the Bush-Cheney
Administration took office in January 2001, controlling the major
oil and natural gas fields of the world had been the primary,
though undeclared, priority of US foreign policy... Not only the
invasion of Iraq, but also the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan,
had nothing to do with 'democracy,' and everything to do with
pipeline control across Central Asia and the militarization of
the Middle East."
F. William Engdahl
"Every ten years or so,
the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country
and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean
business."
neocon Michael Ledeen
"States, most especially
the large hegemonic ones, such as the United States and Great
Britain, are controlled by the international central banking system,
working through secret agreements at the Bank for International
Settlements (BIS), and operating through national central banks
[such as the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve]... The same
international banking cartel that controls the United States today
previously controlled Great Britain and held it up as the international
hegemon. When the British order faded, and was replaced by the
United States, the US ran the global economy. However, the same
interests are served. States will be used and discarded at will
by the international banking cartel; they are simply tools."
Andrew Gavin Marshall
"Somehow we find it hard
to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor."
Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles (Eisenhower Administration)
"From 1945 to 2003, the
United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments,
and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting
against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some
25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people,
and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."
William Blum
"How does continuous war
act to keep the Lows "stupefied by poverty" and thereby
assure the maintenance of the social structure? The goal of the
wars is to enable the economy to be kept going for the benefit
of the High, its military, and its bureaucracy and control personnel
(the Thought Police, etc.), but at the same time to assure that
any excess production capacity is prevented from producing consumer
goods for the lower classes. That excess capacity is instead directed
to producing excess military goods which will ' ultimately rust
away or be destroyed in warfare; that is, the excess capacity
is deliberately wasted in order to turn it away from the production
of goods which would result in added leisure or well-being for
the lower classes. Those classes are instead continually forced
into group activities expressing hatred toward the current enemy
(any enemy) and dependency upon and love toward their benevolent
rulers for protecting them from that enemy. They are thereby led
to accept the consumer shortages, the poverty, and the other privations
to which they are subjected. Their economic status is kept at
the subsistence level, forcing their priorities to be focused
on simply acquiring basic food, clothing, and shelter. They are
thus denied either the time or the inclination to question the
fairness or permanence of their societal condition, or to otherwise
evolve into a threat to the established hierarchy."
from George Orwell's 1949 novel
"1984"
"The question is not how
to get good people to rule; the question is how to stop the powerful
from doing as much damage as they can to us."
Karl Popper
"Why, of course, the people
don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk
his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to
come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people
don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America,
nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after
all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy
and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether
it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or
a Communist dictatorship."
Hermann Goering - Nazi leader
"A competent war on drugs
must begin with a war against the banking institutions and bankers
who 'launder' Dope, Inc.'s ill-gotten gains...Shut down the drug
money-laundering by the major Anglo-American banks, and the dope
cartel would choke to death on its own profits... Dope, Inc.'s
vulnerable flank is the international network of banks and other
financial institutions that 'launder' the cartel's $558 billion
per year in gross revenue... Action by governments against the
drug bankers could rapidly shut down Dope, Inc.."
DOPE, INC., Executive Intelligence
Review, 1992
"Even open-minded people
will often find themselves unable to take seriously the likes
of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn and Susan George on
first encountering their work; it just does not seem possible
that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The individual
may assume that these writers must be somehow joking, wildly over-stating
the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe to grind. We may
actually become angry with them for telling us these terrible
things about our society and insist that this simply 'can't be
true'. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist the reassuring
messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider the evidence
again."
David Edwards
"The Depression [1929]
was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. The
international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair
here [United States] so that they might emerge as rulers of us
all."
Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of
the U.S. House of Representatives' Banking and Currency Committee,
1932
PREPARE FOR A
PLUTOCRAT-CONTROLLED NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC ORDER
AND GLOBAL AUTHORITARIANISM
Things are moving rapidly. Inequality
in America is extreme. Authoritarianism is increasing. Before
we realize it, America's democratic experiment will have ended
in failure, and possibly chaos. Societies with extreme inequality
have always come to ignoble ends. The question is whether America
will end with a whimper, or with a bang.
American hubris has resulted in global economic chaos and strategic
confrontation. We are no longer the only superpower. Both Russia
and China, once great empires, want a second chance at global
prosperity and respect. As the U.S. is forced by circumstances
to abandon its role as the sole global policeman and economic
powerhouse, others are ready to take its place. But, dying empires
are known to flail about and fight viciously to preserve their
former hegemony. And, it looks like the United States will not
go quietly into the night.
U. S. power was at its peak following World War II. America ruled
the globe economically and militarily. It's influence was ubiquitous
and its soft power seemingly unlimited. But, arrogance and greed
have turned the United States into a pariah. We are feared for
our power, but no longer respected for our institutions. Inequality,
injustice, corruption, and our projection of violence, have turned
much of the world against us.
Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, the United
States rhetorically lauded the benefits of democracy, while undermining
democratically-elected governments everywhere. U.S.-sponsored
coups and "color revolutions" dressed-up as spontaneous
popular uprisings, have shown that democratic governments are
not well-suited to withstand 21st century 'realpolitik'.
Developing countries, which once looked to the United States as
a model for political and economic development, are re-evaluating
whether democracy is their best political choice. As the economic
and political might of Russia and China grow, so does their influence.
And, as the United States repeatedly demonstrates how easily it
can manipulate elections and exploit popular unrest, while hypocritically
preaching about democracy, developing countries may conclude that
authoritarian government may be their best survival option.
The result: democracy will be left
in the dustbin of history.
On the economic front, a new feudalism is emerging. As work is
made contingent and part-time, employee benefits are cut, operations
are moved offshore, unemployment increases, well-paying manufacturing
jobs become minimum-wage service jobs, family debt grows, inequality
increases and opportunities disappear, the United States is beginning
to look more like a mal-developed country in the global South,
than an economic giant, while American workers, once the envy
of the world, struggle to compete with workers in the third world.
21st century neoliberal capitalism is producing chaos, globally.
Unabashed greed, absence of effective regulation of business activity,
and the growth of global casino capitalism have caused untold
damage. Austerity, privatization, extreme financial risk-taking,
endemic fraud and market manipulation have combined to produce
a perfect economic storm.
Regulators have stopped regulating,
plutocrats continue to accumulate wealth, and politicians grab
what they can. Nobody trusts anybody, banks won't lend, unemployment
is high and rising, personal debt is staggering, and hardship
and immiseration are growing, while the .01% spends with abandon
and economic inequality has achieved heights not seen since the
Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
Business and political elites have shown a willingness to undermine
and severely damage their own country's economy, in order to weaken
a populist government that refuses to support neoliberal economic
policies that enrich the wealthy. As the economy is covertly sabotaged,
the population, unaware that the source of their misery is the
business elite, blame the populist leaders, and remove them from
office. The result is that neoliberal governments replace populist
governments, anti-worker policies are adopted and accelerated,
the elites grow richer, and the working class suffers even more.
In Asia, China's growing economic power is transforming global
finance. The Chinese yuan may soon take its place as an international
reserve currency, joining the dollar - or even replacing it. The
global impact of the dollar's reserve currency displacement would
be enormous.
Banks have started restricting cash withdrawals. It is now difficult
to take out more than a few thousand dollars in cash from some
banks. Soon it may be nearly impossible to withdraw cash from
bank accounts.
Some countries are considering becoming cashless societies, where
money will no longer be accepted and all monetary transactions
will be digital. The result will be the end of financial privacy.
Governments will then have total control over the economic lives
of their citizens.
In the new "normal" financial environment, banks will
prosper by taxing the deposits of savers (rather than paying interest
on deposits) or by taking some of the savings of their customers
(bail-ins) as needed to enhance their balance sheets.
As the economic noose tightens, political turmoil, popular unrest
and even global conflict may result.
Kleptocratic elites in concert with corrupt political and business
leaders, will not be the solution to the probem - they will be
the problem.
Every person will have to fend for himself or herself, and for
their loved ones, in a more chaotic, less fair, less democratic,
more authoritarian world.
The time to prepare is now.
"The Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR) took control of the ideological foundations of
the American empire, encompassing the corporate, banking, political,
foreign policy, military, media, and academic elite of the nation
into a generally cohesive overall world view. By altering one's
ideology to that of promoting such an internationalist agenda,
the big money that was behind it would ensure one's rise through
government, industry, academia and media. There are divisions
within the elite, predicated on the basis of how to use American
imperial power, where to use it, on what basis to justify it,
and other various methodological differences. The divide amongst
elites was never on the questions of: should we use American imperial
power, why has America become an Empire, or should there even
be an empire? If one takes such considerations to heart and questions
these concepts, be it within the foreign policy establishment,
intelligence, military, academia, finance, corporate world, or
media; chances are, such a person is not a member of the CFR."
Andrew Gavin Marshall
"The privatization of public
services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate
power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner
with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics
and its political culture from a system in which democratic practices
and values were, if not defining, at least major contributing
elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the
state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled."
Sheldon Wolin
"If it had not been for
the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with
their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent
discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born
of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation."
Eugene Debs
"What is masquerading as
government is a crime syndicate with a flag. The US Government
is an instrument of organized crime, alternatively described as
the Octopus, the Washington Consensus, the Shadow Government,
Wall Street, the Round Table (Bilderbergs, Trilaterals, Council
on Foreign Relations, Royal Institute of International Affairs),
and the New World Order."
Nikki Alexander
"Patriotism has got to
be more than hanging out a flag and then sitting on your ass watching
jets bomb Afghanistan."
Ruth Coniff
"American government is
corrupt. Those who have enough money can almost get anything they
want from our government, whether it is tax breaks, or subsidies,
or policies and laws changed, removed, or added.
... Today CEOs and wealthy businessmen are the ruling elite in
the Western world, especially the United States. Their donations
finance elections and even education, which they are constantly
saying has to adapt itself to the needs of the market (that is,
be molded to inculcate their views). It should come as no surprise
therefore that the theories offered by economists rationalize
the self-interest of big business and the wealthy. Overtly, of
course, such theories claim to benefit society and the public's
well-being. But covertly, they do just the opposite: they make
the great mass of people poorer while making the rich fabulously
richer."
Ravi Batra in his book "The
New Golden Age"
"So important did military
spending and the military-industrial sector become during World
War II and the Cold War that they have become fundamental to the
U.S. economy, U.S. economic growth and above all U.S. technological
development. Despite its often almost incredible wastefulness
and corruption, this military spending has also been in some ways
a kind of unacknowledged but rather successful state industrial
development strategy in a country whose free market ideology meant
that it could not formally adopt or admit to such a strategy."
David Edwards
"The Party seeks power
entirely for its own sake, We are not interested in the good of
others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury
or long life or happiness: only power, pure power... We are different
from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we
are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves,
were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian
Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never
had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended,
perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly
and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay
a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are
not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the
intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an
end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard
a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the
dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object
of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
from George Orwell's 1949 novel
"1984"
Howard Zinn 
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