Puzzled by the title? It will all come clear.
By Paul Craig Roberts: Europeans have written to me with more information that raises questions about the Charlie Hebdo affair. Some point out the strange emptiness of the street on which the professional killers depart. Others point out the film has hallmarks of orchestration or staging. Still others point out the size and described physical attributes of the killers do not correspond with the accused brothers and that the getaway car turns away from the scene differently from the official description. Another puzzle is that the video of the police assault on the deli repeatedly shows police moving in front of other police who are firing their weapons, yet despite the pointblank range are not hit. And there are other matters.
All I can say is that clearly at least some Europeans notice and on the basis of what they have seen have a lot of suspicion. I cannot evaluate the information sent to me. I do not know the neighborhood in Paris or traffic patterns. I know nothing about film making. Those who know enough about these matters for their suspicions to be aroused are the ones who need to address these issues. Possibly some of these suspicions are contrived red herrings designed to redirect the focus of suspicion down dead ends and discredit skeptics.
In my articles I raised a question about the official story, which was so completely at the ready as to appear pre-packaged. I said that the official story had many of the characteristics of a false flag operation. I did not say it was one. My intent is for the media to make some effort to verify the story and not simply repeat the script handed to them. I made it clear that I thought it unlikely the story would be examined by the print and TV media. As Patrick Smith makes clear in CounterPunch, an embedded media is not a media. Journalism is absent along with truth.
My column was used both by neoconservatives and the leftwing People for the American Way to attack or to try to embarrass Ron Paul.
I learned of this when an email arrived from a Washington Post reporter asking if I had
considered the possible effect on Rand Paul’s presidential prospects before writing the article for a Ron Paul website. Apparently, the reporter had in mind a story: “Paul Craig Roberts Derails Rand Paul’s Presidential Hopes.” I suppose the story was going to be that by publishing the conspiracy kook Roberts, Ron Paul had destroyed his son’s chance to become President.
At the time I had no idea what the Washington Post reporter was asking about. I replied that I write for my website and that, once I post, many other websites from locations around the world pick up the column and repost it and that it is beyond my powers to consider what implications my columns might have for all the known and unknown websites that might choose to republish it.
Next I learned from readers that some non-entity named Luke Brinker, who doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, had attacked Ron Paul on the tabloid site Salon: “Ron Paul defends insane Charlie Hebdo conspiracy theory,” and in the process called me a “paleoconservative crank and notorious 9/11 truther.”
What was this all about? It turned out that the notorious neoconservative William Kristol
had started it. Kristol’s way of defending the official story was to try to bring embarrassment to Ron Paul, with the result that libertarians would line up with the official story in defense of Ron Paul.
Misrepresentation of my article was essential to the plot. My statement that the Charlie Hebdo affair has characteristics of a false flag event was turned into an accusation that it was a false flag event. Of course, we don’t have proof one way or the other. On one side we have an official narrative that relies entirely on belief in the veracity of officials and their embedded media, which after Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, and Ukraine is not very high. On the other hand we have the suspicious aspects that many have pointed out.
When Ron Paul was deposed on People for the American Way’s RightWing Watch, he stated the obvious. He said that I had not said it was a false flag event but had pointed out reasons that suspicious needed to be investigated and answered for the sake of the credibility of the official account. Ron Paul said that he supports that sound approach and that it was important for people to think and not simply blindly accept government explanations.
That should have been the end of it. But no, libertarians responded not quite like Kristol had hoped but partially. Dale Steinreich wrote on LewRockwell.com that he “doesn’t buy Roberts’ posited theory,” thus perpetuating the misrepresentation as I have no theory, only suspicions. Steinreich then takes issue with the various neoconservative and leftwing obscurantists who are out to get Ron Paul.
I think that Steinreich is unnecessarily defensive. Ron Paul needs no defense from proven warmongers and ideological jerks. Nevertheless, Steinreich took the bait. Part of his defense of Ron Paul is to write: “For clarity, Paul Craig Roberts is not a libertarian. . . . he is a supporter of federal programs such as Social Security and Medicare.” As hardly anything could be worse than that, not even conspiracy suspicions, Steinreich concludes that “far more left progressives share the totality of [Roberts’] current views than libertarians.”
So here we have again the view about which I have written so often that the great mass of people cannot evaluate what is said or written without first classifying it into a prevailing ideological box. If what is said fits their box, it is correct. If not, it is wrong. According to this way of thinking, If you support Social Security and Medicare you are a leftwing progressive. Therefore the leftwing freaks attacking Ron Paul are really attacking their own Paul Craig Roberts.
Steinreich certainly turns the tables on the feeble-minded who tried to attack Ron Paul
through me.
This brings me now to the last part of my title, my real interest in this affair. Possibly on one occasion during his life William Kristol told the truth about something. I just don’t know what it was. As for Salon and RightWing Watch, they have no following among thinking people. Essentially they serve as gatekeepers and propagandists for Washington and private interest groups. Everyone knows that William Kristol and The Weekly Standard want more war, especially with Israel’s enemies, and that leftwing progressives hate people like Ron Paul, who believe in limited government and distrust the left progressives’ god, which is government.
What interest me is Steinreich’s opinion that I am a suspect supporter of freedom and liberty because I support Social Security and Medicare. Clearly, Steinreich knows little about my positions or the history of Social Security privatization, a debate I started with my Business Week column back in the 1980s.
During the 1980s and into the 1990s I supported Social Security privatization, or perhaps more precisely, looking at it closely. In one of my Business Week columns I wrote about the Chilean government minister who succeeded in privatizing the social security system in Chile. I do not know the current condition of Chile’s social security system, but when I wrote the system had proved to be a success, and many Chileans had become share owners in Chile’s economy.
The Chilean minister thanked me profusely for making him world famous. He travelled around the world explaining how he went about the task that he accomplished, and he ended up at the Cato Institute in Washington, at that time a libertarian think tank at which I spent several years before being evicted for being an independent thinker.
Back at the time I was advocating thought about Social Security privatization the Dow Jones was around 1,000. The subsequent rise in the market would have made privatization feasible. More importantly, perhaps, if Social Security had been privatized, it is unlikely Congress would have deregulated the financial system. It is one thing if gamblers wish to risk their money in a casino. It is another if it is the money of Social Security retirees.
Once the financial system was deregulated–a libertarian objective–it became impossible to privatize Social Security other than for insincere reasons of letting Wall Street rob retirees. The lack of accountability, which followed the last financial crash, and the declaration of financial institutions being too big to fail, and thus are carried on the nation’s budget or the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, also make clear that it is impossible to trust old age security to an unaccountable financial system.
Therefore, being practical and not a libertarian ideologue, I understand that Social Security privatization is no longer possible on the basis of a sound and sincere case. It might still happen as part of the normal corruption that now engulfs the US government.
Neoconservatives have an ideology of US world hegemony and an agenda to achieve it. Everything that they do and say relates to their agenda.
The leftwing progressives and neoliberals have their agendas, and, like the neocons,
admissible thought is agenda-specific.
Libertarians have an agenda, an honorable one but largely not practical. In the libertarian mind, it is government that misuses power. The remedy is to place power in private sector hands. Yet as all of history shows, private interests also misuse power.
The solution to the dilemma is countervailing power. Labor unions to offset capitalist monopolies and company stores. Private interests that government must both accommodate and regulate. The division of government power into executive, legislative and judicial, a distribution of power between federal, state, and local governments, and accountability of all to law and the Constitution.
Perfect results would not be forthcoming, but there would be more liberty and more justice than if one power rules us all. The goal is to keep Sauron off the throne.
Being impractical, libertarians have jeopardized a better outcome, and advanced a worse one, as much as have other groups. The rise of jobs offshoring, misinterpreted by libertarians as free trade, destroyed the countervailing power of labor unions. As this domino fell, it knocked over another–the Democratic Party. The decline in union financial support sent Democrats to the same influence purchasers as patronized by Republicans, with the consequence that the same interest groups now control both parties.
Conservatives worshiping presidential power have supported the accumulation of undue power in the executive branch, power that has over-ridden the Constitution.
America is now a closed-mind country. Minds are closed by ideological agendas, by narrow private interests, and by the view that only conspiracy kooks dissent from official explanations. Dissent and protest are gradually being criminalized. The government does not succeed all at once, but gradually step by step.
Before too long we will have to believe the most fantastic stories or be arrested. That is the path that both government and ideologues have us on.
Peter Koenig has a clear vision of Charlie Hebdo and where it is taking us. His case is certainly logically superior to the official case supported by William Kristol and Luke Brinker that defending free speech means shutting down dissenting opinion. (According to my French correspondents, Koenig failed to apply his skepticism of the Charlie Hebdo affair to the vastly over-reported size of the demonstrations.)
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X art by WB7
A million and a half people in Paris take to the streets – about 6 million throughout Europe – all screaming or carrying posters with a maddening, inexplicable “Je Suis Charlie” – depicting an utterly brainwashed mindset, brainwashed for decades with Washington directed mind control.
They do not know, do not want to know, that the Charlie massacre was yet another staged event, another false flag that will eventually give their masters green light to intensify their ‘wars on terror’ around the globe. Terrorists are mostly Muslims; so is their dictum. Before the massacre, the powers that be identified three Muslims as the perpetrators of the crime to come. Soon after the Charlie attack, they sent killer squads to massacre them, before anybody could question them. The fight on terror – don’t leave witnesses behind.
The millions of demonstrators’war cry is literally asking the western armies, led by NATO to turn- and speed up their brutal killing machine in the Middle East – to exterminate the Moslem population.The western public has been told and is constantly being told by the western powers dominated main stream media thatMuslims are at the heart of all evil; when in fact quite the contrary is true. The West under neoliberal leadership (sic) has become a horrifying merciless killing machine.
That’s Paris Charlie revisited and in a nutshell. – That’s our neoliberal ‘civilization’ – with a purpose. False flag written all over the walls of Charlie Hebdo’s blasphemous infrastructure. Waging even more savage war on the 1.6 billion Muslims.Killing 17 people by Empire and its stooges, will allow Empire and its stooges to kill more millions, perhaps tens of millions, to exterminate this ‘evil’ Muslim sect of ‘terrorists’. A ‘terrorist’ is anybody who doesn’t bend to the empire’s boot. That doctrine has been impregnated in western minds ever since another false flag killed on 9/11 about 3,000 people in New York, allowing the beginning of the eternal war – wars, one succeeding the next – the criminal Bush-Blair legacy of the 21st Century.
The Afghanistan invasion of empire directed NATO forces was to control the TAPI pipeline project (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India), for which the Taliban were unwilling to negotiate with the Bush family, nor with a secret Congressional commission in 2001. The project is as of this day a bone of contention – and a good reason for Obama to leave a permanent ‘residue’ of troops in Afghanistan.
To keep a roving mindless populace tight – local false flags, à la Boston Marathon bombing are necessary to intensify repression, abrogate ever more civil liberties – and this even on demand from the very people affected by the repression. They want more security, more protection.
As with Charlie Hebdo, the bad guys were pre-identified,so that when the secret special forces launched their ugly plot, they were easy to trace and chase – and kill. One of the designated ‘perpetrators’ in the Boston case and all of them in Paris. Dead men don’t talk.
The Bostonians literally invited armed police to take over their streets and invade their homes. In Paris the marchers of 1.5 million people were silently screaming, “Hollande go to war and free us from evil! “ – What a depressing joke this is. It would be laughable if it weren’t that serious. – It is one more step won by the neoliberal empire – a step towards full dominance and subjugation of the populace.
The Washington funded AlQaeda-turned-Taliban-turned-AlQaeda Osama BinLaden was made responsible for the Twin Tower’s collapse – in no time. And in no time, two years to be exact, the wind shifted. Iraq’s Saddam is the culprit. The power of the msm – in combination with the brainless masses works wonders.
Saddam, the newly designated culprit of the New York 9/11 monstrosity triggered the war on Iraq – the empire taking over the country’s riches, her oil wells; at that time the world’s cheapest oil to bring to the surface – and making sure that Saddam would not tell who helped and incited him to wage an eight-year war against his neighbor Iran, and who gave him the poison to gas in 1988 the Kurds in the North, and especially, that he would not convert his forced dollar denominated sales of hydrocarbons into euros, as he unwittingly announced – he had to be executed. He received a world stage hanging, propaganda for justice, for American justice – justice of the exceptional people, supported and road-mapped, as always, by the banking backed ‘chosen people’.
The Bush-Blair led ‘coalition of the willing’ slaughtered more than a million and a half Iraqis, mostly civilians;women, children and elderly; creating other millions of refugees. Countless people murdered in Afghanistan. In parallel the NED-induced (National Endowment for Democracy) infamous machinery of ‘regime change’ produced the so-called Arab Spring which had nothing to do with spring, but everything with devastating one Middle Eastern and North African country after another. The obliteration of Libya and Syria through NATO bombing and NATO prompted civil wars, and more brutal and bloody conflicts all over Mother Earth. Obama’s personally directed drone war on Yemen, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Turkey – and the list goes on – is further fomenting and funding local unrest, killing masses of defenseless people.
It is American judgment over nations by war. ISIS, a US-EU-NATO creation, generously funded by the empire and its European and Middle Eastern stooges, as a rebel force to fight Syrian troops and to take over Iraq, is torturing and slaughtering in the (concealed) name of the neocon empire, other thousands of people.
ISIS, supplied with cutting-edge weaponry by the US and NATO, is assailing Iraq, where George W. Bush notoriously declared in May 2003, two months after his shock and awe invasion, “Mission Accomplished”.
Not to mention the horrifying eight more years of war Iraq and her people endured until Obama ceremoniously announced the end of war, pulling out US troops in 2011– not without leaving a core presence behind, though.
As Eduardo Galeano, the famous revolutionary Uruguayan writer and philosopher said – once US troops are in a country, they never leave. Hence, the more than thousand US military bases around the globe.
Wars must go on. The US neoliberal economy depends on them. The war machine and its ramifications contribute more than 50% to the US GDP.
Without wars, the country would collapse. All peace talks and negotiations initiated or feigned by Washington are fake, a deception, propaganda for the goodness of the naked emperor. Kudos for the exceptional nation.
World peace would mean a black hole for the United States, demise.
In both cases, Iraq and Syria, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) – the Sunni caliphate having merged in 2013 with Syria’s al-Nusra Front – and whatever other names the ‘rebels’ may morph into –are paid to fight national armies unwilling to bend. In turn, they are justifying US interventions, bombing the same ISIS they created, though only a little bit, to make believe, lest ISIS might really be wiped out. Recent US helicopter food and ammunition drops behind ISIS Iraqi lines testify to the west’s double standards and deceit.
In reality, when bombing ISIS, NATO is bombing Iraq and Syria for regime change, and as an added icing on the cake, to grease the US war machine, the ever hungry military industrial complex.
Estimates have it that US carried out and inspired wars and conflicts around the globe have killed over ten million people in the last decade and a half.
That’s neoliberal ‘civilization’ – murdering 17 to kill millions – making billions by weapon manufacturing and selling, plus more billions by stealing hydrocarbon – the God of Energy of our ever growth-lusty western greed economy; and making even more billions by converting small-holder agriculture which still today feeds 80% of world population – into pesticide-implanted genetically modified food production, the Monsanto world.
As if this destruction, annihilation and misery of war and mass killing were not enough, there is reconstruction after war, another bonanza for the destroyer. The words of former World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, also known as the US neoliberal trade tsar, will not be forgotten, when he said in the midst of NATO devastating Libya in 2011 – “We hope that the World Bank will also be involved in the reconstruction of Libya.” Well, this wish has not come through yet, but in other war-torn zones it has.
After destruction comes reconstruction with all the neoliberal strings attached, financial robbery of public goods, reduction of pensions, minimum wages, social services, privatization of education and health, expropriation and privatization of natural resources by foreign corporations –and the list goes on, all requisites of extreme austerity measures as conditions for the sacrosanct IMF, World Bank and ECBso-called rescue packages.
At times, countries whose existence remains somehow important for the empire, like those in Southern Europe, will be driven into misery without physical war, just by financial abuse and economic slavery. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and even Italy, were driven to the abyss of suffocation by the all-powerful, but appallingly criminal troika, the IMF, ECB and the European Commission.
After coercing or replacing their elected governments with neoliberal puppets, mostly former Wall Street execs, as is the President of the ECB, they – the troika and their masters – forced these countries into debt, after debt and more debt – debt that is virtually unrecoverable in a generation; debt that causes astronomical levels of unemployment, Greece, Spain and Portugal, hovering above 25% and 65% among the young people, slashing social services, health care, pensions, leaving a huge proportion of their population in absolute poverty and in physical and mental misery.
And who funds all these atrocities – wars and financial devastation? – Wall Street, the extended arm of the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon controlled monetary system, and its puppets, the FED, IMF, World Bank, European Central Bank and their subordinate European mega-banks. Naturally.– Who else?
All of these neoliberal mayhems are guided by the invisible hand of the PNAC – the Plan of a New American Century, designed by Zionist Washington think tanks, the tail that wags the dog. The PNAC foresees the annihilation of the Middle East, the pocketing of Europe by implanting puppets – done! – and finally the encircling and eventual subjugation of Russia and China – the ascent of a Washington directed One World Order.
It shall not happen. There is hope in the solid alliance of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, of Russia and China; a strategic economic and defense pact, the western media are silent about. The less the public knows of the truth, the more it will adore the ‘exceptional nation’, as its one and only master – so goes the theory of western self-adulation.
Neoliberalism wants it all, the supremacy of the 1% – addressing the lowest common denominator in human kind – greed, using the main stream media concocting lies and deceptions to nurture more greed which in turn is the engine that fuels the neoliberal doctrine of private property, of privatization of public goods, privatization – stealing – of other countries natural resources, the steady pursuit of instant profit, of police and military oppression of the few who refuse to comply. A Win-Win-Win situation – energy, food and money, as per Kissinger’s infamous dogma– who controls energy controls continents, who controls food controls people, and who controls money controls the world.
Neoliberalism, the religion of the West, is the epitome of evil, of destruction of civilization itself.Neoliberalism – thanks to its unifying factor of greed, has ravaged the west like brushfire and taken over the world in less than 30 years, a feat grander than that achieved by mono-theistic Judo-Christianity in over 2000 years.
Citizens of Mother Earth – BEWARE ! – Wake up ! Open your eyes and ears ! – Become vanguards of a new world, new values – where the neocons and their globalization bite the dust, and where local production for local markets funded by local banks propels solidarity and harmony into new generations of mankind.
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He is the author of Implosion: An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.
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By Paul Craig Roberts: Europeans have written to me with more information that raises questions about the Charlie Hebdo affair. Some point out the strange emptiness of the street on which the professional killers depart. Others point out the film has hallmarks of orchestration or staging. Still others point out the size and described physical attributes of the killers do not correspond with the accused brothers and that the getaway car turns away from the scene differently from the official description. Another puzzle is that the video of the police assault on the deli repeatedly shows police moving in front of other police who are firing their weapons, yet despite the pointblank range are not hit. And there are other matters.All I can say is that clearly at least some Europeans notice and on the basis of what they have seen have a lot of suspicion. I cannot evaluate the information sent to me. I do not know the neighborhood in Paris or traffic patterns. I know nothing about film making. Those who know enough about these matters for their suspicions to be aroused are the ones who need to address these issues. Possibly some of these suspicions are contrived red herrings designed to redirect the focus of suspicion down dead ends and discredit skeptics.
In my articles I raised a question about the official story, which was so completely at the ready as to appear pre-packaged. I said that the official story had many of the characteristics of a false flag operation. I did not say it was one. My intent is for the media to make some effort to verify the story and not simply repeat the script handed to them. I made it clear that I thought it unlikely the story would be examined by the print and TV media. As Patrick Smith makes clear in CounterPunch, an embedded media is not a media. Journalism is absent along with truth.
My column was used both by neoconservatives and the leftwing People for the American Way to attack or to try to embarrass Ron Paul.
I learned of this when an email arrived from a Washington Post reporter asking if I had
considered the possible effect on Rand Paul’s presidential prospects before writing the article for a Ron Paul website. Apparently, the reporter had in mind a story: “Paul Craig Roberts Derails Rand Paul’s Presidential Hopes.” I suppose the story was going to be that by publishing the conspiracy kook Roberts, Ron Paul had destroyed his son’s chance to become President.
At the time I had no idea what the Washington Post reporter was asking about. I replied that I write for my website and that, once I post, many other websites from locations around the world pick up the column and repost it and that it is beyond my powers to consider what implications my columns might have for all the known and unknown websites that might choose to republish it.
Next I learned from readers that some non-entity named Luke Brinker, who doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, had attacked Ron Paul on the tabloid site Salon: “Ron Paul defends insane Charlie Hebdo conspiracy theory,” and in the process called me a “paleoconservative crank and notorious 9/11 truther.”
What was this all about? It turned out that the notorious neoconservative William Kristol
had started it. Kristol’s way of defending the official story was to try to bring embarrassment to Ron Paul, with the result that libertarians would line up with the official story in defense of Ron Paul.
Misrepresentation of my article was essential to the plot. My statement that the Charlie Hebdo affair has characteristics of a false flag event was turned into an accusation that it was a false flag event. Of course, we don’t have proof one way or the other. On one side we have an official narrative that relies entirely on belief in the veracity of officials and their embedded media, which after Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, and Ukraine is not very high. On the other hand we have the suspicious aspects that many have pointed out.
When Ron Paul was deposed on People for the American Way’s RightWing Watch, he stated the obvious. He said that I had not said it was a false flag event but had pointed out reasons that suspicious needed to be investigated and answered for the sake of the credibility of the official account. Ron Paul said that he supports that sound approach and that it was important for people to think and not simply blindly accept government explanations.
That should have been the end of it. But no, libertarians responded not quite like Kristol had hoped but partially. Dale Steinreich wrote on LewRockwell.com that he “doesn’t buy Roberts’ posited theory,” thus perpetuating the misrepresentation as I have no theory, only suspicions. Steinreich then takes issue with the various neoconservative and leftwing obscurantists who are out to get Ron Paul.
I think that Steinreich is unnecessarily defensive. Ron Paul needs no defense from proven warmongers and ideological jerks. Nevertheless, Steinreich took the bait. Part of his defense of Ron Paul is to write: “For clarity, Paul Craig Roberts is not a libertarian. . . . he is a supporter of federal programs such as Social Security and Medicare.” As hardly anything could be worse than that, not even conspiracy suspicions, Steinreich concludes that “far more left progressives share the totality of [Roberts’] current views than libertarians.”
So here we have again the view about which I have written so often that the great mass of people cannot evaluate what is said or written without first classifying it into a prevailing ideological box. If what is said fits their box, it is correct. If not, it is wrong. According to this way of thinking, If you support Social Security and Medicare you are a leftwing progressive. Therefore the leftwing freaks attacking Ron Paul are really attacking their own Paul Craig Roberts.
Steinreich certainly turns the tables on the feeble-minded who tried to attack Ron Paul
through me.
This brings me now to the last part of my title, my real interest in this affair. Possibly on one occasion during his life William Kristol told the truth about something. I just don’t know what it was. As for Salon and RightWing Watch, they have no following among thinking people. Essentially they serve as gatekeepers and propagandists for Washington and private interest groups. Everyone knows that William Kristol and The Weekly Standard want more war, especially with Israel’s enemies, and that leftwing progressives hate people like Ron Paul, who believe in limited government and distrust the left progressives’ god, which is government.
What interest me is Steinreich’s opinion that I am a suspect supporter of freedom and liberty because I support Social Security and Medicare. Clearly, Steinreich knows little about my positions or the history of Social Security privatization, a debate I started with my Business Week column back in the 1980s.
During the 1980s and into the 1990s I supported Social Security privatization, or perhaps more precisely, looking at it closely. In one of my Business Week columns I wrote about the Chilean government minister who succeeded in privatizing the social security system in Chile. I do not know the current condition of Chile’s social security system, but when I wrote the system had proved to be a success, and many Chileans had become share owners in Chile’s economy.
The Chilean minister thanked me profusely for making him world famous. He travelled around the world explaining how he went about the task that he accomplished, and he ended up at the Cato Institute in Washington, at that time a libertarian think tank at which I spent several years before being evicted for being an independent thinker.
Back at the time I was advocating thought about Social Security privatization the Dow Jones was around 1,000. The subsequent rise in the market would have made privatization feasible. More importantly, perhaps, if Social Security had been privatized, it is unlikely Congress would have deregulated the financial system. It is one thing if gamblers wish to risk their money in a casino. It is another if it is the money of Social Security retirees.
Once the financial system was deregulated–a libertarian objective–it became impossible to privatize Social Security other than for insincere reasons of letting Wall Street rob retirees. The lack of accountability, which followed the last financial crash, and the declaration of financial institutions being too big to fail, and thus are carried on the nation’s budget or the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, also make clear that it is impossible to trust old age security to an unaccountable financial system.
Therefore, being practical and not a libertarian ideologue, I understand that Social Security privatization is no longer possible on the basis of a sound and sincere case. It might still happen as part of the normal corruption that now engulfs the US government.
Neoconservatives have an ideology of US world hegemony and an agenda to achieve it. Everything that they do and say relates to their agenda.
The leftwing progressives and neoliberals have their agendas, and, like the neocons,
admissible thought is agenda-specific.
Libertarians have an agenda, an honorable one but largely not practical. In the libertarian mind, it is government that misuses power. The remedy is to place power in private sector hands. Yet as all of history shows, private interests also misuse power.
The solution to the dilemma is countervailing power. Labor unions to offset capitalist monopolies and company stores. Private interests that government must both accommodate and regulate. The division of government power into executive, legislative and judicial, a distribution of power between federal, state, and local governments, and accountability of all to law and the Constitution.
Perfect results would not be forthcoming, but there would be more liberty and more justice than if one power rules us all. The goal is to keep Sauron off the throne.
Being impractical, libertarians have jeopardized a better outcome, and advanced a worse one, as much as have other groups. The rise of jobs offshoring, misinterpreted by libertarians as free trade, destroyed the countervailing power of labor unions. As this domino fell, it knocked over another–the Democratic Party. The decline in union financial support sent Democrats to the same influence purchasers as patronized by Republicans, with the consequence that the same interest groups now control both parties.
Conservatives worshiping presidential power have supported the accumulation of undue power in the executive branch, power that has over-ridden the Constitution.
America is now a closed-mind country. Minds are closed by ideological agendas, by narrow private interests, and by the view that only conspiracy kooks dissent from official explanations. Dissent and protest are gradually being criminalized. The government does not succeed all at once, but gradually step by step.
Before too long we will have to believe the most fantastic stories or be arrested. That is the path that both government and ideologues have us on.
Peter Koenig has a clear vision of Charlie Hebdo and where it is taking us. His case is certainly logically superior to the official case supported by William Kristol and Luke Brinker that defending free speech means shutting down dissenting opinion. (According to my French correspondents, Koenig failed to apply his skepticism of the Charlie Hebdo affair to the vastly over-reported size of the demonstrations.)
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X art by WB7
________
“Civilization” of the Neocons
“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” ~Albert Einstein
By Peter Koenig: January 23, 2015 "ICH" - Imagine – a bunch of French, CIA and Mossad special forces, one of them or a combination of the three, attack a racist, Moslem-insulting publisher in Paris and a kosher supermarket at another end of town – killing altogether 17 people, notwithstanding the ‘suicide’ of the French police chief in charge of investigating the atrocity.A million and a half people in Paris take to the streets – about 6 million throughout Europe – all screaming or carrying posters with a maddening, inexplicable “Je Suis Charlie” – depicting an utterly brainwashed mindset, brainwashed for decades with Washington directed mind control.
They do not know, do not want to know, that the Charlie massacre was yet another staged event, another false flag that will eventually give their masters green light to intensify their ‘wars on terror’ around the globe. Terrorists are mostly Muslims; so is their dictum. Before the massacre, the powers that be identified three Muslims as the perpetrators of the crime to come. Soon after the Charlie attack, they sent killer squads to massacre them, before anybody could question them. The fight on terror – don’t leave witnesses behind.
The millions of demonstrators’war cry is literally asking the western armies, led by NATO to turn- and speed up their brutal killing machine in the Middle East – to exterminate the Moslem population.The western public has been told and is constantly being told by the western powers dominated main stream media thatMuslims are at the heart of all evil; when in fact quite the contrary is true. The West under neoliberal leadership (sic) has become a horrifying merciless killing machine.
That’s Paris Charlie revisited and in a nutshell. – That’s our neoliberal ‘civilization’ – with a purpose. False flag written all over the walls of Charlie Hebdo’s blasphemous infrastructure. Waging even more savage war on the 1.6 billion Muslims.Killing 17 people by Empire and its stooges, will allow Empire and its stooges to kill more millions, perhaps tens of millions, to exterminate this ‘evil’ Muslim sect of ‘terrorists’. A ‘terrorist’ is anybody who doesn’t bend to the empire’s boot. That doctrine has been impregnated in western minds ever since another false flag killed on 9/11 about 3,000 people in New York, allowing the beginning of the eternal war – wars, one succeeding the next – the criminal Bush-Blair legacy of the 21st Century.
The Afghanistan invasion of empire directed NATO forces was to control the TAPI pipeline project (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India), for which the Taliban were unwilling to negotiate with the Bush family, nor with a secret Congressional commission in 2001. The project is as of this day a bone of contention – and a good reason for Obama to leave a permanent ‘residue’ of troops in Afghanistan.
To keep a roving mindless populace tight – local false flags, à la Boston Marathon bombing are necessary to intensify repression, abrogate ever more civil liberties – and this even on demand from the very people affected by the repression. They want more security, more protection.
As with Charlie Hebdo, the bad guys were pre-identified,so that when the secret special forces launched their ugly plot, they were easy to trace and chase – and kill. One of the designated ‘perpetrators’ in the Boston case and all of them in Paris. Dead men don’t talk.
The Bostonians literally invited armed police to take over their streets and invade their homes. In Paris the marchers of 1.5 million people were silently screaming, “Hollande go to war and free us from evil! “ – What a depressing joke this is. It would be laughable if it weren’t that serious. – It is one more step won by the neoliberal empire – a step towards full dominance and subjugation of the populace.
The Washington funded AlQaeda-turned-Taliban-turned-AlQaeda Osama BinLaden was made responsible for the Twin Tower’s collapse – in no time. And in no time, two years to be exact, the wind shifted. Iraq’s Saddam is the culprit. The power of the msm – in combination with the brainless masses works wonders.
Saddam, the newly designated culprit of the New York 9/11 monstrosity triggered the war on Iraq – the empire taking over the country’s riches, her oil wells; at that time the world’s cheapest oil to bring to the surface – and making sure that Saddam would not tell who helped and incited him to wage an eight-year war against his neighbor Iran, and who gave him the poison to gas in 1988 the Kurds in the North, and especially, that he would not convert his forced dollar denominated sales of hydrocarbons into euros, as he unwittingly announced – he had to be executed. He received a world stage hanging, propaganda for justice, for American justice – justice of the exceptional people, supported and road-mapped, as always, by the banking backed ‘chosen people’.
The Bush-Blair led ‘coalition of the willing’ slaughtered more than a million and a half Iraqis, mostly civilians;women, children and elderly; creating other millions of refugees. Countless people murdered in Afghanistan. In parallel the NED-induced (National Endowment for Democracy) infamous machinery of ‘regime change’ produced the so-called Arab Spring which had nothing to do with spring, but everything with devastating one Middle Eastern and North African country after another. The obliteration of Libya and Syria through NATO bombing and NATO prompted civil wars, and more brutal and bloody conflicts all over Mother Earth. Obama’s personally directed drone war on Yemen, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Turkey – and the list goes on – is further fomenting and funding local unrest, killing masses of defenseless people.
It is American judgment over nations by war. ISIS, a US-EU-NATO creation, generously funded by the empire and its European and Middle Eastern stooges, as a rebel force to fight Syrian troops and to take over Iraq, is torturing and slaughtering in the (concealed) name of the neocon empire, other thousands of people.
ISIS, supplied with cutting-edge weaponry by the US and NATO, is assailing Iraq, where George W. Bush notoriously declared in May 2003, two months after his shock and awe invasion, “Mission Accomplished”.
Not to mention the horrifying eight more years of war Iraq and her people endured until Obama ceremoniously announced the end of war, pulling out US troops in 2011– not without leaving a core presence behind, though.
As Eduardo Galeano, the famous revolutionary Uruguayan writer and philosopher said – once US troops are in a country, they never leave. Hence, the more than thousand US military bases around the globe.
Wars must go on. The US neoliberal economy depends on them. The war machine and its ramifications contribute more than 50% to the US GDP.
Without wars, the country would collapse. All peace talks and negotiations initiated or feigned by Washington are fake, a deception, propaganda for the goodness of the naked emperor. Kudos for the exceptional nation.
World peace would mean a black hole for the United States, demise.
In both cases, Iraq and Syria, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) – the Sunni caliphate having merged in 2013 with Syria’s al-Nusra Front – and whatever other names the ‘rebels’ may morph into –are paid to fight national armies unwilling to bend. In turn, they are justifying US interventions, bombing the same ISIS they created, though only a little bit, to make believe, lest ISIS might really be wiped out. Recent US helicopter food and ammunition drops behind ISIS Iraqi lines testify to the west’s double standards and deceit.
In reality, when bombing ISIS, NATO is bombing Iraq and Syria for regime change, and as an added icing on the cake, to grease the US war machine, the ever hungry military industrial complex.
Estimates have it that US carried out and inspired wars and conflicts around the globe have killed over ten million people in the last decade and a half.
That’s neoliberal ‘civilization’ – murdering 17 to kill millions – making billions by weapon manufacturing and selling, plus more billions by stealing hydrocarbon – the God of Energy of our ever growth-lusty western greed economy; and making even more billions by converting small-holder agriculture which still today feeds 80% of world population – into pesticide-implanted genetically modified food production, the Monsanto world.
As if this destruction, annihilation and misery of war and mass killing were not enough, there is reconstruction after war, another bonanza for the destroyer. The words of former World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, also known as the US neoliberal trade tsar, will not be forgotten, when he said in the midst of NATO devastating Libya in 2011 – “We hope that the World Bank will also be involved in the reconstruction of Libya.” Well, this wish has not come through yet, but in other war-torn zones it has.
After destruction comes reconstruction with all the neoliberal strings attached, financial robbery of public goods, reduction of pensions, minimum wages, social services, privatization of education and health, expropriation and privatization of natural resources by foreign corporations –and the list goes on, all requisites of extreme austerity measures as conditions for the sacrosanct IMF, World Bank and ECBso-called rescue packages.
At times, countries whose existence remains somehow important for the empire, like those in Southern Europe, will be driven into misery without physical war, just by financial abuse and economic slavery. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and even Italy, were driven to the abyss of suffocation by the all-powerful, but appallingly criminal troika, the IMF, ECB and the European Commission.
After coercing or replacing their elected governments with neoliberal puppets, mostly former Wall Street execs, as is the President of the ECB, they – the troika and their masters – forced these countries into debt, after debt and more debt – debt that is virtually unrecoverable in a generation; debt that causes astronomical levels of unemployment, Greece, Spain and Portugal, hovering above 25% and 65% among the young people, slashing social services, health care, pensions, leaving a huge proportion of their population in absolute poverty and in physical and mental misery.
And who funds all these atrocities – wars and financial devastation? – Wall Street, the extended arm of the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon controlled monetary system, and its puppets, the FED, IMF, World Bank, European Central Bank and their subordinate European mega-banks. Naturally.– Who else?
All of these neoliberal mayhems are guided by the invisible hand of the PNAC – the Plan of a New American Century, designed by Zionist Washington think tanks, the tail that wags the dog. The PNAC foresees the annihilation of the Middle East, the pocketing of Europe by implanting puppets – done! – and finally the encircling and eventual subjugation of Russia and China – the ascent of a Washington directed One World Order.
It shall not happen. There is hope in the solid alliance of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, of Russia and China; a strategic economic and defense pact, the western media are silent about. The less the public knows of the truth, the more it will adore the ‘exceptional nation’, as its one and only master – so goes the theory of western self-adulation.
Neoliberalism wants it all, the supremacy of the 1% – addressing the lowest common denominator in human kind – greed, using the main stream media concocting lies and deceptions to nurture more greed which in turn is the engine that fuels the neoliberal doctrine of private property, of privatization of public goods, privatization – stealing – of other countries natural resources, the steady pursuit of instant profit, of police and military oppression of the few who refuse to comply. A Win-Win-Win situation – energy, food and money, as per Kissinger’s infamous dogma– who controls energy controls continents, who controls food controls people, and who controls money controls the world.
Neoliberalism, the religion of the West, is the epitome of evil, of destruction of civilization itself.Neoliberalism – thanks to its unifying factor of greed, has ravaged the west like brushfire and taken over the world in less than 30 years, a feat grander than that achieved by mono-theistic Judo-Christianity in over 2000 years.
Citizens of Mother Earth – BEWARE ! – Wake up ! Open your eyes and ears ! – Become vanguards of a new world, new values – where the neocons and their globalization bite the dust, and where local production for local markets funded by local banks propels solidarity and harmony into new generations of mankind.
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He is the author of Implosion: An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.
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Mass Hopenosis
Payday Monsanto
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