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Gary Edwards

The Divider vs. the Thinker - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3554104577002262150454258.html

Banksters Paul-Ryan Obammunism Peggy-Noonan WSJ The-American-Idea

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • There's a lot to rebel against, to want to throw off. If they want to make a serious economic and political critique, they should make the one Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make in "Reckless Endangerment": that real elites in Washington rigged the system for themselves and their friends, became rich and powerful, caused the great catering, and then "slipped quietly from the scene."
  • It is a blow-by-blow recounting of how politicians—Democrats and Republicans—passed the laws that encouraged the banks to make the loans that would never be repaid, and that would result in your lost job.
  • It began in the early 1990s, in the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration, with the help of an entrenched Congress that wanted only two things: to receive campaign contributions and to be re-elected.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Specifically it is the story of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage insurers, and how their politically connected CEOs, especially Fannie's Franklin Raines and James Johnson, took actions that tanked the American economy and walked away rich.
  • "the temptation to exploit fear and envy returns." Politicians divide in order to "evade responsibility for their failures" and to advance their interests.
  • "The American Idea"
  • Which gets us to Rep. Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don't think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them.
  • But Republicans, in their desire to defend free economic activity, shouldn't be snookered by unthinking fealty to big business. They should never defend—they should actively oppose—the kind of economic activity that has contributed so heavily to the crisis.
  • Here Mr. Ryan slammed "corporate welfare and crony capitalism."
  • "Why have we extended an endless supply of taxpayer credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instead of demanding that their government guarantee be wound down and their taxpayer subsidies ended?" Why are tax dollars being wasted on bankrupt, politically connected solar energy firms like Solyndra? "Why is Washington wasting your money on entrenched agribusiness?"
  • The "true sources of inequity in this country," he continued, are "corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless."
  • The real class warfare that threatens us is "a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society."
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Oct 11
     
    Peggy Noonan writes about Paul Ryan's "The American Idea" speech he recently gave at the heritage Foundation.  It's a beautifully written summary that goes right to the heart of the matter:  the ruling elites have been enriching themselves, feeding at the public trough of corporate welfare and crony capitalism.  Washington DC is corrupt and rotten to the core, and the hand maiden of Banksters, Global Corporatist, Big Unions, and Big Bearucracy.   One things for sure.  Congressman Paul Ryan is a brilliant thinker aho believes in the great promise he calls "The American Idea".   Funny how, as the presidential primary race rolls on, my hopeful attention is being drawn towards four men:  Herman Cain, Paul Ryan, Ron Paul and Marco Rubio.   Herman unfortunately is soft on Banksters, totally unaware and oblivious to the need to take back the currency, and end the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel.  I also have some difficulties with the "revenue neutral" aspects of his 999 plan.  We need less government, not more.  The private sector needs to keep more money, not less.   Too bad because everything else about Herman excites me.  Especially his authentic, from the heart love of America, American exceptionalism and opportunity, and the founders truly unique "American Idea". Ron Paul has an awesome "American Recovery" plan.  Awesome.  But his remarks on terrorism and foreign policy stray far from his usual reliance on the Constitution and the 10th Amendment.   He's right about the connection between global corporatism and the never ending militarism they push.  But he's dead ass wrong about our enemies and their intentions.  And that's scary.  If RP had stuck to the Constitution and 10th Amendment, i would fully support him.   If it's not an enumerated power, it belongs to the States and individual citizens.  End of story.   Marco Rubio is awesome in the same way Herman is.  He connects with a special authenticity that screams the principles and val
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, It's About Blackmail, Not National Security | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...kmail%2C_not_national_security

surveillance state blackmail power-projection empire Obama BushII

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places.  Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington.  The answer is remarkably simple.  For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century.  Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
  • What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies. Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.
  • Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables. This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began.  Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale. In a time of increasing imperial austerity and exceptional technological capability, everything about the NSA’s surveillance told Washington to just “go for it.”  This cut-rate mechanism for both projecting force and preserving U.S. global power surely looked like a no-brainer, a must-have bargain for any American president in the twenty-first century -- before new NSA documents started hitting front pages weekly, thanks to Snowden, and the whole world began returning the favor.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • As the gap has grown between Washington’s global reach and its shrinking mailed fist, as it struggles to maintain 40% of world armaments (the 2012 figure) with only 23% of global gross economic output, the U.S. will need to find new ways to exercise its power far more economically. As the Cold War took off, a heavy-metal U.S. military -- with 500 bases worldwide circa 1950 -- was sustainable because the country controlled some 50% of the global gross product. But as its share of world output falls -- to an estimated 17% by 2016 -- and its social welfare costs climb relentlessly from 4% of gross domestic product in 2010 to a projected 18% by 2050, cost-cutting becomes imperative if Washington is to survive as anything like the planet’s “sole superpower.” Compared to the $3 trillion cost of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the NSA’s 2012 budget of just $11 billion for worldwide surveillance and cyberwarfare looks like cost saving the Pentagon can ill-afford to forego. Yet this seeming “bargain” comes at what turns out to be an almost incalculable cost. The sheer scale of such surveillance leaves it open to countless points of penetration, whether by a handful of anti-war activists breaking into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, back in 1971 or Edward Snowden downloading NSA documents at a Hawaiian outpost in 2012.
  • In October 2001, not satisfied with the sweeping and extraordinary powers of the newly passed Patriot Act, President Bush ordered the National Security Agency to commence covert monitoring of private communications through the nation's telephone companies without the requisite FISA warrants. Somewhat later, the agency began sweeping the Internet for emails, financial data, and voice messaging on the tenuous theory that such “metadata” was “not constitutionally protected.” In effect, by penetrating the Internet for text and the parallel Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for voice, the NSA had gained access to much of the world’s telecommunications. By the end of Bush’s term in 2008, Congress had enacted laws that not only retrospectively legalized these illegal programs, but also prepared the way for NSA surveillance to grow unchecked. Rather than restrain the agency, President Obama oversaw the expansion of its operations in ways remarkable for both the sheer scale of the billions of messages collected globally and for the selective monitoring of world leaders.
  • By 2012, the centralization via digitization of all voice, video, textual, and financial communications into a worldwide network of fiber optic cables allowed the NSA to monitor the globe by penetrating just 190 data hubs -- an extraordinary economy of force for both political surveillance and cyberwarfare.
  • With a few hundred cable probes and computerized decryption, the NSA can now capture the kind of gritty details of private life that J. Edgar Hoover so treasured and provide the sort of comprehensive coverage of populations once epitomized by secret police like East Germany’s Stasi. And yet, such comparisons only go so far. After all, once FBI agents had tapped thousands of phones, stenographers had typed up countless transcripts, and clerks had stored this salacious paper harvest in floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, J. Edgar Hoover still only knew about the inner-workings of the elite in one city: Washington, D.C.  To gain the same intimate detail for an entire country, the Stasi had to employ one police informer for every six East Germans -- an unsustainable allocation of human resources. By contrast, the marriage of the NSA’s technology to the Internet’s data hubs now allows the agency’s 37,000 employees a similarly close coverage of the entire globe with just one operative for every 200,000 people on the planet
  • Through the expenditure of $250 million annually under its Sigint Enabling Project, the NSA has stealthily penetrated all encryption designed to protect privacy. “In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,” reads a 2007 NSA document. “It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.” By collecting knowledge -- routine, intimate, or scandalous -- about foreign leaders, imperial proconsuls from ancient Rome to modern America have gained both the intelligence and aura of authority necessary for dominion over alien societies. The importance, and challenge, of controlling these local elites cannot be overstated. During its pacification of the Philippines after 1898, for instance, the U.S. colonial regime subdued contentious Filipino leaders via pervasive policing that swept up both political intelligence and personal scandal. And that, of course, was just what J. Edgar Hoover was doing in Washington during the 1950s and 1960s.
  • Indeed, the mighty British Empire, like all empires, was a global tapestry woven out of political ties to local leaders or “subordinate elites” -- from Malay sultans and Indian maharajas to Gulf sheiks and West African tribal chiefs. As historian Ronald Robinson once observed, the British Empire spread around the globe for two centuries through the collaboration of these local leaders and then unraveled, in just two decades, when that collaboration turned to “non-cooperation.” After rapid decolonization during the 1960s transformed half-a-dozen European empires into 100 new nations, their national leaders soon found themselves the subordinate elites of a spreading American global imperium. Washington suddenly needed the sort of private information that could keep such figures in line. Surveillance of foreign leaders provides world powers -- Britain then, America now -- with critical information for the exercise of global hegemony. Such spying gave special penetrating power to the imperial gaze, to that sense of superiority necessary for dominion over others.  It also provided operational information on dissidents who might need to be countered with covert action or military force; political and economic intelligence so useful for getting the jump on allies in negotiations of all sorts; and, perhaps most important of all, scurrilous information about the derelictions of leaders useful in coercing their compliance.
  • In late 2013, the New York Times reported that, when it came to spying on global elites, there were “more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years,” reaching down to mid-level political actors in the international arena. Revelations from Edward Snowden’s cache of leaked documents indicate that the NSA has monitored leaders in some 35 nations worldwide -- including Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, Mexican presidents Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.  Count in as well, among so many other operations, the monitoring of “French diplomatic interests” during the June 2010 U.N. vote on Iran sanctions and “widespread surveillance” of world leaders during the Group 20 summit meeting at Ottawa in June 2010. Apparently, only members of the historic “Five Eyes” signals-intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain) remain exempt -- at least theoretically -- from NSA surveillance. Such secret intelligence about allies can obviously give Washington a significant diplomatic advantage. During U.N. wrangling over the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003, for example, the NSA intercepted Secretary-General Kofi Anan’s conversations and monitored the “Middle Six” -- Third World nations on the Security Council -- offering what were, in essence, well-timed bribes to win votes. The NSA’s deputy chief for regional targets sent a memo to the agency’s Five Eyes allies asking “for insights as to how membership is reacting to on-going debate regarding Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions [..., and] the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals.”
  • Indicating Washington’s need for incriminating information in bilateral negotiations, the State Department pressed its Bahrain embassy in 2009 for details, damaging in an Islamic society, on the crown princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?” Indeed, in October 2012, an NSA official identified as “DIRNSA,” or Director General Keith Alexander, proposed the following for countering Muslim radicals: “[Their] vulnerabilities, if exposed, would likely call into question a radicalizer’s devotion to the jihadist cause, leading to the degradation or loss of his authority.” The agency suggested that such vulnerabilities could include “viewing sexually explicit material online” or “using a portion of the donations they are receiving… to defray personal expenses.” The NSA document identified one potential target as a “respected academic” whose “vulnerabilities” are “online promiscuity.”
  • Just as the Internet has centralized communications, so it has moved most commercial sex into cyberspace. With an estimated 25 million salacious sites worldwide and a combined 10.6 billion page views per month in 2013 at the five top sex sites, online pornography has become a global business; by 2006, in fact, it generated $97 billion in revenue. With countless Internet viewers visiting porn sites and almost nobody admitting it, the NSA has easy access to the embarrassing habits of targets worldwide, whether Muslim militants or European leaders. According to James Bamford, author of two authoritative books on the agency, “The NSA's operation is eerily similar to the FBI's operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to ‘neutralize’ their targets.”
  • Indeed, whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the NSA of actually conducting such surveillance.  In a December 2013 letter to the Brazilian people, he wrote, “They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target's reputation.” If Snowden is right, then one key goal of NSA surveillance of world leaders is not U.S. national security but political blackmail -- as it has been since 1898. Such digital surveillance has tremendous potential for scandal, as anyone who remembers New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s forced resignation in 2008 after routine phone taps revealed his use of escort services; or, to take another obvious example, the ouster of France’s budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac in 2013 following wire taps that exposed his secret Swiss bank account. As always, the source of political scandal remains sex or money, both of which the NSA can track with remarkable ease.
  • By starting a swelling river of NSA documents flowing into public view, Edward Snowden has given us a glimpse of the changing architecture of U.S. global power. At the broadest level, Obama’s digital “pivot” complements his overall defense strategy, announced in 2012, of reducing conventional forces while expanding into the new, cost-effective domains of space and cyberspace. While cutting back modestly on costly armaments and the size of the military, President Obama has invested billions in the building of a new architecture for global information control. If we add the $791 billion expended to build the Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy to the $500 billion spent on an increasingly para-militarized version of global intelligence in the dozen years since 9/11, then Washington has made a $1.2 trillion investment in a new apparatus of world power.
  • So formidable is this security bureaucracy that Obama’s recent executive review recommended the regularization, not reform, of current NSA practices, allowing the agency to continue collecting American phone calls and monitoring foreign leaders into the foreseeable future. Cyberspace offers Washington an austerity-linked arena for the exercise of global power, albeit at the cost of trust by its closest allies -- a contradiction that will bedevil America’s global leadership for years to come. To update Henry Stimson: in the age of the Internet, gentlemen don't just read each other’s mail, they watch each other’s porn. Even if we think we have nothing to hide, all of us, whether world leaders or ordinary citizens, have good reason to be concerned.
Gary Edwards

Should We Worry about the Class Divide? - 0 views

dailyreckoning.com/e-worry-about-the-class-divide

Class-Warfare Class-Welfare Charles-Murray daily-recknoning Liberty Libertarian

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Apr 12
     
    Excellent review of Charles Murray's new book on Class Warfare, "Coming Apart".  Excellent libertarian commentary hits hard on solutions pouring out of the both the left and the right advocating the use of big government force and power to level the class divide.  Whatever happened to individual liberty and the Constitution? excerpt: This is what the debate is about. To the left, the answer about what to do is completely obvious. We need massive government programs to boost the lowers, and we need new taxes and punishments to whack the uppers good and hard. Never mind that the programs for the lowers don't work and the punishments on the rich end up only bolstering a new government elite that lords it over everyone. The right has a different solution. Well, not everyone on the right, but those neoconservatives who take it as a given that every coherent nation needs a unified national culture. To quote David Brooks: "We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement. If we could jam the tribes together, we'd have a better elite and a better mass." No thanks on this Stalinist plan. The right is just like the left in this sense: If there is a national problem, it needs a solution imposed by force. The left favors looting people, whereas the right favors Tasing people. Either way, it is all about increasing the police powers of the state. On the extremes, the left wants total expropriation to make everyone equally poor, whereas the right wants total war to unify us all in a grand project of killing and being killed. This is what worries me most about the Murray thesis. No matter where you look for answers, the solutions actually seem worse than the problem itself. More fundamentally, we have to ask: What is the problem we are actually tryin
Gary Edwards

Articles by Mark Dice - 0 views

markdice.com/index.php

Mark-Dice New-World-Order Illuminati Globalist Globalist-Elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Jul 13
     
    Libertarian writer and researcher, Mark Dice, has provided a list of articles he has written.  Mark's literary works include: ... "The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction" ...... separates and analyzes the various claims and evidence about the Illuminati, their history, beliefs, members, organizations, and activities. This is a supplement for Mark's previous book - ..... "The Resistance Manifesto",  which focuses more on the New World Order, the 9/11 attacks, Big Brother, and how the political agendas of the elite are fulfilling Bible prophecy.   .... "The New World Order" ....   His website, markdice.com has high light summary of his work that's quite interesting: A detailed analysis of the September 11th attacks and evidence they were aided by elements within U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies to be used as a reason to jumpstart the "War on Terror" and the erosion of privacy and personal liberties outlined in the constitution. The Knights Templar, the real Holy Grail, and the role the Templars played in the formation of the Illuminati mafia. Quotes from the original writings of the Illuminati founders and how the organization drew up plans over 200 years ago to take over every major institution of power and influence in the world through deception and criminal activity. An expose on the Bohemian Grove resort including quotes from President Richard Nixon, senator John Decamp, and information from Chris Jones who worked at the club and became an informant on the activities within the compound. The secrets of Freemasonry and a history of the organization and their influence on society and quotes from the bible of Freemasonry on how the organization knowingly deceives lower level members and nonmembers as to the true secrets and goals of the fraternity. The history and meaning of the mysterious Georgia Guidestones monument and why the elite want to reduce world population to 500 million by killing billions of people through wars and plagues. A history of
Gary Edwards

19 Reasons Why The Federal Reserve Is At The Heart Of Our Economic Problems - 0 views

theeconomiccollapseblog.com/...heart-of-our-economic-problems

financial-collapse Federal-Reserve-Bank-Cartel Federal-Reserve Banksters banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Jul 11
     
    Nice summary with a chilling conclusion. I can't believe i've been so wrong about the financial collapse and the End of the American Dream. In 2008 i set out to discover why the September financial collapse occurred. This was the beginning of my Diigo "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" list. Since then however, i've come to see that it isn't ideology that's behind the financial collapse and the assault on the American Constitution, Rule of Law, and the principles of individual liberty and freedom described in our Declaration of Independence. No, IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY! Mark Levin argues eloquently and with great passion and insight that "Statism" is the problem. He argues that socialism, progressivism, communism and fascism are just forms of centralized government, authority, and control. For Mark, it's all about power. And that's Tyranny of the highest order. Today though, i see things differently. It's all about the money. And with that money comes the power to dictate, control and seize property at will. The Banksters are behind it all, and debt is their doomsday nuclear weapon of choice. Baron Von Rothschild once famously said that WAR is the most expensive endeavor governments can engage in. War means borrowing from banksters. It means debt. The problem for the Banksters has long been the lesson of Charlemagne and Napoleon: There is no way for the Banksters to collect their debt (and interest) from the victor. The only way to force Napoleon to pay was to create an opposing army (thanks to the ruling elites of England and the Duke of Wellington - who were not threatened by Napoleon. And since then, the Bansters have been beholden to the Brittish ruling elites). Balance of Power and the magic of Francois Metternich's Treaty of Vienna worked for almost 100 years after the defeat of Napoleon. The ruling nobility of Europe came apart with WWI, but the Banksters played both ends against the middle, and came out on top.
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Jul 11
     
    i hate it when Diigo clips my comments!#!$$ . No warning. The above was clipped short so here's the bottom line: It's not the ideology. It's the money and the power.
Gary Edwards

The Business Offensive: A Symmetrical Ruling Class - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...ive-a-symmetrical-ruling-class

Ruling-Class American-Oligarchy Corporate-Oligarchs Corporate-Facsists

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Since the close of World War II, America has sought an integrated policy as the militarization of capitalism
  • In the intervening years, this was not always easy to achieve, as, depending on circumstances, one or the other, the corporate-financial order, and the military itself, asserted itself and made strong demands on government.
  • the Cold War itself providing a cover for the US globalization of power via market penetration, international financial and monetary architecture under US supervision, and the steady build-up of an Armaments State.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Yet, the dynamism of early modern capitalism, realized in part through grinding methods of labor suppression, notably, the privatization of force, helped on by a compliant government, meant that within capitalism itself there was tremendous jockeying for power requiring the imposition of Order if major railroads and industrial firms were to enjoy their secure monopoly status.
  • Here government was crucial to harmonious internal structural arrangements, anticompetitive in its policies for the promotion of monopolism sector-by-sector including banking (the House of Morgan, whose offshoots firmed up the organization of railroads and manufacturing) as the means to systemic consolidation—an end to internecine competition—which was achieved in the early 20th century under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (themselves the Janus-faced construct of the Battleship Navy and supposed liberal internationalism) setting the stage for the present era.
  • In practice, we see the interpenetration of business and government as the integration of monopoly capitalism in its own right.
  • By the late 1940s one can say that the military remained a junior partner of a synthesized ruling group or class, given the overwhelming thrust of business and its ascendant banking wing in defining American capitalism.
  • American capitalism could no longer go it alone, the military increasingly supplying the muscle for continued expansion and profitability. Korea and Vietnam were important chapters in the reshaping of a capitalist polity, with numerous interventions beyond mention the underpinning for a coalescent framework of elites, all making for a structural process of shaking down to the bare essentials the capitalist and military components in search of equilibrium. For otherwise, America feared its decline and would do anything to prevent.
  • Granted, it is hard to conceive of capitalism as a perpetual war machine, especially in America, which labors under the fiction of being, or if it ever was, then remaining, a democracy.
  • But there it is, an arms budget dwarfing all else, military bases strategically gathered worldwide, death squads euphemistically termed Special Ops, presidential-directed drone assassinations, the list goes on—so much so that one almost forgets capitalism is centrally about business and profits, not murder and mayhem.
  • the Great Capitalist Synthesis
  • an accomplice to the more successful militarization of capitalism by holding its own as an integral part in the relationship. In sum, the desideratum of business as usual, as in fleecing the consumer and jeopardizing his/her safety, destroying the environment, and best of all, removing itself from the constitutional foundations of the rule of law.
  • Corporations and banks have become a law unto themselves, with all the organs of government stretching from the Executive, Congress, the Supreme Court, to myriad regulatory agencies some unbeknownst to the public, sitting as a chorus of admiring voices egging them on.
  • Corporate Rescindment of Legal Rights: Business Power Run Amuck,
  • Class-action law suits, frequently the only feasible action of the poor for seeking redress of grievances against the giant corporations, are all but prohibited, replaced in contracts by compulsory-arbitration clauses, intended in the first place to kill class actions, which compel the individual standing alone to face insurmountable odds in a process by which the corporation names the arbitrator, keeps the proceedings secret, and determines the rules of procedure.
  • Civil courts are thrown to the winds.
  • It is as though capitalism, in this one seemingly minor area touching primarily the normalization of everyday relationships, has gone on the offensive, not of course to re-establish its relation to the military, but specifically and directly to exercise its domination over the people.
  • The now-and-future business polity is the fulfillment of the fascist dream, an authoritarian power structure of corporate consolidation supported through governmental suppression of dissent at home and an aggressively waged foreign policy to capture world markets.
  • The small print of the contracts one signs, whether for car rentals or nursing homes, and thousands of transactions in between, emboldens capitalism to go its solipsistic way, to the destruction of freedom, the planet, and human dignity.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Nov 15
     
    "Since the close of World War II, America has sought an integrated policy as the militarization of capitalism. In the intervening years, this was not always easy to achieve, as, depending on circumstances, one or the other, the corporate-financial order, and the military itself, asserted itself and made strong demands on government. The result was never an intracompetitive mold because each needed and recognized the value of the other, but still there were periods of imbalance in their respective surges of governmental policy-emphasis. American capitalism had become a functional duopoly (C. Wright Mills' Power Elite was a good popular discussion of this general structure at an earlier point in our capitalist-development trajectory after the war), the Cold War itself providing a cover for the US globalization of power via market penetration, international financial and monetary architecture under US supervision, and the steady build-up of an Armaments State. There is nothing actually new here about the American historical pattern, except of course the more explicit and pronounced role to be assigned the military in the stabilization and expansion of American capitalism. The military was never at any point following the Civil War a negligible input in synthesizing the materials for an operational ruling class, but essentially, as in the late-19th century policy of the Open Door, business was sufficiently confident of its own power (the "imperialism of free trade") to carry forward the process of expansion largely on its own. Yet, the dynamism of early modern capitalism, realized in part through grinding methods of labor suppression, notably, the privatization of force, helped on by a compliant government, meant that within capitalism itself there was tremendous jockeying for power requiring the imposition of Order if major railroads and industrial firms were to enjoy their secure monopoly status."
Gary Edwards

1913: The Blow That Killed America 100 Years Ago - 0 views

www.freemansperspective.com/1913-america

1913 Woodrow-Wilson Nelson-Aldrich Rockefeller Bilderbergs ruling-class-elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Aug 13
     
    "There is a lot of ruin in a nation," wrote Adam Smith. His point was that it takes a long time for nations to fall, even when they're dead on their feet. And he was certainly right. America took its fatal blow in 1913, one hundred years ago; it just hasn't hit the ground yet. This is a slow process, but it's actually fast compared to the Romans. It took them several centuries to collapse . The confusing thing about our current situation is that America - and by that I mean the noble America that so many of us grew up believing was real - has long been poisoned. Its liver, kidneys, and spleen have all stopped functioning. Its heart beats slowly and irregularly. But it still stands on its feet and presents itself as alive to all those who would let their eyes fool them. And I'm not without sympathy for those who want to believe. They find themselves in a world where politics is almighty, and where their comfort, prosperity, and perhaps their survival all hang in a delicate balance. They don't want to upset anything, and questioning the bosses is a good way to get yelled at. But just because someone wants to believe doesn't make it so. We are not children and we are not powerless. We Producers should never be intimidated by those who live at our expense. So let's start looking at the facts. 1913: The Horrible Year For all the problems America had prior to 1913 (including the unnecessary and horrifying Civil War), nothing spelled the death of the nation like the horrors of 1913. Here are the key dates: February 3rd : The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, authorizing the Federal government to impose income taxes on individuals. An amendment to a tariff act in 1894 had attempted to do this, but since it was clearly unconstitutional, the Supreme Court struck it down. As a result - and mostly under the banner of bleeding the rich - the 16th amendment was promoted and passed. As a result, the Revenue Act of 1
Paul Merrell

The Progressive Movement is a PR Front for Rich Democrats » Counterpunch: Tel... - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...-a-pr-front-for-rich-democrats

propaganda progressives bankster defenses

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • There is good news in the Boston Globe today for the managers, development directors, visionaries, political hacks and propaganda flacks who run “the Progressive Movement.”   More easy-to-earn and easy-to-hide soft money, millions of dollars,  will be flowing to them from super rich Democrats and business corporations.  It will come clean, pressed and laundered through Organizing for Action, the latest incarnation of the Obama Money Machine which has recently morphed into a “nonpartisan non-profit corporation” that will  ‘‘strengthen the progressive movement and train our next generation of leaders.’’
  • Does this information concern you?  If not, you need to get out of the propaganda bubble of your Progressive Movement echo chamber and think.  Think hard.  Think about fundamental, radical, democratic, social and economic change, who might bring it about and how.  Ask yourself if the the rich elite, the 1%, are going to fund that.   Leave The Nation and Mother Jones on the shelf;  turn off Ed Schultz, Rachel Madow and Chris Hayes;  don’t open that barrage of email missives from Alternet, Media Matters, MoveOn, and the other think tanks;  and get your head out of the liberal blogosphere for a couple days.  Clear your mind and consider this:
  • The self-labeled Progressive Movement that has arisen over the past decade is primarily one big propaganda campaign serving the political interests of the the Democratic Party’s richest one-percent who created it.  The funders and owners of the Progressive Movement get richer and richer off Wall Street and the corporate system.  But they happen to be Democrats, cultural and social liberals who can’t stomach Republican policies, and so after bruising electoral defeats a decade ago they decided to buy a movement, one just like the Republicans, a copy. The Progressive Movement that exists today is their success story.  The Democratic elite created  a mirror image of the type of astroturf front groups and think tanks long ago invented, funded and promoted by the Reaganites and the Koch brothers.  The liberal elite own the Progressive Movement. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Real movements are not the creation of and beholden to millionaires.  The Progressive Movement is astroturf beholden to the rich elite, just as the Democratic millionaires and operatives of the Democracy Alliance intended.  The “movement’s” funding is in the hands of a small number of super rich Democrats and union bureaucrats and advisors who run with them.  Its talking points, strategies, tactics and PR campaigns are all at the service of the Democratic elite.  There is no grassroots organized progressive movement with power in the United States, and none is being built.  Indeed,  if anything threatens to emerge,  the cry  “Remember Nader!” arises and the budding insurgency is marginalized or coopted, as in the case of the Occupy Wall Street events.  Meanwhile, the rich elite who fund the Progressive Movement, and their candidates such as Barack Obama, are completely wedded to maintaining the existing status quo on Wall Street and in the corporate boardroom.  Their well-kept Progressive Movement is adept at PR, propaganda, marketing and fundraising necessary in the service of the Democratic Party and the corporate elite who rule it.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Mar 13
     
    Why the anti-war and 99-percenter "progressives" never get around to ending wars and reforming Wall Street. Spot on. An excellent snapshot of where the real political power in the U.S. is. And for Gary, George Soros gets mentioned more than once.
Gary Edwards

Liberty in the Breach | The End of the American Dream - 0 views

bayareapatriots.wordpress.com

Alexis-de-Tocqueville freedom-liberty Banksters Globalist-Elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 13
     
    This link will take you to a public blog, the content of which comes from the collaborative work of the Diigo group, "Socialism and the End of the American Dream". The content for the Liberty in the Breach (http://goo.gl/AAFJ9) blog is posted directly from a Diigo.com group called "Socialism and the End of the American Dream". So yes, this groups bookmarking efforts are public.  The way this works is easy for anyone to to do, and I encourage everyone to make use of blog and RSS posts. The Diigo bookmark service enables groups of people to share tagged and categorized lists of bookmarks, but the only way to take these group collaborations truly public is through the blog and RSS posting mechanisms. There are also select sharing methods.  Each Group of bookmarks and comments can have any number of "Lists". A list is a subset of a group, but it can stand on it's own or serve many groups. The difference is that Groups have members and lists do not.  The effect of this separation is that you can publish or RSS any list to a Web Site or Reader, and not be concerned about errant group membership comments and posts. Fortunately we not encountered that problem with the End of the American Dream group.  The "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" group contains two prominent "lists": Banksters and USA-Constitution. There are other lists, but over time these two became dominant.  I started the "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" group in August of 2008 as part of my research and attempt to understand the financial collapse of 2008. What I found was quite chilling, and has nothing to do with "Socialism" or it's many forms.  I came to understand that socialism in it's many forms (liberalism, Progressivism, Marxism, Naziism, and Communism), is used the same as conservatism and corporate facism by a wealthy globalist elite to seize the instruments and resources of government for their own purposes.  So yeah, if I had the chance to rename to group, I
Gary Edwards

First Tea Party, Now Trump: Battle Against Globalization Gains Strength | The Daily Bell - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...t-globalization-gains-strength

Tea-Party-Patriots Trump Globalist

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 May 16 - No Cached
  • The larger question, (and this Bloomberg article addresses it in its own way) is one that we used to ask with some regularity: Are Western elites going to have to take a step back?
  • What it construes as  a “cultural retreat” is actually a manifestation of both a free society and representative democracy.
  • Indeed this conflict will likely present itself ever-more powerfully throughout the 21st century. It is the conflict between globalism and freedom.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The US political system is NOT engineered to allow a rejection of elite, globalism. The modern Western political system is almost entirely in thrall to this sort of internationalism.
  • The ultimate solution to what has occurred in the 20th and now 21st century will evolve from individual action and people literally find new ways of addressing and rejecting elite control.
  • Gary Edwards on 06 May 16
     
    "More and more, Donald Trump seems to us at least partially an extension of the Tea Party movement that the US mainstream media declared dead a few years ago. Whether Trump wins or not, or whether his campaign and then his presidency is considered a "success" is in a sense incidental. The larger question, (and this Bloomberg article addresses it in its own way) is one that we used to ask with some regularity: Are Western elites going to have to take a step back? From a social, political, economic and investment perspective, what will the West and the world look like if the quasi-libertarian impulse represented by Trump and the Tea Party somehow emerge victorious in the US? What Trump represents is like an incoming tide. You can divert it or dam it momentarily but it will not be halted in the longer term. It will reach its destination, whatever that is. We've written a number of articles, for instance, pointing out that one of the unfortunate results of the Trump candidacy may be to inflame tensions between Hispanics and white, Western culture. The idea is that these tensions can lead to a rapprochement that reignites a previous movement to further align and consolidate Mexican and US economies and even sociopolitical elements. Additionally, some Trump statements have an authoritarian and populist ring to them that seem to indicate a Trump presidency would reinforce certain oppressive and anti-freedom aspects federal power. But as Trump approaches, potentially, a successful destination, the ramifications of what he has accomplished - and may yet accomplish - should be considered seriously by anyone living in the US or affected by Western power."
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Occupy Wall Street Demands Global UN Tax and Worldwide G20 Protest - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...-Tax-and-Worldwide-G20-Protest

Banksters OWS

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Oct 11
     
    Occupy's busting out on a new path ... So Adbusters is asking people all around the world to march on Oct. 29. "We want to send a clear message that we the people want to slow down this global casino." And Adbusters does have one specific demand, a 1 percent tax on financial-sector transactions (perhaps stocks, bonds, foreign-currency trades and derivatives). Some form of that idea, known as the "Robin Hood" tax, has been around for a while and might actually fly. - Jerry Large/Seattle Times Dominant Social Theme: We want justice for the world and the UN will give it to us. Free-Market Analysis: Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters magazine, based in Vancouver, B.C. - the magazine that issued the call for the initial Occupy Wall Street protests - has called on people to protest the upcoming G20 while demanding a one-percent tax on financial transactions. The revenue raised would be enormous and the lingering question is where this incredible revenue stream would be directed. The answer is obvious to those who follow what we call "directed history." The intention is likely to fund the UN as part of a final push to rationalize and perfect the initial stages of true world government. As we have written before, the movement toward world government is happening very quickly now. The ramifications are enormous and people who write off these protests as spontaneous and short-lived are not grasping what is taking place, in our humble opinion. The financial sales tax has been around for a very long time but has found its most recent voice in a column by Jerry Large of the Seattle Times. He recently gained an exclusive interview with Kalle Lasn, who sounds as if he hopes that a large protest on Oct 29th will mark the beginning of a push for such a tax. What's going on is pure one-worldism, an OWS ideology that is gradually revealing itself in dribs and drabs. It is one reason that that the OWS leaders have made no specific demands. They have hoped to create a momentu
Gary Edwards

The Roberts Jizya and the Art of War - 0 views

www.canadafreepress.com/...47757

tb2 John-Roberts-TB2 ObamaCare-TAX

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • he is violating his oath of office in doing so, and that is the only sensible explanation because the Constitution is fairly clear; the United States Constitution expressly grants all powers not specifically enumerated in the document to the states and the People, and nowhere is this particular tax authorized.
  • this is rather like Jizya, the Muslim concept of taxation on non-Muslims.
  • The purpose of the Islamic Jizya is to compel approved behavior, and as such has been a powerful tool used by Islamic societies to compel conversion to Islam
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In this instance the United States government is using it to compel conversion to socialist medicine, forcing us to either buy expensive private insurance or go on the government plan.
  • In short, they are abridging our freedom of religion, a constitutionally protected category.
  • What is clear is that this is an abridgement of the Establishment clause, and of the First Amendment.
  • The argument that this saves us from a super-stretching of the Commerce Clause is immaterial; we have simply replaced it with a super-stretching of the power of taxation. In the end, dead is just as dead.
  • What is really needed is a Constitutional Amendment, and the individual states need to spearhead that.
  • We have allowed the United States to move from a representative democratic republic to an empire, a system dominated by a ruling elite, an oligarchy.
  • We must return to the Federalism that was at the core of the Republic.
  • He is a traitor to his oath, a Benedict Arnold in a black robe
  • He has placed his desire for self-aggrandizement over his duty, and so has affirmed the power of government and the ruling elite to do anything to the public they please.
  • It’s time we take this country back. That can only happen at the state level.
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Jul 12
     
    Another well written article describing in full what that treasonous backstabbing bastard chief justice John Roberts has done to shred and destroy our Constitution.  Thanks to the Canadian Free Press and Timothy Birdnow. excerpt: So, why is this so important to our discussion of the ruling by the Roberts Court? Because many on our side seem to believe that John Roberts did us a favor in his decision upholding the Affordable Healthcare Act, or as it is known colloquially, Obamacare. The argument in conservative circles for a silver lining to this dark cloud of human bodily excretions is that this ends the debate over the right to use the Commerce Clause to justify any action of Congress and that it hangs this around Osama's neck, a huge tax increase, for the November elections. While a little soothing may be in order we are making a terrible mistake here, because, A.) an eggplant could see this is unconstitutional and, B.) it simply kicks the can down the road, forcing us to fight yet another unnecessary battle. We should have declared victory here. First, this is not a mere political move on Roberts part. He is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and as such is not going to tie his name to a partisan decision that will be read about in American textbooks. If he is to violate his oath it will be for personal reasons, such as upholding this law against all expectations. What will he gain personally from doing the right thing and striking it down? Upholding such a crazy law guarantees him a spot in the history books. But he is violating his oath of office in doing so, and that is the only sensible explanation because the Constitution is fairly clear; the United States Constitution expressly grants all powers not specifically enumerated in the document to the states and the People, and nowhere is this particular tax authorized. Furthermore, it violates the principle of equality under the law as only some of the public is actually paying a tax; the rest are buyin
Gary Edwards

Civil Unrest Ahead - LewRockwell.com - 0 views

www.lewrockwell.com/...civil-unrest-ahead

Ron-Paul Libertarian

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Victimized Inner Cities
  • This social disruption has motivated the enthusiastic growth and militarization of our local police departments. The law and order crowd thrives on excessive laws and regulations that no US citizen can escape. The out-of-control war on drugs is the worst part, and it generates the greatest danger in poverty-ridden areas via out-of-control police. It is estimated that these conditions have generated up to 80,000 SWAT raids per year in the United States. Most are in poor neighborhoods and involve black homes and businesses being hit disproportionately. This involves a high percentage of no-knock attacks. As can be expected many totally innocent people are killed in the process. Property damage is routine and compensation is rare. The routine use of civil forfeiture of property has become an abomination, totally out of control, which significantly contributes to the chaos. It should not be a surprise to see resentment building up against the police under these conditions. The violent reaction against local merchants in retaliation for police actions further aggravates the situation —hardly a recipe for a safe neighborhood.
  • Civil liberties are ignored by the police, and the private property of innocent bystanders is disregarded by those resenting police violence.
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • The entitlement mentality is a source of much anger and misunderstanding. It leads people who see themselves as victims to one conclusion: they are entitled to be taken care of.
  • If one trillion dollars per year doesn’t do the job, then make it $2 trillion. If the war on poverty’s $16 trillion hasn’t worked, make it $32 trillion.
  • The wealthy special interests, such as banks, the military-industrial complex, the medical industry, the drug industry, and many other corporatists, quickly gain control of the system.
  • Honest profits of successful entrepreneurs are quite different than profits of the corporate elite who gain control of the government and, as a consequence, accumulate obscene wealth by “robbing” the middle class.
  • To blame and destroy those who make an honest living by satisfying consumers without the use of special benefits from the government is destructive to liberty and wealth.
  • Crumbs may be thrown to the poor, but the principle of wealth transfer is hijacked and used for corporate and foreign welfare instead of wealth transfers to the poor.
  • True satisfaction comes from productive effort and self-reliance and not from a government transferring wealth in an effort to bring about an egalitarian society.
  • The people have too little confidence that most problems can be solved in a voluntary manner in a society that cherishes civil liberties. There’s never an admission that government problem-solving doesn’t work. Government-created problems are a road to poverty and resentment. Too many people believe that “free stuff” from the government can solve our problems. They mistakenly believe that deficits don’t matter and that wealth can come from a printing press.
  • The high profile episodes of police violence and overreaction are a consequence of conditions that in many ways were generated by government policy.
  • equal justice requires the end of welfare redistribution
  • Retraining the police won’t touch the complex problems that pit the police against the victims of complex social conditions generated by hate, violence and bad economic policies.
  • Redistribution is a process that is always destined to help a small minority, whether in an economy like ours that endorses central economic planning or in one run by radical fascists or communists.
  • Under an authoritarian regime, those in power take care of themselves. This always leads to poverty and discrepancy in wealth distribution.
  • Eventually the social strife that is predictable leads to an overthrow of the government.
  • The strife that we are witnessing is a reflection of a growing number of people who are recognizing the discrepancy between rich and poor, the weak and the powerful, Wall Street and Main Street.
  • Both political parties are financed by Wall Street, the big banks, and the military-industrial complex. Getting rich by being part of the government class is the problem.
  • Indeed the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. The extreme current inequality is not a consequence of free markets and true liberty. Rather it results from the welfare state that, as always, morphs into a system that provides excesses for the powerful few.
  • The economic interventionist system under which we live today rewards those who benefit from government economic planning by the Federal Reserve, access to government contracts, and targeted special regulations to help one group over the other
  • There are two problems. First is conceding the principle that government has the moral authority to redistribute wealth. Second is believing the redistribution will be managed wisely and without corruption.
  • Police brutality and militarization may well induce a violent event far beyond what we have seen in Ferguson. It also can serve as an excuse. But it is not the root cause of turmoil. The real cause is poverty, the entitlement mentality, and the breakdown of the rule of law. Moral decay and the national police state are the real culprits.
  • We must limit the government’s role to protecting equal justice in defense of life, liberty, and property.
  • We have too many police, too many laws, and too much exemption of government officials from the crimes they commit.
  • There has to be an understanding that productive effort and self-reliance on the part of everyone is required for a free society to thrive.
  • The loss of our liberty has sharply accelerated since the 9/11 attacks. We have done to ourselves what no foreign enemy could have possibly accomplished.
  • Welfare, for the rich or poor, cannot exist without the sacrifice of the principal of property ownership.
  • The national police are made up of over 100,000 bureaucrats and police officials who carry guns to enforce federal law on the American citizens.
  • Today every American is a suspect. Our president has established a policy that an American citizen can be assassinated without even being charged with a crime.
  • The Founders and our Constitution intended that policing powers would be the responsibility of the individual states. That was forgotten a long time ago
  • the Feds are there taking charge over all local officials and property owners,
  • The Founders did not even want a standing army. They wanted only a militia.
  • Old-fashioned colonialism was deemed necessary by various European powers to secure natural resources along with control over sea lanes and markets for selling manufactured goods.
  • European-style colonialism — supporting a mercantilistic economy — came to be seen as politically unrealistic and unnecessary.
  • We are now subject to an out-of-control domestic police force while the US military maintains our Empire overseas.
  • When free-trade principles were utilized, colonialism did not die; it only changed form. Mercantilism in various forms and degrees drove trade policies of nations with strong economies and militaries.
  • The United States military presence around the world provides a “private” police force to protect US and other international companies against any local resistance or leaders that turn unfriendly. Our military presence overseas has nothing to do with protecting our freedoms and defending our Constitution.
  • The international monetary system is a powerful tool for the select few.
  • In fact, the real heroes are the ones who expose the truth and refuse to fight foreign wars for the international corporations.
  • The “one percenters,” generally speaking, are internationalists who are not champions of individual liberty and free trade. They are supporters of managed trade and international institutions like the WTO where the interests of the one percent can influence the rulings that frequently have little to do with advancing advertised goals of low tariffs and free trade.
  • Disengaging our troops from around the world and refusing to defend American neocolonialism is pursuing a course compatible with the qualities that Americans claim to stand for.
  • The obsession with continuing all the same policies has increased our poverty, increased violence between the classes, and lowered the standard of living for all except the elite one percent. And worst of all, the sacrifice of liberty was for naught.
  • Losing both liberty and the right to truly own property undermines the ability to create wealth.
  • When this process gets out-of-control the economy goes into a death spiral, in the beginning of which we currently find ourselves. Without a correction to the basic understanding of the proper role of government, the downward spiral will continue.
  • Tax revenues will continue to rise, aiding the policy of the government spending the people’s money rather than those who earned it.
  • Wall Street will be protected, and the trillions of dollars of big banks derivatives will be absorbed by the Fed, the FDIC, and ultimately by the American taxpayers in the next financial crisis.
  • There’s no doubt the poor will get poorer and the rich richer until the spirit of revolution in the people calls a halt to the systematic destruction of freedom in America.
  • Authoritarianism has overtaken our economic system as the welfare mentality takes over at every level of government.
  • Once the initiation of force by government is accepted by the people, even minimally, it escalates and involves every aspect of society. The only question that remains is just who gets to wield the power to distribute the largess to their friends and chosen beneficiaries.
  • It’s a recipe for steady growth of the government at the expense of liberties, even if official documents and laws written to limit government power are in place.
  • Restraining the few who thrive on the use of force to rule over us is the challenge. Fortunately they are outnumbered by those who would choose liberty yet lack the will to challenge the humanitarian monsters who gain support from naive and apathetic citizens.
  • The sentiments supporting secession, jury nullification, nullification of federal laws by state legislatures, and a drive for more independence from larger governments will continue.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Jan 15
     
    "If Americans were honest with themselves they would acknowledge that the Republic is no more. We now live in a police state. If we do not recognize and resist this development, freedom and prosperity for all Americans will continue to deteriorate. All liberties in America today are under siege. It didn't happen overnight. It took many years of neglect for our liberties to be given away so casually for a promise of security from the politicians. The tragic part is that the more security was promised - physical and economic - the less liberty was protected. With cradle-to-grave welfare protecting all citizens from any mistakes and a perpetual global war on terrorism, which a majority of Americans were convinced was absolutely necessary for our survival, our security and prosperity has been sacrificed. It was all based on lies and ignorance. Many came to believe that their best interests were served by giving up a little freedom now and then to gain a better life. The trap was set. At the beginning of a cycle that systematically undermines liberty with delusions of easy prosperity, the change may actually seem to be beneficial to a few. But to me that's like excusing embezzlement as a road to leisure and wealth - eventually payment and punishment always come due. One cannot escape the fact that a society's wealth cannot be sustained or increased without work and productive effort. Yes, some criminal elements can benefit for a while, but reality always sets in. Reality is now setting in for America and for that matter for most of the world. The piper will get his due even if "the children" have to suffer. The deception of promising "success" has lasted for quite a while. It was accomplished by ever-increasing taxes, deficits, borrowing, and printing press money. In the meantime the policing powers of the federal government were systematically and significantly expanded. No one cared much, as there seemed to be enough "gravy" for the rich, th
Gary Edwards

Hating the Establishment Is Not the Same as Supporting Liberty | Foundation for Economi... - 1 views

fee.org/...the-same-as-supporting-liberty

Banksters The-Establishment Jeffrey-A-Tucker

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • You might point to the American Revolution as a contrary case. We tossed out the British monarchy and invented freedom! But think again. The war itself created a new establishment consisting of politicians, military generals, bond dealers, and influential landholders.
  • Twelve years after the Declaration of Independence, these groups got together and formed a new government that, in time, became as oppressive and restrictive — and in some ways, more so — as the one the revolutionaries overthrew. And this occurred despite the existence of classical liberal political norms and intellectual culture.
  • He has said nothing about dismantling power.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Indeed, he is on record with his desire to radically expand the power of the state.
  • He wants surveillance, controls on the internet, religious tests for migration, war-like tariffs, industrial planning, and autocratic foreign-policy power. He’s praised police power and toyed with ideas such as internment and killings of political enemies. His entire governing philosophy boils down to arbitrary, free-wheeling authoritarianism.
  • As for Sanders, everything that is bad about the current establishment he promises to make worse with more programs, bureaucracy, taxes, controls, and government power in order to making life fair, just, and equitable. He speaks as if he’s never heard of the failed history of socialism and certainly hasn’t learned anything from it.
  • The ideal is liberty, not the overthrow of existing elite structures as such.
  • They resist rampant populism that would lead to a pillaging of the nation that is serving them so well.
  • To understand Machiavelli, realize that his black beast was the cleric Savonarola, Florence’s quasi-dictator who led a mass movement of crazed pietists who pillaged and burned material possessions as a pathway to heaven. The Bonfire of the Vanities of 1487 was one result. This is exactly the kind of mania that establishments exist to keep at bay.
  • The main payout is the control of the state apparatus that outlives the establishment’s overthrow. It makes sense that the results will tend to be more ruthless, vengeful, and bloody than anything that came before.
  • Establishments are as Machiavelli described: stable machines that keep competitors at bay but otherwise seek to make the system work for themselves.
  • The goal should be the tearing down of power itself and its replacement by simple human rights and a society that functions according to civilized standards.
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16
     
    "But there's a problem. The state power we oppose is not identical to the establishment we reject. You can overthrow the establishment and still be left with a gigantic machinery of legalized exploitation. All the agencies, laws, regulations, and powers are still in place. And now you have a problem: someone else is in charge of the state itself. You might call it a new establishment. It could be even more wicked than the one you swept away. Indeed, it usually is. Maybe always. Anatomy of the Establishment What is an establishment? It is a network of large and cooperating interest groups that have developed a stable relationship with state power. It includes finance, organized labor, public bureaucrats, government contractors, big businesses with quid pro quo relationships with regulators and politicians, political families with a strong stake in the election process, intellectuals at state-friendly think tanks and universities, and so on."
Gary Edwards

Money Power - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...1863

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • money power exists and is wielded ruthlessly by the Anglo-American power elite that has amassed astounding, unimaginable wealth. Today, as the Internet forcibly relaxes the grip of the power elite (at least momentarily) the term is making something of a comeback. There are over 1.5 million Google cites featuring the term "money power."
  • "In a letter written to William Elkin less than five months before he was assassinated: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war."
  • They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "The fact is that there is a serious danger of this country becoming a pluto-democracy; that is, a sham republic with the real government in the hands of a small clique of enormously wealth men, who speak through their money, and whose influence, even today, radiates to every corner of the United States."
  • Thomas Jefferson – "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
  • American Mercury Magazine (December 1957, pg. 92) – "The invisible Money Power is working to control and enslave mankind. It financed Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Zionism and Socialism. All of these are directed to making the United States a member of World Government."
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - The Economist Hoists Its Battle Balloon? - 1 views

www.thedailybell.com/...mist-Hoists-Its-Battle-Balloon

economist-magazine Banksters World-Wars New-World-Order

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 13
     
    "The first world war... Look back with angst ... Thanks to its military, economic and soft power, America is still indispensable, particularly in dealing with threats like climate change and terror, which cross borders. But unless America behaves as a leader and the guarantor of the world order, it will be inviting regional powers to test their strength by bullying neighbouring countries. The chances are that none of the world's present dangers will lead to anything that compares to the horrors of 1914. Madness, whether motivated by race, religion or tribe, usually gives ground to rational self-interest. But when it triumphs, it leads to carnage, so to assume that reason will prevail is to be culpably complacent. That is the lesson of a century ago. - Economist Magazine Dominant Social Theme: Beware the coming wars ... Free-Market Analysis: You can't make this stuff up. The top men in the globalist community have been hard at work building wars and potential wars, and now it's time to let 'er rip. This is one dominant social theme we saw coming miles away. We've been writing about its imminence for years, and predicting war and more war as internationalists try to blunt the effect of the Internet Reformation. After the Gutenberg press blew up the Middle Ages and the Roman Catholic Church besides, the globalists of the era used economic chaos, war and the invention of copyright to fight back. We predicted they would use the same tools this time around and have no reason to revise our predictions thus far. The only thing we've consistently pointed out that has not yet been addressed is the inability of the top men to launch a full-out world war because that would involve nuclear weapons. And lacking a full-out war, we have questioned how successful the strategy can be. Obviously, the top elites see something we don't. Or perhaps they are willing to risk an all-out war anyway - as they retreat into reported fully-stocked, underground "cities." Here's more fro
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - America's Coming Crackup - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...ltberg-Americas-Coming-Crackup

Nelson-Hultberg Libertarian

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Our government bankers print money today like loons in an asylum spew absurdity. Glib media shills lure us every night into a disgraceful indolence. And our corporations lust like spoiled children after mega-billions of illicit lucre. Cataclysm is coming. No one with a minimal awareness of history, politics and proper economics today has faith that our society can continue much longer at its present level of government privilege and debt accumulation. There is a Grand Piper that must be paid, and he will manifest in any number of scenarios, none of which will be pleasant. One thing is for sure: The next two decades are going to be tumultuous and tragic. The events that unfold will be far more radical than we dare envision today. Paradigms in banking, politics and philosophy will be overturned. Wrenching lifestyle shifts will be forced upon millions. Something akin to what happened in the Soviet Union after the fall of communism in 1991 will take place in America. Our ruling regime will collapse and bring Russian-style economic hardship to us all. How exactly things unfold will depend upon whether the nation's intelligentsia bring themselves to seriously question the shams of statism, or whether the government-media-academy triad is able to continue bamboozling them. What is extremely unnerving is that whoever wins this battle to control the destiny of our country will determine the fate of freedom on the planet for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. A monumental clash of ideology and propriety looms up ahead.
  • Why We Are Disintegrating as a Society
  • America's dilemma is this: We are being propelled toward an Orwellian style despotism that's purpose is to centralize government power in Washington, phase out American sovereignty and move our country as much as possible into subordination to the United Nations and eventually alignment with Canada, Mexico and Central America into a regional government. The world is moving toward the nightmare of Oceana, Eurasia and East Asia in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which will extinguish freedom and merge mankind into a tyrannical egalitarianism. Why is this happening? Such is the influential force of ideology. We are being destroyed because of what historian Clarence Carson called a "collectivist curvature of the mind" that took over our intellectuals back in the early twentieth century. This curvature of the mind functions as the grand fueling mechanism for the goals of government centralization and ending our national sovereignty. It's horrifying, but every year our schools form the "best and the brightest minds" into collectivist apparatchiks to go out in the world and work their way into the power centers of society. The schools do this via false teachings in philosophy, economics, political science and history. This "ideological indoctrination" teaches every new generation that capitalism is an evil, exploitative, racist, warmongering system and must be phased out of modern societies. It teaches that national sovereignty is anachronistic and must be given up. Such indoctrination is being done very subtly and sophisticatedly, but it is a powerful, pervasive theme instilled into all our children from the first grade on.
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  • This is why we have so many bankers, corporate moguls, political statesmen, authors, pundits, artists, publishers and priests working today to undercut the country. Being "the best and the brightest," they were taught in their youth that capitalist America is an evil nation. They, thus, have gone out and risen to positions of power with a globalist worldview that believes economic freedom can't work in the modern day, that American sovereignty is an anachronism belonging to the nineteenth century. Since they are the nation's intelligentsia, they are immensely influential. Their socialist-collectivist worldview is spread to the masses which then elect legislators sympathetic to such irrationality to Congress and the White House.
  • Every one of us has to choose whether we will try to make a difference or give in to indifference. Will we fight to inform our neighbors or succumb to the easy road of apathy? Will we opt for principle or popularity? Will we succumb to the statist thugs on the far left, or fall for the anarchic screwballs on the far right? The "mean" of constitutional sanity beckons to the percipient among us. Will it survive the tumult ahead?
  • All quite clear and horrifying. But how are we, as mere laymen with no access to national media or huge fortunes, to confront this destruction of freedom and sanity in America and throughout the West?
  • We must take a page from the story of the old man and the starfish. After a huge storm had brought a mini-tidal wave to his beach community one night, there were tens of thousands of starfish washed up on the shore that next morning. Amidst the masses of starfish the old man could be seen patiently picking them up and tossing them back into the sea. Along came a young lad in his twenties with green hair, eyebrow rings and a scornful face. He started laughing and mocked the old man with cynical derision. "You have to be crazy, old timer. You can't possibly save those starfish; there's thousands of them. You're wasting your time, you fool. YOU CAN'T MAKE A DIFFERENCE!" The old man looked up at the insolent youth and smiled. He then reached down and picked up one of the struggling starfish and winged it far out into the water, replying to his tormentor, "Made a difference with that one, didn't I?"
  • Making a Difference
  • A Diplomatic Nuisance
  • Not everyone, naturally, has the time and mental wherewithal to forcefully fight the "ideological indoctrination" destroying our country today. But many of us do. Our power lies in our minds and the strength of our personalities. We who possess this inner strength feel compelled to spread the word in any way we can for as long as we live. We feel compelled to wing as many starfish back to life as we can. The apathetic and cynical will scorn all this as senseless, just as the green-haired youth did. They will choose to remain wards of the state and sanction their enslavers. This has always been the nature of most humans. When such wards see others fighting valiantly against seemingly insurmountable odds for the freedom they have scorned, they are subconsciously humiliated because they are not deep in the thick of the fight themselves. They have chosen to avoid the fight and sanction the tyrants who are destroying our way of life. Thus, they must find a way to salve their consciences. That way is to caustically mock the Davids who go up against the Goliaths, to smear the Rolands of Roncesvalles that history hands down to us as heroic exemplars.
  • You the reader have a paramount decision to make regarding all this. It is High Noon for the cause of freedom. Will you fight with the heroic exemplars? If you choose to fight, then your first necessity is to become aware of WHAT is happening and WHY it is happening. That awareness can only be found via fervent curiosity and a commitment to the study of libertarian and conservative literature.
  • Your second duty is to emulate Paul Revere and warn all those in your sphere of influence. You do this by making a diplomatic nuisance of yourself, by pleasantly pestering your comrades to wake up to the elite's usurpations growing by leaps and bounds in our lives. You do it by convincing them that there are grander values in life than shiny new SUVs and country club memberships. There is something called the American way of life that requires personal independence.
  • Time is short. Collectivism steals over us like crack cocaine filters into a ghetto. It devastates everything of worth in its path. All the stoic traditions of strength, all the great lessons of logic, all the revered truths of Nature that have been handed down to us throughout the centuries are being assailed. The weasel-tyrants and their unctuous lackeys have gained control of the intellectual, political and banking power centers of our country, but they can't control the ultimate factor – the truth – because they can't control our minds unless we let them. They can't prohibit defiance. Solzhenitsyn showed us this. They can't extend their enslavement UNLESS WE SANCTION IT!
  • What the elites fear is a populace with the strength of William Wallace fighting King Edward at Sterling Bridge in 1297, the daring of Washington's band crossing the Delaware in the dead of winter. They fear those willing to fight for the original America. Up against such heady citizens, our collectivist tyrants will scatter like feeding jackals in face of approaching hunters. Our job is to build an army of such heady citizens. You can help by joining the cause. Read the books of freedom and sound money, and pass them on as the early Americans did with Common Sense. Bring people to the website where you are reading this essay. Bring them to AFR's website. Bring them to a state of urgency. Bring them to the truth of our Constitution and to the laws of Nature and Nature's God. Nothing other than this kind of effort will suffice. You cannot help truth and freedom by watching moronic TV shows at night. That is how the elites control you. They flood the airwaves with mindless entertainment. It's today's version of Brave New World's "soma for the masses." Today's TV is for zombies and dullards. The same applies to our movies. Next time you're in the theater, look around you at all the hoi polloi stuffing their faces with popcorn and their psyches with over-the top-violence and trashy sex.
  • Aldous Huxley was the first to point out that modern totalitarian regimes leave the "activities of sex" alone, but regiment the "activities of production." This allows those who are servile to think they are still free as they vote away their REAL freedom – their freedom to acquire and keep wealth, to associate with whom they please, to speak and worship as they please. Look around you. There are far more servile people in this human race than there are independent people. This is the reason why dictatorships dominate the history of man; the majority of humans want to be ruled. They want to relinquish their meaningful freedom; it requires too much self-assurance and grit.
  • Logic and History
  • The cause of America is the cause of REAL freedom. It won't be found with the malefic forces of statism on the left, nor with the eccentric cults of anarchism on the right. Both are living death, a fool's game for those devoid of the capacity to see the big picture, i.e., to see that the spectrum of reality is not two-poled, but three-poled with multifarious gradations and a golden mean of truth in between. The nature of human existence is complexity, wrapped up in mystery, contained in inconceivability, subsumed under the power of Truth. We will never create a free society by denying this and ignoring the results of logic and the record of history. This is what statists and anarchists do. REAL freedom is impossible without a grasp of logic and a deep knowledge of history, which teach us that the cornerstones of freedom are equal rights, strictly limited government, gold money and self-reliant people. The statists violate logic and ignore history because they are callous brutes who place power above all and simply don't care. The anarchists violate logic and ignore history because logic and history show their political system to be unworkable.
  • The truths we learn from logic and history are the disinfectants we must hurl into Washington's swamp of political leeches that are sucking all verity from our lives. When the Washington leeches have so stultified our nation that ghastly ruin prevails throughout, then is when the crackup will commence. All readers should take note. A meltdown is coming; a revolution will follow. We must make sure this revolution goes in the direction of the Founding Fathers, not in the direction of the statist left, nor in the direction of the anarchistic right. Statism and anarchism are like the AIDS virus; they will always be deadly to life. It is to Aristotle, Locke and Jefferson that we must turn. They will always be sustaining to life.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 15
     
    Wow, if this article isn't a MUST READ, then nothing is. Spot on call-to-arms. "Nelson Hultberg is a freelance scholar/writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic. Nelson's articles have appeared in such publications as American Conservative, Insight, Liberty, The Freeman and The Dallas Morning News, as well as on numerous Internet sites. He is the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email: NelsHultberg (at) aol.com."
Gary Edwards

Tea Party Community Organizers? - 2 views

news.google.com/?ar=1375483947

Tea-Party-Patriots Precinct-Activism

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Aug 13
     
    Tea Party Precinct Workers Needed: http://goo.gl/8u9wAI Republican Community Organizers? Or are they really libertarian infiltrators posturing as repubicans :) Interesting discussion at The Tea Party.org. Here is my comment concerning "fragmentation" and third party participation. And yes, I have registered to become a precinct worker on behalf of the Republican Party Libertarian Caucus movement. I've also listed myself in a number of local County Sheriff activities. It's getting real that matters :) ................... Fragmentation is an issue. Which is exactly why the core set of principles must be very limited. IMHO, restoring the founding documents and principles; the American Republic, the Constitution and the principles so famously described in the Declaration of Independence are the single point of agreement that defines "America". The founding documents created a Republic based on "individual liberty". So it would seem that the concept and value of "individual liberty" would be the single "lowest common denominator" that all Americans can rally around. Stray from the Constitution and Declaration, and you will have arguments that divide and defeat. Stay on point, arguing the value and importance of "individual liberty" and it becomes very hard to wander from the importance of limiting government, and protecting individual rights to privacy, property and prosperity. I've been very successful at arguing that a socialist can not honestly take the oath of office, oath of citizenship, or pledge of allegiance. The socialist believes that the rights and liberty of the individual is subordinate to the needs of society. For the socialist, there is no such thing as individual liberty or inalienable rights. They are un-Constitutional and un-American to the core of their being. For the libertarian, an ordered society based on limited government and the Rule of Law, is the best guarantor of effective and meaningful "individual liberty". The ess
Paul Merrell

Chinese elite special operations units to assist Assad's fight against jihadist insurgency - 0 views

theduran.com/ht-against-jihadist-insurgency

war & peace Syria China boots-on-the-ground

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • o advise and assist the Syrian Army in an attempt to root out the country’s terrorist insurgency. A focus of the Chinese elite unit will be on Chinese Islamist foreign fighters, who have shown up in increasing numbers in Syria’s north since the start of the US/Saudi intervention in Syria.
  • f confirmed this won’t be the first time China – one of the five veto-wielding powers of the UN Security Council – has sent assistance to the Assad government: according to previous reporting by Middle East Eye, China began quietly sending soldiers in an advisory capacity into Syria earlier this year to assist government forces in weapons systems, intelligence collection, logistics, and medicine. But this certainly marks a dramatic and more public escalation in terms of Chinese operations in the region as Beijing will reportedly send special forces to work closely with government troops, and likely in coordination with the Russians as well. Sources told the Saudi Arabia based newspaper New Khaleej that the Chinese Ministry of Defense intends to send two units known as the “Tigers of Siberia” and the “Night Tigers” – both elite special operations units – to assist the Syrian government’s fight against the jihadist insurgency. The news follows a high level meeting last week in China between Syrian Presidential Advisor Bouthaina Shaaban and Chinese Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who praised Damascus’ efforts in fighting foreign militants from the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM, also commonly called the Turkestan Islamic Party, or TIP). The Muslim separatist group was founded by ethnic Uighurs and is based in the Xinjiang province of northwest China.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Dec 17
     
    All three major powers now positioned to kick off WWIII.
Paul Merrell

Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...sunstein_2

surveillance state psywar Sunstein Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.”  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here. Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”  Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story‘s Daniel Tencer.
  • There’s no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein’s position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked.  Regardless, Sunstein’s closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote.  This isn’t an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein’s close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees.  Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class.  All of that makes Sunstein’s paper worth examining in greater detail.
  • Initially, note how similar Sunstein’s proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates.  The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as “independent analysts” in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon.  Bush officials secretly paid supposedly “independent” voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts.  In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens.  In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda — and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda.  Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government ”propaganda” within the U.S., aimed at American citizens: As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.”  By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.
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  • Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves.  His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise.  Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer’s closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat “false conspiracy theories” in Iraq — the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.Sunstein’s response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself.  He acknowledges that some “conspiracy theories” previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples:  the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in “mind control” experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters).  Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government “conspiracy theories,” discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements?  Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good — i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama
  • Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so. But it’s precisely because the Government is so often not “well-motivated” that such powers are so dangerous.  Advocating them on the ground that “we will use them well” is every authoritarian’s claim.  More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture:  when our side does X, X is Good, because we’re Good and are working for Good outcomes.  That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.
  • Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President’s health care plan.  With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama’s health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House — falsely — as an “independent” or “objective” authority.  Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of the President’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed.  This created an infinite “feedback loop” in favor of Obama’s health care plan which — unbeknownst to the public — was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned.  Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”
  • Sunstein himself — as part of his 2008 paper — explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls “credible independent experts” to advocate on the Government’s behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don’t trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are “independent.”  In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that “government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” but warns that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed.”  In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda — i.e., pretending that someone is an “independent” expert when they’re actually being “prodded” and even paid “behind the scenes” by the Government — but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don’t make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.  
  • In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber:  covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as “independent” analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line.  Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different.  Why?  Because, as Sunstein puts it:  we have “a well-motivated government” doing this so that “social welfare is improved.”  Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years — coordinated government/media propaganda — is instantaneously transformed into something Good.* * * * *What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein’s worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that “false conspiracy theories” are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world.  That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories — both domestically and in Muslim countries — as his prime example.
  • It’s certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive “false conspiracy theories” have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power:  namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, “crazy conspiracy theorist” has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption. Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance — the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation?  And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government?  The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources:  namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.
  • It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant.  The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned — rationally — to distrust government actions and statements.  Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is.  In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.
  • The point is that there are severe dangers to the Government covertly using its resources to “infiltrate” discussions and to shape political debates using undisclosed and manipulative means.  It’s called “covert propaganda” and it should be opposed regardless of who is in control of it or what its policy aims are. UPDATE II:  Ironically, this is the same administration that recently announced a new regulation dictating that “bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.”  Without such disclosure, the administration reasoned, the public may not be aware of important hidden incentives (h/t pasquin).  Yet the same administration pays an MIT analyst hundreds of thousands of dollars to advocate their most controversial proposed program while they hold him out as “objective,” and selects as their Chief Regulator someone who wants government agents to covertly mold political discussions “anonymously or even with false identities.”
  • UPDATE III:  Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for ”cognitive infiltration of extremist groups,” as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:
  • So Sunstein isn’t calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government ”ban conspiracy theorizing” or “impose some kind of tax on those who” do it — but he says “each will have a place under imaginable conditions.”  I’d love to know the “conditions” under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will “have a place.”  That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment.  Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14
     
    This is a January 2010 article by Glenn Greenwald. The Sunstein paper referred to was published in 2008 and is at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585  Sunstein left the Obama Administration in 2012 and now teaches law at Harvard. He is the husband of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice,a notorious neocon.  His paper is scholarly only in format. His major premises have no citations and in at least two cases are straw man logical fallacies that misportray the position of the groups he criticizes. This is "academic" work that a first-year-law student heading for a 1.0 grade point average could make mincemeat of. This paper alone would seem to disqualify him from a Supreme Court nomination and from teaching law. Has he never heard of the First Amendment and why didn't he bother to check whether it is legal to inflict propaganda on the American public? But strange things happen when you're a buddy of an American president. Most noteworthy, however, is that the paper unquestionably puts an advocate of waging psychological warfare against the foreign populations *and* the American public as the head of the White House White House OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2008 through 2012 and on Obama's short list for the Supreme Court. Given the long history of U.S. destabilization of foreign nations via propaganda, of foreign wars waged under false pretenses, of the ongoing barrage of false information disseminated by our federal government, can there be any reasonable doubt that the American public is not being manipulated by false propaganda disseminated by their own government?  An inquiring mind wants to know ...   
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