Worst Black on White Crime Yet
Your Weed Habit May Be Messing With Your male fertility
Thanks, John Frahm.
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More Spending, More Debts, More War — And A Trade War?
America has massive problems, which can be summed up in two words — overwhelming government. Despite some impressive exposures from DOGE, our chief problem is being exacerbated. Government spending is increasing, government debt is increasing, President Trump threatens new wars, and now we’re in the midst of a trade war. The troops are not coming home, the 1,000 bases are not being closed, and the “foreign aid,” is not being eliminated. In order to get rid of overwhelming government, all of these variables have to move in the opposite direction.
The post More Spending, More Debts, More War — And A Trade War? appeared first on LewRockwell.
Peter Dale Scott on Early OSS/CIA Relationship with the International Drug Networks
Old Wealth, the Kuomintang, and the CIA’s Air America
By: Peter Dale Scott
September 15, 2022
Abstract: An essay of mine, with the title “Private War Enterprise in Asia: Air America, the Brook Club and the Kuomintang,” was sent by me in 1970 to Ramparts magazine. But it was impounded by the CIA, and retained in their archives until released in 2009, under three CIA cover slips (one almost fully redacted). It is now published here, under a 2022 Introduction I have written for it.
Introduction
The essay, like the 2022 Introduction, describes two important facts about the early CIA: (1) how enmeshed the agency was in both policies and personnel with the milieu of New York inherited wealth, and (2) how the early policies of that milieu were determined by private financial interests, sometimes in direct conflict with public USG objectives.
In 2009, the CIA released three pages of their records from 1970, along with the document they referred to. One of the three CIA cover records was from the Security Directorate, classified “SECRET,” and wholly redacted except for an OS file number, presumably mine. The document attached to these records was my long-lost manuscript essay entitled, “Private War Enterprise in Asia: Air America, the Brook Club. and the Kuomintang.”
I remember nothing about this essay. CIA notations suggest that I submitted it to Ramparts magazine in September of 1970. However, a cover sheet indicates very clearly that the article was entered into CIA records on August 18, 1970. The article was never published before now, and I have no way of knowing whether it ever reached Ramparts.1
It was, however, passed from the CIA’s Deputy Directorate of Security to the Office of the Executive Director/Comptroller, Col. Lawrence K. White, who in September forwarded it to the Deputy Director of Plans for brief discussion “at the morning meeting.”2
The year 1970 was a busy one for me. Earlier that year, I had three anti-war articles published in the New York Review of Books and two more in Ramparts. In June, I submitted to Bobbs Merrill the manuscript of my book, The War Conspiracy, which was not published until two years later in June of 1972. By then, the book contained an additional chapter, on “Opium, the China Lobby, and the CIA,” which incorporated some of the prose from this lost August 1970 essay.
A digression: The book contract with Bobbs Merrill gave them two years to publish, a deadline they missed by one week. This brought my book into the time frame of my friend Al McCoy’s monumental The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a book announced with great fanfare in July on the front page of the New York Times, along with the bonus (which of course I would have welcomed) of a vigorous CIA attack.3 Al McCoy’s book was a much more definitive study than my meagre chapter, and it changed history. At the same time his thesis differed from mine: he alleged that “U.S. officials in Southeast Asia… have generally turned a blind eye to official involvement.”4 Nor did he conceal the fact that his book was written with input from CIA veterans like Edward Lansdale and Lucien Conein (at “McClean, Virginia,” the site of CIA Headquarters).
My book in contrast argued that the United States (including the CIA) was consciously using “illegal narcotics networks [ and their resources] to fight communism.”5 In late 1972, the critic Paul Krassner wrote that my book was being “suppressed,” or as we now say, “privished”: that is, I could find it in bookstores in Berkeley; but most of my friends across the country could not. In retrospect I have wondered if Bobbs Merrill (whose legal counsel at the time was the notorious CIA veteran William Harvey) may not have made a preemptive purchase.
The CIA had been aware of me since at the latest June 1970, when I consented to the request of a fellow researcher, a CIA veteran, that I let the CIA look at my book manuscript.6 He told me later that a car drove over from San Francisco to Berkeley, to pick it up from him.
Reading the essay a half century later, I see an argument in it that I would not endorse: the suggestion that the socially prominent New Yorkers named below on the boards of CIA proprietary firms had any control over those firms, rather than merely serving as a front for the agency. However, I do believe that the article demonstrated two important facts about the early CIA: (1) how enmeshed the agency was in both policies and personnel with New York inherited wealth, and (2) how the early policies of that milieu were determined by private financial interests, sometimes in direct conflict with public objectives.
Today we have further evidence in support of the second proposition.
The date of 1970 explains certain glaring omissions in the essay. I could not then have been aware of the impending close to the era of eastern US establishment-Kuomintang cooperation, as Kissinger and Nixon, starting with the “ping pong diplomacy” of 1971, began the delicate task of guiding America towards the major policy change of recognizing Communist China and the deep diplomatic, economic, financial, technological and other relations that followed in subsequent decades.
Nor could I have foreseen the extent to which Nixon would realign the base of the Republican Party, exploiting white racist resentment in the South and thus wresting control of the party away from white establishment liberals in the northeast. That realignment culminated in the Reagan Revolution of 1981 and continuing in fundamentals to 2022. It was accompanied by the creation of a new organization called the Council on National Policy, explicitly designed by people like the Texas oil millionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt to combat the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
But the biggest omission reflects how little I knew then about the postwar development of US support for Kuomintang remnant troops in Burma. A key role in this was played by Paul Helliwell—a Miami lawyer and a veteran of the OSS in Kunming, China. Helliwell acted first in his role in the Far East Division of the Strategic Service Unit (1945-47), a successor to OSS. Later he was instrumental in the creation of two CIA proprietary companies: SEA Supply Inc, and CAT—the latter of which became Air America. SEA Supply and CAT were both incorporated by Helliwell, a Miami lawyer, for Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC).
This direct US support for the chief opium traffickers of the Southeast Asian “Golden Triangle” became official with Truman’s authorization in late 1950 of Operation Paper. This CIA/OPC program—which CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith had opposed—was intended to divert Chinese armed forces towards their southern frontier, away from the conflict in Korea.
A key role in this support to Kuomintang remnants in Southeast Asia had been played earlier by a private Thai trading company set up in 1946 by Willis Bird, OSS Kunming Deputy Chief over Helliwell. After mishandling a post-war mission to Korea, Bird had left OSS under a cloud, but remained a friend of OSS Chief William Donovan. Bird’s trading company is said to have been originally financed by his friend Donovan’s post-war World Commerce Corporation (WCC), and Donovan himself visited Thailand in 1948. William Stevenson writes that Donovan “turned Siam into a base from which to run [postwar] secret operations against the new Soviet threat in Asia.”7
I should have written more about the WCC in my 1970 essay, for reasons that will become clear later in this introduction.
With Truman’s approval of the KMT-supporting Operation Paper in 1949, Bird’s trading business was subsumed under the new CIA proprietary that Bird’s old OSS mate Helliwell had incorporated in Miami, SEA Supply, Inc. But Bird himself was now well established in right wing, anti-democratic Thai military circles. He even plotted secretly with them to prepare for a Thai military coup in 1950—against, and sometimes in overt opposition to, the US Embassy’s efforts to consolidate Thailand’s fragile democracy. The 1950 coup brought to power Phao Sriyanon, the Thai general controlling the movement of KMT opium through Thailand from the rebel Shan states in Burma. It was not long before Phao was alleged to be the richest man in the world.
As I write in American War Machine,
Bird’s energetic promotion of Phao, precisely when the U.S. embassy was trying to reduce Phao’s corrupt influence, led to a 1951 embassy memorandum of protest to Washington about Bird’s activities. “Why is this man Bird allowed to deal with the Police Chief [Phao]?” the memo asked.8
But the uncontrollable Bird, in his de facto consolidation of the opium traffic in Thailand, appears to have conformed to the purposes of an unseen higher force which overrode the policy of the appointed officials in the U.S. Embassy. What Bird did was in concert with Helliwell in Miami, as well as with Helliwell’s CIA proprietaries, SEA Supply and CAT/Air America. Additionally, the Thai Border Patrol Police (BPP), part of General Phao’s military forces, had been receiving covert U.S. intelligence support, training, and military aid, from as early as 1948 following their role in an earlier Thai military coup in 1947.
Bird’s collusion with a major drug trafficker was in concert with other CIA-related activities at this time in remote areas, from France, Italy, and the Middle East, to Mexico and Taiwan. In later years, similar operations would be carried out in Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Australia, and Afghanistan.9
These widely dispersed grey alliances with drug traffickers were interconnected, but from a base outside the United States. Starting in 1950, Ting Tsuo-shou, civilian advisor to the KMT troops in Burma, began organizing for a larger Anti-Communist League.10 In 1954, ostensibly as part of the CIA operation to overthrow the Arbenz government of Guatemala, Howard Hunt (the future Watergate plotter), helped organize a Latin-American chapter for the League.11 In the same year, the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League (APACL) was established in Taiwan, allegedly with financial support from the CIA Deputy Chief of Station there, Ray Cline.12
In 1950, the Kuomintang ambition of “rolling back” Communism in Asia was endorsed by both the Republican Party and General Macarthur at his SCAP Headquarters in Japan. But it was opposed by the containment policy devised by Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and George Kennan.
Truman and Acheson had even worse news for the KMT, now re-established in Taiwan. “In January 1950, [they] publicly announced that Washington would not provide military assistance to safeguard Taiwan.”13
That Taiwan and the KMT survived was due largely to private initiatives taken by Admiral Charles M. Cooke, former commander of the US Seventh Fleet. In February 1950, Cooke flew to Taiwan, on a trip “apparently arranged by SCAP headquarters with MacArthur’s approval [while] the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Taipei were kept in the dark.”14
A month later,
Cooke worked out a draft contract, in which he proposed the formation of a “Special Technician Program” (STP) under the nominal supervision of the New York–based Commerce International China Inc. (CIC), a subsidiary of World Commerce Corporation chaired by S. G. Fassoulis, another powerful figure in the China lobby…. The CIC’s complex pedigree thus imbued the STP with political intrigue from its inception. As Cooke admitted later in a congressional hearing in October 1951, he never received any governmental authorization for the STP, nor for any of the several related underground activities undertaken through these ostensibly commercial firms.15
In the same month of March, Cooke and the WCC affiliate Commerce International China began purchasing millions of dollars of munitions for Taiwan. Rumors that they would purchase 426 surplus tanks in the Philippines
…disturbed politicians at both the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office, who worried that these heavy weapons would eventually fall to the Chinese Communists when Taiwan was captured, thus posing a threat to the West.16
Some of Cooke’s backers in the World Commerce Corporation had personal as well as ideological reasons for covertly opposing the Truman-Acheson Taiwan policy. These backers included wealthy oligarchs from both America (Nelson Rockefeller, John J. McCloy, Richard Mellon, and David Bruce) and Britain (Sir Victor Sassoon and Sir William “Tony” Keswick).17
In this list, it is relevant that Richard Mellon and David Bruce (his cousin by marriage) were both directors of Pan Am, which Bruce had helped bring into being. Sir Victor Sassoon had been a major pre-war investor in Shanghai, where the chief British interests were represented by the trading company Jardine Matheson—headed by Sir William Keswick, a collateral descendant of the Jardine family, and a director of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.18 All would gain considerably if the KMT could reestablish itself in mainland China.
Hsiao-ting Lin’s well-researched book, published by Harvard University Press, argues emphatically:
With the advisory assistance of the retired former commander of the Seventh Fleet, Admiral Charles M. Cooke, and his “Special Technician Program” in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek was able to withstand a critical stage of his political career in the months surrounding the outbreak of the Korean War.19
So we see that in Taiwan with Cooke, just as in Thailand with Willis Bird, Americans backed by the World Commerce Corporation were able to further the interests of the Kuomintang, against the policies of Truman and his administration.
Others have argued that the World Commerce Corporation, perhaps with access to Nazi gold in Austria, played a similar role in preserving the cadres of OSS through the difficult 1945-1947 years, after OSS was dissolved by Truman and before the CIA was created.20 All in all, between 1945 and Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration, we see two historically important trends. First, we see how private wealth—consolidated in the World Commerce Corporation—pursued policies which diverged from those of the public state. Secondly, in the matters we have discussed, the World Commerce Corporation prevailed over the public state.
That is, I believe, the core story underlying my 1970 essay.
Peter Dale Scott
Berkeley, California
August 30, 2022
The Essay: “Private War Enterprise in Asia: Air America, the Brook Club, and the Kuomintang”
[Minor additions and corrections to the 1970 manuscript, such as this one, will be distinguished by the use of brackets.]
It is common practice to speak of the U.S. involvement in Indochina as a chaotic muddle into which America stumbled, as Richard Goodwin has put it, “almost by accident.” A chief source for this soothing notion has been those who were once in the White House under President Kennedy, and who, understandably, have been quick to tell us that an Asian ground war was never what they intended.
Yet the patterns underlying the confusion are, when studied more closely, all too prevalent: America has not “blundered” erratically forwards like one who is drunk or absent-minded, but has inched inexorably down a road which many observers could foresee. At the end of that road, of course, is an ultimate confrontation with either China, the Soviet Union, or both countries together.
To speak of a society’s designs or intentions is I think a false metaphor; but in our pluralistic society there have been for two decades powerful individuals whose explicit design was just such an ultimate confrontation. Many more have accepted it as a risk worth running for a U.S. presence in Asia. Few of the former have held high office, and some of the most prominent have not held public office at all.
[Private Activists and Covert War in Indochina]
Within the government, proposals for “rolling back” Communism on the Chinese mainland have come chiefly from dissident minorities in the CIA — men like Chiang Ching-kuo’s close personal friend Ray Cline, who was in effect “exiled” to a quiet post in Germany after proposing a Chinese Bay of Pigs operation in 1962. For years the cause of rollback has been advocated more energetically by General Claire Chennault and Admiral Felix Stump, the Board Chairmen of the “private” airline CAT Inc., since March 31, 1959, known as Air America.
For two decades these private activists have been working to break down governmental inertia. No one of their successes in this campaign has been spectacular. Cumulatively, however, they have landed us in the third largest [foreign] war of America’s history.
One clear recurrent pattern in Southeast Asia has been the continuous provocations by the CIA and/or CAT/Air America, from the flying of Kuomintang guerrillas into Burma in 1951 to the recent training of Khmer Serai guerrillas and the defoliation of Cambodian rubber plantations—two major factors in the successful overthrow of Prince Sihanouk.
[Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs] Roger Hilsman, citing the CIA’s “fiascoes” in Indochina, Burma, and Laos, admitted that by 1961 there was a recurring “problem of CIA,” a problem which — from the three examples he cited — might equally well be labeled “the problem of Air America.” Hilsman suggests that the problem was one of inadequate control, just as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. criticizes the actions in Laos of irresponsible CIA agents “in the field.”
But the CIA continues to have as large a responsibility as ever for our billion-dollar covert war in Laos. Still more surprising, air support for this and other covert activities in Asia continues to be supplied by Air America, a “private” and hence uncontrollable airline whose capital, as we shall show, is derived in large part from Kuomintang sources in Taiwan.
[The Problem of Air America]
Worse still, though it is commonly hinted in the U.S. press that the CIA “uses” the KMT-linked Air America, I shall argue that the truth is at least as much the opposite way around. Air America is a powerful agent for an expanded war in Asia precisely because it is private, and hence not responsive to Congressional or even Presidential control. Its power, at least until recently, has been derived from that of its financial backers: a strange coalition of KMT wealth in Taiwan and the inherited Wall Street wealth of Manhattan bankers to be found in the New York Social Register. [I would still point to the role of KMT wealth in determining Air America policy. But the central problem on the American side, I would now say, was in fact not “inherited Wall Street wealth,” but the lack of central USG control, perhaps designed for the sake of “plausible deniability.”]
Air America is admittedly a marginal instrument in the present expanded Indochina war; yet it has been from the margins, the covert operations in inaccessible places like Laos and Cambodia, that escalations have proven likely to arise. In Nixon’s projected “low profile” for U.S. actions in Asia, the role of the “private” airline will almost certainly increase; and today Air America is indeed taking steps to increase its roster of pilots.
The important point is that Air America’s “privateness” does not make it remote from the sources of power in this capitalistic society; it makes it close to them. And Washington’s desire for peace in Asia will not have been demonstrated until such time as it ceases its contracts with an airline over which it is convenient to have no control.
For example, it is true that, in January 1970, Nixon terminated the unmanned “drone” reconnaissance overflights which had been secretly resumed in October 1969 a few days after Ray Cline’s return from Germany.
Yet this constructive step is more than nullified by the actions reported on April 13, 1970 in the Dallas Morning News:
American pilots working with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are making low-level, night-time flights over Communist China to further dissension and eventual revolution, the Dallas News has been told by a former government flier. “Our boys are doing quite a bit of flying into China,” said John Wiren in an interview.
“They fly upriver at night in old PBY’s [Patrol Bombers]. They drop [Chinese Nationalist] guerrillas and supplies put in there to stir things up.” Wiren… who spent much of the 1960’s flying for the CIA-sponsored airline “Air America” in Laos… said the clandestine flights are made into China as part of a long-range strategic plan. “The big plan is for revolution in China,” he said.
[Joe Alsop: A Manufacturer of Crises]
Today the excesses of Indochina, and particularly of America’s recent Cambodian adventure, may well have weakened the status of those in America who still harbor such fantasies. It can however be shown that, in the genesis of the Second Indochina War, such individuals, even though “private” rather than “public,” played a role that was central, carefully deliberate, and recurrent.
Take for example Joe Alsop, the man who in the not wholly playful words of Townsend Hoopes, “seemed at times to have invented the Vietnam War.”21 “Unexpected” crises in Indochina are not infrequently preceded by Joe Alsop’s ominous visits. The last was to Vietnam in April of this year, when he wrote from Saigon to attack “the possibility that havering and wavering in Washington can cause us to lose the golden opportunity in Cambodia,” to pacify at least half of South Vietnam.”22
[Joseph Alsop in 1974. Source: New York Times]
This timely visit recalls others. Alsop visited Taiwan and Indochina in late 1953, as the French were making their fateful buildup at Dienbienphu; he was the first to report USAF support for Dienbienphu before announcing his conversion to Chiang’s and Macarthur’s view that “there was no substitute for victory” in Asia.23
He visited Laos and Vietnam in April 1961, in time to witness “Operation Noel,” the first U.S.-advised paratroop operation in Indochina (with transports piloted by Nationalist Chinese and/or American pilots of Air America)24 and to “discover” a colonel in Vietnam’s Kien Hoa Province named Pham Ngoc Thao, who for the next two years was primed by an activist CIA faction as a candidate to displace the increasingly untrustworthy Ngo Dinh Nhu.
This Alsop visit preceded by one month the fateful tour in May 1961 of Vice-President Johnson, which led in turn to Kennedy’s Vietnam commitments. In May 1964, finally, Alsop returned to Indochina and advocated the bombing of North Vietnam, on the eve of the June 1 Honolulu Conference which in turn preceded the Tonkin Gulf Incidents.25
But the most productive of Alsop’s visits was undoubtedly that of August-September 1959, when, as we saw in an earlier issue of Ramparts,26 America’s covert war in Indochina can be said to have begun. On that occasion two cargo planes of the Taiwan commercial airline Civil Air Transport (i.e. two Air America planes) arrived in Vientiane on August 22, four days before an emergency aid program to pay for them was signed in Washington on August 26, and a week before “proof” of an August 30 North Vietnamese invasion was first brought forward.
Written “En Route to Vientiane,” Joe Alsop’s column of August 26 predicted “that the key city of Sam Neua will soon turn into another Dienbienphu,” an absurd charge that was nonetheless echoed almost immediately by the CIA’s protege General Phoumi Nosavan and by the U.S. press. Alsop arrived barely in time to interview the pretended survivors of a non-existent North Vietnamese “invasion” on August 30; his alarmist report of September 2 contributed to a secret U.S. Executive Order of September 4, under which, among other things, the first U.S. ground troops (an Army Signal unit) were apparently dispatched to “neutral” Laos.27
[Secret Orders Adopted in Eisenhower’s Absence]
Denis Warner, another anti-Communist reporter, heard the same “survivors” as Alsop and was contemptuous: “General Amkha accepted as fact what the most junior Western staff officer would have rejected as fiction.”28 Bernard Fall goes further and suggests that the evidence was not only false but deliberately staged. But those who swallowed the bait included not only Joe Alsop, who as Warner must have known had been a U.S. staff officer under Chennault in China during the war, but Alsop’s willing believers in Washington who despatched the undisclosed secret order of September 4.
Apparently, the latter did not include President Eisenhower, who on the crucial day of September 4 was isolated on a one-day golfing holiday at the secluded Culzean Castle in Scotland.
The full content of the secret order is unknown (a later column by Alsop is our only source), but may well have authorized the immediate recruiting of pilots by the “American Fliers for Laos,” a “volunteer” group “said to be negotiating with the Laotian Government for a contract to run an operation like that of the Flying Tigers.”29 Such authorization was necessary to avoid prosecution under Section 959 of the U.S. Criminal Code, which penalizes anyone who hires or retains another within the United States to enlist himself in any foreign military service.
Congress should ask for the publication of this secret order, to see what it authorized, whether Alsop’s misrepresentations were incorporated into it, how and by whom it was signed, and why it was dated on the day of Eisenhower’s seclusion in Scotland rather than awaiting his return to America three days later.
It is possible that talk of a high-level limited war conspiracy in Washington, perhaps even involving members of the present administration, is not as paranoid as writers like Schlesinger would have us think.
[Pan Am and the Wall Street Overworld]
One fact is certain: Joe Alsop, along with his Washington friend Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran, was in on the planning for an earlier secret Executive Order, that of April 15, 1941, which authorized Chennault’s American Volunteer Group or “Flying Tigers.”
Nor was Alsop the only link between the two Executive Orders: behind both was the shadowy presence of Pan Am, America’s largest airline in the Far East and a frequent “private” cover for U.S. military preparations before World War II.
In 1941 a former President of Pan Am’s Chinese subsidiary CNAC, William Pawley, was President of the “Central Aviation Manufacturing Company” which “hired” reserve officers as Flying Tigers pilots. In 1959 (as today) the former Pan Am Regional Director for the Middle East and India, George Arntzen Doole, was Chief Executive Officer of Air America, where he was assisted by two other former Pan Am Executives: Amos Hiatt, Air America’s Treasurer, and Hugh Grundy of CNAC, now President of Air America’s Taiwan operation Air Asia.
More specifically, the pilots for the “American Fliers for Laos” were recruited by a veteran USAF combat pilot, Clifford L. Speer. Speer was described as a “major in the Air Force Reserve and civilian employee at Fort Huachuca, Arizona,30 where Pan Am has a contract to conduct highly secret “electronics weapons” research for the USAF.
Pan Am’s links with the Flying Tigers and CAT/Air America were both intimate and profitable, since Pan Am has always picked up a major share of the supporting charter airlift behind Chennault’s wartime and postwar operations. During the war, Pan Am’s huge Chinese subsidiary, China National Aviation Co. (CNAC), flew the bulk of what was then the world’s largest airlift “over the hump” into China, using many former pilots with the Flying Tigers.
Madame Chennault identifies Gordon Tweedy, a former lawyer with Sullivan and Cromwell who served from 1941 to 1948 with CNAC, as a leading member of Chennault’s “Washington Squadron,” the group organized by Corcoran and Alsop to mount lend-lease for China. Meanwhile, Marion Cooper, one of the many Pan Am directors who at one time or another have belonged to New York’s wealthy and exclusive Brook Club, flew out to China in 1942 to become chief of staff of what was by then Chennault’s China Air Task Force.
Thus, paradoxically, Chennault, a man born in Commerce, Texas, who was never popular with the hierarchies of the War and State Departments, had personal links to the Brook Club and to Pan Am, whose other directors in those days included a Vanderbilt, a Mellon, and two Whitneys.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Pan Am again supplied a trans-Pacific back-up to various CAT/Air America operations, starting with the Korean War. For example, it was on May 5, 1953, that Civil Air Transport, using planes and pilots “loaned” by the USAF, arrived in Hanoi to begin its airlift to Dienbienphu. Seventeen days later, on May 22, Pan Am began its “commercial service” to Hanoi, a service opened with the assistance of the U.S. government “in the national interest,” and a service which became a chief money-earner for Pan Am during the accelerated Vietnam War buildup.
The Wall Street interest in CAT, however, altogether transcended the profits to be reaped from military airlift contracts alone: CAT was the logistical backbone for the new post-Korean formula to stop Communism in Asia. As Eisenhower put it, “If there must be a war there, let it be Asians against Asians, with our support on the side of freedom.”
The world had been simpler before the war. As the U.S. Navy recorded then in its pamphlet, The United State Navy as an Industrial Asset — What the Navy Has Done for Industry and Commerce,
In the Asiatic area a force of gunboats is kept on constant patrol in the Yangtse River. These boats are able to patrol from the mouth of the river up nearly 2,000 miles into the very heart of China. American businessmen have freely stated that should the United States withdraw this patrol they would have to leave at the same time.
After World War II gunboat diplomacy was no longer respectable. Overt intervention was giving way to covert, just as the warship was being replaced by the airplane. In China, above all, there were numerous reasons why the United States wished to avoid too conspicuous an identification with the moribund regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Yet the demands of U.S. businessmen for protection in Asia were as great as ever.
[Civil Air Transport: A Corporate-State Amalgam]
All of these factors must have influenced the decision of the U.S. State Department indirectly to subsidize General Chennault in the establishment of his post-war “private” Chinese airline, Civil Air Transport (at first called Chennault Air Transport). Kuomintang capital was undoubtedly involved as well, reportedly that of T.V. Soong and his sister Madame Chiang, and assuredly that of the Chinese industrialists Wang Yuan-ling, Hsu Kuo-mo, and Wang Wen-san (today’s CAT Chairman), then Manager of the Kincheng Bank which also invested in CAT.31
But CAT’s 47 U.S. Army Air Force transports were supplied by the U.S. relief agency UNRRA, for less than a tenth of their original cost, and for no cash. UNRRA gave Chennault contracts for Chennault and his men, including former OSS officers under Chennault such as Malcolm Rosholt
to fly relief supplies into the interior. When his bill for flying the supplies at high emergency rates equaled UNRRA’s low charge for the surplus planes, they became his.32
At first, UNRRA Director LaGuardia turned down this proposal after he and all other responsible UNRRA officials opposed it as wasteful and unnecessary. However, Laguardia “was called in for consultation by the State Department and told that both Soong and Madame Chiang had insisted on the need for the airline. LaGuardia reversed himself.”33 The Kuomintang clearly wanted Chennault to stay on to support its widely scattered armies; and indeed when Chennault “got full support of the line, he used it in semi-military support of the Kuomintang.”34
[Mail being loaded onto a CAT plane. Source: CAT Association.]
But the U.S. Government was also represented in CAT through Chennault’s partner Whiting Willauer, a graduate of Exeter, Princeton, and Harvard. Willauer had first been used as a trouble-shooter to fight Communists in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Justice Department in the 1930s (when he worked with Benjamin Mandel of the Martin Dies-led HUAC Committee). He went on to help overthrow Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and to represent the State Department in the 1960 planning for the Bay of Pigs.
Willauer was until then a representative of the Foreign Economic Administration engaged in “economic intelligence” in the Far East. During the war, he had worked with Chennault as an employee of the Delaware corporation China Defense Supplies Inc., and as Special Assistant to its President, W.S. Youngman—the postwar partner of Tommy Corcoran. The Chairmen of China Defense Supplies had been T.V. Soong and Frederic Delano, uncle of Pan Am director Lyman Delano.
Another important member of CAT was its treasurer James J. Brennan, a wartime member of Chennault’s Washington squadron, who after the war became a personal secretary to T.V. Soong in China.
CAT in other words, like the Flying Tigers before it, represented a covert alliance between Soong KMT elements and key elements around Tommy Corcoran in the Democratic Administration. This “private” arrangement left Chennault free in 1948 and 1949 to lobby against the State Department in favor of greater aid and airlift to China—particularly to the Chinese Moslem armies of General Ma Pu-fang in the northwestern Qinghai Province which CAT was then supplying through Lanchow.
By 1949 Chennault’s views and activities were visibly much closer to Nationalist China’s than to the State Department’s. For example in November 1949, Chennault, shortly after a similar visit by Chiang, flew up to Syngman Rhee in Korea, “to give him a plan for the Korean military air force”; at this time it was still U.S. official policy to deny Rhee planes and to arm his men with light defensive weapons only, to remove any temptation to invade North Korea.35
[1949: US Governmental Involvement in CAT Grows]
Yet, beginning in this same month of November 1949, covert U.S. government links with Chennault’s Chinese-backed airline began to be markedly increased. At first this new U.S. support was for ad hoc rather than long-term strategic purposes. The State Department feared that China’s civil air fleet, if it continued to serve under the new Chinese People’s Republic, would soon be used to mount an invasion against Taiwan.
Thus on November 30, 1949, the day of the fall of Chungking, a dummy Delaware corporation, Civil Air Transport, Inc., was set up to “buy” over 70 planes of Nationalist China’s two government airlines then taking refuge in Hong Kong. This served to keep the planes (by a process which Madame Chennault has since frankly called a “legal kidnapping”) from being acquired by the newly constituted Chinese Peoples’ Republic.
The State Department could now exert pressure upon the Hong Kong and British authorities on behalf of “an American company,” and it did so energetically. Meanwhile, former OSS Chief William Donovan flew out to Hong Kong with Chennault’s old lawyer Tommy Corcoran, now CAT Counsel as well. The U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong (and its air force attaché, Col. Leroy G. Heston, who had served with Chennault in China) played a particularly active role on CAT’s behalf.
One by-product of the deal was that Pan Am, unlike the other U.S. companies in China, secured compensation for its 20% investment in the airline CNAC. In fact, Civil Air Transport Inc.’s action in writing a check directly to Pan Am in New York, rather than to the CNAC offices in China, was one of the weakest links in its rather transparent case (or what Madam Chennault called “one last anti-Communist ‘miracle’”).36
Legally the new Delaware corporation, which supplied $4.8 million for the deal, issued only two of an authorized 2,000 shares — not to Chennault, but to former T.V. Soong employees Willauer and Brennan. It is possible that the $4.8 million really came from the CIA; for when the British Privy Council finally awarded the planes to Civil Air Transport, Inc. (overruling the Hong Kong courts), the seventy planes, which had been “bought” for a fraction of their real value, came home to the United States for repairs on the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Windham Day.37
But the legal work on the dummy corporation was handled by Tommy Corcoran’s law firm, whose business address was that reported over the next seven years by all of Civil Air Transport Inc.’s Washington directors: Tommy Corcoran, his law partner W.S. Youngman, whom Willauer had served as Special Assistant in China Defense Supplies, Corcoran’s brother Howard F. Corcoran, Duncan C. Lee who had flown out to China for OSS during the war,38 and Annetta M. Behan, the Notary Public who notarized the company’s annual reports filled out by herself.
Neither Corcoran nor the CIA seems to have done anything at this stage to help CAT solve its own financial and operating problems. In early 1950 Chennault had to advise his pilots that they would be put on half-pay and were free to look for jobs elsewhere. The outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950 saved CAT, which promptly began to fly the bulk of the U.S. military airlift inside Korea. On July 10, a second Delaware corporation was chartered: CAT Inc., later renamed Air America Inc. The older Civil Air Transport Inc., having served its limited purpose of “kidnapping,” was quietly dissolved in 1956.
Control of the new corporation remained with the officers of the Chinese airline Civil Air Transport, who held four out of seven directorships. The remaining three went to the officer-directors of the holding company Airdale Corp., also chartered on July 10, 1950, allegedly as a pass-through for CIA funds. Airdale Corp. (in 1957 renamed Pacific Corp. has ever since held 100% of CAT Inc./Air America’s stock. With fresh capital, specially-recruited pilots, and its Korean charter contracts, CAT was soon prospering, possessing assets of some $5.5 million, and income in the order of some $6 to $12 million a year.39
But CAT’s new American backing did nothing to change its status as the sole flag air carrier of Chiang’s Republic. On the contrary, from as early as October 1950, the Taiwan Foreign Ministry exchanged notes with various Asian countries to confirm the landing and loading rights of the burgeoning commercial airline CAT.
At some point in the 1950s, at the insistence of the Chiang Government, a 60% controlling interest in the commercial airline (CAT Co., Ltd., or CATCL, a Taiwan company) was granted or returned to the KMT interests who had originally invested in it. Thus, Wang Wen-san—previously Chairman of CAT’s Policy Board—replaced Chennault as Chairman of the CAT Board, a post he holds today. He was joined by Henry K. Yuan, a CAT employee, and by Y.C. Chen, apparently a former section chief in the KMT Ministry of Information and Director of the KMT’s Overseas Affairs Division.
A 40% interest was retained in the name of Airdale Corp., which in 1957 was renamed the Pacific Corporation. Legally speaking, CAT Inc./Air America Inc. (the Delaware corporation) and CATCL (the Taiwan company) are separate entities. In practice it is difficult to distinguish between Air America’s Taiwan subsidiary, Air Asia, and CATCL: the two operations shared directors, officers, facilities, pilots, and above all planes.
[The CIA and “Plausible Deniability”]
In the typical year 1963, for example, the World Aviation Directory attributed 4,600 employees and 300 pilots to CATCL at the same address. According to a former CATCL publicist, Air Asia “holds a service contract with CAT, which is the way the Americans operate the ‘Chinese-owned’ airline.”40 CAT’s commercial “Mandarin Jet,” which crashed in 1968, was leased from the CIA-front “Southern Air Transport” in Miami, which flew in the Caribbean at the time of the Bay of Pigs and also worked with Air America in Laos and Vietnam.
Southern Air Transport’s attorney, Alex E. Carlson, also represented the Double-Chek Corporation (same address) which hired American pilots to fly at the Bay of Pigs.41 And Whiting Willauer, who in 1960 was the State Department’s senior representative on the Bay of Pigs Operation, later testified that CAT pilots trained the Cuban pilots involved.42
Meanwhile, it would appear that in February-March 1952, the CIA ended the anomaly of its direct subsidy to the prospering commercial Taiwan airline, [Civil Air Transport]. This was an outfit whose officers were lobbying against State Department policy in the hopes of overthrowing Mao. The airline seemed to have sold its financial interest in Airdale Corp. and CAT Inc. to a closely allied group of New York businessmen, of whom two (later three) were Joe Alsop’s club-mates in the Brook Club: Samuel Sloan Walker and William A. Read Jr., joined in 1958 by Robert Guestier Goelet. Walker, Read, and Goelet are still the controlling directors of Pacific Corp. and of Air America.43
It is possible of course that the data in the companies’ annual reports is misleading, that the Walker-Brook Club group is merely a front, and that the Airdale Corp. continued to be what is technically known as a “proprietary” directly owned by the CIA.44
But the support given by the CIA to Air America, such as the recruitment and security clearance of pilots from the military for covert operations, seems overall to reflect a contractual rather than a proprietary relationship, like the links between CIA and Lockheed in the development of the U-2 Program.45
Air America, like CATCL, is clearly also engaged in private business for profit, and is said to make on the order of $10 million a year. According to the New York Times, the airline,
…flies prospectors looking for copper and geologists searching for oil in Indonesia, and provides pilots for commercial airlines such as Air Vietnam and Thai Airways and for China Airlines [Taiwan’s new Chinese-owned flag airline which since 1968 has taken over CAT’s passenger services].46
It is the practice of the CIA to disengage itself from embarrassingly distasteful covert war enterprises it has helped to establish, such as Interarmco, the huge small-arms purchasing firm headed by former CIA agent Samuel Cummings (which imported inter alia the Mannlicher-Carcano said to have been used in the assassination of J.F. Kennedy).47
In the case of CAT Inc., the divestment seems to have been handled by Walter Reid Wolf, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Administration between 1951 and 1953. Wolf was a trustee of the small Empire City Savings Bank in New York, of which Samuel Sloan Walker was Chairman and Arthur Berry Richardson, a third trustee. A fourth trustee, Samuel Meek, was a director of Time, in those days strongly pro-Chiang, and later served on the CIA-front “Cuban Freedom Committee.”
In early 1952, Walker and Richardson became directors of Airdale (now Pacific Corp.) and CAT Inc. (now Air America) along with a third director, William A. Read, who was Walker’s wife’s former brother-in-law. Wolf was also a Vice-President of the National City Bank, and Senior Vice-President of its investment affiliate City Bank Farmers’ Trust, along with Walker’s cousin, Samuel Sloan Duryee. In addition, Wolf and Duryee sat on the American boards of Zurich Insurance and related Swiss companies. About the time that Wolf became CIA Deputy Director, Desmond FitzGerald, a member of Duryee’s law firm, joined the CIA and became for years in charge of its covert Indochina operations, working in conjunction with Air America. FitzGerald is said to have spent much of his time in Asia, yet he apparently never condescended to become a lowly CIA desk officer or station chief. Instead, his cover was that of a private lawyer with a downtown Washington address…
[The manuscript continues. For more of this detailed essay click here.]
References
APACL–its Growth and Outlook. Taiwan: The League, 1960.
APACL, Free China and Asia. Taiwan: Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League., 1963.
Dibble, Arnold. “The Nine Lives of CAT II.” Saturday Evening Post, May 18, 1968.
Dommen, Arthur J. Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization. United Kingdom: Praeger, 1971.
Fall, Bernard B. Viet-Nam Witness, 1953-66. United Kingdom: Praeger, 1966.
Frillman, Paul., Peck, Graham. China; the Remembered Life. United States: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
Gielen, Alfred. Das Rotbuch über Spanien. Germany: Nibelungen, 1937.
Hilsman, Roger. To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy. United States: Dell Publishing Company, 1967.
Hoopes, Townsend. The Limits of Intervention: An Inside Account of how the Johnson Policy of Escalation in Vietnam was Reversed. United Kingdom: Norton, 1987.
House Committee on Un-American Activities, International Communism: Consultation with Major General Claire Lee Chennault, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess., Apr. 23, 1958.
Koen, Ross Y. The China Lobby in American Politics. United States: Macmillan, 1960.
Labin, Suzanne. The Unrelenting War: A Study of the Strategy and Techniques of Communist Propaganda and Infiltration. United States: American-Asian Educational Exchange, 1960.
Peck, Graham. Two Kinds of Time. United Kingdom: University of Washington Press, (n.d.).
Ross, Thomas B., Wise, David. The Invisible Government. United Kingdom: Random House, 1964.
Ross, Thomas B., Wise, David. The Espionage Establishment. United Kingdom: Cape, 1968.
Steinberg, Alfred. Sam Johnson’s Boy: A Close-up of the President from Texas. United Kingdom: Macmillan, 1968.
Thayer, George. The War Business: The International Trade in Armaments. United States: Simon and Schuster, 1969.U.S. Cong., Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Security Agreements and Comm Abroad: Kingdom of Laos, Hearings, Oct. 20, 1968, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 367.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Communist Threat to the United States through the Caribbean, Hearings, July 27, 1962.
U.S. Senate. Congressional Record, Mar. 28, 1950.
U.S. State Department. U.S. Policy in the Korean Crisis, 1950.
Warner, Denis A. The Last Confucian; Vietnam, South-East Asia and the West. New Ed., 1964.
Wertenbaker, Charles. “The China Lobby.” The Reporter, April 15, 1952.
The Wikipedia article on Operation CHAOS lists Ramparts as one of five “targets of Operation CHAOS within the antiwar movement.” However CHAOS was a Counterintelligence operation. My essay appears to have been handled in Langley by the CIA’s Office of Security (under DD/S Robert Bannerman), rather than the Counterintelligence Center (under James Angleton). This would suggest that it was impounded as a security matter, rather than as part of Operation Chaos, the counterintelligence project directed at antiwar activists.
Two marginal queries on the second page of my MS suggest that a senior CIA officer may not have been aware of the facts I was reporting, including the very relevant one that some Air America planes, despite being funded through a CIA proprietary, were not fully under CIA control.
Seymour M. Hersh, “C.I.A. Aides Assail Asia Drug Charge,” New York Times, July 2, 1972.
Alfred W. McCoy, with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P Adams, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 353, emphasis added.
Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), 213.
I am often asked why I consented. My chief reason is that I believed in acting transparently, and declined many offers of software to make my computer inaccessible. My second reason was my conviction that, if the CIA wanted my MS, they would be able to obtain it anyway.
William Stevenson, The Revolutionary King, 50-51; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, The American War Machine, 72. Cf. William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912-1954 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 184-85: ”[By 1947,] the United States increasingly defined for Thailand a place in Western strategic policy in the early cold war. Among those who kept close watch over events were William J. Donovan, wartime head of the OSS, and Willis H. Bird, who worked with the O.S.S in China…. After the war, Bird,… still a reserve colonel in military intelligence, ran an import-export house in Bangkok. Following the November [1947 Thailand coup] Bird…implored Donovan: “Should there be any agency that is trying to take the place of O.S.S.,… please have them get in touch with us as soon as possible. By the time Phibun returned as Prime Minister, Donovan was telling the Pentagon and the State Department that Bird was a reliable source whose information about growing Soviet activities in Thailand were credible.”
Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 83; citing Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951, Vol. 6, Pt. 2, 1634. The memo described Bird as “the character who handed over a lot of [US] military equipment to the Police, without any authorization as far as I can determine, and whose status with CAS [local CIA] is ambiguous, to say the least.”
In the 1990s, Dennis Dayle, a retired senior DEA official, said on camera in my presence that “In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.” (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 149); Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics (1998 edition), xviii-xix).
Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 111–14.
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 109. The Conference convened to cement this alliance was chaired by Antonio Valladares, the Nicaraguan lawyer for New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello.
Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League, 54-55; cited in Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 65. In 1967 the APACL became part of a larger World Anti-Communist League (WACL). According to Wikipedia, Both Hunt and Cline were stationed by OSS in China, where in 1946 they collaborated with OSS Kunming Chief Paul Helliwell (“Ray S. Cline,” Wikipedia). I have not been able to confirm this.
I learned much by studying the American delegations to the annual conferences of the APACL, which included the names of young people from America who later became noteworthy for other reasons. Let me cite in particular:
- Spas T. Raikin, the Secretary-General of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations., who is named in the Warren Report (p. 718) as the “representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society” who met Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina when they landed in Hoboken after their voyage from Russia in 1962;
- Tom Huston, later briefly famous as the nominal author of the “notorious Huston Plan” of 1970 “for expansive surveillance of domestic protest movements during the Nixon presidency” (“Spying on Americans: Infamous 1970s White House Plan for Protest Surveillance Released,” National Security Archive, June 25, 2020, );
- Douglas Caddy, later briefly famous as the first attorney for the seven men arrested for the 1972 Watergate burglaries.
Hsiao-ting Lin, The Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016]. 141). Earlier, in March 1949, “the White House adopted NSDC 34/2, in which it declared its desire to maintain contact with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. In so doing, it hoped to draw the Chinese communists away from the Soviet Union” (Victor S. Kaufman, “The United States, Britain and the CAT Controversy,” Journal of Contemporary History, 40:1, January 1, 2005, 96).
Lin, The Accidental State, 144: “They were told that the purpose of [the] visit to Taiwan was to conduct private business, including ‘selling fertilizer’.” I presented a version of the Cooke-Fassoulis story in The War Conspiracy (279), adding the detail, not reported by Lin, that “Fassoulis, accused of passing bribes as the vice president of Commerce International, was under indictment ten years later when he surfaced in the syndicate-linked Guterma scandals.” Such collaboration between overworld and underworld is not infrequent, leading me to write on occasion of “The Dark Quadrant” (Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 46).
Lin, The Accidental State, 145-46. The STP proposal was implemented by Cooke, but not initiated by him. In November 1949, a proposal for such a technician mission had been proposed in a letter to Acheson by William Pawley, who before the war had been President of Pan Am’s Chinese Affiliate CNAC, and who was in business after the war with WCC director John J. McCloy. Pawley asked for “approval or acquiescence” of private American citizens going to Taiwan, if their civil services wee contracted directly by the Nationalist government and if the United States took no part therein. Although Acheson gave Pawley the “acquiescence” he requested, nothing substantial followed (Lin, The Accidental State, 141-42). At the same time Pawley participated in the elaborate legal scheme devised by Donovan and OPC to transfer ownership of China’s civil air fleet (including CNAC planes) from Chinese government ownership to an ad hoc Delaware corporation owned by Claire Chennault and his partner Whiting Willauer (Alfred T. Cox, “Civil Air Transport (CAT): A Proprietary Airline 1946-1955,” CIA, Clandestine Services, Historical Paper, April 1967, I, 95ss.
Hsiao-ting Lin, “Taiwan’s Secret Ally,” Hoover Digest, 2012 No. 2, April 6, 2012, cf. Lin, The Accidental State, 148.
The Australian scholar Greg Poulgrain has written that the Rockefeller family controlled the Dutch firm Nederlandsche Nieuw Guinea Petroleum Maatschappij (NNGPM), which in the 1930s discovered in New Guinea what may be the world’s largest and most profitable copper and gold mine, and for decades took conspiratorial steps to conceal the scope of this discovery. After the bloody Indonesian coup and massacre of 1965, the new Indonesian dictator, Col. Suharto, signed an agreement for the mine’s development with Freeport Indonesia, where the Rockefellers also had an interest and sat on the board. See Greg Poulgrain, JFK vs. Dulles, 19-20, 23. I am very impressed by Poulgrain’s life-long research into the Asian part of the story, but I have issues with his claims about the American part.
The fortunes of the Sassoon family and of the Keswick family both derived from the major trafficking of opium through Shanghai (and Jardine Matheson) in the 19th century, when (at least in the eyes of British law) it was still legal.
Lin, The Accidental State, 8.
E.g. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 110-11: “The money for the opiates would eventually come from Nazi gold that had been laundered and manipulated by [Allen] Dulles and [Sir William] Stephenson through the World Commerce Corporation.” Cf. Scott, American War Machine, 72: “Helliwell acquired a banking partner in Florida, E.P. Barry, who had been the postwar head of OSS Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna, which oversaw the recovery of SS gold in Operation Safehaven. And it is not questioned that in December 1947 the NSC created a Special Procedures Group “that, among other things, laundered over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].” Note that this authorization was before NSC 10/2 of June 18, 1948, first funded covert operations under what soon became OPC.”
Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, 149.
Alsop, Washington Post, Apr. 26, 1970, A23. This column of Alsop’s appeared the day that the National Security Council was scheduled to discuss Cambodian proposals from the Special Action Group that had been convened on April 22, and four days before the intervention was finally approved. A column by Evans and Novak on the same day, written from Phnom Penh, also spoke of a “golden opportunity.”
[Alsop, Washington Post, June, 1954; reprinted in Congressional Record Appendix, June 14, 1954, A4366. Cf. Alsop’s report (Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1953, 8) of an interview with Chiang Kai-shek: “‘If the United States remains on the defensive in Asia for another two years, it will be needless to talk about Free China being in danger, for the U.S. and the whole free world will then be in deadly danger.’ It must be added that every fact of the situation in Asia appears to support and confirm this grim forecast by the Generalissimo.”]
[Alsop, Washington Post, Apr. 6, 1961, A9; Apr. 7, 1961, A8, A17.]
[Alsop, Washington Post, May 22, 1964, A19.]
[Ramparts, Vol. 8 no. 8, February 1970.]
Alsop, Washington Post, Sept. 10, 1959, A9; London Times, Sept. 11, 1959, 12. An official DOD spokesman said only that a signal corps unit had been assigned to Admiral Felt, CINCPAC, for use “in that area” as he saw fit. However, the Bangkok Post reported the next day that the unit “actually was en route to Laos.”
Warner, The Last Confucian, 210.
New York Times, Sept. 25, 1959, 4. Nine of the fliers were soon reported to be in Laos, including one active USAF officer (New York Times, Sept. 27, 1959, 16).
New York Times, Sept. 27, 1959, 16.
New York Times, Nov. 11, 1949, 14; Free China Review, Nov. 1953, 31. Air America pilots still repeat the rumor that “Madam Chiang owns the planes and we lease them from her” (San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 1970, 31).
Frillman and Peck, China: The Remembered Life, 288-89.
[Wertenbaker, “The China Lobby,” Reporter, 9.]
Peck, Two Kinds of Time.
House Committee on Un-American Activities, International Communism: Consultation with Major General Claire Lee Chennault, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess., Apr. 23, 1958, 9-10; U.S. State Dept., U.S. Policy in the Korean Crisis, 1950, 21-22.
Congressional Record, Senate, Mar. 28, 1950, 4226.
Aviation Week, Feb. 2, 1953, 54.
[Ironically, Duncan Lee, who was OSS Assistant General Counsel and before that in General Donovan’s Wall Street law firm, was denounced by Elizabeth Bentley as a Communist Party member and informer in the celebrated HUAC Hearings of 1948. Her testimony seems to have been intended to discredit in that election year not only the Democratic Administration, but also the OSS elements who were returning to it in the infant CIA (despite the bitter opposition of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) and the so-called “liberal” or “Rockefeller” faction of the Republican Party (opposed by the Chicago or “Taft” faction, who for a while were able to help Hoover block the formation of the CIA).]
Colliers, Aug. 11, 1951, 35.
[Dibble, “The Nine Lives of CAT-II,” Saturday Review, 50.]
Wise and Ross, The Invisible Government, 1965, 156.
U.S. Cong., Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Communist Threat to the United States through the Caribbean, Hearings, July 27, 1962, 875.
[It is now clear that what I wrote in this and later paragraphs was wrong; and that indeed, as I speculated in the next paragraph, Walker, Read, and Goelet were merely providing a respectable front for a CIA proprietary. In 1975, when the CIA finally privatized its proprietary aviation assets, Air America, Air Asia, and Southern Air Transport were all sold off—the first two to the CIA-linked firm E-Systems. The reported information does however illustrate correctly how deeply embedded the early CIA was in the northeastern hereditary culture and milieu of the Brook Club and Wall Street.]
[I believe this now to be the case. But in fronting for the CIA, Air America fronted even more significantly for the power which brought both agencies into being: the New York financial interests into whose milieu Air America’s controlling directors were born.]
[Air America pilots, like U-2 pilots, are mostly recruited from the USAF, and are said to have the same rights of return into the USAF at the end of their “civilian” tour.]
[New York Times, Apr. 5, 1970, 22.]
[Thayer, The War Business, 43-112.]
American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (War and Peace Library), by Peter Dale Scott
This provocative, thoroughly researched book explores the covert aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Prominent political analyst Peter Dale Scott marshals compelling evidence to expose the extensive growth of sanctioned but illicit violence in politics and state affairs, especially when related to America’s long-standing involvement with the global drug traffic. Beginning with Thailand in the 1950s, Americans have become inured to the CIA’s alliances with drug traffickers (and their bankers) to install and sustain right-wing governments. The pattern has repeated itself in Laos, Vietnam, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, Nigeria, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Panama, Honduras, Turkey, Pakistan, and now Afghanistan—to name only those countries dealt with in this book. Scott shows that the relationship of U.S. intelligence operators and agencies to the global drug traffic, and to other international criminal networks, deserves greater attention in the debate over the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. To date, America’s government and policies have done more to foster than to curtail the drug trade. The so-called war on terror, and in particular the war in Afghanistan, constitutes only the latest chapter in this disturbing story.
Editorial Reviews
In Scott’s view, the American military-industrial complex so feared by Eisenhower has grown into a military-industrial-corporate behemoth. This ‘overclass,’ often functioning independently from the official elected government, has spearheaded countless actions that it perceives to be in the best interest of perpetuating American hegemony. With exhaustive research and extremely persuasive arguments, Scott seeks to prove that the funding and motivation behind America’s assertion of global supremacy can be traced to drugs. Drug money fueled American actions in Laos and Vietnam during the Cold War, American support of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the ’80s, and defines American political action in Latin America and present-day Afghanistan. By looking at covert activity and recorded history through the lens of American global dominance, Scott makes a terrifyingly compelling case; he asks readers to consider what actions taken in the last fifty years have not benefited America’s military-industrial complex, such an integral part of the global economy. . . . [His] carefully structured arguments never fail to interest or disturb. ― Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Scott has written a provocative account of CIA machinations and their link to spikes in global drug production, war, and terrorism. His chapters on Thailand and the Far East are especially well-grounded and of great use to historians. . . . [Scott] is a creative thinker who deserves credit for delving into the netherworld of clandestine operations and global corruption which most academics choose to ignore. . . . At his core, Scott is an idealist who believes that in exposing the sinister forces accounting for the spread of unnecessary violence, an aroused citizenry can mobilize to rein them in. The stakes today are especially high, because if left unchecked, the pattern of warfare and destabilization which Scott describes may lead to a global confrontation of truly catastrophic proportions as well as irreversible environmental damage and the economic bankruptcy of the United States. ― History News Network
There are certain books that, once read, alter one’s mind permanently. This is such a book. Naïve readers and patriots beware: You will never think about the world in the same way after you have read just the first two chapters of American War Machine.
I said of Scott’s last brilliant take on this subject, Drugs, Oil and War, that ‘It makes most academic and journalistic explanations of our past and current interventions read like government propaganda written for children.’ Now Scott has written an even better book. Read it! — Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
What I like most about Peter Dale Scott are his fierce intellectual curiosity, his willingness to investigate radioactive topics, and his tireless commitment to unearthing the truth. Over the years, he has done more than almost anyone to discover and chronicle the forces that covertly shape our policies. American War Machine may be his greatest work yet. — Russ Baker, award-winning investigative journalist and author of Family of Secrets
Peter Dale Scott is our most fearless and illuminating chronicler of the lethal and mysterious web of unaccountable violence linking government to organized crime, the drug trade, state terror, and eventuating in disastrous wars. Read this extraordinary book to understand why this country finds itself gridlocked in Afghanistan, yet another costly quagmire, because a small cabal at the top is still dedicated to the mirage of American global dominance. — Richard A. Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University
Peter Dale Scott writes with his inimitable eloquence about the intersection between U.S. covert operations and international narcotics trafficking and its destructive undermining of American democracy. The past half-century of drug politics―and the country’s complicit acceptance of the violence it has spawned―is an ominous portent for our present and future. American War Machine should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the upper- and underworld marriage that drives contemporary foreign policy. — Sally Denton, author of The Bluegrass Conspiracy
The post Peter Dale Scott on Early OSS/CIA Relationship with the International Drug Networks appeared first on LewRockwell.
Il piano diabolico dell'UE andrà avanti a tutti i costi
(Versione audio dell'articolo disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-piano-diabolico-dellue-andra-avanti)
Oggi vorrei aggiungere una parola al vocabolario e far fare un passo avanti a tutti coloro che cercano di comprendere le politiche pubbliche. Il cinismo mette in discussione le motivazioni degli altri; la mia nuova parola, “cinicetticismo”, l'unione di cinismo e scetticismo, è un modo per evitare di essere danneggiati da esse. Nella vita pubblica le persone affermano di migliorare il mondo. “Fai questo”, dicono alcuni; “fai quello”, dicono altri. Il cinicetticismo ci dice cosa sta realmente accadendo: qualunque cosa propongano non funzionerà e le persone che lo suggeriscono sono delle frodi. Un buon esempio è l'inflazione: quante promesse sono state fatte in merito al fatto di voler migliorare il benessere pubblico? Eppure apprendiamo che, in Italia, i salari reali sono in discesa e la povertà è aumentata.
La BCE ha promesso di rilanciare l'economia abbassando i tassi, ma li ha tenuti troppo bassi per troppo tempo. La crescita del PIL ha rallentato e ora non può rialzarli per “combattere” l'inflazione; c'è troppo debito. Tassi più alti farebbero crollare l'economia europea. L'UE, infatti, è il più fulgido esempio adesso delle conseguenze della linea di politica “Inflate or die”. L'unica scelta per la BCE è quella di stampare in modo da abbassare il valore reale del debito.
Cosa fare al riguardo? Il cinicetticismo può proteggervi, infatti se lo si sviluppa diviene particolarmente prezioso per valutare le politiche pubbliche e i loro effetti sulla vostra ricchezza. Come diceva Ronald Reagan, la frase più pericolosa che potevate sentire era: “Sono un agente dello stato e sono qui per aiutare”. Il cinicetticismo vi dice che qualsiasi cosa l'apparato pubblico stia promuovendo sarà una truffa e un fallimento. La maggior parte delle questioni non ha molta importanza, ma due di esse contano molto: la guerra e il denaro. “Ci dobbiamo riarmare per difenderci ed essere sicuri”, dicono in coro i burocrati dell'UE; “i tassi più bassi ci renderanno più ricchi”.
Il cinicetticismo suggerirebbe di non crederci.
LE BASI APODITTICHE DELL'INFLAZIONE
Ricordiamo cos'è l'inflazione: un fenomeno sempre e comunque monetario, tanto per citare Friedman e non essere accusato di partigianeria. La cinghia di trasmissione tra tutte le informazioni economiche nell'ambiente di mercato è fortemente influenzata da quella merce che fa da minimo comun denominatore tra le varie altre, anche se i beni di consumo, in un frangente di tempo “X”, non dovessero avere grosse fluttuazioni in termini monetari. Per l'articolo di oggi è superfluo sottolineare/spiegare l'imprescindibilità del denaro come cinghia di trasmissione delle informazioni all'interno dell'ambiente economico. Di conseguenza l'interventismo artificiale nella domanda/offerta di denaro causa scossoni che devono essere assorbiti dall'intera struttura economica e, in particolar modo, dagli attori di mercato (soprattutto coloro che ricevono per ultimi gli assestamenti dato che sono i più penalizzati). Questo fenomeno ingloba tutti gli asset: dai beni di consumo a quelli di capitale. Sì, ciò include anche materie prime, case e automobili. Il singolo atto di poter distorcere l'offerta di denaro rappresenta un vantaggio competitivo non indifferente che ha conseguenze impreviste lungo un lasso di tempo imprecisato. Di norma il riverbero dell'interventismo monetario ha un ritardo di 18 mesi prima che si manifesti completamente nell'economia più ampia, ma il suo perdurare si espande molto più a lungo dato che suddetto interventismo può accumulare tante variazioni nel breve periodo, ma nel lungo gli effetti sono proporzionalmente imprevedibili in base alla quantità di tali variazioni. Di conseguenza la reazione del sistema bancario centrale a un determinato fenomeno è SEMPRE in ritardo, dato che esse non controllano alcunché se non l'influenza del breve periodo ed ecco perché nel lungo i prezzi tendono a essere “appiccicosi”. Paradossalmente questa motivazione è stata sventolata dai keynesiani per richiedere maggiore interventismo. E ancora più paradossale dover citare lo stesso Keynes che ci spiegava il motivo di ciò: “Solo una persona su un milione capisce il fenomeno inflazione”.
La manipolazione dell'offerta di denaro è il motivo principale dell'inflazione dei prezzi conseguente, ma ce ne sono anche altri. Ad esempio, l'iper regolamentazione. La creazione di un'impalcatura burocratica che capillarmente vuole normare/regolare l'ambiente economico (perché la sua espansione inevitabile lavora con la Legge di Parkinson) crea una distorsione/deformazione del sistema prezzi a causa dell'arbitrarietà con cui vengono sfornate nuove leggi. L'obsolescenza per decreto di determinati output ricade nel famoso caso della “finestra rotta” di Bastiat, dove la distruzione di capitale viene trattata come trasformazione necessaria affinché la burocrazia possa avere voce in capitolo in questioni più grandi di essa. Come sappiamo già da “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, la conoscenza dispersa all'interno dell'ambiente di mercato richiede un certo grado di alertness che è caratteristico di quegli imprenditori di successo in grado di anticipare quanto più correttamente possibile la domanda dei clienti. Ciò richiede la capacità di saper raccogliere quegli input che davvero “hanno valore”, ma la scarsità di quella capacità di “unire i puntini” (o per meglio dire gli input) è ciò che rende unici solo una manciata di grandi imprenditori. Ciò a sua volta significa un'allocazione delle risorse economiche scarse quanto più in accordo con le esigenze degli attori di mercato, un processo in grado di essere concluso con efficienza tramite, ad esempio, il sistema profitti/perdite. O più in generale dal calcolo economico. La burocrazia è sganciata da questo calcolo, di conseguenza, nel momento in cui emette i suoi editti, si arroga prepotentemente il diritto di “avere ragione” a prescindere. Ciò significa a sua volta misallocation di risorse scarse che vengono deviate artificialmente dagli usi più urgenti percepiti dagli attori di mercato e di conseguenza subiscono un rialzo dei prezzi.
Poi abbiamo un terzo motivo: l'abbassamento della qualità/quantità, o altrimenti detto “shrinkinflation”. Questo segue logicamente i primi due ed è uno stratagemma messo in campo nel momento in cui un'attività cerca disperatamente di sopravvivere. In fin dei conti, le attività economiche sono attività “organiche” essendo un'estensione della creatività e dell'esperienza della persona trasformate in qualcosa di tangibile nel mondo fenomenico tramite l'azione umana. E l'istinto di sopravvivenza è innato in tutti gli esseri organici.
Queste motivazioni sono assolutamente vere perché dedotte logicamente dall'assioma dell'azione umana. Queste sono le cause del fenomeno, da non confondere con gli effetti: disonestà, comfort, logistica, miglioramenti/peggioramenti tecnologici, ecc. Non solo, ma sono il motivo cruciale per cui non c'è stata alcuna ripresa finora.
L'obiettivo più importante dei keynesiani è stato farvi pensare che le conseguenze dell'inflazione fossero le cause. Solo l'aumento dell'offerta di denaro, alimentato dalla crescente spesa pubblica, crea inflazione. Gli stati continueranno a spendere e ad aumentare deficit e debito, le banche centrali continueranno a stampare e daranno la colpa a tutt'altro. Il sordido furto dei risparmi tramite l'inflazione e la progressiva erosione degli stessi man mano che questo processo s'è incancrenito a causa del denaro fiat, è già adesso la rappresentazione di quella realtà fabbricata e riassunta dal motto “non avrai nulla”... e ovviamente “sarai infelice”, dato che ultimamente i sicofanti di regime che imbrattano le pagine dei giornali si chiedono sempre più come mai i giovani sono depressi. La risposta che accomuna tutte le cause: il denaro fiat, il quale crea una società fiat svuotata progressivamente da tutto. L'essenza fiat trascina e consuma tutto quello che s'è creato, è un buco nero per i valori sociali, la scuola, l'educazione, l'alimentazione, il benessere psicologico, l'intrattenimento, ecc.
Se davvero i sicofanti di regime volessero aiutare i giovani e alleviare le cause psicologiche dei loro disagi, dovrebbero iniziare opponendosi all'euro digitale e aumentare la consapevolezza riguardo le alternative decentralizzate.
GIOCHI A SOMMA (SOTTO)ZERO
La linea di politica della BCE, sin dalla sua nascita, è stata quella di “stimolare” l'economia con tassi d'interesse sempre più bassi. Ma dopo la più forte medicina “stimolante” mai somministrata, dal 2012 al 2022, il paziente si è ammalato di più: i tassi di crescita sono scesi e il debito è aumentato. Ma la BCE ha imparato dai suoi errori? No. Sta abbassando di nuovo i suoi tassi, e mentre alimenta prestiti a basso costo alle sue banche affiliate, l'economia reale è bloccata con tassi d'interesse reali più alti. I creditori temono una maggiore inflazione; vogliono tassi d'interesse più alti per proteggersi.
Di recente c'è stato un importante selloff sui mercati obbligazionari europei, per niente menzionato dalla stampa finanziaria generalista. Altrimenti, poi, come riuscirebbero a vendere ai gonzi le nuove obbligazioni SURE con cui finanziare il piano da €800 miliardi della Commissione europea?
Il nostro nuovo credo, il cinicetticismo, ci aiuta a spiegarlo. La politica e gli investimenti sono entrambi giochi a somma zero oggi. Si vince non perdendo, ovvero non diventando una vittima. Come? In politica il modo per evitare di essere delle vittime è votare per politici che ridurranno il peso della spesa pubblica. E negli investimenti, la cosa più importante è evitare la “Grande Perdita” e restare in gioco. Ad esempio, le persone che acquistano titoli di stato a lunga scadenza, contando sul fatto che la BCE le ripaghi in tempo utile con denaro che conserva il suo potere d'acquisto, sono le principali vittime.
Non ci credete? Comprate titoli di stato italiani a 10 anni e teneteli fino alla scadenza. Chi l'ha fatto nel 2020, ad esempio, sulla scia delle campagne pubblicitarie “patriottiche”, è più che sommerso.
Inoltre gli annunci delle ultime settimane, con l'euro digitale e la Savings and Investments Union, hanno praticamente reso chiaro anche alle teste di legno quale sia il piano dell'UE: c'è bisogno della guerra in Europa in modo da dare la colpa ai russi per lo stato pietoso in cui versano i mercati dei capitali, questo servirà da innesco per mandare in bancarotta (di proposito) il continente ed emettere nuovi titoli (es. perpetual bond) con cui ripartire daccapo poi. Affinché questo piano possa andare a buon fine, la classe dirigente europea ha bisogno di accedere a garanzie collaterali, in particolar modo energia (che non hanno), ed ecco perché ultimamente sono salite alla ribalta voci che vorrebbero il Canada unirsi con la UE. Con l'arrivo di Carney il Canada potrebbe trasformarsi in un avamposto della cricca di Davos, infatti già si stanno stilando piani affinché esso tenga quanto più liquido possibile il mercato degli eurodollari. Ma Trump e i NY Boys non sono degli idioti, quindi la retorica a proposito di una annessione statunitense di Canada e Groenlandia è indirizzata principalmente a rompere questa alleanza in formazione.
Per arrivare a queste deduzioni mi basta guardare ai mercati dei capitali e chiedermi non perché si muovano, bensì come si muovano. La forma principale di risparmio in Europa sono i bund tedeschi e i Btp italiani. Negli ultimi 3 anni la Yellen e la Lagarde hanno messo in piedi un processo di yield curve control per contrastare il rialzo dei tassi di Powell, in modo da disinnescare l'esplosione del mercato dei titoli sovrani europei (i rendimenti di questi ultimi rispetto alla controparte statunitense). Questa operazione ha tenuto aperti i rubinetti della liquidità internazionale affinché affluisse in Europa e tenesse in piedi l'illusione che i titoli sovrani europei avessero mercato nonostante le difficoltà delle relative economie (permettendo altresì ai fondi pensione europei di rimanere finanziati). Ora che quei rubinetti sono chiusi, grazie al taglio degli sprechi da parte del DOGE, l'unica cosa che rimane alla classe dirigente europea è la nazionalizzazione “coatta” dei risparmi dei contribuenti in modo da sostenere il mercato obbligazionario, mentre la BCE si occupa dell'euro. Questo a sua volta rende ragionevolmente attraenti i titoli sovrani europei tra gli investitori e permette ai relativi stati di non soffrire per costi di finanziamento esosi; inoltre l'apparenza è che non c'è crisi e che i rendimenti sono positivi al netto dell'inflazione.
I dazi di Trump hanno rotto l'incantesimo. La capacità beggar thy neighbour (rendimenti obbligazionari più bassi rispetto al livello dove dovrebbero trovarsi realmente e valuta più debole di quanto dovrebbe essere) viene smantellata. L'euro, e tutte le macchinazioni che finora l'hanno tenuto a galla, sono sopravvissute grazie all'ingegneria finanziaria, in particolare negli ultimi 15 anni, la quale è stata esclusivamente funzionale a mantenere vivi gli eurodollari e il conseguente spolpamento indiretto del bacino della ricchezza reale degli Stati Uniti. Oltre a questa verità ne sta uscendo fuori un'altra: la Francia è il burattinaio politico nell'UE.
Quando la classe dirigente europea piagnucola, significa che si sta andando nella giusta direzione. Quando questi cretini approvavano le armi di ricatto nei confronti degli USA (es. GDPR, DSA, DMA), la stampa se ne stava buona al suo posto parlando di “digitalizzazione” dell'economia. Anche quei giornalisti “liberali” che adesso fanno gli indignati di fronte ai “dazi americani”, e allo stesso tempo dicono di approvare l'amministrazione Trump, si sono ben guardati dal criticare/approfondire questi aspetti. Balle, quindi: erano dazi nei confronti degli USA e un modo di estorcere ricchezza da chi crea valore aggiunto. Le multe dell'UE, quindi, nei confronti dei “colossi” tecnologici americani, altro non sono che un pizzo mafioso richiesto da una banda di cretini che sta giocando col fuoco.
La stessa “agenda green” è un gigantesco ricatto normativo nei confronti degli USA. Ma questo aspetto sfugge ad analisti e giornalisti “furbi”, i quali non vedono un millimetro oltre il loro naso... o non vogliono vederlo. Il Paese a cui farebbe davvero male l'elettrificazione dei veicoli sarebbero gli USA. Pensateci: se guidate per 1000 km in Europa siete già in un'altra nazione; se lo fate negli USA siete ancora nello stesso stato, forse anche contea. La popolazione europea, i contribuenti europei, sono sempre stati la carne da cannone in questa scalata ostile di Bruxelles e Londra nei confronti degli USA; sono stati la base, il collaterale, attraverso cui piramidare e sottoporre a leva le imbecillità normative partorite sinora.
Se davvero Londra e Bruxelles avessero voluto mettersi al pari degli USA dal punto di vista economico e commerciale, allora avrebbero dovuto deregolamentare, abbattere le tasse, tagliare la spesa pubblica. Insomma l'influenza stessa della classe dirigente europea sarebbe dovuta indietreggiare. Per questa gente, che è colonialista nell'anima, non esiste niente del genere. Quindi la scelta è stata quella di infiltrarsi nelle stanze dei bottoni statunitensi e demolirli dall'interno.
I dazi sono un modo diretto da parte degli USA di dire “No” a questa distopia e alla rapina del valore aggiunto da loro creato. Ciò che rimane alla classe dirigente è piagnucolare e un manipolo di sicofanti sulla carta stampata e sui social che danno sfogo al loro isterismo.
FEBBRE GIALLA
L'oro sta facendo ciò che dovrebbe fare: anticipa l'inflazione e offre protezione a risparmiatori/investitori. Tuttavia, cari lettori, attenzione: anche i “tori” e gli amanti dell'oro possono diventare “irrazionalmente esuberanti”. Arriverà il momento in cui le persone saranno euforiche per l'oro: i tassisti vi racconteranno delle azioni minerarie che hanno appena acquistato; le persone si vanteranno di “quando sono entrati”; vi diranno che l'oro “sta andando sulla luna”. Il prezzo salirà così tanto che sarete in grado di acquistare l'intera lista di azioni Dow Jones per sole 5 once d'oro. Sarà allora che uno dovrebbe essere felice di scaricare il proprio oro e acquistare azioni.
Ma questo (probabilmente) avverrà tra qualche anno. Nel frattempo sia le azioni che l'oro hanno stabilito nuovi record, ciononostante il quadro fondamentale non è cambiato: il rapporto Dow/oro era a 20 tre anni fa; oggi è a 16; le azioni hanno perso il 20% del loro valore reale. Devono perdere un altro 70% (in termini di oro) prima di diventare veri affari. E su questo potete contare sulle banche centrali. La BCE non aveva motivo di tagliare i tassi il mese scorso... se non che sta cercando di causare inflazione, non di eliminarla. Negli ultimi tre anni l'inflazione dei prezzi è stata più di tre volte superiore a quanto la BCE (presumibilmente) volesse. Vale a dire, con un aumento annuo del 2%, i prezzi dovrebbero essere circa il 6% più alti di quanto non fossero nel 2021; invece sono, ufficialmente, più alti del 20%.
Ufficiosamente, i prezzi sono ancora più alti. Il Tempo, ad esempio, ci dice che il costo di alcune materie prime è letteralmente schizzato alle stelle. O basta guardare ai veicoli. La Fiat Panda, l'autovettura più popolare in Italia, costava in media circa €12.000 nel 2021. Con un'inflazione del 2%, il prezzo del modello di quest'anno dovrebbe essere di circa €13.000. Invece no: si parte da circa €16.000, un aumento del 35% e una erosone reale del potere d'acquisto degli stipendi (nonché del tempo).
E per quanto riguarda l'edilizia abitativa? I tassi ipotecari più bassi hanno convinto gli acquirenti di case a sottoscrivere mutui basati su prezzi gonfiati e basse rate mensili. Poi, nel 2008, i prezzi delle case sono crollati, gli istituti di credito sono andati in bancarotta e milioni di famiglie hanno perso le loro case. Le banche centrali abbassarono ulteriormente i tassi e li ancorarono sotto lo zero, in termini reali, per un lasso di tempo di 10 anni. Ciò, ovviamente, ha portato a una maggiore inflazione immobiliare e poi, all'assurda situazione in cui le persone avevano difficoltà sia ad acquistare che a vendere una casa. La parentesi del SuperBonus non ha fatto altro che aggiungere più distorsioni economiche a quelle esistenti. Nonostante tutti gli “stimoli” escogitati non c'è stata alcuna ripresa... anzi il bacino dei risparmi reali ha continuato a contrarsi. È questa la situazione che si viene a creare quando entrano in scena gli affari “lose-lose” (o vicendevolmente svantaggiosi): la Legge dei rendimenti decrescenti entra nella sua fase negativa, ovvero per ogni unità di debito creata ne viene (progressivamente) erosa una di PIL. Ecco perché, come scrivevo sopra, l'UE ha disperatamente bisogno di un default da cui ripartire in seguito. E senza ripresa la classe dirigente europea non ha alcun potere di leva sui suoi pari esteri.
Ma scrutiamo un po' più da vicino il settore immobiliare. Una casa media costava circa €1600 al m² nel 1998. Con un'inflazione al 2% quella cifra oggi dovrebbe essere di circa €2500 al m². Invece se prendiamo una città campione a caso, ad esempio Roma, siamo ben al di sopra; per non parlare di Milano. E ora la BCE ha iniziato un nuovo ciclo di allentamento e questo ha fatto gridare al miracolo gli analisti immobiliari, i quali affermano che ciò renderà più facile per le persone acquistare una nuova casa. Il risultato reale? Prevedendo una maggiore inflazione i creditori hanno aumentato i tassi dei mutui a lungo termine rendendo le case meno accessibili che mai!
In altre parole l'inflazione reale dei prezzi al consumo è ben oltre il 2% e per riportarla all'obiettivo di riferimento la BCE dovrebbe portare il tasso effettivo dell'inflazione dei prezzi al di sotto del 2% per diversi anni. In che modo farlo visto che una variazione mensile negativa della stessa inflazione dei prezzi scatenerebbe grida isteriche di “deflazione”?
CONCLUSIONE
Il nostro nuovo credo (il cinicetticismo) ci avverte che le cose non sono sempre come vorremmo che fossero e non sono nemmeno sotto il nostro completo controllo. Quando i risparmi e i fondi pensione sono per la maggiore allocati in titoli sovrani, e le pensioni sono il più grande schema Ponzi e la più grande spada di Damocle pendente sul collo dei conti pubblici, un haircut è l'unica cosa che ti risolve questi problemi... oltre ad avere una platea di investitori e risparmiatori che non hanno alternative. Questo significa che verrà ingegnerizzata una nuova crisi del debito sovrano attraverso la spesa folle in difesa e altre follie fiscali, molto probabilmente sulla scia di un'operazione false flag per incolpare la Russia e distrarre chi deve essere fregato; il tutto per resettare il mercato dei titoli sovrani europei. Nella cricca di Davos non ci sono stupidi e si sono preparati per entrambi gli scenari, ovvero quello ostile alla loro visione e quello favorevole. Quest'ultimo avrebbe significato che gli USA sarebbero scesi in guerra contro la Russia e il crollo dei mercati dei capitali sarebbe stato affibbiato al conflitto mondiale; nel primo caso, invece, avrebbe significato grandi stimoli fiscali “per la difesa”, per il “cambiamento climatico”, la messa in discussione della NATO e tutte le provocazioni di questo mondo affinché la Russia li attaccasse.
Secondo quest'ottica un tale reset porterebbe anche la tanto agognata ripresa affinché le persone tornino a badare ai propri affari, contente di quel poco che si ritrovano e lasciano “lavorare” la classe dirigente. Quest'ultima farà di tutto pur di rimanere in carica e non finire nella pattumiera della storia. Perché è questo che significa una sconfitta dell'Europa in Ucraina, per quanto quest'ultima sia già fallita e fatta a pezzi. La Russia, infatti, ha già combattuto contro la NATO e ha vinto. Ecco perché se la può prendere comoda e rimanere ferma nelle sue richieste; ecco perché “benedice” gli Stati Uniti nel momento in cui vogliono sbarcare in Groenlandia. Non dovrebbe essere una mianccia diretta? No. La visione di USA e Russia è quella di un ritorno agli “equilibri” della Guerra fredda ma senza le tensioni geopolitiche e commerciali, rendendo l'artico un punto di snodo per le nuove rotte mercantili. Di conseguenza gli europei possono essere sottoposti a dazi fino alla morte senza grandi contraccolpi oltreoceano, riducendo quel surplus commerciale che gli europei hanno ottenuto in modo fraudolento.
Chi è un lettore stagionato del mio blog sa che una delle critiche più feroci alle linee di politica fiscali e monetarie degli Stati Uniti è arrivata dal sottoscritto. Questo è stato vero fino al 2022, quando il cambio di passo è stato evidente e concreto. Tale inversione di tendenza mi ha spinto a rivedere il libro che poi avrei pubblicato due anni dopo, spiegando cosa stava succedendo. Così è nato “Il Grande Default”. Con il SOFR, infatti, gli USA possono bere il “frullato” del dollaro senza dare peso alle conseguenze come invece accadeva prima. Esiste ancora una narrativa che sottolinea le difficoltà economiche e finanziarie degli USA, ma gli manca la prospettiva più ampia. Chi ha letto il mio libro sa da dove si alzano queste voci e cosa vogliono raggiungere; coloro ignari, invece, fantasticano di un declino del dollaro a favore di un'ascesa dei BRICS e dello yuan.
Favole. Qual è la domanda che non si pongono? La seguente: E tutti gli altri? È vero, lo zio Sam ha un problema di debito pubblico, la Federal Reserve ha un problema di bilancio a causa di titoli comprati in precedenza ora sommersi e il resto del mondo non sta comprando titoli sovrani americani come faceva in passato. Ma... e tutti gli altri? Anch'essi hanno tutti questi problemi e anche di più. Il governo federale ha un debito pubblico di $36.000 miliardi, ma il resto del mondo, tutte le altre nazioni non solo hanno il loro debito pubblico (gigantesco) ma ANCHE debiti denominati in dollari da saldare. E questo è il mercato degli eurodollari; se non capite come funziona questo sistema, allora state guardando il singolo albero piuttosto che l'intera foresta. Il resto del mondo è in debito non solo nella propria divisa, ma anche in dollari, e non esclusivamente nei confronti degli Stati Uniti bensì tra di essi. Non potendo stampare dollari questo li rende molto più suscettibili al default rispetto al Paese che li può stampare.
Inoltre quando emergono difficoltà economiche ci si aggrappa a quella cosa di cui si ha più bisogno, non a quella cosa che si desidera. La reputazione degli USA è leggendaria da questo punto di vista: il luogo dove il capitale è trattato meglio. Non solo, ma le altre banche centrali del mondo, nonché quelle commerciali, hanno riserve in dollari e titoli denominati in dollari. Nel caso in cui ci dovesse essere un evento catastrofico a livello di Dipartimento del Tesoro USA o altro, i bilanci dei player esteri verrebbero fatti letteralmente a pezzi. La FED non possiede alcun titolo denominato in una divisa estera (così come sta facendo Tether), le altre banche centrali invece sì. Anche qualora si tirasse in ballo l'oro come copertura attiva gli USA sarebbero comunque avvantaggiati dall'alto delle loro 8000 tonnellate e dall'afflusso di oro da Londra.
Quindi, prima di lanciarsi in scenari futuri fantasiosi in cui i BRICS diventano magicamente il punto di riferimento del mondo oppure il dollaro e l'economia statunitense vanno in acuta sofferenza, meglio capire come funziona davvero il mondo. Fortunatamente ci sono testi che facilitano il compito.
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Prophets, Nomads and a Fourth Turning Accelerating Towards a Bloody Climax
“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe
“Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning the way you might today distance yourself from news, national politics, or even taxes you don’t feel like paying. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted. The Fourth Turning necessitates the death and rebirth of the social order. It is the ultimate rite of passage for an entire people, requiring a luminal state of sheer chaos whose nature and duration no one can predict in advance.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
In my last Fourth Turning article, a few days before the presidential election, I stated Trump would win in a landslide, unless the Deep State pulled some outrageous stunt to steal it, like they did in 2020. Their cheating machines were unable to overcome the dementia dummy effect and running a vacuous cackling moron DEI candidate as Trump’s opponent. I also thought the ingrained opposition would use all their vast ill-gotten financial resources to pay for violent protests, if Trump won. The gutting of USAID has defunded the domestic terrorists and made their protests pathetic.
Trump’s overwhelming victory in the election and defeat of the illegal lawfare attacks from his Deep State enemies defused their ability to keep him from being inaugurated. And boy did he hit the ground running. His first 7 weeks in office have been a tornado of executive orders, shockingly bold cabinet picks, mass firings of government drones, deportations of illegals, tariff wars, threats to take over Greenland and Canada, confrontations with world leaders, war on DEI and woke bullshit policies within the government and at universities funded by the government, and unleashing Musk and his DOGE team on the Federal bureaucracy.
The dynamics of this Fourth Turning have begun to crystalize in my mind with the re-ascension of Trump to the most powerful position in the world, and now willing to wield his power on a far grander scale then he did during his first term. The previous two Fourth Turning presidents, during the Great Depression/World War II Fourth Turning and the Civil War Fourth Turning, acted like dictators, wielding their authoritarian powers, using war as the excuse for overstepping their Constitutionally granted authority.
Ruling by executive order has now become commonplace, as our Republic has degenerated into a corporate fascist totalitarian state where the spoils have been shared by the privileged few, while the rest of us have been propagandized into subjugation, depravity, debt, and debasement. Trump has assumed a dictatorial attitude, with the rationale that he must do so to defeat the evil forces of the Deep State, and more than 50% of the population is enthusiastically onboard.
There is generally no middle ground when it comes to Donald Trump. You either despise him and scream he is literally Hitler, or you worship him as the savior of America, leading us to a glorious renaissance. Personally, I find myself in the middle ground, based on what he has done, rather than what he says. I was disappointed in his first term, even though he did a number of good things. His personnel choices were awful, putting Barrett on the Supreme Court was a terrible selection, and locking down the country while making a deal with the devil (Fauci & Pfizer) to produce a toxic vaccine destined to kill far more than it saved, continues to be a massive blemish on his record. But what is done is done. Even the most skeptical cynic has to admit, there have been several positive developments in Trump’s second term.
The issue which had biggest impact in getting Trump elected was the border and the democrat plot to destroy America by funding the invasion of America by 3rd world dregs. The dementia dummy president was given ice cream and told to stand aside by his Obama handlers, while millions of lowlifes poured across our southern border. Trump’s selection of Tom Homan as border czar was brilliant, and the actions taken to secure the border thus far have produced dramatic results. We need millions more deportations, but we are off to a good start.
Trump learned his lesson from the first term, when he surrounded himself with Deep State backstabbers, while failing to purge the departments of his enemies. He has appointed highly competent outsiders into most of the key cabinet positions. The DC bureaucracy is being gutted as we speak, if not by his appointees, then by Musk and his DOGE army. Purging the swamp of his bureaucratic enemies is essential to achieving progress. And purging the judiciary of far-left apparatchiks on the payroll of Soros must be next.
There truly is $2 trillion in spending that can be cut. Going back to 2019 spending levels, before the “Covid emergency spending” should be the goal. The amount of corruption, bribery, and fraud within the Federal government is astronomical, and Musk and his DOGE unit should be applauded for lifting the rocks and shining a light on these maggots. DOGE claims to have saved $130 billion thus far. That sounds like a lot, and it is. But some perspective will reveal the true nature of our predicament.
The Federal government spends $130 billion per week on average. We add over $5 billion to the national debt every single day. This tsunami of deficit spending is a perpetual uniparty supported machine. The continuing resolution jammed through by Trump and his minions increases spending. DOGE is great PR for the Trump army, and it is the perfect bogeyman for his enemies. But, it is unlikely to materially alter the course we are on. The national debt was $36.2 trillion when Trump assumed control. There is no doubt it will exceed $44 trillion before he leaves office.
There are 135 million full-time workers in the U.S., and approximately 18 million of them work for the government. Many millions more in private industry are dependent upon government contracts to sustain them. I am 100% onboard gutting government bureaucracy. But there will be consequences. Data from Washington DC is already showing a plunge in home prices and surge in unemployment. The combination of layoffs, reduced government outlays, and tariff impacts will likely push us into recession during 2025.
Taking the pain in year one of his administration may be Trump’s game plan, with an anticipated strong recovery in the 2nd half of his presidency. The question is whether the recession will deflate the everything bubble – stocks, bonds, real estate, and crypto, or just be a bump in the road to long term prosperity. With valuations in all asset classes at nosebleed heights, I expect a major correction across the board. Whether a recession and correction turn into a depression and crash will depend upon the behavior of our leaders.
At each of these great gates of history, eighty to a hundred years apart, a similar generational drama unfolded. Four archetypes, aligned in the same order – elder Prophet, midlife Nomad, young adult Hero, child Artist – together produced the most enduring legends in our history. Each time the Grey Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum. – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe
There has been much debate since Trump descended on the escalator in 2015 at Trump Towers as to whether he was one of the Grey Champions of this Fourth Turning. I had my doubts after the 2020 election was stolen, but his re-ascension to power in 2025 leaves no doubt he is the lightning rod for what will take place in the final stages of this Crisis period. Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping are all from the Prophet generation and have assumed the mantle of Grey Champions for their nations.
How these men interact over the next several years will determine the course of this Fourth Turning. Thus far, the skirmishes in Ukraine and the Middle East have been relatively contained. Fourth Turning climaxes have been historically bloody and devastating. If China invades Taiwan, North Korea invades South Korea, or the EU pushes Putin too far, that will surely spur mass destruction and mass casualties on a grand scale. And with nuclear technology far more advanced since WWII, the possibility of planetary destruction is not a zero possibility.
Fourth Turnings can have multiple regeneracies with the first being when the financial system was artificially propped up by the Fed and Treasury in 2009, making the financial system far less stable over the long-term and setting the stage for the grand collapse. The regeneracy cannot always be identified with a single news event. But it does have to mark the beginning of a growth in centralized authority and decisive leadership at a time of great peril and urgency.
Trump’s actions during his first 7 weeks back in office most certainly classify as a regeneracy, through executive orders, mandates, and decisive actions, designed to undo all the purposeful destruction incurred under Biden. The reaction of his enemies, using lawfare, their media mouthpieces, and judicial roadblocks, has ratcheted the anger and vitriol within the country to a boiling point.
The blowback from the Trump/Musk agenda of slashing Federal bloat, firing government drone bureaucrats, dismantling corrupt, treasonous organizations hidden within the Federal bureaucracy (USAID), eliminating ineffective departments, like the Department of Education, and trying to root out corruption and waste, has been predictably violent. The burning of Tesla dealerships, coordinated anti-Musk messaging from the captured mainstream media, and artificial protests across the nation are all funded by Soros and his ilk, just as the fake BLM protests were used to destroy Trump’s first term.
Every executive order designed to rectify the purposely created border invasion, cut waste, fraud, and corruption within the Federal government, along with the purging of agencies of his enemies, has been met with judicial obstruction by judges placed in positions of power by Soros and the lawfare army created by Obama and his minions. The term Constitutional Crisis has been overused, but I believe we are headed for a clash that will not resolve itself through the existing legal system.
The judiciary can no longer be expected to interpret the law in an unbiased manner based upon the Constitution. When Trump decides to ignore the rulings of this plethora of corrupt judges, what happens next? The so-called judges thwarting Trump at every turn are not interpreting the law, they are exercising activist political prerogatives which they have been paid off by Soros and his lawfare organizations to sponsor.
From my perspective, the world has become more chaotic and confusing on a daily basis since Trump’s election. From a Fourth Turning perspective, this is to be expected. The Crisis never resolves itself through compromise or an agreed upon peaceful resolution. The cascade into a spiraling downward implosion of trust in institutions, politicians, media talking heads, corporate titans, and central bankers is leading the country and world towards a catastrophic debt collapse which will plunge the world into a global depression.
Whether this has been pre-planned by the ruling oligarchs to invoke the Great Taking, the new world order, and CBDCs, is still a question in my mind. Is Trump a willing participant in this diabolical plan or a well-intentioned patsy they are manipulating with his MAGA army to ensure their plan goes off without a hitch?
What is clearly evident to me, is the globalist cabal ruling elite are absolutely trying to thwart Trump and Putin’s peace efforts in resolving the Ukraine war. They are using every opportunity to provoke Putin into starting WW3 with NATO and forcing the U.S. to honor our treaty obligations. Their desperation is obvious, as the discredited and highly unpopular stooges governing France, the U.K., Canada and Germany make unhinged statements and threats on a daily basis, threatening war with Russia.
Putin is the only statesman, operating in a rational manner, and attempting to negotiate a sane outcome to a conflict initiated by U.S. neocons in 2014. This global crisis will just be exacerbated by the brewing Constitutional crisis being precipitated by the Deep State operatives and their judicial machinations, designed to force Trump into initiating a violent response to Soros and his bought off treasonous judicial cronies.
Trump’s rhetoric about a glorious new era of economic nirvana, built upon tariffs, lower taxes and energy independence sounds great, but it is nothing but pie in the sky pipe dreams. It’s too late. Talk about balancing the budget is nothing but bloviating bullshit. Trump and his economic gurus have no intention of balancing the budget, because doing so would lead to the worst depression in history.
This entire Ponzi economic house of cards depends upon the issuance of $6 billion of debt PER DAY. Our fake positive GDP growth data depends on the government spending $5 trillion of printed fiat (17% of GDP) per year on wars, welfare, and waste, with the ignorant brainwashed masses spending $19 trillion of money they don’t have (using credit cards) on shit they don’t need making up 68% of total GDP.
Meanwhile, financial markets are at historically high (and dangerous) levels, home prices are at all-time highs, real inflation has been pushing 10% for the last five years, credit card, auto and student loan debt are at record levels, and most importantly, gold continues to hit new record highs every day. The stock market is wobbling like it normally does as a precursor to a crash. Home sales are at decade lows as sky high prices and higher mortgage rates have made it impossible for most people to buy.
Credit card and auto loan delinquencies are surging. Millions of people who haven’t made a student loan payment in years now have to pay up. Their credit scores are crashing due to non-payments. Gold surges when the financial system shows signs of collapse. All the ingredients are present for a catastrophic explosion, just waiting for a spark to ignite the volatile mixture. At this point, the financial system is so unstable and fragile that an otherwise inconsequential grain of sand added to the pile could precipitate the collapse.
I believe the chaos, confusion, conflict, and collapse of confidence portends a prolonged period of discord as this Fourth Turning accelerates towards its denouement. The numerous neocon forces in the EU and US attempting to prolong and broaden the Ukraine conflict, along with the Zionist efforts to provoke a war with Iran, have pushed the world to the brink of a new global conflict. All previous Fourth Turnings were decided by an all-out bloody war, and this one is likely to experience a similarly tragic outcome. The billionaire oligarchs who have purposely created havoc and turmoil as a means to increase their wealth, power, and control over the politicians they have put into place to implement their new world order agenda.
The proliferation of assassinations and assassination attempts is a sign of increased vitriol towards those considered evil and expendable by their enemies. The assassination of corporate executives, attempts on Trump, and foiled plans against a Supreme Court justice and Musk mark a new violent turn to this Fourth Turning. Will someone try to take out some of these leftist judges who are impeding the will of the people on behalf of their leftist billionaire quislings?
Will the Ukraine and EU attempt to assassinate Putin, as they have done to numerous other Russian politicians? What I do know is there is a powerful faction attempting to initiate a global war as part of their new world order agenda. All it will take is for someone somewhere to do something stupid and then it will turn nasty, with more death and destruction than a reasonable American can possibly conceive after living in their false bubble of safety and security for decades. Once the dominos begin falling, there will be no stopping them.
“With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid. And when they do, things will turn nasty.” – Inspector Finch – V for Vendetta
The burning of Tesla showrooms, brainwashed idiots committing acts of vandalism, and the Soros funded fake protests across the country are only infuriating the normies and pushing us closer to civil chaos. Russia rightfully accusing France and the UK of committing acts of war against energy sites within Russia, along with Trump fulminating about Putin not cooperating, while bombing the shit out of Yemen as instructed by Israel, has turned up the heat on the imminent global conflict.
The two Prophet generation lightning rods for the coming conflict, Trump and Putin, with Bill Gates and RFK Jr. as lesser players, will make the decisions and choices which will determine the future course of this world. In the previous two Fourth Turnings, Nomad Generation facilitators of Lincoln and FDR’s strategy, Grant, Sherman, Eisenhower, and Patton, had to unflinchingly send hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths. Trump’s Nomad Generation agent of change – Elon Musk – has concentrated on rooting out fraud, waste, and inefficiencies in the Federal government, provoking violence and revealing the traitorous henchmen within the judiciary and Soros financed NGOs. Putin’s chief Nomad generation right hand man – Dmitry Medvedev – is a bomb thrower who thrives on conflict.
This Crisis period is accelerating and intensifying on a daily basis, as Trump, Putin and Xi, and a myriad of other world leaders provoke, posture, and threaten each other, with all signs pointing towards military conflict. The propaganda media, led by the NYT, are now admitting we have been at war with Russia since 2014. The entire conflict since 2022 has been funded and fought using U.S. technology, weapons, and personnel. Over $200 billion wasted on another lost war. Those of us in the alt-media revealed the truth about this proxy war years ago.
With Zelensky following orders from his EU benefactors, the fledgling peace efforts of Trump and Putin are destined to fail. The ongoing slaughter in the Middle East, along with the intense saber rattling regarding the U.S. attacking Iran on behalf of Israel, and the US declaring China as its largest military threat regarding their eventual takeover of Taiwan, are building towards a major global conflict, which the purposely distracted and dumbed down masses have no clue is approaching. Boomer leaders are unbending, punitive, authoritarian minded, and willing to risk the destruction of the planet in order to achieve what they have been assigned to accomplish by the globalist oligarchs calling the shots. In 1997, Strauss & Howe predicted the dangers we would face as the climax of this Fourth Turning approached.
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
“History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
Gold and Oil have been surging, with gold hitting new highs every day, up 38% in the last year, indicating all is not well in this world. The United States has been a nation for two and half centuries, only becoming an empire within the last one hundred years. Trump can pontificate about creating a new morning in America, but it is too late, as darkness descends upon the Republic created by strong courageous men, but slowly destroyed by weak cowardly men, moneyed interests, corrupt politicians, traitorous globalist billionaires, and a populace too dumbed down and distracted by technological bread and circuses to care about future generations.
In 1785 the Americans had won the Revolutionary War, but had not yet written the Constitution or elected a president in the final stages of the first American Fourth Turning. Exactly 80 years later in 1865, the American Civil War Fourth Turning reached its bloody conclusion. Exactly 80 years later in 1945, World War 2 was won, after the loss of 65 million lives. We are now exactly 80 years later in 2025, ready to write another dramatic chapter in the annals of history.
After World War 2, America was the conquering hero wearing the golden crown, but failed to heed the warning all previous empires had also ignored – all glory is fleeting. As we approach our rendezvous with destiny, take note, as described in the bible, that history is cyclical and there is a time for everything. I think everyone needs to understand we are entering a time of war, a time to hate, a time to kill, and a time to die. I wish it weren’t so, but the cycles of history don’t lie. Good luck and Godspeed.
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven;
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8
Reprinted with permission from The Burning Platform.
The post Prophets, Nomads and a Fourth Turning Accelerating Towards a Bloody Climax appeared first on LewRockwell.
The Assassination and Resurrection of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The following article, in a slightly different form, appears in my new book, At the Lost and Found (Clarity Press)
“I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadorian people…” – Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred, 24 March 1980
Whether we are aware of it or not, we live by stories. We live by others’ stories while we tell our lives by how we live. Our actions tell our stories. Then, when we die, others tell our stories as they wish.
This is the spiritual thread that links the meanings of our lives. It is the way we pass over to other lives and return to our own. But without truth, we end up in the wrong place, living the wrong stories. So it is crucial to get our facts straight.
And don’t the stories of certain special people inspire us to carry on their legacies because their spirits are far stronger than death? Their courage contagious? Their witness the triumph of life over death? Love over hate?
Don’t they challenge us to imitate them, to kindle in us the fire of their resurrected spirits?
One of the most inspirational stories that has motivated so many people to fight for peace, justice, and human equality is that of Jesus, the Palestinian Jew born in Bethlehem who grew up in Nazareth and was executed as a criminal in Jerusalem by the Roman state. A criminal for peace.
Spring turns our minds to rebirth, to resurrection, but first it compels us to dwell on death, the death of nature that will spring to life, the death and resurrection of Jesus, the deaths of all those slaughtered in Gaza and so many other places, and the deaths of those who have died working for peace and human reconciliation. Martyrs.
April 4th marks the 1968 assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Christian prophet and martyr, executed by the U.S. government in Memphis, Tennessee. A day that gives rise to doubly deeper thoughts that cross religious boundaries where people of all faiths or none can unite in the spirit of non-violent resistance to the forces of war, poverty, racism, and materialism – violence in all its forms. Everything that stands in the way of what King called “the Beloved Community.”
Speaking of his ally MLK, Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.” That walkway of prayer led from Selma to King’s Riverside Church speech against the U.S. war against Vietnam on April 4, 1967 and straight to his death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel exactly a year later on April 4, 1968.
That Jesus met violence with non-violent love and voluntarily entered the darkness of death and abandonment is at the heart of the Christian faith. So too his Resurrection. If the Jewish radical Jesus had not been executed by the Roman state occupiers of Palestine, if all hope for his followers had not seemingly been lost, then his Resurrection could not have given birth to hope in his followers to carry on his spirit of love for the poor, the downtrodden, and the outcasts – his resistance to violence.
Like Oscar Romero in El Salvador, gunned down by U.S. trained death squads at the altar while offering Mass and subsequently named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s witness and the truth about his death should be a central meditative focus this week. As Passover and Easter approach, April 4 offers us a way to contemplate what is now demanded of all people who yearn for the end to hatred, violence, and injustice, and the creation of a beloved world community where love and kindness reign.
The spirit of all the prophets and martyrs is about now, not then; about us, not them; it confronts us with the challenge to interrogate ourselves.
Shall we turn away from their witness? What truly animates our souls? Where do we stand? Do we support the state’s power to kill and wage war, to deny people freedom, to discriminate, to oppress the poor?
Do we support, as does the U.S. government, the Israeli Zionist state’s genocide of the Palestinians?
It is always about now; the living truth is now.
To contemplate the lives of the prophets takes us very deep into the darkness where we encounter the murders of Jesus, King, Romero, and all those who have died trying to make peace and justice a reality. But only if we go into the darkest truths will we be able to see the light that leads us to accept the resurrected spirit of their resistance to evil.
For Americans, the darkest truth is that that their national security warfare state kills its peacemakers and celebrates their killers.
Another prophet of our broken world, the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, soul brother to King, told us: “We dare not think of birth without death on the cross. Living Christ means a Living Cross, without it life is a living death.”[1]
So what do we need to know about MLK, and why does it matter?
The Repressed Truth About MLK, Jr.
Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the United States’ celebrated civil rights icon. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For more than fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government disinformation to hide the truth. And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of one man capable of leading a mass movement for transformative change in the United States. Today we are eating the fruit of our denial when we refuse to face the facts of the U.S. government conspiracy to kill King.
After more than a decade as America’s best-known and most respected civil rights leader, by 1968 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had increasingly focused on poverty issues and publicly declared his intense opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam in a famous speech – “Beyond Vietnam: The Time To Break the Silence” – at New York’s Riverside Church.[2]
MLK speaking at Riverside Church, NYC, 4 April 1967
Having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he emerged in the mid-1960s as an international figure, whose opinions on human and economic rights and peaceful coexistence were influential world-wide. Shortly before his assassination, he was organizing the Poor People’s Campaign that would involve hundreds of thousands of Americans who would encamp in Washington, D.C to demand the end to economic inequality, racism, and war.
At the same time, Reverend King was hated by an array of racists throughout America, especially in the American South. Among his greatest declared enemies was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who seemed convinced that King’s backers were Communists out to damage America’s interests. In the late 1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program created a network of informants and agent provocateurs to undermine the civil rights and anti-war movements with a special focus on King.[3]
After King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, William Sullivan, the head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division, wrote in a post-speech memo:
Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful, demagogic speech that he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.[4]
The FBI, after extensive eavesdropping on King, subsequently sent him an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself or else his extramarital sex life would be exposed. The FBI’s and its Director J Edgar Hoover’s hatred for King was so great that nothing was too low for them.[5]
This history is common knowledge as reported in the Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.
During the Senate Church Committee hearings in the mid-1970s, a parallel group within the CIA, code-named CHAOS, was uncovered. Despite its charter disallowing it from operating inside the United States, the CIA similarly used illegal means to disrupt the civil rights and anti-war movements.
Because MLK, in his Riverside Church speech, spoke clearly to what he identified there as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and continued to relentlessly confront his own government on its criminal war against Vietnam, he was universally condemned by the mass media and the government that later – once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat – praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.
Today Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, but his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 – people are encouraged to make the day one of service (from Latin, servus = slave). Etymological irony aside, such service does not include King’s commitment to protesting a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resisting the warfare state that is the United States.
Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest.
The word service is a loaded word; it has become a smiley face and vogue word over the past thirty-five years. It’s use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, delivering meals to the elderly, etc., activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet’s message. After all, Martin Luther King’s work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on.
But service without truth is slavery. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people into thinking that they are serving the essence of MLK’s message while they are following a message of misdirection.
Educating people about who killed King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory.
What exactly is the relationship between King’s saying that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” and his murder?
Let’s look at the facts.
MLK speaking at Mason Temple, Memphis, 3 Apr 1968
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 PM as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was shot in the lower right side of his face by one rifle bullet that shattered his jaw, damaged his upper spine, and came to rest below his left shoulder blade. The U.S. government claimed the assassin was a racist loner named James Earl Ray, who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967. Ray was alleged to have fired the fatal shot from a second-floor bathroom window of a rooming house above the rear of Jim’s Grill across the street.
Running to his rented room, Ray allegedly gathered his belongings, including the rifle, in a bedspread-wrapped bundle, rushed out the front door onto the adjoining street, and in a panic dropped the bundle in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company a few doors down. He was then said to have jumped into his white Mustang and to have driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the car. From there he fled to Canada and then to England and then to Portugal and back to England where he was eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and extradited to the U.S. The state claims that the money Ray needed to purchase the car and for all his travel was secured through various robberies and a bank heist. Ray’s alleged motive was racism and that he was a bitter and dangerous loner.
When Ray, under extraordinary pressure, coercion, and a payoff from his lawyer to take a plea, pleaded guilty (only a few days later to request a trial that was denied) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, the case seemed to be closed, and was dismissed from public consciousness. Another hate-filled lone assassin, as the government also termed Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, had committed a despicable deed.
Ray had received erroneous advice from his attorney, Percy Foreman. Foreman had a long history representing government, corporate, intelligence, and mafia figures, including Jack Ruby, in cases where the government wanted to keep people silent. Ray was told that the government would go after Ray’s father and brother, Jerry, and that he’d get the electric chair if he didn’t plead guilty,
Ray initially acquiesced. He entered what is known as an Alford plea before Judge Preston Battle. In making his plea, Ray did not admit to any criminal act and asserted his innocence. The following day, he fired Percy Foreman, who, by offering money to induce a guilty plea, had committed a criminal offense. Foreman had also lied to Judge Battle about his contract with Ray. And, the transcript of Ray’s testimony was doctored to help support the government’s case. Ray was sentenced to life in prison. After three days, Ray tried to retract his plea and maintained his innocence for almost 30 years until his death.
The United State government’s case against James Earl Ray was extremely weak from the start, and in the intervening years has grown so weak that it is no longer believable. A vast body of evidence has accumulated that renders it patently false.
But before examining such evidence, it is important to point out that MLK, Jr, his father, Rev. M. L. King, Sr, and his maternal grandfather, Rev. A.D. Williams, all pastors of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, were spied on by Army Intelligence and the FBI since 1917.[6] All were considered dangerous because of their espousal of racial and economic equality. None of this had to do with war or foreign policy, but such spying was connected to their religious opposition to racist and economic policies that stretched back to slavery, realities that have been officially acknowledged today. But when MLK, Jr. forcefully denounced unjust and immoral war-making as well, especially the Vietnam war, and announced his Poor People’s Campaign and intent to lead a massive peaceful encampment of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., he set off panic in the inner sanctums of the government. Seventy-five years of spying on black religious leaders here found its ultimate “justification.”
The corporate mass media has for more than fifty years echoed the government’s version of the King assassination. Here and there, however, mainly through the alternative media, and also through the monumental work and persistence of the King family lawyer, William Pepper, the truth about the assassination has surfaced. Through decades of research, a TV trial, a jury trial, and three meticulously researched books, Pepper has documented the parts played in the assassination by F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I., Army Intelligence, Memphis Police, and southern Mafia figures. In his last two books, An Act of State (2003) and later The Plot to Kill King (2016), Pepper presents his comprehensive case.
William Pepper’s decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Army Intelligence, and Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures. He is right to assert that “we have probably acquired more detailed knowledge about this political assassination than we have ever had about any previous historical event.” This makes the silence around this case even more shocking.
This shock is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty-day trial with over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK.
In that 1999 Memphis civil trial (see complete transcript) brought by the King family, the jury found that King was murdered by a conspiracy that included governmental agencies.[7] The corporate media, when they reported it at all, dismissed the jury’s verdict and those who accepted it, including the entire King family led by Coretta Scott King[8], as delusional. Time magazine called the verdict a confirmation of the King family’s “lurid fantasies.” The Washington Post compared those who believed it with those who claimed that Hitler was unfairly accused of genocide. A smear campaign ensued that has continued to the present day and then the fact that a trial ever occurred disappeared down the memory hole so that today most people never heard of it and assume MLK was killed by a crazy white racist, James Earl Ray, if they know even that.
The civil trial was the King family’s last resort to get a public hearing to disclose the truth of the assassination. They and Pepper knew, and proved, that Ray was an innocent pawn, but Ray had died in prison in 1998 after trying for thirty years to get a trial and prove his innocence. During all these years, Ray had maintained that he had been manipulated by a shadowy figure named Raul, who supplied him with money and his white Mustang and coordinated all his complicated travels, including having him buy a rifle and come to Jim’s Grill and the boarding house on the day of the assassination to give it to Raul. The government has always denied Raul existed. Pepper proved that that was a lie.
Slowly, however, glimmers of light have been shed on that trial and truth of the assassination.
On March 30, 2018, The Washington Post’s crime reporter, Tom Jackman, published a four-column front-page article, “Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.” While not close to an endorsement of the trial’s conclusions, it is a far cry from past nasty dismissals of those who agreed with the jury’s verdict as conspiracy nuts or Hitler supporters. After decades of clouding over the truth of MLK’s assassination, some rays of truth have come peeping through, and on the front page of the WP at that.
Jackman makes it very clear that all the surviving King family members – Bernice, Dexter, and Martin III – are in full agreement that James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, did not kill their father, and that there was and continues to be a conspiracy to cover up the truth. He adds to that the words of the highly respected civil rights icon and now deceased U.S. Congressman from Georgia, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who said, “I think there was a major conspiracy to remove Dr. King from the American scene.”
And former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who was with King at the Lorraine Motel when he was shot, concurs: “I would not accept the fact that James Earl Ray pulled the trigger, and that is all that matters.”
Additionally, Jackman adds that Andrew Young emphasized that the assassination of King came after that of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and a few months before that of Senator Robert Kennedy.
“We were living in a period of assassinations,” he quotes Young as saying, a statement clearly intimating their linkages and coming from a widely respected and honorable man.
In the years leading up to Pepper’s 1978 involvement in the MLK case, only a few lonely voices expressed doubts about the government’s case, such as, Harold Weisberg’s Frame Up in 1971 and Mark Lane’s and Dick Gregory’s Code Name “Zorro” in 1977. While other lonely researchers dug deeper, most of the country put themselves and the case to sleep.
As with the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert (two months after MLK), all evidence points to the construction of scapegoats to take the blame for government executions. Ray, Oswald, and Sirhan Sirhan all bear striking resemblances in the ways they were chosen and moved as pawns over long periods of time into positions where their only reactions could be stunned surprise when they were accused of the murders.
It took Pepper many years to piece together the essential truths, once he and Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King’s associate, interviewed Ray in prison in 1978. The first giveaway that something was seriously amiss came with the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations’ report on the King assassination. Led by Robert Blakey, suspect in his conduct of the other assassination inquiries, who had replaced Richard Sprague, who was deemed to be too independent, “this multi-million-dollar investigation ignored or denied all evidence that raised the possibility that James Earl Ray was innocent,” and that government forces might be involved. Pepper lists in his book over twenty such omissions that rival the absurdities of the magical thinking of the Warren Commission. The HSCA report became the template “for all subsequent disinformation in print and visual examinations of this case” for the past forty-two years.
Blocked at every turn by the authorities and unable to get Ray a trial, Pepper arranged an unscripted, mock TV trial that aired on April 4, 1993, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination. Jurors were selected from a pool of U.S. citizens, a former U.S. Attorney and a federal judge served as prosecutor and judge, with Pepper serving as defense attorney. He presented extensive evidence clearly showing that authorities had withdrawn all security for King; that the state’s chief witness was falling down drunk; that the alleged bathroom sniper’s nest was empty right before the shot was fired; that three eyewitnesses, including the New York Times’ Earl Caldwell, said that the shot came from the bushes behind the rooming house; and that two eyewitnesses saw Ray drive away in his white Mustang before the shooting, etc. The prosecution’s feeble case was rejected by the jury that found Ray not guilty.
As with all Pepper’s work on the case, the mainstream media responded with silence. And though this was only a TV trial, increasing evidence emerged that the owner of Jim’s Grill, Loyd Jowers, was deeply involved in the assassination. Pepper dug deeper, and on December 16, 1993, Loyd Jowers appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live that aired nationwide. Pepper writes:
Loyd Jowers cleared James Earl Ray, saying that he did not shoot MLK but that he, Jowers, had hired a shooter after he was approached by Memphis produce man Frank Liberto and paid $100,000 to facilitate the assassination. He also said that he had been visited by a man named Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until arrangements were finalized …. The morning after the Primetime Live broadcast there was no coverage of the previous night’s program, not even on ABC …. Here was a confession, on prime-time television, to involvement in one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the Republic, and virtually no American mass-media coverage.
In the twenty-eight years since that confession, Pepper has worked tirelessly on the case and has uncovered a plethora of additional evidence that refutes the government’s claims and indicts it and the media for a continuing cover-up. The evidence he has gathered, detailed and documented in An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King, proves that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy masterminded by the U.S. government. The foundation of his case proving that was presented at the 1999 trial, while other supporting documentation was subsequently discovered.
Since the names and details involved make clear that, as with the murders of JFK and RFK, the conspiracy was very sophisticated with many moving parts organized at the highest level, I will just highlight a few of his findings in what follows.
- Pepper refutes the government and proves, through multiple witnesses, telephonic, and photographic evidence, that Raul existed; that his full name is Raul Coelho and that he was James Earl Ray’s intelligence handler, who provided him with money and instructions from their first meeting in the Neptune Bar in Montreal, where Ray had fled in 1967 after his prison escape, until the day of the assassination. It was Raul who instructed Ray to return from Canada to the U.S. (an act that makes no sense for an escaped prisoner who had fled the country), gave him money for the white Mustang, helped him attain travel documents, and moved him around the country like a pawn on a chess board. The parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald are startling.
- He presents the case of Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent working out of the Atlanta office in 1968, who went with a senior colleague to check out an abandoned white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray’s car, to which Raul had a set of keys) and opened the passenger door to find that an envelope and some papers fell out onto the ground. Thinking he may have disturbed a crime scene, the nervous Wilson pocketed them. Later, when he read them, their explosive content intuitively told him that if he gave them to his superiors they would be destroyed. One piece was a torn-out page from a 1963 Dallas telephone directory with the name Raul written at the top, and the letter “J” with a Dallas telephone number for a club run by Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer. The page was for the letter H and had numerous phone numbers for H. L. Hunt, Dallas oil billionaire and a friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Both men hated MLK. The second sheet contained Raul’s name and a list of names and sums and dates for payment. On the third sheet was written the telephone number and extension for the Atlanta FBI office. (Read James W. Douglass’s important interview with Donald Wilson in The Assassinations, pp.479-491.)
- Pepper shows that the alias Ray was given and used from July 1967 until April 4, 1968 – Eric Galt – was the name of a Toronto U.S. Army Intelligence operative, Eric St. Vincent Galt, who worked for Union Carbide with Top Secret clearance. The warehouse at the Canadian Union Carbide Plant in Toronto that Galt supervised “housed a top-secret munitions project funded jointly by the CIA, the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the Army Electronics Research and Development Command …. In August 1967, Galt met with Major Robert M. Collins, a top aide to the head of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group (MIG), Colonel John Downie.” Downie selected four members for an Alpha 184 Sniper Unit that was sent to Memphis to back up the primary assassin of MLK. Meanwhile, Ray, set up as the scapegoat, was able to move about freely since he was protected by the pseudonymous NSA clearance for Eric Galt.
- To refute the government’s claim that Ray and his brother robbed the Alton, Illinois Bank to finance his travels and car purchase (therefore no Raul existed), Pepper “called the sheriff in Alton and the president of the bank; they gave the same statement. The Ray brothers had nothing to do with the robbery. No one from the HSCA, the FBI, or The New York Times had sought their opinion.” CNN later reiterated the media falsehood that became part of the official false story.
- Pepper shows that the fatal shot came from the bushes behind Jim’s Grill and the rooming house, not from the bathroom window. He presents overwhelming evidence for this, showing that the government’s claim, based on the testimony on a severely drunk Charlie Stephens, was absurd. His evidence includes the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses and that of Loyd Jowers (a nine-and-a-half-hour deposition), the owner of Jim’s Grill, who said he joined another person in the bushes, and after the shot was fired to kill King, he brought the rifle back into the Grill through the back door. Thus, Ray was not the assassin.
- He presents conclusive evidence that the bushes were cut down the morning after the assassination in an attempt to corrupt the crime scene. The order to do so came from Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans to Maynard Stiles, a senior administrator of the Memphis Department of Public Works.
- He shows how King’s room was moved from a safe interior room, 201, to balcony room, 306, on the upper floor; how King was conveniently positioned alone on the balcony by members of his own entourage for the easy mortal head shot from the bushes across the street. (Many people only remember the iconic photograph taken after-the-fact with Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, et al., standing over the fallen King and pointing across the street.) He uncovers the role of black Memphis Police Department Domestic Intelligence and military intelligence agent Marrell McCollough, attached to the 111th MIG, within the entourage. McCollough can be seen kneeling over the fallen King, checking to see if he’s dead. McCollough officially joined the CIA in 1974 (see Douglass Valentine’s “Deconstructing Kowalski: The DOJ’s Strange MLK Report”)
- Pepper confirms that all of this, including that the assassin in the bushes was dutifully photographed by Army Intelligence agents situated on the nearby Fire House roof.
- He presents evidence that all security for Dr. King was withdrawn from the area by the Memphis Police Department, including a special security unit of black officers, and four tactical police units. A black detective at the nearby fire station, Ed Redditt, was withdrawn from his post on the afternoon of April 4th, allegedly because of a death threat against him. And the only two black firemen at Fire Station No. 2 were transferred to another station.
- He confirms the presence of “Operation Detachment Alpha 184 team,” a Special Forces sniper team in civilian disguise at locations high above the Lorraine Motel balcony, and he names one soldier, John D. Hill, as part of Alpha 184 and another military team, Selma Twentieth SFG, that was in Memphis.
- He explains the use of two white mustangs in the operation to frame Ray.
- He proves that Ray had driven off before the shooting; that Lloyd Jowers took the rifle from the shooter who was in the bushes; that the Memphis police were working in close collaboration with the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the “Dixie Mafia,” particularly local produce dealer Frank Liberto and his New Orleans associate Carlos Marcello; and that every aspect of the government’s case was filled with holes that any person familiar with the details and possessing elementary logical abilities could refute.
- So importantly, Pepper shows how the mainstream media and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation, just as they have done with the Kennedy and Malcom X assassinations that are of a piece with this one.
There is such a mass of evidence through depositions, documents, interviews, photographs, etc. in Pepper’s An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King that makes it abundantly clear that the official explanation that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King is false and that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him that involved the FBI and other government agencies. Only those inoculated against the truth can ignore such evidence and continue to believe the official version.
Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a radical non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on institutionalized violence, racism, and economic exploitation. He was a very dangerous man to the U.S. government and all the institutional and deep state forces armed against him.
Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off. Fifty-three years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression, and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects.
They will not be resolved until this nation decides to confront the truth of why and by whom he was killed.
For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted MLK Day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know.
But it is what we need to know in order to resurrect his spirit in us, so we can carry on his mission and emulate his witness.
The time is now.
__________________________________________
Notes
[1] As quoted in James W. Douglass, The Non-Violent Cross, New York, 1968, p. 57
[2] See “50 Years Ago: Riverside Church and MLK’s Final Year of Experiments With Truth,” David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 4 April 2017
A significant moment in Dr. King’s odyssey occurred on 14 January 1967 when he first saw a photographic essay by William Pepper about the children of Vietnam. Initially, while he hadn’t had a chance to read the text, it was the photographs that stopped him. Bernard Lee, who was present at the time, never forgot Martin King’s shock as he looked at photographs of young napalm victims: “Martin had known about the [Vietnam] war before then, of course, and had spoken out against it. But it was then that he decided to commit himself to oppose it.” The truth force in these photographs led directly to Dr. King’s Riverside Church exhortation in April.
See “The Truth of The Children of Vietnam: A Way of Liberation – How Will We Challenge Militarism, Racism, and Extreme Materialism?, David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 30 November 2017
[3] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Case Study, US Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (“Church Committee”), Final Report – Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 23 April 1976, pp. 79-184
[4] “MLK’s speech attracted FBI’s intense attention,” Tony Capaccio, Washington Post, 27 August 2013
[5] “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals,” Beverly Gage, New York Times, 11 November 2014
[6] “Army feared King, secretly watched him, Spying on blacks started 75 years ago,” Stephen G. Tompkins, The Commercial Appeal, 21 March 1993
[7] An overview of the trial with links back into the court transcript is “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis,” Jim Douglass, Probe Magazine, Spring 2000. Apart from the courtroom participants, Douglass was one of only two people who attended the entire thirty-day trial.
[8] See Transcript of the King Family Press Conference on the Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Trial Verdict, Atlanta, Georgia, 9 December 1999
Many thanks to my good friends Dave Ratcliffe and Jim Douglass for all their help.
The post The Assassination and Resurrection of Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared first on LewRockwell.
After Ukraine and NATO Are Spun Off, Who’s Next?
Moon of Alabama observes that Trump’s mineral deal with Ukraine creates indefinite indentured servitude for western Ukraine. Trump seems to see himself as General MacArthur to Zelensky’s Hirohito, after a great defeat, rather than two losers who a provoked – and lost – a war with Russia. As some have noted, a deal like this with the Americans may make unconditional surrender to a wealthy and Slav-sympatico Russia a far better alternative for the average Ukrainian.
Inauthentic leadership, corruption and cowardice all lead to failure in war, and in everything else. NATO, long afflicted with a lack of defensive mission, roams incoherently creating chaos. The European ruling elite sustains itself by losing wars slowly and endlessly for profit, and to stay out of prison or the gallows.
The New York Times “expose on Ukraine” revealed Western contempt for the Russian Army, as well as a Western sense of superiority vis a vis Ukrainians. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych says European and American elites see Ukrainians as “monkeys with grenades.” After lying for over a decade about Ukraine, the Times now graces us with a pseudo-intellectual explanation of how the US elite and CIA constructed, fueled and guided this proxy war with Russia. Not a single neocon is mentioned in their shady mea culpa, nor does the Times own their part selling another Congressionally unauthorized war against a nuclear armed power. In a nutshell, this is the story of US foreign policy for over 70 years.
Congress cheers the smooth diversion of defense profiteering from Afghanistan to Ukraine, and now from Ukraine to Gaza, Yemen, and Iran. Sun Tzu may not have said “follow the money,” but he did say “there is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.” Government media like the Times can see this in Ukraine, but refuses to acknowledge how 70 years of non-stop conflict, war and proxy war has destroyed the Constitution and impoverished the United States.
Notwithstanding its limited value to the US, or even to Europe, restoration and development costs to “fix” what the war damage has done to Ukraine is estimated at over $500 billion. That’s ten times the cost to “fix” the damage US bombs have done to Gaza, estimated at a paltry $53 billion. No wonder Trump would rather build profitable Gaza Riviera, using Arab money, instead of sacrificing the $200 billion Biden gave Ukraine plus the half a trillion it would take to clear the Ukrainian deathscape.
Here’s a thought: Ukraine surrenders to a Russia-led and -funded reformation that meets the clear and salient objectives of the SMO. Zelensky is the perfect foil for this “next step” because he is soundly disrespected by Trump and most Ukrainians. Trump will then place this “loss” on NATO’s doorstep, as he chides them for “not spending enough on defense.” NATO has long chosen expansion and intervention over strategic focus and military effectiveness, and it shows. Member states depleted their military inventories, voluntarily contracted their economic and energy options, and willingly entered a master-slave relationship with Washington DC and US-controlled global capital firms. When their voters demand better, their elite capitols ban speech, blacklist parties and jail political challengers.
With Russia and Ukraine off the table, Trump can turn to his other projects. Having eaten their young and consumed their seedstock, EU and NATO face domestic demographic and political crises, and Trump holds the whip. NATO is unnecessary to the US, except as a submissive buyer of US weapons systems delivered a generation late with overpriced maintenance contracts.
Reality tells us Denmark with a divided and militarily denuded NATO can’t stop Trump from turning Greenland into a US protectorate. The US could spend five times the $4 billion that the Danish taxpayer gives to Nuuk each year, and create a tax free zone of wealthy Greenlanders at a fraction of the cost to rebuild and restore Ukraine. This is in no way advocating for the purchase, coercion or both of Greenland, or any expansion of the US military footprint. I’m just trying to examine Donald’s business plan.
Trump sees the US, in part, as a business entity, carrying dangerous debt, having expensive commitments, and making repeated financial errors (expensive boutique wars among them). He wants to spin-off the unprofitable parts (end some wars, reduce the immigrant welfare state). He wants to target waste and inefficiency inside the company (via DOGE and DC swamp reduction).
Trump has been falsely told that foreign currency depreciation will totally offset his tariffs. That aside, his personal language of tariffs (and threats of tariffs) sound much like his language of war (and threats of war). Lew Rockwell points out the language of war is the same used by trade protectionists and this isn’t by accident. As Sun Tzu knows, no nation can benefit from prolonged warfare.
Which brings us to the Zionist state of Israel – and the undeniable fact that its weaknesses in faith, economy, and battle are becoming more and more apparent.
The Zionist government and its American lobbies are now seeking, Euro-style, to criminalize and ban American citizen, media, and journalistic criticism of the Israeli government, its soldiers and its protected criminal classes. Instead of debating or proving that such criticism in unwarranted, Zionists seek to label such speech as anti-Semitic and silence it – and they have a point. If a Jewish state can behave outrageously outside of religious, political and legal norms as it is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, in Syria, in Lebanon, and elsewhere, such un-countered criticism can lead to anti-Semitism. If a Jewish democracy can murder and starve unarmed and unhoused people in the name of “justice” and infinite revenge, such un-countered criticism can lead to anti-Semitism. In seeking to silence critics, the Zionist state reveals it has no counter to this criticism. This speaks directly to its own inauthentic leadership, corruption and cowardice, and Israelis themselves are critically aware of this.
In the business world, a loss leader is a portfolio product that is subsidized and sold below cost, in order to increase brand popularity, loyal customers, and more profit overall. After Trump deals with other planned spinoffs, efficiencies and cutbacks, Israel will remain the lone overseas loss leader for the United States – a loss leader that is failing to increase US global popularity, loyal allies, and profit. The Zionist state is an ever-expanding, apartheid, genocidal, land-stealing entity in a permanent and destructive war. The more we subsidize it, the more money, market share, and respect for the American brand we lose. As time reduces the transactional relationship between Trump the politician and his biggest pro-Israel donors, what can, and what will, Israel’s government do to avoid its performance review, and the chopping block?
Trump may be on a workable path in openly viewing the US “republic” as a US corporation. As he constructs his golden global legacy, he might wish to consider another bit of Sun Tzu wisdom. “The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”
The post After Ukraine and NATO Are Spun Off, Who’s Next? appeared first on LewRockwell.
Caught Between the System Swarm and the Group Think Horde
“There are no conservatives in Cambridge, Massachusetts” – Steven B., PhD, Harvard, Brandeis, phone conversation
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, PhD, MIT, is a distinguished research biological-engineer and developer of artificial intelligence systems based in the high-tech and bio-tech corridors of Cambridge, Massachusetts who ran for president in the 2024 election. Dr. Shiva also sponsors the political awareness and self-health Truth-Freedom-Heath Movement. Below I evaluate the radical Shiva political awareness movement from a conservative perspective rather than lower myself to a rant of why I was compelled to disaffiliate from his movement.
“…the prime political imperative of our present situation – the refusal to identify with any horde” – Sociologist Peter Berger, Movements and Revolution, 1970.
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai organized his Truth-Freedom-Health movement to serve as a support base for his run for the presidency in 2024 and to generate a working-class self-health movement to respond to the AI challenge to labor. Thus far his movement is mostly educational, focused on learning a biological systems approach to human health (not disease) and how systems engineering can explain the workings of everything from how the human bio-cell works to how the world political economy works. Shiva views social systems as working either like a thermostat (programmed closed system) or like a personal computer (open system requiring inputs).
His powerful “Shatter the Swarm” video explains how about 10,000 elites in the Knowledge Class oppress the Working Class by telepathically “swarming” like a flock of Starling birds for power, profit and control that keeps the Working Class divided, unorganized, unaware and unhealthy. He explains how politicians portrayed as anti-establishment are really “Not-So-Obvious Establishment” actors (among them Trump, Hillary, Biden, RFK, etc.). Shiva firmly believes in the utopian occupational ideology of Artificial Intelligence: all trades, occupations, professions and gig work can be automated (regardless that automation is almost invariably not cost efficient). However, as explained greater below, systems engineering cannot adequately explain the unintended consequences, blowbacks and the ironies of history.
The two rules for automating industry are that an efficient operation will magnify any manufacturing efficiencies but conversely will also magnify any inefficiencies. However, this ignores that making the process efficient will be prohibitively costly in a competitive market economy. But cost is unlikely to be as much a factor in a public-private venture socialist economy where government subsidizes private-public enterprises such as Tesla and Starlink, the same way as is done in China. Consider the analogy of greater efficiency of a jet engine that can transport 250 passengers but its immensely greater cost compared to a gasoline combustion engine that can transport 4 people. But buying a jet engine for a car would not be economic.
Shiva also uses system engineering to explain caste and social class systems. But the social class system is enforced not only externally but also by internal controls. For example, a working-class conservative such as, say, longshoreman Eric Hoffer (The True Believer: Thoughts on Mass Movements), who may want to join a pro-labor movement nonetheless will be made to understand in unmistakable terms that he “would be happier elsewhere;” to wit precisely my experience as to why I was made to disaffiliate from the Shiva movement. Thus, Shiva fails to focus his own “systems science” on the ‘group think’ of his own political movement, regardless that he promotes thinking for oneself.
Shiva ran in the primary election in 2018 as a Republican for US Senator in Massachusetts and as an independent for U.S. president on the 2024 ballot in 15 states and a write-in candidate in other states. He is inclined to the radical Leftist embrace of demonstrations and lawsuits that I believe would be precisely where the oligarch class wants to corral the working-class opposition. Ipso facto, what did the Canadian Trucker Movement accomplish or the Yellow Vest Movement in France? Nothing. Shiva’s own free speech lawsuit was successful but then the case was sealed. History is replete with irony and paradox and subterfuge.
Shiva himself admits he is sympathetic with Marxist Communism as far as the need to create community but not its authoritarianism. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see who Shiva identified himself with on the cover of his 2016 book “The System and Revolution” which is nearly identical to the book covers and titles of V.I. Lenin’s 1917 “State and Revolution” and Karl Marx’s 1848 “On Revolution”.
Most people don’t know that Marx was never against Capitalism nor genuine religion and was a poet, mathematician, stock market speculator, gun toter who spent most of his inheritance buying rifles for Belgian peasants, tried to emulate a bourgeoisie family for his daughters better chances for marriage and advocated the end of Judaism. Marx was fired by bankers and industrialists for defending freedom of speech as a newspaper editor. He was an idealistic utopian who believed that only materialism drove history but never addressed the unintended consequences of revolutionary change. He contended he could predict the future of a classless society, but he could not foresee how advocacy for revolution in his “Communist Manifesto” would set up his book to be hijacked by oligarchs for political purposes. It must be understood the “Manifesto” was paid propaganda by British oligarchs that the Manifesto criticizes as oppressors. Nonetheless, Marx’s book morphed into a sort of sacred scripture that legitimatized mass murder mainly of 1.7 million of the working class in the Russian Revolution plus 7 million Ukrainian farmers in the Holodomor under the banner of creating a worker’s paradise. Irony.
Skepticism about Artificial Intelligence and Systems Engineering
Sociologist Peter Berger says there are three types of conservatives. Those conservatives of faith who are strongly opposed to any change and who believe the current social order is good, natural or sacred; and conservatives who desire change solely for profit making. Then there are the conservatives by lack of faith who are pessimists and skeptics by inclination and are suspicious about the promised benefits of social and technological change (the category to which I fall into). Skeptical conservatives see social institutions as the result of accidents, ideological hijacking, co-optation, blowback, irony, etc., not design. As Max Weber puts it: “It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil from evil, but that often the opposite is true”.
For example, the invention of the printing press and Protestant Christianity inadvertently brought about legitimization of usury and profit that the Catholic Church had banned for centuries.
A mechanistic systems engineering approach fails to understand the messiness of history and that ideology often has an opposite result to what was intended typically due to oligarch co-optation of any oppositional social movement, witness Marxist Communism and the covert manipulation of secret societies.
Excepting Dr. Shiva’s personal knowledge of the caste system and freedom, technocrats have little comprehension of the discovery of freedom and how it has been destroyed time and again by some notion about the certainty of technological and scientific progress. Unfortunately, for the moment conservatives are on the side of AI to facilitate needed reforms to money corruption in government and are not considering the contingencies that monopolistic surveillance capitalism could end up as totalitarianism. This is why former Secretary of the US Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, calls AI Surveillance Capitalism: “Bringing Us the Communism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and Paul Pot Were Unable to Deliver.
Or let’s take Oracle computer technologies company founder Larry Ellison who has imperiously declared that the public will have to accept that AI will be soon used for surveillance of everyone’s commercial and banking activities and their entire personal life. He says everyone will have to wear cameras, like the police and those on probation do. So, criminals will just switch off their camera or not wear their camera and everyone else will have to wear cameras? And how would this be enforced except by blocking one’s access to their bank accounts? The entire population will be treated as if they are on probation! What an innovation! This is like those activist hysterics who fear that our brain will be controlled by implanting a chip in our body connected to Elon Musk’s satellites when this can be easily thwarted by covering the chip with aluminum foil. The public are not automatons and are already switching back to check writing to buy groceries and paying utility bills, using cash rather than debit cards, and buying non-trackable cell phones in response to the invasion of privacy posed by AI. Fighting back by creating an activist “movement” and lawsuits will not be much help and employ tactics of the hard Left. More important than organizing any collective resistance movement are the actions of individual citizens to: abandon credit cards and go back to using cash and checks, to stop using the self-check out lane at grocery stores, supporting the chartering of state banks, issuance of state currency based on the value of labor and collateralized by gold and silver, stopping the issuance of digital ID’s (Social Security ID registration), using a gold-backed debit card, protecting against land grabs, hardening homes against suspicious firestorms facilitated by government negligence and covert actions and not relying on insurance companies (see here). .
Skepticism about the mRNA innovation has also gained momentum. For example, according to Our World Data online, the number of COVID vaccination doses per one million population in the U.S. dropped from 10,239 doses in April 2021, to 236 doses by May 2023, and to zero by August 2024, an underreported 100 percent decline! If the shots had been administered in, say, 1950, the likely proportion of people taking the shots would likely have been something like 95%. This attrition is probably due to the influence of the Internet. There was massive blowback to COVID vaccinations, albeit undisclosed. That is why the effort to put mRNA in food which is occurring on Trump and RFK’s watch while concern about red dye 40 in children’s cereal is a diversion.
Conservatives should be skeptical about claims of the benefits of artificial intelligence. In an occupation I am familiar with, automated real estate appraisals of homes are not statistically reliable (correlation coefficient, T-Test, F-Test, coefficient of variation) because to do multiple regression analysis at least 30 to 40 comparable sales are needed. Typically, there are only 3 to 6 sales available, and the entire market is a data set of unique outliers from one another. For example, Zillow’s algorithm for pricing homes is based mainly on house size, then adjusted for time/price trend, and has failed to be proven reliable in adjudication many times. It is unreliable because there is insufficient data from which to extract the uniqueness of each property, such as building condition, obsolescence, corner location, style or luxury amenities or proximity to a next-door nuisance neighbor. Moreover, in commercial real estate the data on income, expenses and capitalization rates are kept proprietary by each owner, thwarting any automation of valuation altogether. Artificial intelligence is oversold. If automation is so profitable it would have been implemented long ago. Only government socializing the economy by public-private partnerships can make it viable.
Consider the Marxist concept of false consciousness applied to human health, which would assert that most people eat commercialized processed foods and undertake a Bourgeoisie lifestyle that is deleterious to their health interests. This presumes that we know what clean foods and health are in the first place. While “Big Farma” (corporate agriculture) has successfully sold the public on the virtues of a vegan diet, Dr. Bruce Ames, PhD, biochemistry, Cal Berkeley, found that plant-based foods have 10,000 times the natural pesticide toxins than industrial glyphosate (half of that from rat droppings from food storage). Most plant foods need to be fermented, pressure cooked, boiled or soaked for human consumption but don’t expect even natural alternative doctors or bio-tech engineers to tell you this. Plants are excellent for detoxification but not for food unless prepared properly. There may be no such thing as organic or clean food because any non-nutrient metabolite that hypothetically seeps through the lining of a leaky gut can cause an autoimmune reaction (William Davis, MD, Super Gut, 2023). Call me a skeptic.
Moreover, it has been known for 100 years that poop can ascend from the bowel due to a damaged ileocecal valve back into the duodenum food transfer chamber and seep into the bloodstream causing deadly metabolic sepsis blood poisoning (see page 53 of Dr. John Kellogg, MD, Autointoxication or Intestinal Toxemia, 1919; William Davis, MD, Supergut, 2023 ). Disease can be caused by self-poisoning, something that bio-engineering and modern medicine has not grasped (see Charles Bouchard, Lectures on Autointoxication in Disease: or Self-Poisoning of the Individual – 1894). All disease starts in the gut – Hippocrates. That microbiology and medicine are also based on self-serving ideologies is a very Marxist concept.
The only thing new about the technocrats of Silicon Valley and Technology Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts is they want to get rid of humans altogether and replace them with robots and algorithms. Even Dr. Shiva advises that all white collar and blue-collar jobs are going to disappear due to AI. Nonetheless, AI is uneconomic in a market-based economy and can only thrive in a socialist economy. Once institutionalized, AI may be impossible to reverse just as Communism was. We don’t want China to conquer us, but we ironically proceed to support the transition to a socialist economy under the guise of artificial intelligence so we can “win the AI war with China.” The antidote is a free market economy, local banks, the issuance of state currencies backed by real labor and collateralized with gold or silver not debt.
Trapped Between the System and the Horde
Technocrats and activists both have the same traits of humorlessness and the constant seriousness of the Bolshevik revolutionists in Russia. Sociologist Peter Berger states: “Activists by inclination, almost to a man, are contemptuous…and irredeemably humorless.” Humorless technocrats like Larry Ellison are invariably found at the top of organizations in both the system and the anti-system hordes and the anti-anti-system hordes. Beware of those who can’t tell a joke, even a sick joke given that our systems for food, medicine and even religion are covertly malevolent. There was a sort of almost religious transcendence operating even under the old Soviet Communism system by subversive joke telling (see Ben Lewis, Hammer and Tickle: The Story of Communism: A Political System Almost Laughed Out of Existence, 2009). “It’s the Law of Faust’s Devil’s Bargain: the worst the times, the better the jokes” (Ernst Royle).
The corporate oligarchs want to keep us diverted to political mobilization and protests, mostly symbolic lawsuits, and natural health veganism and crusades against supercilious red dye 40 and glyphosate, not putting pressure on state legislatures to allow the creation of local economies by state banks and currencies that would protect privacy and civil liberties. Must I repeat this sentence to underscore its importance vis-à-vis the Shiva Movement?
If you’re going to join the Shiva movement, be aware that you must be a loyal automaton and adhere to group think because that is what involvement with a quasi-religious militant movement requires for it to be successful. The same organization tactics apply for a labor union or a Communist cell (see Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization, 1953; Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study in Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics, 1951). Group Think and Swarm behavior are two sides of the same coin. But you better be a Lefty or you will be drubbed out. The slogan that the Shiva movement is beyond Left and Right is not correct in my experience.
Caught Between the System Swarm and the Group Think Horde, Why I Disaffiliated from the Dr. Shiva Movement, Wayne Lusvardi.
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Bipartisan Assault on Free Speech
International Man: Under the previous administration, we saw an aggressive push against so-called “disinformation”—fact-checkers, censorship, and suppression of views outside the mainstream narrative. At the same time, there was a strong focus on social justice, gender ideology, and migrant protection.
What’s your perspective on that era and its impact on free speech?
Doug Casey: It’s no longer okay to have a difference of opinion in politics and academia. Not so long ago, it was possible to have a polite discussion and ask Socratic questions to determine what’s right or wrong. Not anymore.
Free speech is one of Western Civilization’s most important contributions to the world. Throughout history, of all the world’s cultures and civilizations, only the West made free speech and free thought into cultural icons. Free speech is a major reason why the West—with all its flaws—has always been not only different from but objectively better than any other. Incidentally, just saying that can now get you canceled or even prosecuted in some places.
Without free speech, it’s very hard to have free thought because if you’re forced to keep concepts within the confines of your own mind, it’s very hard to explicate, expand, and concretize them. What’s going on now is extremely dangerous. It amounts to putting tariffs on others’ ideas so they can’t enter your brain.
Europe and the Anglophone world—Australia, New Zealand, England, the US, and Canada—are turning into police states where thought crime is a real thing that can be prosecuted. It’s not 1984 yet, but things are rapidly moving in that direction.
One of the most perverse aspects of the trend is that universities have become the center of this anti-freedom groupthink. They once were— and should be—centers of discussion, debate, and free thought. That’s no longer true. They’ve become institutionally corrupt. They’re no longer even places to hang out, party, and pick up a few idle facts while delaying the onset of maturity. They’ve mutated into something destructive and dangerous, as illustrated by the recent scandals at Colombia, Harvard, and Penn.
95% of American universities have become indoctrination centers. It’s quite amazing. Most of the teachers and administrators are Woke or Marxist and actively destructive to young minds. The schools are scams, losing money even with tuitions crowding $100,000 per nine-month year. They’ve become self-licking ice cream cones mainly benefitting the staff.
International Man: Now, under the new Trump administration, those left-leaning agendas seem to have fallen out of favor.
Has the pendulum swung the other way?
Doug Casey: I can only say that as bad as things look today, they would have been much, much worse if Kamala Harris had been installed as the US President. But we should take a moment to comment on Trump, who currently bestrides the world like a colossus.
As I’ve been saying for years, Trump has no philosophical center. He doesn’t have any core beliefs. The good thing about him, and the reason why he’s popular, is that he’s a cultural conservative who wants to preserve many aspects of what was good in America. But he doesn’t have any consistent view of the world. He just does whatever seems like a good idea at the time, flying by the seat of his pants. I fear that he suffers from megalomania. Things could get out of control because he lacks a philosophical core. His military threats and his using tariffs as weapons could lead to a genuine catastrophe.
That said, what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE is absolutely great. As is Trump’s anti-Wokeism. Wokeism has become an ideological force. It’s a set of memes, beliefs, and feelings—psychological aberrations, really—that have captured the West.
Wokism is defined by things like LGBTQ, DEI, intersectionality, safe spaces, trigger warnings, irrational pandering to minorities, identity politics, guilt about being white, abolishing traditional norms and culture, and disavowing Western values in particular. It’s actually a spiritual illness. Throughout history, there have been lots of similar episodes—the Inquisition, witch hunts, Jacobinism, Leninism, Hitlerism, Maoism, and many, many more.
It’s fine that Trump reacts against what amounts to a mass psychosis. But you can’t win a battle of ideas just by reacting against them. It’s good to destroy the foundations of Woke. They’re evil—a word rarely used since it was inadvertently discredited by religious fanatics. The problem is that, at best, Trump will just create a vacuum, and that vacuum can be filled by almost anything in today’s world. It seems unlikely, in the resulting chaos, that it will be filled by the things which actually made America great—free speech, free thought, free markets, individualism, rationality, the rule of law, and a half dozen other things I outlined in the article here.
International Man: Beyond cultural issues, we’re also seeing the political right suppress certain kinds of speech. The Trump administration has cracked down on campus protests and issued an executive order targeting anti-Semitism, stating:
“President Trump’s new Order takes forceful and unprecedented steps to marshal all Federal resources to combat the explosion of anti-Semitism on our campuses and in our streets since October 7, 2023.”
How do you view this development?
Doug Casey: The real question, the important question, is: What’s the government doing on campuses in the first place?
The State and its minions have absolutely no place on campuses. Injecting force and politics into academia is poisonous. Entirely apart from that, the US university system has outlived its usefulness. Almost all of them are intellectually dead. They’re essentially indoctrination centers attached to hedge funds. They’re no longer centers of free thought and critical thinking to help you find a direction in life, determine what’s right or wrong, and build your character. If you take STEM courses, you’ll pick up some facts at best. But that’s not what education is about.
Worse, looking at Trump’s statement, he’s looking to defend one group, the Jews, and particularly Israel. It’s none of the government’s business. And it’s not about promoting freedom. It’s about taking sides in a dispute between two antagonistic groups—the Muslims against the Jews, or the Palestinians against the Israelis. Trump isn’t solving the problem. He’s making it worse by choosing sides. Local police and the University itself are responsible for preventing violence.
International Man: From the left and now the right, it seems like free speech is increasingly conditional—depending on who’s in power and what views are deemed acceptable.
Do you believe the First Amendment is being eroded from both ends of the political spectrum?
Doug Casey: Unfortunately, the political spectrum is only divided into left and right.
Historically, the Left has always talked about free speech and social freedom. They never really believed in them, but they were overt about hating economic freedom. The Right always pretended to defend economic freedom but traditionally hated freedom of speech and social freedom. They’re really two sides of the same coin and should both be thrown out. Only libertarians believe in both free minds and free markets as a matter of principle.
The US Constitution was intended to defend citizens from government. But unfortunately, the Constitution is now a dead letter. It’s been completely interpreted out of existence. It’s become a meaningless sham. I don’t think that’s likely to change because the people it governs no longer have any philosophical or moral grounding.
In recent elections, particularly the last, half of the population voted for actual communists—although they always avoid that word. The only way this can be solved, if it can be solved, is by returning to a government which exists only to prevent violence and allow people to pursue free minds and free markets.
Unfortunately, government has become the source of all solutions, funding, and everything else. As I’ve explained before, since government is pure force, it should do nothing but protect you from force. Force from abroad with the military, and force inside the country with the police and a court system.
Unfortunately, those three extremely important elements of a civil society can be easily corrupted by the type of people who are inevitably drawn to government.
International Man: Given these trends, from disinformation crackdowns to culture wars to campus speech battles, where do you see this headed? What does the future of free speech look like in the US?
Doug Casey: I’ve said numerous times over the last decade that the US is headed towards a civil war.
For a while, with the defeat of the Democrats—who have mutated into thinly disguised communists, Marxists, and socialists—it looked like we might have a “Morning in America.” But it turns out that morning only lasts six hours.
I think we’re headed towards something like a civil war, though nothing resembling the unpleasantness of 1861 to 1865.
The point is that when you have 350 million people compressed into a political aggregation that no longer shares a common culture, religious values, economic interests, or political beliefs and no longer has any internal cohesion, it can only be held together by force. And that’s the way the US is headed.
It’s a real pity because the concept of America was unique in the world; it was the only country that was overtly founded on the principles of free minds and free markets. But it’s completely lost the plot and has transformed from a guiding light to an active danger, both to itself and the world at large.
Reprinted with permission from International Man.
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How Globalists Use Crazed Leftists To Piss Off the Populace and Provoke Dictatorship
There is nothing more dangerous than an incomplete picture of history. A hundred years from now, if the powers-that-be have their way, the few children still allowed to be born (due to carbon controls) will be regaled with school lessons about the “Dark Ages of Nationalism” – When humanity was divided into warring states and divided societies that refused to embrace multiculturalism “to the detriment of all”.
They will say that a “great movement” for globalism and wokeness arose and that the courageous revolutionaries fought evil conservative fascists using any means necessary. The political left will be painted as heroes fighting, not for freedom, but for equity and the “greater good”. Western culture, Christianity, meritocracy, moral objectivity, personal liberty and appeals to reason will be demonized as relics of the old world – Monstrous constructs that prevented civilization from attaining true “oneness”.
None of this will be true, of course. The majority of wars are triggered by globalist interests, not nationalists, and the political left is a gaggle of insane zealots hellbent on destroying the west. But, as they say, history is written by the victors.
Many conservatives and liberty advocates still don’t understand that we are in the middle of a 4th Generation conflict. It’s not a political or ideological disagreement, it’s a war; a guerrilla war in which the enemy hides behind civilian status and the legal apparatus.
They use our moral code and our constitutional provisions against us. They find loopholes in the governmental structure and exploit those weaknesses. They turn our society into a living suicide bomb, all while claiming they hold a position of ethical superiority. It has happened before…
If you get the chance I highly recommend readers check out the in-depth investigative analysis of professor and economist Antony Sutton; specifically his book ‘Wall Street And The Bolshevik Revolution’. In it he describes the historical timeline of how Trotsky and Lenin were funded and aided by the elites of the era. The key leaders of the Marxist takeover of Russia could not have done what they did without the help of American and European globalists.
In other words, the globalists created a Marxist terror campaign across Europe and then used it to drive the public into the arms of another socialist empire in the form of The Third Reich.
In Germany, people supported fascism because they sought to drive out and eliminate the social rot created by Bolshevik relativism (very similar to the rot we see in America today). For instance, sexual degeneracy was rampant in Germany after WWI. The very first transgender clinic was founded in Berlin in 1919. The Marxists lobbied for the legalization of abortion in order to garner more female support.
The rise of the “sexual reformation” was initiated and the 1920s equivalent of the “Gay Pride” movement was born. Pedophiles began to creep out of the woodwork – The concept of underage prostitution and “rent boys” was a notable problem in Berlin.
Questions of personal liberty are fair to argue. But without moderation, psycho-sexual obsessions embraced on a large scale can trigger social collapse. The true intent of any sexual reformation is to normalize cultural and psychological outliers. Weimar Germany in the 1920s was very much like America in the 2020s in this way.
Then there was hyperinflation, economic hardship and vying political factions that drove fear into common Germans. The fascists offered a clear vision, they offered economic prosperity, they offered domestic peace, they offered an end to the morally bankrupt madness of the left, and the public jumped at the chance. It was not a good choice, but it was better to them than allowing a communist takeover.
The globalists have a tendency to attack a target population from two sides, using chaos they control, and then order they control. Marxism plays the role of chaos, and fascism plays the role of order.
Most of us are familiar with the idea of the Hegelian Dialectic. However, I would argue that the situation is much more complex today than it has ever been. There is only one true option; order is the obvious choice. Leftists and globalists must be removed from power.
But how do we avoid doing what the Germans did? How do we remove the leftist threat without diving headfirst into our own brand of totalitarianism? It might not be possible.
As I warned in my article ‘Terror Attacks Kick Off In 2025 – It’s Only Going To Get Worse So Be Prepared’, published in January, there is now a rising tide of leftist sabotage. Today, activists across the country are using property destruction for intimidation. It’s not going to stop there. This is just the first phase.
There’s the judicial overreach by activist judges to thwart any cuts to the bureaucracy, and the attempts to stop deportations of illegals. There’s steady online threats of assassination and calls for alliances with foreign adversaries and terror groups. Just be ready for bombings, shootings and the rampaging mobs because that’s all coming this summer, I have no doubt.
The risk of martial law being declared is very high if things go the way I suspect they will go, and a majority of the US public will applaud the idea. Donald Trump has taken measures to follow through on every one of his campaign promises so far and I believe that this has earned him the benefit of the doubt. However, if he did call for martial law under the circumstances I describe to expedite matters, conservatives would be falling into a classic government power trap.
Once that door is opened it will be hard to reverse matters, and there’s no guarantee that the right wing will be in control of the machine as it shifts from checks and balances into a streamlined top down autocracy. We almost fell off that cliff under the Biden Administration during covid and it’s a miracle the country is still in one piece.
The scary thing is, beyond the hypothetical risks involved, it’s difficult to argue that martial law is unreasonable. The leftists are making it very hard for us to want to fight for their liberty, and frankly most conservatives would not care if they were shipped off to an isolated island somewhere to cannibalize each other. If you examine how these activists rationalize their violence on social media, one can only conclude that they need to be locked up or booted out of the country. They’re not redeemable.
Their actions are designed to elicit a call of force from conservatives. Then the activists rush to to the global stage and scream “You see! The right wingers really are the fascists we said they were!” The mere act of applying law and order becomes “tyranny” by the definition of the progressives.
In the meantime, a lot of libertarians are still out there in the wilderness searching for a perfect solution in which no one’s rights are stepped on and all viewpoints are respected. I’ve accepted that this is not going to happen. There is no silver bullet, no magically pure society in which everyone leaves everyone else alone. In a war, someone’s rights are going out the window.
It’s a zero sum game for conservatives because the more we accommodate the political left and treat them like fellow citizens rather than an enemy insurgency, the more the US will degrade into chaos. If we respond to them as enemies, crushing them like the bugs they are, then we become the bad guys and potentially welcome in a level of government power that could hurt us all in the end.
My solution is an ugly one and it’s something that most conservative commentators don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole: Instead of relying on government power to stop the political left and the globalists, common Americans should organize and handle the problem independently. This removes the danger of government overreach and constitutional trespass.
The average American is not limited by the constitution, the government is. We don’t have to respect the legal rights of NGOs. We don’t have to give leeway to leftist rioters because we’re afraid of political optics. We don’t have to let globalists operate in the US with impunity and without fear. Keep in mind that the US was NOT founded as a libertine nation where anything goes.
The Founders believed in revolution against tyranny, not revolution against morality. They believed in freedom, as long as it’s freedom WITH responsibility. They believed in rules and order, not anarchy. There’s no way on Earth they would have tolerated leftist and globalist machinations. Neither should we.
When we do act, we have to make sure we don’t create a governmental Golem that ultimately turns on us.
Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.
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Wintour of Our Discontent
The irony of it is that we’re still living in the thick of so many of the left’s bad ideas and policies. Biological boys are still excelling in girls’ sports, and every Democrat in the Senate voted against a law to stop it. I could go on, but let’s look at how the media is reacting to The Donald’s Second Coming.
A New York Times columnist who is among the very few not suffering from a nervous breakdown after the last election wrote: “I think parallels with Nazi Germany are overdrawn; the word fascism may likewise muddy more than clarify. America won’t become North Korea, but we could look more like Hungary.” He then predicted with great assurance that Trump will go after checks and balances, will crush independent referees and civil society institutions, including the media, and will recruit shadowy private enforcers to intimidate critics.
As I said, this bum was the least anti-Trump among the paper’s motley crew, one that eerily reminds me of early Nazi propaganda back in the ’30s. To his credit, the bum did not specifically state that The Donald is being fitted for boots and a German military uniform. In The New Dentist, formerly The New Yorker, the editor David Remnick, unlike the Times man, does not hold back. Like his old man the dentist, he drills and drills like a deranged orthodontist on speed, probably dreaming he’s got The Donald open-mouthed on his chair. “In record time he has brought shame and disorder to the country.” I first thought he was referring to Sleepy Joe, but no, he meant the tall blond one. The dentist’s offspring then goes after Musk: “He flashes a smile of privilege and malice.” He means Musk, but it sounds as if he’s talking about his old man after a tooth extraction. Remnick then goes on to predict we will end up like Turkey—the country, not the bird—and prays that working-class folks will see the light sometime soon.
“Anna Wintour, who was born working-class, now acts as if she were to the manor born.”
What I find amusing is that those who scream the loudest about working people’s concerns are the least likely to know anyone who works and does not live off a Newhouse charity called Condé Nasty. Never mind. There are phonies and there are phonies, but the phoniest of all are those who scream the loudest about working-class people’s rights but can hardly say hello to the elevator operator in their posh building. Go to a Condé Nast office and see for yourself. Anna Wintour, who was born working-class, now acts as if she were to the manor born, but some of us are unfortunately old enough to remember her when she was hustling back in rainy old London. Wintour hates Trump, but she’s known for having said good morning to elevator operators. At times, that is.
Wintour’s loathing of Trump has brought him the luck needed to reach the highest office, of that I’m sure. Otherwise, my crystal ball tells me that the D.C. elites—fraudsters who oversaw waste, fraud, and graft, and used the federal budget as a kitty bank—will try to take revenge on the house cleaners, namely Trump and Musk. The federal bureaucracy is as crooked as they come, and the N.Y. Times is its guardian. A lot of powerful people are going to see their livelihoods curtailed, and they’re not going to go quietly. In will step the Times and The Washington Post with hit pieces on Musk that will get some fools to believe that DOGE is overdoing it. There will be lots of reaction to the Trump-Musk alliance, and even talk of calls for the military to depose Trump and arrest Musk, such is the despair of the entitled elite.
They’re squealing like pregnant penguins, the little darlings, but such are the joys of overdoing it. Musk is cleaning the Augean stables of bureaucracy, and there’s nothing the little darlings can do about it.
This originally appeared on Taki’s Magazine.
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They Tell You The Houthis Attack Ships, But They Never Tell You Why
None of the people applauding Trump’s war on Yemen because “the Houthis are attacking ships” will tell you why the Houthis started attacking ships.
The pundits won’t say, and the people don’t know.
After two weeks of interacting with people who support Trump’s war I can confidently say that none of them know why the war is happening. They know it has something to do with the Houthis attacking ships in the Red Sea, but they never have any idea why those attacks started happening in the first place. They generally assume it’s because the Houthis are just plain evil and want to attack ships, or because Iran ordered them to do it in order to take over the middle east. The words “terrorists” and “pirates” come up a lot.
They legitimately do not know it’s a blockade aimed at halting Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, and that all attacks had ceased while the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was in effect. They have no idea that Ansar Allah only announced the Red Sea blockade would resume after Trump and Netanyahu actively collaborated to sabotage the ceasefire and resume starving Gaza, or that they hadn’t even resumed attacks yet when Trump began bombing them.
My latest piece in @Mondoweiss: Yemen is acting responsibly to stop genocide and the U.S. is bombing them for it https://t.co/STmueYMCdR
— Craig Mokhiber (@CraigMokhiber) April 2, 2025
They do not know that the Houthis succeeded in causing an 85 percent reduction in shipping activity to Israel’s Port Eilat, putting effective pressure on the Netanyahu regime to end the Gaza holocaust. They do not know that Trump’s reason for bombing Yemen is the same reason as Biden’s: because the US empire believes it should be allowed to back Israel’s genocide without any consequences or resistance of any kind.
They’re supporting a war without knowing why they support it. This is possible because they not only don’t know why the war is happening — they also don’t care. They would support literally anything Trump did for any reason whatsoever, because they are mindless infantile cultists and not free thinking adults.
They don’t need to know why Trump is bombing Yemen, all they need is to be assured in a confident-sounding tone that the people he is bombing deserve to be bombed. As long as they receive that assurance, they don’t ask any further questions. They don’t even bother doing a few seconds worth of research. All they care about is supporting whatever Trump and his pundits tell them to support.
When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen’s critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign trying to get rid of them. pic.twitter.com/kL3fYDqJlY
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 21, 2023
And what keeps blowing my mind is that they’re still supporting Trump’s war even after seeing the leaked Signal chat featuring Trump’s own team privately acknowledging to each other that it isn’t really necessary. They know that chat exists. They saw Trump officials talking about how there’s no real reason the bombing needs to happen right now and at most it can be used to “send a message” (whatever that means). But they’ve been aggressively defending Trump’s war this whole time anyway.
Really all that would need to happen for the Houthis to permanently stop attacking ships would be for Trump to use the immense amount of leverage the White House has over Israel and force Netanyahu into a permanent ceasefire. That’s how he could make himself into the “President of Peace” Tulsi Gabbard says he is instead of another disgusting warmonger advancing all the longstanding neocon war agendas his political faction pretends to oppose.
But that all it is. Pretending. They’re all phonies and frauds. A bunch of George W Bush Republicans LARPing as Ron Paul libertarians. Bleating human livestock cheering for every act of mass military slaughter they are instructed to cheer for.
______________
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We Are Facing the Most Dangerous Totalitarian Movement in History
Legendary award-winning filmmaker and political activist turned freedom fighter, Aaron Russo, left us an explosive legacy before his passing. In a never-before-seen interview that challenges official narratives and lays bare the hidden threads of power, this award-winning filmmaker and freedom fighter offers a chilling glimpse into how the global system operates from the shadows. In this 2007 interview with Alex Jones, conducted shortly before his passing after a prolonged battle with cancer, Russo offers a deep and revealing analysis of the conversations he had with his friend Nick Rockefeller. Throughout the conversation, he unravels an intricate web of corruption, financial control, and government manipulation that has subjugated not only the United States, but also the rest of the world.
An Unexpected Journey Toward Truth
Aaron Russo’s story begins as a successful entrepreneur and creative visionary. He pioneered the women’s fashion industry, creating the first bikini bottoms for women in 1963, and later founded the Electric Theater in Chicago, a nightclub that became a haven for hippies during the turbulent 1968 Democratic Convention. But it was precisely there that Russo experienced what he calls “my awakening.”
Russo, a man who always championed individuality and freedom, tells us how his awakening was not a singular event, but a progression of realizing the growing inhibitions of the government. One key incident, the senseless raid on his Chicago nightclub, opened his eyes to systemic corruption, although he initially thought it was a local problem. The falsification of facts by authorities and the subsequent extortion by the police were a brutal education in the true nature of power. “That was my awakening,” Russo confesses. “I thought this was America. I thought we lived in a country where there was justice.”
This incident marked the beginning of a personal transformation that would lead Russo to question everything from tax policies to the very structure of the American government. “At first, I thought it was just Chicago,” he reflects. “But then I realized this wasn’t local; it was systemic.“
But Russo’s insight transcended local corruption. Through his research for the film “America: Freedom to Fascism,” he exposed the core of the system:
- The Federal Reserve is a private bank that controls the issuance of money, forcing the government to borrow and tax the labor of citizens to pay interest to these private bankers. In 1980, Ronald Reagan stated that not one cent of income tax would go to the nation, but directly to the Federal Reserve.
- The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) is a symptom of this problem, and although Russo acknowledges that the Supreme Court has ruled it lacks the authority to tax labor and wages based on the 16th Amendment, he advises paying taxes for fear of retaliation, comparing it to paying the mob.
- We are led to believe that we live in a democracy, but this is an orchestrated lie. The Founding Fathers abhorred democracy, envisioning us as a constitutional republic where individual rights are protected from the will of the majority. Democracy is the rule of the 51% over the 49%, while in a republic, the 99% cannot take away the rights of the 1%.
But Russo’s vision delves even deeper into the shadows, revealing a sinister agenda for the future, directly from an insider: Nick Rockefeller. According to Russo, the banking industry’s ultimate plan is the creation of a one-world government, controlled by them, through of stages such as the European Union and the attempt at the North American Union.
A Look Inside the Elite
According to Russo, Rockefeller contacted him after seeing one of his videos critical of the establishment. What followed was an unusual relationship: while they enjoyed dinners and philosophical conversations, Rockefeller attempted to recruit him as part of the global elite, offering him business deals and even membership in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The real intention was to silence his dissenting voice and make him part of his plan.
However, this closeness gave Russo access to chilling information. In one of the most explosive revelations, Rockefeller confessed to him eleven months before 9/11 that there would be a catastrophic event that would justify military invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the implementation of massive control measures under the pretext of fighting terrorism.
“He told me there would be an event, although he never specified what it would be,” Russo recounted. “From that event, we would invade Afghanistan to build pipelines from the Caspian Sea, invade Iraq to seize the oil fields, and establish bases in the Middle East.”
According to Russo, it was clear that the alleged terrorist act was a massive hoax without a tangible enemy, part of a carefully designed strategy to establish a regime of fear and control over both the American and global population. He maintains that 9/11 was carried out by individuals within the government and banking system to instill terror and subjugate citizens.
“The war on terror is a total fraud,” he stated emphatically. “There is no one to defeat. It’s endless because it’s designed to be. That way they can do whatever they want to the American people.”
Another disturbing aspect of the interview is Rockefeller’s portrayal of women’s liberation as a deliberate tool to break up families and increase tax revenue. According to Russo, Rockefeller admitted that the Rockefeller Foundation funded feminist movements not for noble ideals, but to achieve two main goals:
- Taxing the half of the population that previously didn’t work outside the home.
- Disintegrating the family structure by sending children to school at an early age, where they could be indoctrinated to view the state as their primary guardian.
This strategy, according to Russo, has had devastating effects on marginalized communities, especially among Black families in the United States, where illegitimacy rates have jumped from 10% decades ago to 90% today due to welfare policies that discourage men from being in the home.
Rockefeller also openly discussed with Russo the elite’s ultimate agenda:
- The reduction of the world’s population. He expressed concern that there was an excess of people on the planet and advocated for a drastic decrease in population, suggesting it should be cut in half.
- The implantation of microchips to control society. This chip, he explained, would serve as a universal identification system that would allow bankers and rulers to monitor and regulate every aspect of our lives. “It’s part of their plan to establish a centralized world government.”
- The elimination of physical money. These chips would store all of an individual’s financial and personal information, allowing absolute control over the population. “If you protest or rebel, they simply turn off your chip,” he warns. “Without access to money or basic resources, you instantly become a pariah.”
It’s astonishing to see how his 2007 predictions are materializing today. Indeed, all of these points have been fulfilled since 2021. People continue to die by the thousands around the world as a result of vaccines; microchips were already implemented in 2021, with the introduction of graphene-based nanotechnology; and the elimination of cash and the introduction of a currency are gradually being implemented in all countries.
Continuing the interview, Rockefeller hinted that those who possess certain privileges within this new order would have immunity from common laws. For example, he mentioned that there are special cards (“KMA,” or “Kiss My Ass”) that guarantee legal protection for members of the elite, exempting them from fines, arrests, and other legal consequences.
Perhaps Russo’s most forceful criticism is directed at the Federal Reserve, the central bank he claims is responsible for the United States’ massive debt and loss of economic sovereignty. He denounced the government’s borrowing from private bankers when it could issue its own interest-free currency.
The Origin of the Modern Crisis
Russo begins by pointing to a pivotal point in American history: 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was founded. According to him, this event marked the beginning of an economic and moral collapse that has brought the country to the brink. Before the creation of the Fed, Russo asserts, the United States lived in an era of economic stability without significant inflation. A dollar had the same value for decades, allowing families to plan their lives with confidence. However, since 1913, everything has changed.
And make no mistake, this inflation is no accident. It’s a deliberate tool! By printing unbacked money, these bankers have devalued our currency, forcing the working class into deeper debt and becoming less competitive globally. This is a war on the middle class!
Russo doesn’t stop at criticizing only the Federal Reserve; he goes further, pointing out how this institution is interconnected with other global central banks. “The bankers own the United States Congress,” he declares, quoting Senator Dick Durbin, who publicly admitted that bank lobbyists have absolute control over Capitol Hill. But the dominance of these actors is not limited to the US. According to Russo, the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland acts as the “central bank of all central banks,” coordinating efforts to establish a world government under the control of a financial elite.
This elite, made up of families like the Rockefellers, uses its influence to control and manipulate both the economy and politics, creating false divisions between left and right so that we don’t see the true puppet masters who are above all else. “It doesn’t matter if a Republican or a Democrat wins; both parties are bought,” Russo asserts. His vision is clear: to create a world where institutions replace people as the dominant actors, eliminating any vestige of individual sovereignty.
The post We Are Facing the Most Dangerous Totalitarian Movement in History appeared first on LewRockwell.
Ending Militarism in America
read the news today, oh boy. About a lucky man named Elon Musk. But he lost out on one thing: he didn’t get a top secret briefing on Pentagon war plans for China. And the news people breathed a sigh of relief.
With apologies to John Lennon and The Beatles, a day in the life is getting increasingly tough to take here in the land of the free. I’m meant to be reassured that Musk didn’t get to see America’s top-secret plans for — yes! — going to war with China, even as I’m meant to ignore the constant drumbeat of propaganda, the incessant military marches that form America’s background music, conveying the message that America must have war plans for China, that indeed war in or around China is possible, even probable, in the next decade. Maybe in 2027?
My fellow Americans, we should be far more alarmed by such secret U.S. war plans, along with those “pivots” to Asia and the Indo-Pacific, and the military base-building efforts in the Philippines, than reassured by the “good news” that Comrade Billionaire Musk was denied access to the war room, meaning (for Dr. Strangelove fans) he didn’t get to see “the big board.”
It’s war, war, everywhere in America. We do indeed have a strange love for it. I’ve been writing for TomDispatch for 18 years now — this is my 111th essay (the other 110 are in a new book of mine) — most of them focusing on militarism in this country, as well as our disastrous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the ruinous weapons systems we continue to fund (including new apocalyptic nuclear weapons), and the war song that seems to remain ever the same.
A few recent examples of what I mean: President Trump has already bombed Yemen more than once. He’s already threatening Iran. He’s sending Israel all the explosives, all the weaponry it needs to annihilate the Palestinians in Gaza (so too, of course, did Joe Biden). He’s boasting of building new weapons systems like the Air Force’s much-hyped F-47 fighter jet, the “47” designation being an apparent homage by its builder, Boeing, to Trump himself, the 47th president. He and his “defense” secretary, Pete Hegseth, continually boast of “peace through strength,” an Orwellian construction that differs little from “war is peace.” And I could, of course, go on and on and on and on…
Occasionally, Trump sounds a different note. When Tulsi Gabbard became the director of national intelligence, he sang a dissonant note about a “warmongering military-industrial complex.” And however haphazardly, he does seem to be working for some form of peace with respect to the Russia-Ukraine War. He also talks about his fear of a cataclysmic nuclear war. Yet, if you judge him by deeds rather than words, he’s just another U.S. commander-in-chief enamored of the military and military force (whatever the cost, human or financial).
Consider here the much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by that lucky man Elon Musk. Even as it dismantles various government agencies like the Department of Education and USAID, it has — no surprise here! — barely touched the Pentagon and its vast, nearly trillion-dollar budget. In fact, if a Republican-controlled Congress has any say in the matter, the Pentagon budget will likely be boosted significantly for Fiscal Year 2026 and thereafter. As inefficient as the Pentagon may be (and we really don’t know just how inefficient it is, since the bean counters there keep failing audit after audit, seven years running), targeted DOGE Pentagon cuts have been tiny. That means there’s little incentive for the generals to change, streamline their operations, or even rethink in any significant fashion. It’s just spend, spend, spend until the money runs out, which I suppose it will eventually, as the national debt soars toward $37 trillion and climbing.
Even grimmer than that, possibly, is America’s state of mind, our collective zeitgeist, the spirit of this country. That spirit is one in which a constant state of war (and preparations for more of the same) is accepted as normal. War, to put it bluntly, is our default state. It’s been that way since 9/11, if not before then. As a military historian, I’m well aware that the United States is, in a sense, a country made by war. It’s just that today we seem even more accepting of that reality, or resigned to it, than we’ve ever been. What gives?
Remember when, in 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever”? Fortunately, after much struggle and bloodshed, he was proven wrong. So, can we change the essential American refrain of war now, war tomorrow, and war forever? Can we render that obsolete? Or is that too much to hope for or ask of America’s “exceptional” democracy?
Taking on the MICIMATT(SH)
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern did America a great service when he came up with the acronym MICIMATT, or the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, an extension of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, or MIC (from his farewell speech in 1961). Along with the military and industry (weapons makers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin), the MICIMATT adds Congress (which Eisenhower had in his original draft speech but deleted in the interest of comity), the intelligence “community” (18 different agencies), the media (generally highly supportive of wars and weapons spending), academia (which profits greatly from federal contracts, especially research and development efforts for yet more destructive weaponry), and think tanks (which happily lap up Pentagon dollars to tell us the “smart” position is always to prepare for yet more war).
You’ll note, however, that I’ve added a parenthetical SH to McGovern’s telling acronym. The S is for America’s sporting world, which eternally gushes about how it supports and honors America’s military, and Hollywood, which happily sells war as entertainment (perhaps the best known and most recent film being Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, in which an unnamed country that everyone knows is Iran gets its nuclear ambitions spanked by a plucky team of U.S. Naval pilots). A macho catchphrase from the original Top Gun was “I feel the need — the need for speed!” It may as well have been: I feel the need — the need for pro-war propaganda!
Yes, MICIMATT(SH) is an awkward acronym, yet it has the virtue of capturing some of the still-growing power, reach, and cultural penetration of Ike’s old MIC. It should remind us that it’s not just the military and the weapons-makers who are deeply invested in war and — yes! — militarism. It’s Congress; the CIA; related intel “community” members; the mainstream media (which often relies on retired generals and admirals for “unbiased” pro-war commentary); academia (consider how quickly institutions like Columbia University have bent the knee to Trump); and think tanks — in fact, all those “best and brightest” who advocate for war with China, the never-ending war on terror, war everywhere.
But perhaps the “soft power” of the sporting world and Hollywood is even more effective at selling war than the hard power of bombs and bullets. National Football League coaches patrol the sidelines wearing camouflage, allegedly to salute the troops. Military flyovers at games celebrate America’s latest death-dealing machinery. Hollywood movies are made with U.S. military cooperation and that military often has veto power over scripts. To cite only one example, the war movie 12 Strong (2018) turned the disastrous Afghan War that lasted two horrendous decades into a stunningly quick American victory, all too literally won by U.S. troops riding horses. (If only the famed cowboy actor John Wayne had still been alive to star in it!)
The MICIMATT(SH), employing millions of Americans, consuming trillions of dollars, and churning through tens of thousands of body bags for U.S. troops over the years, while killing millions of people abroad, is an almost irresistible force. And right now, it seems like there’s no unmovable object to blunt it.
Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve written dozens of “Tomgrams” suggesting steps America could take to reverse militarism and warmongering. As I look over those essays, I see what still seem to me sensible ideas, but they die quick deaths in the face of, if not withering fire from the MICIMATT(SH), then being completely ignored by those who matter.
And while this country has a department of war (disguised as a department of defense), it has no department of peace. There’s no budget anywhere for making peace, either. We do have a colossal Pentagon that houses 30,000 workers, feverishly making war plans they won’t let Elon Musk (or any of us) see. It’s for their eyes only, not yours, though they may well ask you or your kids to serve in the military, because the best-laid plans of those war-men do need lots of warm bodies, even if those very plans almost invariably (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) go astray.
So, to repeat myself, how do you take on the MICIMATT(SH)? The short answer: It’s not easy, but I know of a few people who had some inspirational ideas.
On Listening to Ike, JFK, MLK, and, Yes, Madison, Too
Militarism isn’t exactly a new problem in America. Consider Randolph Bourne’s 1918 critique of war as “the health of the state,” or General Smedley Butler’s confession in the 1930s that “war is a racket” run by the “gangsters of capitalism.” In fact, many Americans have, over the years, spoken out eloquently against war and militarism. Many beautiful and moving songs have asked us to smile on your brother and “love one another right now.” War, as Edwin Starr sang so powerfully once upon a time, is good for “absolutely nothin’,” though obviously a lot of people disagree and indeed are making a living by killing and preparing for yet more of it.
And that is indeed the problem. Too many people are making too much money off of war. As Smedley Butler wrote so long ago: “Capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people — those who do the suffering and still pay the price — make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.” Pretty simple, right? Until you realize that those whom we elect are largely obedient to the moneyed class because the highest court in our land has declared that money is speech. Again, I didn’t say it was going to be easy. Nor did Butler.
As a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, I want to end my 111th piece at TomDispatch by focusing on the words of Ike, John F. Kennedy (JFK), Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK), and James Madison. And I want to redefine what words like duty, honor, country, and patriotism should mean. Those powerful words and sentiments should be centered on peace, on the preservation and enrichment of life, on tapping “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln wrote so long ago in his First Inaugural Address.
Why do we serve? What does our oath of office really mean? For it’s not just military members who take that oath but also members of Congress and indeed the president himself. We raise our right hands and swear to support and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
There’s nothing in that oath about warriors and warfighters, but there is a compelling call for all of us, as citizens, to be supporters and defenders of representative democracy, while promoting the general welfare (not warfare), and all the noble sentiments contained in that Constitution. If we’re not seeking a better and more peaceful future, one in which freedom may expand and thrive, we’re betraying our oath.
If so, we have met the enemy — and he is us.
Ike told us in 1953 that constant warfare is no way of life at all, that it is (as he put it), humanity crucifying itself on a cross of iron. In 1961, he told us democracy was threatened by an emerging military-industrial complex and that we, as citizens, had to be both alert and knowledgeable enough to bring it to heel. Two years later, JFK told us that peace — even at the height of the Cold War — was possible, not just peace in our time, but peace for all time. However, it would, he assured us, require sacrifice, wisdom, and commitment.
How, in fact, can I improve on these words that JFK uttered in 1963, just a few months before he was assassinated?
“What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living…
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age… when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn… surely the acquisition of such idle [nuclear] stockpiles — which can only destroy and never create — is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war — and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.
Are we ready to be urgently rational, America? Are we ready to be blessed as peacemakers? Or are we going to continue to suffer from what MLK described in 1967 as our very own “spiritual death” due to the embrace of militarism, war, empire, and racism?
Of course, MLK wasn’t perfect, nor for that matter was JFK, who was far too enamored of the Green Berets and too wedded to a new strategy of “flexible response” to make a clean break in Vietnam before he was killed. Yet those men bravely and outspokenly promoted peace, something uncommonly rare in their time — and even more so in ours.
More than 200 years ago, James Madison warned us that continual warfare is the single most corrosive force to the integrity of representative democracy. No other practice, no other societal force is more favorable to the rise of authoritarianism and the rule of tyrants than pernicious war. Wage war long and it’s likely you can kiss your democracy, your rights, and just maybe your ass goodbye.
America, from visionaries and prophets like MLK, we have our marching orders. They are not to invest yet more in preparations for war, whether with China or any other country. Rather, they are to gather in the streets and otherwise raise our voices against the scourge of war. If we are ever to beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks and make war no more, something must be done.
Let’s put an end to militarism in America. Let’s be urgently rational. To cite John Lennon yet again: You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Together, let’s imagine and create a better world.
Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.The post Ending Militarism in America appeared first on LewRockwell.
The Prince Charming Problem
There is a pretty constant discussion on social media in general and the Catholic blogosphere in particular about the flight from marriage among young people. A subset of that discussion came up in a recent tweet, where discussants debated whether a woman who has reached 30 and not found her “ideal” will have to “settle” for an “average” guy.
I know that such “discussions” are tilted clickbait, intended to elicit barbed comments. I, rather, want to go back to a different problem. The National Marriage Project, whose research on marriage trends is far more valuable than much of the babble either the never-ending Synod groups or Pontifical Academy for Life assembles, hit this nail on the head over 20 years ago in a report: “Who Wants to Marry a Soul Mate?” It warned that, especially among but not limited to young women, there was a growing phenomenon of imagining there is somebody out there who would fulfill one’s every wish and dream, provide total emotional succor, and bring utter contentment to one’s life.
The “soul mate” ideal of marriage was going strong a few years ago, and, honestly, it probably still continues to coast along in people’s—especially young women’s—minds. It would be interesting, however, to see updated social science data as to whether despair about finding that “soul mate” has fueled the flight from marriage.
Consider, after all, Disney’s reboot of Snow White. I haven’t seen it, but the “re-visioning” of what Rachel Zegler called its “dated” tale centers on a heroine convinced of her own powers, without needing that guy.
No human being is, of course, going to be that total and comprehensive “perfect” match. To expect that is to set you and the other up for failure. Even the best of couples will disagree. Also implicit in the “soul mate” vision is the expectation not that I should be the “soul mate” of another but that what determines the propriety of the match is whether the other fulfills me. Not getting out of that egocentric focus will poison any relationship.
Consider the very terms of the discussion: Will I “settle?” Neo-Protagorean women seem to think they are “the measure of all things,” another misleading perception likely to leave them—contrary to their real desires—unfulfilled. Pace Zegler’s “update,” one finds one’s self by losing, not tightly clinging to, one’s self.
These are basic truths of Catholic marriage theology that the world desperately needs to hear and ponder if it is to get out of the suicidal, egocentrically focused mindset that is destroying the formation of marriages and young families. This is where the communion, participation, and mission focus of the Church belongs, not self-referential talk.
There are hooks to be found in our American culture. I recommended Marty as a Valentine’s Day film. It’s about an average-looking Italian Catholic working-class guy who’s entered his 30s, wants to get married, but hasn’t found the girl—until he meets an “average” Irish Catholic woman equally looking for love.
Thirteen years ago, I also asked: “Do you want to marry George Bailey or Prince Charming?” Because “soul-mate” marriage is looking for Prince Charming, a creature so rare Snow Zegler White replaces him with Girl Boss (and, in a few years, likely a litter of cats). Though it’s thought of as a “Christmas movie,” It’s a Wonderful Life has a broader perspective and, in many ways, is amazingly modern.
George Bailey is also an “average” guy. Initially, it might seem he is without ambition: He still lives at Ma Bailey’s. He hasn’t gotten a college degree. Mary, whom he’ll marry, has. Should she “settle” for him? Or Sam Wainwright? George couldn’t afford a McMansion. He gave Mary a fixer-upper that—given the staircase railing finial that keeps detaching—is more fixer than upper.
Is the question—for the Baileys and for moderns—one of “settling”? Or, rather, how one defines “Prince Charming”?
This originally appeared on Crisis Magazine.
The post The Prince Charming Problem appeared first on LewRockwell.
The Western World Has Abandoned Democracy
Once upon a time political establishments would focus on defeating their opponent/challenger in elections. Now they imprison them or stop them from running, as the Democrats tried to do to trump with four criminal indictments. In Brazil Jair Bolsonaro faces alleged coup charges. In Romania, a host country for a US missile base on Russia’s border, Calin Georgecu has been falsely charged with “incitement to actions against the institutional order,” which in translation means running for president against Washington’s puppet government, which he is now barred from doing. In France Marine Le Pen has been sentenced to two years in a jail cell and a five year ban on running for president of France.
Le Pen’s party holds the largest number of seats in the French legislature or National Assembly. Recent polls show her with a 10 point lead over the establishment candidate, so the establishment protected itself by putting her in prison. Understand what this means, the French people are being denied by the French government the political representation that they want.
In Ukraine the “democracy” the West is so concerned to protect has been ruled for some time by a dictator whose term of office has expired. I am beginning to have some concern that Trump himself could become part of the dissolution of Western democracy. Why has Trump jumped all over Russian President Putin, who has kept Trump’s agreement, while protecting Zelensky, who has not kept the agreement, from Putin’s criticism? Is it because Trump is studying Zelensky’s ability to rule beyond his term in office? Other developments indicate weakening American democracy. Trump’s kowtowing to Israel has destroyed the First Amendment, which is the foundation of American democracy, and Democrat judges are destroying confidence in judicial rulings by their interference with President Trump’s powers. These are not healthy developments. A judiciary that has discredited itself cannot rein in an ambitious leader.
I have written a lot about the collapse of the belief system in the West, such as yesterday’s article. This is an immensely serious problem, and I have been unable to get any attention given to it.
Throughout the Western World the main focus of the educational system is to undermine the belief system that maintains accountable government, which means a government accountable to the people and not to an establishment of vested interests. The erosion of the belief system is far advanced. President Trump is certainly not helping when he sacrifices the Constitution of the United States to protecting Israel from criticism.
Ideas have consequences, and the consequence of the destruction of our ideas that uphold liberty is tyranny, which has raised its ugly head in France, Romania, and Brazil, and perhaps in America.
The post The Western World Has Abandoned Democracy appeared first on LewRockwell.
They’re all going to hell for the genocide in Gaza
US ARMY Colonel (Retired) and diplomat Ann Wright calls them all out!
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Well, If Viruses Don’t Exist Then What Causes (Measles, Chickenpox, Etc Etc Etc)?
MM Comment:
One of the most persistent objections when presenting the overwhelming evidence that viruses do not exist or cause a particular disease is for someone to immediately ask the following question, expecting to shut the conversation down completely:
Well then, What Causes (It)?
Please watch at least the first 9 minutes this video, HERE.
You will love the examples Dr Tom Cowan gives to clearly answer this question.
Highly Recommended
For a deeper dive into the scholarship please also read these resources, HERE and HERE.
Thanks to MT for alerting us to this video segment.
The post Well, If Viruses Don’t Exist Then What Causes (Measles, Chickenpox, Etc Etc Etc)? appeared first on LewRockwell.
Is The West About To Implode?
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